November 4, 2018 (All Saints) – Ruth 1:1-18
Ruth 1:1-18
God Works Through Saints
All Saints Sunday [Lectionary 31B] – November 4, 2018
First Lutheran Church – Winnipeg, MB
Naomi and her husband Elimelech are forced to flee their home because of hunger.
They go to the land of the enemy, to Moab, and there, among the enemy,
Naomi finds a friend – Ruth, who marries one of her sons.
Naomi’s husband dies – and then Ruth’s husband dies.
And then it becomes clear what Naomi must do, for her situation has become perilous:
driven by hunger yet again, she decides to return home.
She is determined to go back to her home alone,
for it makes no sense to her for her foreign daughter in law –
a supposed enemy of Israel, mind you – to return with her.
Naomi figures she should stay among her own people, the Moabites, in her own country.
Surely that would be safer for her.
To be a single woman, to go on a long journey, to go to the land of her enemy:
all this was perilous for Ruth.
But Ruth will have none of it, and in one of the most moving of all biblical scenes,
ruth, the foreigner, declares to Naomi:
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 me, and more as well, if even death parts me from you!
God does not appear directly in this story, as God does in other biblical stories.
And Naomi feels, justifiably, that God has abandoned her.
“The hand of the LORD has turned against me,” she says to Ruth.
But in response to that, Ruth speaks some of the most beautiful words in the Bible,
As if to say, “You may feel as if God has abandoned you, but I will not –
Not even death will separate me from you.”
And here she could have quoted from the Song of Songs,
Love is as strong as death, passion as fierce as the grave.
This is what the saints do: they accompany others, they stick by others,
so that none need ever feel alone, or abandoned by God.
The presence of God is best met by the presence of God’s people.
This is what the saints do.
Countless thousands of people are still driven to leave their homes because of hunger.
The people of the migrant caravan in Mexico were forced to leave their homes in Honduras
because of the hunger caused by government corruption.
4000 weak hungry people, half of them women and children,
are currently seeking asylum in Mexico and perhaps ultimately the United States.
They are twice the size of some of the Mexican towns they journey through,
and yet . . . the Mexicans feed the people of the caravan and leave food for them.
“What else can we do?” says one Mexican. “They are Christians like us.”
This is what the saints do.
They make a decision to be God’s people – to be the presence of God.
Every week the people of this neighbourhood leave their homes
to come to First Lutheran Church, driven by hunger.
Like Naomi, like the people of the migrant caravan,
they may feel like the hand of God has turned against them.
But here they are fed. Here God’s absence is met with the presence of God’s people.
Here the saints accompany them.
This morning, you, too, left your home to come to First Lutheran Church,
driven by hunger of some kind.
Hungry for justice and to be part of something that makes a difference in the world.
Hungry for companionship, for the presence of God’s people even though God feels absent.
Hungry for meaning, for some sense to the non-sense of the world.
Hungry for good news in the midst of bad news.
And here, dependably, you are met with the presence of God’s people.
Here you are fed, with the wine of the compassion and the bread of new birth.
Here you become part of something bigger than yourself.
Here you accomplish much much more together than
you could possibly accomplish on your own.
This morning, you remember the people who bore God’s presence to you,
even when God felt far away.
This morning you light a candle for them, even as they lit the way for you.
These are the ones who clung to you as Ruth clung to Naomi,
who felt the hand of God was against her.
These are the ones who said to you by their words and their deeds,
Where you go, I will go; where you lodge I will lodge; your people will be my people.
These are the people who bore God’s presence to you.
And these are the ones who enable you and inspire you to do likewise.
Honour their memory this morning.
Make a commitment to honour them by
accompanying those who come hungry to First Lutheran,
looking for food, and looking for meaning – for in such ways,
as in the story of Ruth, we bear God’s presence.
As we will find out next week, Ruth the foreigner,
eventually becomes King David’s grandmother – and so an ancestor of Jesus . . .
and so an ancestor of you.
Ruth is part of your Christian DNA – you have it in you. Her story is your story.
Her words are woven into you as they were woven into Jesus.
It should be as natural to us as it was to Jesus to accompany, to feed, to bear God’s presence,
to pick up the light these saints have lit for us, and be the saints of God.
So together, with all the saints, let us say, “Amen.”
Pastor Michael Kurtz
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