November
5, 2006
All
Saints Observance
TEXT:
Ruth 1:1-18
"Holding on for Dear Life"
This is a story of lostness and
grief. Famine. Foreign lands. Spouses dying. Children dying. Grief upon grief. Emptiness filled with deprivation. It is a story of losing. And here on this day of the saints, freshly
in the company of flowers of remembrance scenting our experience with the melancholy
fragrance of loved ones lost, we have some appreciation for the mood. We know what it means to navigate our days
around the craterous hole left by the death of a parent or a spouse or a loved
one who has become family by affection.
We know what it means to lose and lament a job or a dream or an idealism
or a confidence or identity. This is a
story of loneliness and loss, and we know it well.
But it is also a story of
finding. Naomi, who considers herself
empty and bereft, who concludes that she has nothing left to lose and
determines to retrace her steps back to her homeland, finds that she has a
daughter by choice not convention. And
Ruth finds a community fashioned by will, not necessity or obligation.
“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!”
Finding, and hanging on for dear
life! Little wonder that the words of
this story often find their way into marriage ceremonies, for the act of
binding oneself relationally to another, without regard for what might lie
ahead, is clearly what marriage is all about.
But the amazing thing about this
story is that such commitment is not confined to husbands and wives. Here are two people from different lands,
different families, different faiths.
Here are two people from different generations, different cultures and
different needs. Here are two people
with different pasts and potentially different futures finding and binding
themselves to one another, demonstrating that people have the capacity to
choose fellowship – to will community – whether or not their bloodlines demand
it or their hormones entice it. People
can honor and elevate their common life.
It is a
notion that begins to sound strangely familiar.
What, after all, does it mean to be the church? What does it mean to be the Body of
Christ? Let me suggest that it means humbly
and self-consciously accepting the grace of God as revealed in Jesus Christ,
and the animating presence of God’s own Spirit.
It means loving God and then striving to love as God loves. As the Body of Christ, the church is that community
of people who have bound themselves to God and those to whom God has bound God’s
own self. It is taking to heart the
wisdom of Ecclesiastes who observed:
Two are better than one, because they have a
good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up the other; but
woe to one who is alone and falls and does not have another to help. Again, if
two lie together, they keep warm; but how can one keep warm alone? And though
one might prevail against another, two will withstand one. A threefold cord is
not quickly broken. (4:9-12)
To be the church is to choose each other, as God has chosen
us. It is to find in one another God’s
own face.
Ruth’s
promise is dramatically counter-cultural.
In an election season in which candidates seldom bother to demonstrate
their own credibility, preferring, instead, to cast their opponents in the
worst, least flattering light; in an age where personal bigotries are strapped
with explosives and vigilantism is on the rise; in a culture where
individualism reigns and relationships are as disposable as paper plates and
plastic forks; where loyalty is tempered by convenience and help is
counterbalanced by hassle, willfully having to do with each other has almost
become subversive. Ruth does not promise
to stick with Naomi as long as Naomi is nice to her, or as long as it is
expedient, convenient, or comfortable.
Ruth does not promise to remain until something better comes along, or
until it becomes difficult or they disagree.
Ruth simply promises to be present – in this life and beyond.
…as God has
promised to be with us. “If God is for
us,” the Apostle Paul observed, “who is against us? Who will separate us from the love of
Christ? In fact,” he goes on to
conclude, “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present,
nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all
creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our
Lord.”
…this same
Jesus whose Body we now are:
…Counter-culturally devoted;
…Subversively faithful;
…Extravagantly relational…
…because God knows that we need one another, in our losing
and in our finding. And so we, too, hold
on for dear, dear life.