November 4, 2012 – Ruth 1:1-18
Ruth 1:1-18
The Saints – Set Apart for God’s Work
All Saints Sunday [Lectionary 31] – November 4, 2012
First Lutheran Church – Winnipeg, MB
The Book of Ruth is part of a long Biblical conversation about who is in and who is out.
About who is or can be part of God’s people and who can’t.
There are disagreements in the Bible about this: different voices have different views.
Let’s take the case of the Moabites.
The Moabites were considered, in general, beyond the pale.
Indeed: the Moabites were the enemy.
Deuteronomy prohibits a Moabite from entering the assembly of God’s people,
and even goes so far as to prohibit the Israelites from sharing their prosperity with or
even promoting the welfare of the Moabite peoples. (Deuteronomy 23:6)
Moabites were the enemy.
So, when famine drives Naomi and her husband and two sons from Bethlehem,
you know they must have been desperate to go to Moab.
As time goes on, Noami’s husband dies, leaving her a widow in a foreign land,
which is a precarious situation.
Fortunately, she has two sons, who come to marry Moabite women, one of whom is Ruth.
But when both sons tragically die, what we are left with is three widowed women,
none of whom are blood relations, none of whom have children,
an even more precarious situation for them to be in.
And, worse of all, maybe, two of the three are Moabites!
This is a story of loss.
Here is Naomi, widowed, childless, and far from home.
She takes stock of her situation and decides that it is better for her to return home than to stay.
Even at home, life would be precarious, although perhaps marginally less so.
So she starts out, and Ruth and her daughter in law accompany her.
But Naomi just looks at them and tells them straight: Go back! Go back home.
Go to your own people. You’ll be safer. Find new husbands. It’ll be better for you.
It’s at this point that Naomi reveals what she really thinks: she thinks God has abandoned her.
She thinks all this tragedy is God’s doing. She thinks God’s hand is against her.
This finally, is enough to convince one daughter-in-law to return.
But it seems that it is enough to convince the other daughter-in-law Ruth, to stay.
In one of the most moving speeches in scripture,
Ruth responds to Naomi’s talk about being abandoned by God with these words:
Do not press me to leave you or to turn back from following you!
Where you go, I will go; where you lodge I will lodge,
your people shall be my people, and your God my God.
Where you die, I will die – there will I be buried.
May the LORD do thus and so to me, and more as well, if even death parts me from you!
And this leaves Naomi speechless, as well it might.
Even death, seemingly the most permanent resident of this household to this point,
will not get in the way of Ruth’s commitment to Naomi’s welfare.
It is one of the great Biblical ironies, right?
The Moabite – whose welfare an Israelite is supposedly forbidden to promote – here
commits herself to an Israelite’s welfare even if it means death.
So Ruth accompanies Naomi back to Bethlehem, never leaves her side, and
ends up doing all she can to promote her welfare and to secure the future of them both.
Nevertheless, shortly after returning to Bethlehem,
Naomi still insists that God has abandoned her:
When her friends back home call her Naomi, Naomi says,
Don’t call me Naomi any more: God has dealt bitterly with me. I’m changing my name:
just call me Bitter.
Grief is like that, right?
Death can become the thing that obliterates the beauty and reality of everything else.
Grief can blind you to so much: Naomi can’t see what is right before her.
Grace is walking right beside Naomi the whole time, unseen, yet refusing to leave her.
(Patricia Tull at http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?lect_date=11/4/2012)
God is at work in this story, just not in the way that Naomi thinks.
The story-teller never affirms that it is God who has brought this tragedy upon Naomi.
Rather, it is clear that God has walked alongside Naomi all along in the person of Ruth,
who shares God deepest, most biblical, most characteristic quality:
the quality of hesed: faithful, steadfast, abiding loyalty and love.
Apparently, even the enemy can be part of God’s people.
Apparently God can work through those we consider beyond the pale.
For it is up to God to decide who is useful to God, and not us.
As I said in my e-mail to you this week, this is a wonderful story for All Saints Sunday.
In the Lutheran understanding, a saint is one whom God names holy.
And in the biblical understanding, what it means to be holy is to be set apart for God’s work.
Naomi may try to re-name herself “Bitter” in the book, but that’s not who she truly is,
it’s not what God names her.
Who she is is closer to her given name: Naomi means “Delightful.”
And Ruth – well, Ruth means “Beloved.”
In baptism, we too are named, named by God we say, and what we are named is Saints.
In baptism what we are named is Holy, Beloved, Delightful, and Useful,
In baptism, we are named Holy: set apart for God’s work,
which is to participate in God’s mission to heal, comfort and restore.
This is the church’s purpose.
Baptism graciously names us Holy, Beloved, Delightful, and Useful,
and invites us into this purpose.
A purpose shared by a community that is based not on blood,
but on a commitment to one another, to stay true to one another,
a commitment that refuses to leave one another.
A commitment that promises to be the grace that walks right beside each other.
A commitment and a loyalty and a steadfastness to one another that promises that –
as I said a few weeks ago –
the absence of God can be met by the presence of God’s people.
For in baptism, God not only names us saints, but binds us into a communion.
And it is a communion or community not based on blood,
but on the common purpose we are loyal to, and above all by
the love that binds us together.
We are a communion of saints – not because we have common interests,
not because we like each other, but because we have a common purpose and
because we are bound together by one thing: the eternal and
completely unconditional love God has for each of us.
You are beloved now. You are holy now. You are useful now. You are beloved now.
God expressed this love for us not just by naming us but
by incarnating it, by clinging to us in Jesus,
by refusing to leave us even when we put him on the cross,
And God expresses it again by coming to us again in bread and wine this morning.
By coming to you. By coming to the person beside you.
By coming to the person you are having difficulties with.
Loving us all the same. Binding us together in love, a love that is loyal and steadfast.
Grace is walking beside you – grace is sitting beside you – right now.
Ruth discovers this morning that she has a purpose that is more important than
self-preservation and survival: her purpose is to loyally accompany Naomi.
And together, you have a purpose that is more important than self-preservation and survival.
To love one another unconditionally and to journey with one another through thick and thin.
And together to place groceries in the hands of the poor ones in your weekly food banks.
And together to feed the hungry of this neighbourhood in your bi-weekly community meals.
Together to care for and nurture the refugees you have co-sponsored and welcomed last Sunday.
To be present to those for whom God seems absent.
To be light to one another and to all those who sit in darkness.
That is your purpose: that is what you have been named beloved and holy and set apart for.
When I was in the depths of depression many years ago now, when I was a university student,
I was in a dark place.
I was bitter and anxious and felt that God’s hand was clearly against me – if there was a God.
It was December, the shortest day was approaching, when one of my teachers –
who knew the state I was in –
invited me to stay with him and his family over the holidays.
They set up a place for me to sleep on a hide-a-bed in the rec room in the basement.
But it was no use: I couldn’t sleep.
I tossed, and turned, and could not get out of my head the awful state of the world,
so many hungry, so many poor, so many hungry, so much war.
In that dark, dark basement, with no window and no light, I couldn’t see an inch from my face.
That first night, though, in the middle of the night I heard something:
the door at the top of the stairs opening.
And down the stairs footsteps: and then, all of a sudden, a flashlight, pointing in my direction.
It was my teacher: old as he was, he’d set his alarm to get up in the middle of the night,
come downstairs, and check on me, because he was worried about me and about
what I might do to myself.
And it was at that moment – with light shining in a dark place, that I knew I wasn’t alone.
That God was accompanying me, through this person who was intentionally being Christ to me.
Here was a saint: holy, beloved, and useful, set apart for God’s work,
being light in a dark place, refusing to leave.
In the morning, I walked up those stairs a different person.
And yet it was such a simple thing that had been done for me.
What a powerful thing Christian community is.
The power of knowing that you are not alone.
The power of knowing others are journeying with you.
The power of being able to change the bitterness we name ourselves with to delight.
The power of knowing others are journeying with you not for what they can get out of you,
but for the sake of what they can give to you.
This is the communion of saints.
And friends: it is a powerful and all too rare thing.
It is a communion that not even death can annul.
Those among the dead for whom we have lit candles today? Death cannot part us from them.
We often say that we have lost them, but they are in fact not lost at all.
They are safe in God’s keeping until the day of resurrection and
we are still in communion with them for we are all held – the living and the dead –
in Christ.
They journey with us even as we journey with one another.
Together we have a purpose with them that transcends death and that death cannot annul:
with Ruth, the purpose of being set apart for God’s work,
the purpose of together being God’s unlikely people:
The purpose of participating in God’s mission to bless heal comfort and restore,
bound not by blood by something higher and stronger and more permanent:
The Infinitely vast and unimaginably deep well of God’s mercy for us and all things.
In light of this commitment of God to us, let us commit ourselves to one another this morning.
Let us pledge with Ruth to go with one another.
Let us comfort heal and bless one another by our presence.
Let us be present to one another when God seems absent.
Let us remind one another that we have been named holy, beloved, delightful, and useful.
Let us bear light to one another so together we can be light to a dark world.
And let us look forward to that day when the sun will not set nor any go hungry.
When death will ever be removed as a barrier to be our being present to one another.
When we will be reunited with those we remember today.
When the communion of saints will be complete and our purpose fulfilled.
But until then, let us stick together, and together let us say, “Amen.”
Pastor Michael Kurtz
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