Luke 14:26-27 “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters–yes, and even his own life–he cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple.”

Does Jesus really expect us to hate our own family? What does he mean by this? He isn’t saying that he wants us to mistreat our parents, our children, our spouse, or siblings. He doesn’t want us to do things that will get our children put into foster care or have the police at our house for a domestic disturbance. “Love your neighbor as yourself” applies to family as much or more than anyone else.

But following Jesus will change the priority that family plays in our lives, and it won’t always make it a higher one. There are some hard driven career types who need to give family more time and attention. There are neglectful parents who overlook the needs of their children. But there are also moms and dads who dote on their children and spoil them, men and women who idolize their spouses. Jesus isn’t satisfied merely to have a place in your life. He’s your God, your Maker, and your Savior, and he demands first place. In many cases, that means family needs to move over to make room for him.

Sometimes, that can even mean making a choice. My friend was a missionary in Japan for almost ten years. When people showed interest in getting baptized and joining the church, their families often threatened to cut them off if they did so. These new Christians had to “hate” their families, in the sense that they were ready to give up those relationships, to follow Jesus. I have twice read advice columns advising atheist families in our own country what to do if their children get interested in “religion.” Again they talk about bringing pressure to steer them away from Jesus. Will Jesus win the battle for their hearts?

You and I are not immune to these kinds of temptations. I’ve known Christian parents afraid to confront their children’s sinful living situations because they are afraid it will cause a rift in the relationship, and maybe they won’t be invited to the wedding or get to see their grandchildren. To be faithful to Jesus, frankly to love their children truly, they need to be willing to risk their children’s negative reaction. It is in this sense that Jesus wants us to “hate” those family relationships. He wants us to follow him and do what he says. It is part of the high cost of discipleship.

But it is far from the whole cost. Jesus widens his demand to “yes, even his own life.” Obviously he isn’t encouraging self-injury. He doesn’t want us to neglect our health. He is calling for us to surrender our lives and all their contents, the whole thing, to him.

Sometimes that will mean making the hard and unpleasant choice. Early Christians went cheerfully to prison and martyrdom to stay faithful to their Lord. Why would anyone do that? Why would we accept a harder life? Why would we give up relationships we hold dear? The high cost of discipleship says something about the high value of the person we follow, doesn’t it? In him we find love unmatched. We possess peace no matter what life hands to us. We receive freedom from all our guilt. We live in the certainty of eternal life. Jesus makes it worth it when we pay the high price for following him.

2 Corinthians 3:2-6 ² You yourselves are our letter, written on our hearts, known and read by everybody. ³ You show that you are a letter from Christ, the result of our ministry, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts. ⁴ Such confidence as this is ours through Christ before God. ⁵ Not that we are competent in ourselves to claim anything for ourselves, but our competence comes from God. ⁶ He has made us competent as ministers of a new covenant–not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.

Sometimes we romanticize the situation in the early churches. But I don’t believe anyone romanticizes the church in Corinth. When I feel like complaining about the problems in my church, I can read the book of 1 Corinthians and be glad that God has put me where I am. At least we don’t have any members publicly defending incest, trying to eat all the communion bread, or fighting for the pulpit in the middle of the service yet.

Paul, however, was not embarrassed to be associated with the church in Corinth. On the contrary, he felt that they were an impressive vindication of his ministry. He describes them here as his letter of recommendation, “written on our hearts, known and read by everybody.” It seems that if Paul had been filling out a resume, he would have been happy to list the congregation in Corinth as a reference, or perhaps more to the point, as exhibit A on his list of projects successfully completed.

Maybe that’s because, for all the earnest and impassioned rebukes he had to direct at these people, he never lost sight of the main thing: “You show that you are a letter from Christ, the result of our ministry, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.” These people had not stopped being human as a result of Paul’s mission work. To borrow a picture from Brennan Manning, they did not become the spiritual equivalent of patients anesthetized on the operating table. Therefore they didn’t stop being sinners who regularly needed to hear God’s law.

At the same time, through Paul’s preaching, the Spirit had etched the cross of Jesus Christ on their hearts. They were a tribute to Paul’s ministry, not because of the heights of sanctification to which they had climbed, but because of depths of Jesus’ love in which they had been sunk, washing away their sins and dressing them in robes stained white by Jesus’ blood.

Shame on us for setting up false measures of progress for ourselves and the members of the congregations to which we belong! If Christians had no sin, there would be no reason for pastors, or for Jesus to be their Savior. Jesus tended to the spiritually weak and the sick. He wants us to do the same. Sometimes we forget the obvious: it is the nature of being weak not to act like you are strong.

Of course, we want to move on to maturity, but the difference between being spiritually weak and spiritually dead is still as big as the difference between heaven and hell. When God is using the application of law and gospel to enable strugglers to struggle on a little farther, our ministries have been fantastically and miraculously blessed. Keeping the strong alive takes no skill. Nursing the weak along is a better indication of our competence.

Not that we have any reason for selfish pride. “Such confidence as this is ours through Christ before God. Not that we are competent in ourselves to claim anything for our selves, but our competence comes from God.” The gospel of forgiveness supports more than struggling church members. It supports struggling pastors, too. You remember in Philippians 3 how Paul recounts all the prestige and zeal and legalistic righteousness he used to have as a Pharisee. It made him appear to be a relatively competent rabbi. But now he had thrown it all away, considered it rubbish, dung, manure, for the sake of knowing Christ, and being found in him, not having a righteousness of his own, but having the righteousness that is from God and comes by faith in Christ.

Despite appearances to the contrary, “He (God) has made us competent as ministers of a new covenant.” Paul was an expert on that new covenant in Jesus’ blood. This was not because he was such a great scholar. It was because he was such a great sinner. He had experienced its medicine himself.

When we speak the gospel, we don’t speak like experts on the geography and customs of some foreign country– men who have read every book available but never visited. We speak like natives of that country who have lived there all their lives. The gospel of forgiveness–the new covenant, not of the letter, but of the Spirit who gives life–has become our home, not just an object of study. That’s how God has made us competent to share that gospel with others. If being a forgiven sinner is a prerequisite for church membership, it is especially so for being a minister of the gospel.

If the members of our congregations are not too proud to be forgiven; if they speak of Jesus as their dear friend, whether eloquently or clumsily; if they claim his grace as their one great hope, in spite of every other trait they may pick up from us or others, that would be a ringing endorsement of our ministries.

Ezra 9:5-9 “At the evening sacrifice, I rose from my self-abasement, with my tunic and cloak torn, and fell on my knees with my hands spread out to the Lord my God and prayed: “O my God, I am too ashamed and disgraced to lift up my face to you, my God, because our sins are higher than our heads and our guilt has reached to the heavens. From the days of our father until now, our guilt has been great… But now for a brief moment, the Lord our God has been gracious in leaving us a remnant and giving us a firm place in his sanctuary, and so our God gives light to our eyes and a little relief in our bondage.”

When the Christians around you do something stupid (and by stupid I don’t mean your garden variety stupid because they were ignorant or careless, but, to borrow a phrase from money guy David Ramsey, this is a special kind of stupid because it’s just mean, gross, and scandalous), when that happens do you…

A) …go to your quiet place–your study, your room, your car–and fume for a while, or cry, or both?

B) …call up the friend, coworker, or family member in whom you can most confide and vent for half an hour about the idiots you have to work with?

C) …close up shop for the day, go home, go fishing, go work out, or binge watch episodes of Yellowstone so that you can numb your mind for awhile? Or

D) …go to church, fall down on your knees, and confess your sins for your part in your people’s behavior and plead for God’s grace?

Yeah, me either. The idea that I need to repent is not the first thing that comes to mind. But that’s what godly leaders in the past thought to do. We see Ezra’s response to his people’s sin in these words from Ezra 9. Do you remember Daniel’s prayer when he figured the seventy years of exile should be up? Do you remember all the first-person plural pronouns he used? “We are covered with shame…because of our unfaithfulness to you…we have sinned against you…we have not obeyed the Lord our God…”

This is Daniel praying, “…confessing my sin and the sin of my people,” he says. You remember Daniel. Of all the people in the Bible other than Jesus, is there anyone you can think of who would seem to have less to confess, less reason to include himself in the sins of the people he served?

Ezra would seem to have no more reason to include himself in his confession of the sins of his people than Daniel. Yet here he is, on his knees, confessing sins and seeking God’s grace.

Our prayers of confession aren’t an end in themselves, because “confession is good for the soul.” They are the prelude to our plea for God’s mercy. They turn our hearts and our souls, our ears and our eyes, to look for God’s grace.

Don’t leave your hearts and souls hanging, like the person waiting for the other half of a high five. Grace, forgiveness, assurances that God has dropped all the charges, paid every debt, and repaired all the damage we have done to our relationship with him—these are the main things. You can read some absolving passages of Scripture to yourself. You can pray some comforting, grace-filled thoughts. But will you? Do you? Or will you leave your parched soul hanging, thirsty for the cool drink that never comes?

Isn’t this why David was “glad when they said to me, ‘Let us go to the house of the Lord'”? There our prayers for God’s grace don’t go unanswered. Gathered with God’s people, we hear and speak words of pardon. We hear the gospel. We taste and eat the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, given and shed for you for the forgiveness of your sins. Frustrated, tired, broken Christian people, your Father still loves you. Like Ezra, gather with his people, and plead his love for the frustrated, tired, broken people with whom you live and serve.

John 1:43 “The next day Jesus decided to leave for Galilee. Finding Philip, he said to him, ‘Follow me.’”

Why isn’t following Jesus easier? Following him means going where he goes, experiencing what he experienced, living like he lived. When Philip was younger, I doubt he said to himself, “When I grow up, I am going to join a persecuted little minority, give up my desires and comforts to love others and spread the gospel, and die by execution thousands of miles from home.” But that is where following Jesus, and living a life of love, led in Philip’s case if we can trust the writings of early church father Eusebius.

That’s not to say that following Jesus is all pain and unpleasantness–not by far! The blessings are immeasurable. But following Jesus in love is less about self-fulfillment, self-promotion, or self-realization. It is more about self-giving, self-denial, and self-control. Following Jesus is a life lived for others. Following Jesus is a life of service and sacrifice. That’s where he went.

It’s no secret why many refuse to follow him, many stop following him, and we are tempted to go our own way. My sinful nature doesn’t like where Jesus is leading me in this world. It doesn’t like the things he lets me suffer. It doesn’t want to give up what he asks me to give up. It doesn’t want to see others have it all while I seem to be falling behind. It doesn’t want to follow him in faith.

Following Jesus means one other thing. It means staying close and keeping him in sight, so that we don’t lose our way. For three years Philip walked where Jesus walked, slept where he slept, ate where he ate. Think of what he witnessed! The sick healed, the dead raised, the greatest sermons ever preached, violent storms stopped in their tracks, vile demons forced to retreat, a cross with God’s Son hanging on it, a tomb with God’s Son lying in it, an empty grave with God’s Son overcoming it.

Following Jesus still means never letting him out of our sight. We don’t see him with our physical eyes, but he is near us in his word and in the sacraments. We hear and read the same things Philip saw in sermons and Bible classes. We come to the same table at which Philip once ate, and we receive the same body and blood given for the forgiveness of our sins.

In God’s word, in God’s house, gathered in Jesus’ name, he is still in our sights, leading us closer to our heavenly home each day.

In this sense, “Follow me” is as much a special invitation, a blessed gift, as it is a command. From that blessed spot right behind Jesus you can peer into his manger to see God becoming weak, and little, and human so that he could live with you and be your Savior. Just behind Jesus, following him, you can look up to the cross where every sin we ever committed drains his life away, while he drains sin of every penalty and all its power. Following Jesus from the grave you can see the shades of your own empty tomb in his. When Jesus finds you, follow where he leads, and you will never regret it as long as you live…which will be forever.

1 Corinthians 9:27 “I beat my body and make it my slave so that after I have preached to others, I myself will not be disqualified for the prize.”

Our country is becoming a more casual place. Etiquette, formality, and seriousness are out. “Do what feels comfortable” is in. We dress casual, almost everywhere. We interact casual, on a first-name basis with everyone.

Whether you find this trend towards the casual refreshing or regressive, there is one place we must agree it does not belong: A casual approach to Christianity will not do. You can no more be casual about your Christian faith and life than you can be casual on a battlefield. But we are all tempted to try.

Paul was taking his faith and life seriously when he confessed, “I beat my body and make it my slave.” He understood the serious consequences for failing to do so: “so that…I myself will not be disqualified for the prize.” He recognized a basis for his concern in Israel’s history: “For I do not want you to be ignorant of the fact, brothers, that our forefathers were all under the cloud and that they all passed through the sea. They were all baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea. They all ate the same spiritual food and drank the same spiritual drink; for they drank from the spiritual rock that accompanied them, and that rock was Christ” (1 Corinthians 10:1-4).

Look at the advantages God gave to the people who came out of Egypt. They all traveled under the shadow of the cloud of God’s special presence. You remember that cloud that led them, that appeared as a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. They themselves had walked on dry ground through the middle of the Red Sea. They personally experienced the most important act of deliverance and demonstration of God’s saving love for his people in world history before the coming of Christ!

God’s special graces didn’t stop on the eastern shore of the Red Sea. They all ate the same spiritual food, the manna God gave them in the wilderness. It’s not hard to understand how the manna took care of their bodies. But in what sense did it feed them spiritually? Moses gives us the answer in Deuteronomy 8:3, “He humbled you, causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna, which neither you nor your forefathers had known, to teach you that man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.” The gift of manna taught Israel a lesson in faith: Every day they must trust God to take care of their needs. They could not save manna for a month ahead, or a week ahead, or even a day ahead. If they tried it turned rotten. And every day God kept his promise, confirming that he was still thinking about them and loved them. This message behind the manna became food for their souls.

And then what happened? “They served God wholeheartedly as his obedient children and marched through the wilderness from victory to victory until they all reached the promised land.” No. “Nevertheless, God was not pleased with most of them; their bodies were scattered over the desert” (1 Corinthians 10:5). Israel took a casual approach to all the good things God had done. They overlooked God’s gracious gifts, turned against the Lord, and they died in the desert for their sin.

It shouldn’t be difficult to see the point of Paul’s little historical review: Beware of casual approach to God’s grace! We haven’t walked between walls of water, but we have seen God himself die on a cross to free us from sin. We know how he broke through the walls of his own tomb when he rose on the third day. Do you think those Israelites who walked through the Red Sea ever forgot the experience? But somehow it lost its impact on their souls. I don’t believe any of us will forget that Jesus sacrificed himself for us on a cross and took his life back three days later. But somehow we lose our sense of wonder at it. We stop marveling. It doesn’t seem so important anymore.

Israel got used to the idea that the miracle of manna would be there day after day. They even got tired of it. We get used to the idea that there is church this week, and next week, and every Sunday after that as far as we can tell. And dare I say it–sometimes we even get tired of it? Such a loss of appreciation for God’s saving grace, such a casual disinterest in the sacrifices God has made to rescue from the eternal night of death, is death to our faith. It is dangerous to overlook God’s gracious gifts!

James 2:12-13 “Speak and act as those who are to be judged by the law of freedom. For judgment is without mercy to the one who has not shown mercy. Mercy triumphs over judgment.”

Favoritism misrepresents and misunderstands the God to whose family we belong. The church is a place where everyone is a sinner saved by God’s grace and mercy–no exceptions. No one starts ahead of anyone else. No one has special access. There are no V.I.P.’s, no backstage passes handed out because of how much you pay or who you know.

We were all spiritually poor at the beginning, dressed in the rags of our own sins. “There is no difference, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,” Paul writes to the Romans. Nothing to make God want us there! He had every reason to judge us and condemn us. But he goes on, “…and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.” All have sinned. All are justified freely by his grace. God’s mercy triumphed over his judgment when he sent Jesus to redeem us, and then he set us free from our sins and claimed us as his own in spite of them.

It is important for our own faith that we understand ourselves to be sinners who have received God’s mercy. It’s also important for how we treat others. Do you remember Jesus’ parable of the unmerciful servant? A servant owes his master an insurmountable debt–ten thousand talents, two hundred thousand years of wages for the typical worker. When the man pleads with his master for more time, the master simply forgives the whole debt and lets him go.

Then this man, forgiven so much, goes out and finds a fellow servant who owes him about three months of wages–not a small debt, but perhaps manageable over time. The man who was forgiven so much forgets the mercy he was shown. He has his fellow servant thrown into prison until he pays the debt. He is all full of judgment. He knows no mercy.

When the master hears of it, he calls the first man in and demands that he explain himself. He had been forgiven so much. Shouldn’t he be merciful to others, too.

The issue of favoritism isn’t exactly the same, but it is similar. Before God, didn’t we all start out like the poor man James says walks into your church? Don’t we have nothing to offer God? Yet didn’t he show mercy, and treat us with dignity and love anyway, and wasn’t this the same for everyone of us?

Realizing this, can we justify judging some people as beneath our respect and kindness because they look and smell a little ragged and have so little? Would God approve? “For judgment without mercy to the one who has not shown mercy.” But God still expects his mercy to have its way and change our hearts towards them. “Mercy triumphs over judgment.” God keep us from ignoring his mercy when the time comes!

James 2:10-11 “Whoever keeps the entire law, and yet stumbles at one point, is guilty of breaking it all. For he who said, Do not commit adultery, also said, Do not murder. So if you do not commit adultery, but you murder, you are a lawbreaker.”

As people deal with each other not all sins or crimes are the same, and it is proper that we recognize that. Driving over the speed limit, shoplifting, and murder are all against the law. But they don’t affect my neighbor the same.

Speeding creates risk. It may put my neighbor’s life in danger. But until there has been a collision, no one is actually harmed, so the penalty is relatively mild, usually just a fine.

Shoplifting takes money out of other people’s pockets–the store owner, perhaps the employees he may struggle to pay, even the other customers who have to pay more for their purchases to make up for what has been stolen. It interferes with my neighbor’s daily bread. The impact is greater, so the punishment is more severe: bigger fines and perhaps time in jail.

Murder, of course, makes the ultimate impact on the victim’s life. Society responds by taking the murderer’s life away, either literally with the death penalty, or practically by sending them to prison for life. We agree with these distinctions between crimes and their punishments. They intuitively feel right to us.

As we deal with God, all our sins or crimes are the same. There is no difference in their impact on him. If we steal, God has lost nothing. If we murder, it’s not his life we take. James compares murder and adultery. The Lord isn’t losing anything personally either way.

Or perhaps we should say he is losing the same thing in each case. The creatures he made for himself are showing him disrespect. They are replacing him in their lives with their own desires and choices. They are living in defiance of his law. That is why to God every sin is the same, from selfish thoughts to vulgar slips of the tongue to great crimes and atrocities.

That is what James wants us to remember about the problem with playing favorites. We might be tempted to downplay this sort of thing. No one is physically hurt, after all, just their feelings. No one goes hungry as a result. No one’s life is shortened.

But the Lord is fully offended just the same. His children have been mistreated. His law has been defied. His honor has been disregarded. It creates the same wedge between us and him as every other sin. Whether we think of playing favorites as a big sin or a little one, it is a problem for our relationship with him, a problem calling for our repentance and requiring his grace.

Thankfully, God applies his grace to us with the same equal consideration with which he applies his law. No one is favored or excluded over the nature or number of their sins. As lawbreakers we all have equal access to his pardon. Take it.

James 2:8-9 “Indeed, if you fulfill the royal law prescribed in Scripture, Love your neighbor as yourself, you are doing well. If, however, you show favoritism, you commit sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors.”

Let’s take a minute to consider James’s describing the law as “the royal law.” Some of you remember when CNN founder Ted Turner proposed replacing the Ten Commandments with his “Ten Voluntary Initiatives.” That’s how some see determining moral behavior. There is no one to whom we must answer above. Our choices and actions are just voluntary. There are no real laws or demands outside of us, just initiatives, plans and directions arising from within us to address the problems we perceive. It sounds so much less authoritarian, so much more free–how nice!

Sometimes even Christian teaching and preaching can sound more like advice, less like God’s holy, unchanging law. Here is a list of suggestions for improving your life. Little to no mention is made that failing to follow them endangers your soul and invites God’s judgment.

Though James is pointing us to the “law of love,” he begins by reminding us this is God’s “royal law.” We may make some use of democratic forms in the church, like voting and elections. But God’s church isn’t a democracy. It’s a monarchy. There are no legislators drafting the laws, no system of judges interpreting and enforcing them. There is only our one Great Chief Executive, who gives the law, demands that we obey it, and imposes consequences if we fail.

We need, then, to take the issue of playing favorites as Christians seriously, and not just for how it affects our neighbor. But it does affect our neighbor. Playing favorites undermines “love your neighbor as yourself.” It automatically means that some get treated as second class citizens. It raises questions about their value and dignity. This cannot end well for God’s people.

In some cases, it will drive people from the church, and not only those who are mistreated. You can hardly fault those who receive a cold shoulder for leaving. They have been all but invited to go.

But others are watching–rank and file members who still have a conscience and a sense of decency, children and young people who often have a stronger sense of fair play. In our time of shrinking churches, it is not hard to find examples of people who left–not because of the way they were treated themselves, but because they saw how someone else was marginalized for reasons that had nothing to do with defending sin or false teaching.

Favoritism may raise doubts in those who receive the less-favored treatment. Some tender hearts may begin to question their desirability to God. Their faith is shaken. They begin to believe there is something particularly wrong with them, something that disqualifies them for God’s grace and acceptance.

James doesn’t deny that some individuals may develop closer friendships within the church than others. Common interests, common experiences, common problems may draw them close together and make it easier to relate. But that is a matter of their private lives, not the public life of the whole church. Even then, God’s people will be careful not to let their private relationships get in the way of loving the whole family of believers, where “love your neighbor as yourself” is still the royal law, and playing favorites will only create problems.

Luke 13:28-30 “There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth in that place when you see Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and all the prophets in the kingdom of God, but yourselves thrown out. They will come from east and west, from north and south, to share the banquet in the kingdom of God. Note this: Some who are last will be first, and some who are first will be last.”

The surprise at the end is not that Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and the prophets make it in to heaven. The Bible pretty much assured us they would, though none of them got there on good behavior. Their stories reveal they were constantly making a mess of their lives. Bad parenting, bad marriages, and dysfunctional families were pretty much the standard by which they lived. But the one thing they held onto was God’s promise. They listened when God spoke. They embraced his grace and lived by faith. And now they find themselves in the kingdom of God.

The surprise comes from the people who were Jesus’ contemporaries. They had all the examples from the lives of the patriarchs and the prophets. They had the same promises, now fulfilled. The Savior stood among them. God’s Son walked in their streets and taught them God’s word. They had all the advantages, but most of them would end up on the outside looking in.

The surprise comes from the great masses who have turned to Jesus from every point of the compass. They have given up their ancestral gods and religions, beliefs that were woven into the fabric of their culture for generations, to embrace the Jewish man who was executed on a cross at the eastern end of the Mediterranean 2000 years ago as their Lord and God. They have given up on their own best accomplishments, considered themselves broken failures, just to own Jesus’ life of love as their own, his sacrifice for sin as their cleansing and redemption.

Think of how exotic this Christian faith should seem to them, how strange and foreign to their experience, and even scary. Yet such people will come “to share the banquet in the kingdom of God.” You and I need to take care of our own faith if we want to be one of them.

For the past 1000 years Christianity has seemed to be a white European thing to many. The rise of Islam, the fall of the Byzantine Empire, all but ended Christianity among the people of color across the Middle East and North Africa. Today, only a remnant of the faith remains in those places.

Today, perhaps, people of European heritage stand in a place similar to those who were listening to Jesus when he first spoke these words. The Bible faith is passing from such people to those of other colors and languages in distant countries. The nations where Christianity once dominated now have only a tiny percentage of practicing Christians. Already more Christians live south of the equator than north of it. Asian Christians are sending missionaries to the United States. Leaders of African Churches confront the heresies that are constantly rising in the European and American churches that planted Christianity in Africa one or two centuries ago. Christians in these places now are faithfully following Jesus while those who had every spiritual advantage for so long are letting him go.

You and I don’t have to lose him. While we have life and breath, “Make every effort to enter through the narrow door.”