What the Rota Cannot Roster

The rota is laminated and it is on the wall by the sluice, and everybody on that floor reads it the same way, which is fast and with a small sinking feeling.

Names down the side. Days across the top. Boxes.

She is on early all week. Seven till three, which means up at five, which means she has already been awake two hours by the time she pushes through the double doors and the warm smell of that building comes at her, breakfast and laundry and the particular smell of a place where people live.

She has been doing this nine years. She is very good at it. The rota knows none of that.

The rota knows she is a body in a box on a Tuesday. It does not have a column for the fact that she is the only one who knows Mrs Adeyemi will not take her tablets unless somebody sits down first. It does not record that she calls Frank by his rank because it makes him sit up straighter, or that she learned four words of Polish for a woman who has forgotten all her English.

Nine years of that, and none of it has ever appeared in a box, and lately when she looks at the laminate on a Monday morning she feels something she does not like: maybe that is all I am here. A body in a box.

That is your rota. That is your seven o'clock. And I want to reach you before the double doors, because something walks onto that floor with you that the wall has no way of naming.

He was not describing clergy

Peter writes to ordinary scattered people, most of them working, many of them servants in other people's houses, and he says the biggest sentence about them that anybody has ever said.

But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people; that ye should shew forth the praises of him who hath called you out of darkness into his marvellous light.1 Peter 2:9

Royal priesthood. Not the leadership. Not the ones with a title in a building. The people he was writing to had no standing anywhere: they were the workforce, the household staff, the ones a rota would have described in a box.

You walk onto that floor as a priest. Not one day, if things change. At seven, in the tunic, through the double doors, with the smell of breakfast and laundry coming at you. The written word calls that a royal priesthood, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes that live in a woman rather than leaving it as a compliment in a letter she will never quite believe.

Now hear what a priest actually does, because we have all got a picture of it that is far too narrow.

A priest carries people into God's presence and carries God's kindness back out to people. That is the job in one sentence. And I want you to look at your last nine years with that sentence in your hand.

Sitting down first so Mrs Adeyemi will take her tablets is priesthood. Using Frank's rank because it straightens his back is priesthood. Four words of Polish for a woman who has lost her English is priesthood, and it is a beautiful piece of it, and there is no laminate on any wall in this country that has a column for it.

You have been carrying out something holy on that floor for nine years. The written word names you a priesthood and gives the work as shewing forth His praises, which means making what He is like visible where people can see it. The Holy Spirit has been in every one of those small acts of attention, and not one of them went unrecorded. They simply were not recorded there.

And let me say the honest thing about the rota, because I am not going to pretend it is wicked.

It is a scheduling tool. It is doing its job. The trouble started when a laminated sheet by a sluice quietly became a mirror, and a woman began reading her worth off a document that was only ever built to say who is on Tuesday.

You are not a body in a box. A peculiar people is the old phrase, and it means a people God has kept as His own particular treasure. The Holy Spirit bears witness to that in a corridor at seven in the morning, and no roster has the standing to contradict Him.