Not Ashamed to Call Them

She has never asked for anything in public, and she thinks that is humility, and it is not, and it took a stranger to see it.

Iona is forty-nine. She has been in that chapel eleven years. She does not ask for prayer in a meeting; she asks the one woman she trusts, afterward, at the door, quietly, and only for other people. She does not put her name down for anything with a list. She has never once told her story to that congregation and she does not intend to, and if you asked her why she would say that other people's are more interesting, which is a sentence she has used twice and which is not true and which she knows is not true.

She would put the whole of it like this, if anybody ever got her to say it, which nobody has: she believes God has her, privately, in a kind of arrangement, and that He is good to her, and that if it ever came to a public moment He would not claim her.

Not reject. She wants to be exact. Not send her away. Simply not introduce her. Tolerated at home, deniable in the street.

And she has built eleven years of a faith around not putting Him in a position where He would have to.

That is why she has never asked in public. It is not modesty. It is a woman protecting somebody from the embarrassment of her.

If you have organized your faith around not being an embarrassment, hear the question. Which verse says He is ashamed of you?

The verse raises the subject itself

For both he that sanctifieth and they who are sanctified are all of one: for which cause he is not ashamed to call them brethren.Hebrews 2:11

The thing to see first is that the verse brings up shame without being asked.

Nobody in the argument had raised it. The writer is establishing that Christ and the ones He makes holy share a common origin, and then, having said that, he adds a clause that answers a question nobody put to him: he is not ashamed to call them brethren.

That is a very strange thing to include unless the writer knew perfectly well that the people reading it would be wondering.

Not ashamed. Written in the negative on purpose, which is what you do when you are denying a specific suspicion rather than making a general statement. You do not say a man is not ashamed of his car unless somebody thought he might be.

To call them. And it is a calling word, which is public. It is not about how He feels about them privately. It is about what He says about them out loud and in company.

You are somebody He is not ashamed to name out loud, and it is already written in the negative because somebody knew the suspicion would be there. I am not being kind to a woman on a porch. It is written in Hebrews 2:11, and the Holy Spirit is the one who put a denial of shame into a sentence nobody had asked for it in.

What He calls her

And it is worth reading what the word is, because it is not a minimal one.

He could have been not ashamed to acknowledge them. He could have been not ashamed to have them present, or to be associated with them, and any of those would have been a real thing to say and would have been more than Iona expects.

Brethren. Family. The same word she would use for her own brother in Oban, which is the closest relation she has and the one she measures all others against.

And two verses later the writer quotes Christ saying I will declare thy name unto my brethren; in the midst of the church will I sing praise unto thee. In the midst of the church. Publicly. Singing.

There is no version of this in which she is the deniable one, because the passage puts Him in a room, in the middle of a congregation, saying it out loud.

You are called family by Him in public, and it is already the word He uses, and the passage puts Him in the middle of a room saying it. Scripture says I will declare thy name unto my brethren, in the midst of the church will I sing praise unto thee (Hebrews 2:12), and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries a public declaration to a woman who has spent eleven years keeping quiet.

The cost of protecting Him

And now let me say what those eleven years have actually done, because Iona has thought of them as a kindness and they have not been.

She has never asked for prayer in a meeting, which means that room has never once had the chance to carry her, and there are women in that chapel who would consider it an honor and who have privately wondered whether Iona thinks they are not up to much.

She has never told her story, which means the two or three people in that congregation whose story is very like hers have never heard it, and one of them left last year.

And she has been living as though God has a reputation that needs managing, which is the strangest part of it, because He has never once in Scripture shown the slightest interest in being protected from the company He keeps. The entire complaint against Him from the religious people of His own day was who He ate with.

You are not required to protect Him from the company He chose, and He is already famous for it. It is written that this man receiveth sinners, and eateth with them (Luke 15:2), which was said as an accusation, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has kept that accusation in the Bible as a commendation.