Hope/less (Luke 21:25-36)

(Homily for Gayton Road Christian Church's Sunday Worship on Nov 29, 2015, Advent I)

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It’s the End of the World

(Season’s Greetings!)

Today is the first Sunday of Advent. And just as we have already decorated the sanctuary, many of us have begun decorating our homes for Christmas. Setting up trees, adorning the windows with lights, assembling gentle nativity scenes on coffee tables. And all against the background of festive music and the warmth of a roaring fire, perhaps, and the occasional cup of hot chocolate or cider.

All these preparations make for a charming scene. One that’s almost completely ruined by today’s scripture. Why did the church choose a text of trouble for a season of joy? In my mind, it plays out like this: there’s a choir, full of smiles, empty of anxiety, singing “Deck the Halls” with gusto, with delight, lifting our spirits as we set up the trees and put on the ornaments and take out old keepsakes that warm our hearts. And then, all of the sudden, Jesus barges in like a wrong note, like a misplayed chord, discordantly declaring one of the most disturbing speeches we have recorded in the gospels.

Stars falling. A blood red moon. Flooding along the coasts and rivers. Cities trembling from earthquakes. People huddled in places of refuge, fainting from fear. These are some of the images that today’s scripture evokes. Today’s text is about the end of the world. Literally. Jesus says, “Heaven and earth will pass away,” which is another way of saying that the world as you know it will end.

Doomsday Fascination

While Jesus’ proclamation today seems dreadfully misplaced in a season of joy, it is not an unfamiliar cry to our ears. In fact, it is quite common. In the last few decades, the popular genre of doomsday or end-of-the-world stories has flooded our culture. The list of books and movies is almost endless: Armageddon, The Day after Tomorrow, 2012, Interstellar, and one of my favorites, The Road. It is a rich genre of stories, and if nothing else, it shows us that there are many ways the world could end. But I think if we look beneath the surface of these different doomsdays, we find something even more fascinating. Underneath the different plots of these stories lies a common theme: hope holding out in a hopeless world. Which is precisely the reason we watch these stories, again and again, why they never get old, why they keep coming out. Hopeless worlds make us hope. Each time, as the twisting storyline draws us deeper into a bleak landscape, further into a world without hope, we finding ourselves hoping harder and harder, matching the hope of the heroic characters who hold out until their deliverance or their death, whichever comes first.[1]

Our Own End Times

But why do these stories captivate us? Why is hope such an attraction? Perhaps it’s because our own lives mirror these stories. We all endure experiences that seem, in the heat of the moment, like the end of the world. From the outside, a person may never guess. But on the inside, it feels just like the catastrophic terror we see on the big movie screen: stars falling, buildings collapsing, darkness and confusion and terror. The end of the world is not a far-fetched fear. It is something we all feel.

I’m reminded of a story my good friend from New York City told me once. It was New Year’s Eve. My friend and his housemate were hosting a little get-together, and supplies were running low. So he ran out to the corner shop. The lady in front of him in line to the cashier was visibly distraught. She said nothing, but her tear-stained face spoke volumes. After paying for a single bottle of wine, she shuffled out the door. When my friend had made his purchase and left, he couldn’t help but notice the same woman sitting at a nearby bench, head bowed. He felt an inexplicable pull to sit beside her for a moment. So he did. He asked how she was. And she poured out a hopeless story: a divorce, the threat of losing her home…and more than anything, the feeling that life was finished, that there was no way out of the darkness. For her, the sky was falling. The earth was shaking.

My friend ended up sitting with her for over an hour. Mostly just listening. Occasionally offering a sympathetic and encouraging word. I don’t know whether she got a start on the bottle she had bought or not. But either way, I cannot help but feel that the moment they shared was sacramental. That somehow the light of hope found its way through a tiny crack into her hopeless horizon, that “the Son of Man coming in a cloud” came to her (21:27). Because my friend tells me that at the end, she expressed her deep gratitude to him, hugged him for an uncomfortably long time—although he says that in this case, it wasn’t uncomfortable—and said that even though she didn’t know what would happen next, the future no longer frightened her quite as much as it had.

As I picture their parting, I imagine the lady walking away with her head held higher than before. In a very real sense, her world had passed away (cf. 21:33). But the presence of my friend and the few words he offered her—I would like to think that they echoed an ancient word of hope, a word that looks upon life and says, “It is good, very good.” I would like to think that, in that moment that she shared with my friend, redemption was drawing near, the kingdom of God was drawing near. I would like to believe that for a moment, the woman’s heart had been cut free from the worries weighing her down (cf. 21:34), like a balloon cut free from its string.

A Hope/less Christmas

Like all the doomsday stories that give expression to our moments of hopelessness, this personal story of despair hints at a paradoxical truth. It is precisely when things have become hopeless that hope is truly born. Before things have become hopeless, before darkness has covered the horizon, when we can still see possible solutions or answers, it is not hope that fills our hearts. It is our own plans or proposals, our own strategies or schemes. When there is still a chance of delivering ourselves, we live in the closed world of our own thought. We are not yet praying (cf. 21:36), not yet on our knees.

Hope is not a reasonable expectation. It is not the currency of stockbrokers, who measure probabilities and plan for possible outcomes. It “is not hope if you can see what you are hoping for on the horizon.”[2] Hope begins with hopelessness. Hope begins when we cannot see a way out, and yet we keep our eyes open anyway.

Hope is a woman who has lost her marriage and mostly likely her house, but who is nonetheless convinced in her heart of hearts not to give up on the possibility of new life. Hope is a homeless couple in Bethlehem, who cannot possibly foresee how their child will be born, but who nonetheless keep knocking…until they find a stable. Hope is a world that cannot possibly imagine peace but presses on for it anyway, trusting that its redemption is drawing near, believing that the kingdom of God is meant for earth as it is for heaven.

The words of Jesus that we hear today are not pleasant like the words that we expect to hear at this time of year. But to forget them, to sing “Deck the Halls” without any awareness of the many halls of life that are crumbling and passing away, including our own, is to—as the pope recently said—make a “charade” of Christmas.[3] If nothing else, today’s scripture strips our seasonal preparations of their excessive sparkle and glitter. It turns down the blinding lights. It returns us to a world of dirt and shadows, where hope actually means something.

Our joy at this time of the season is not mistaken. It’s only forgetful, sometimes, of where it comes from. Not from our own doing or wishing or expectation, not from our own plans or programs, but from the God of hope—which is to say, the God of hopelessness, the God who is truly born only when things are hopeless.

Prayer

God, the truth is, the world is sometimes a very scary, very unwelcoming place. And so we put up lights and sing songs and make merry. Bless our festivities. May they not be an escape or a charade, but rather an honest reflection of our hope. Not a hope that merely smiles and makes believe that everything is alright. But a hope that wakes, works, eats, and sleeps in a world that is often without hope. Bless our festivities and our lives with a hope that can hold its head high even as the world ends, a hope that anticipates the advent of a new, unforeseeable world, a hope that relishes all the adventure, risk, and joy of birth and new life. Amen.

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[1] See, e.g., Cormac McCarthy, The Road (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), 213, which explains the main character’s the hope: “He hoped it would be brighter where for all he knew the world grew darker daily.”

[2] John D. Caputo, The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Religion; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), ebook loc. 5379.

[3] http://time.com/4123703/pope-francis-christmas-charade/. Accessed Nov 28, 2015. Put otherwise, it is to make the same mistake that the prophets made long ago, when they said, “Peace, peace” even as there was no peace. Cf. Jer 6:14.

Not from Here (John 18:33-37)

(Homily for Gayton Road Christian Church's Sunday Worship on Nov 22, 2015, Christ the King Sunday)

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When Jesus Was Lynched in Georgia

Many of you know that before I saw the light and became a Christian…I was a Baptist. I don’t know what you’ve heard about the Baptists. I’d be afraid to ask, actually, because most of the time when you read about the Baptists in the news, it’s less than favorable coverage.

But today I’d like to share a redeeming story from my Baptist heritage. A story about a Baptist saint (if that’s not a complete oxymoron), Clarence Jordan. Born in 1912, Clarence grew up in small town Georgia. From an early age, he sensed a deep hypocrisy: the same people who went to church on Sunday and embraced Jesus also comfortably embraced segregation and racism. This unease plagued Clarence until finally, after completing his doctorate in Louisville, he returned to Georgia and started Koinonia Farm, an interracial farming community. But as you might guess, not too long after the farm began, the KKK made his acquaintance. The story goes that they came strolling through the neighborhood one day with this threat, “We don’t let the sun set on people like you around here.” And in Clarence’s own words: “I gave ‘em my broadest smile and said, ‘Pleased to meet you, gentlemen. I’ve been waiting all my life to meet someone who could make the sun stand still. ’”[1]

Clarence may have been living in small town Georgia, thousands of years and miles away from Christ, but he had eyes to see an eerie parallel between the trials of Koinonia Farm, which was repeatedly threatened and bombed, and Christ’s trial before Pilate and the empire of Rome. The struggle for truth in Georgia was little different than the struggle for truth in Judea. In the United States as in Rome, the imperial powers-that-be felt threatened by the kingdom of God. Remember, it was 1942, before desegregation, before the Civil Rights Movement. Koinonia Farm was in the heart of the Jim Crow South. The truth that they were living—the truth that all humanity bears the blessing and divine image of God—was not a truth that the ruling powers of racism and segregation were ready to accept.

The distance between Christ’s encounter with the empire of Rome and Clarence’s experience in Georgia is very little. Rome had merely relocated to the Potomac, where its threat of sword and spear was just as real for anyone who challenged the conventions of the land.[2] Anyone promoting racial equality would have incurred the suspicion of others at best, a lynching at worst. So it is that Clarence, who famously retranslated the New Testament into southern idiom, put it this way: “They crucified [Jesus] in Judea”—“and they strung him up in Georgia, with a noose tied to a pine tree.”[3]

Not from the World, but for the World

As far as I’m aware, Clarence never stood trial before an official United States court. But he did endure trials and hardship at the hands of the powers-that-be in rural Georgia. And if he had ever been called to answer for what he had done, I imagine he would respond much like Jesus. “My kingdom is not from this world. If [it] were…my followers would be fighting…. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here” (18:36). Koinonia Farm was ushering God’s kingdom into rural Georgia just as Jesus was ushering it into Judea—fearlessly and without fighting. Koinonia Farm was not a part of the American kingdom. It was not part of a kingdom that secures peace and peace-of-mind through sword and spear. It was part of God’s kingdom, where peace is not an objective achieved through the way of violence, but is the way itself. 

Koinonia farm gives us a glimpse of the kingdom of God, a kingdom unlike any we know, a kingdom that does not police its own borders, a kingdom whose king welcomed even the one who would betray him to his table, welcomed even his kiss. The kingdom of God takes risks, makes itself vulnerable, exposes itself to the hooded threats and hateful bombs of this world—all in the name of love, a love that knows no fear, a love that, as John writes, “drives out fear” (1 John 4:18). The kingdom of God is not from this world, but that’s not to say that it is against this world; it is steadfastly for this world.[4] It is a dreamy kingdom hoping to come true, not through fighting and force, which would negate the dream, which would turn the dream into a nightmare, but through love.

A Foolish Kingdom

I am convinced that God’s kingdom is the steepest challenge I will ever face in my life. Because I am part of an empire. And I still live much of my life as a follower of a kingdom of this world. The kingdoms of this world make more sense to me than the kingdom of God. The kingdoms of this world are reasonable. They know that strangers pose a risk, that outsiders may be hospitable or hostile. They know that sometimes closing the door and locking it is the surest way of protecting our own lives, that taking up sword and spear is sometimes the only way to guarantee our safety. That’s just common sense.

The way of Christ, the way of the cross, the dream of God’s kingdom—is madness. Or as Paul says, foolishness (1 Cor 1:18-23). It proclaims that I find life only when I risk it, only when I lose it,[5] only when I turn it inside-out and allow the outsiders in.[6]

For Clarence as for Christ, the kingdom of God is not from this world, but it is for this world. Which means that rather than taking up arms against the threat of the outsider, it takes the outsider into its arms, into an embrace of love—even as that embrace may be its last. “Love,” Clarence wrote, “makes itself available.” And if he were around today, I imagine he might add: “to hurting people from every corner of the world.” Love, Clarence wrote, “makes itself expendable.” And today, perhaps, he would add: “expendable even to our enemies who need no second invitation.” “Love,” declared Clarence, “doesn’t quit or give up on a [person] whether [they] be a Communist or a Kluxer,” and today, I imagine, he might add a few more names to the list. “Christ,” Clarence insists, “showed us how far love would go when he prayed for those who were driving nails into his hands and said, ‘Father forgive them, for they don’t know what they’re up to.’”[7]

Long Live the King

Please don’t mistake any of this for veiled political counsel. As today’s passage makes clear to me, Jesus is not party to party politics. He is not party to a politics that operates by force and domination, where kingdom stands against kingdom, where people dream of power over others, where followers fight to make their point. 

The scene of Jesus before Pilate—which is ultimately a scene of the kingdom of God before the empire of Rome—should haunt us all the same, one side of today’s debates just as much as the other, because it reminds us all of the cost of love. Jesus before Pilate echoes the madness of a man who proclaimed a non-existent kingdom, who pledged allegiance to a kingdom that never will exist as long as the world chooses security over vulnerability. Jesus before Pilate echoes the foolishness of a fool who rushed into this world and died as a victim of his love for it. Jesus before Pilate echoes the dream that this not-from-here love—which is selfless and sacrificial and a stranger to the empires and kingdoms of this world—may one day transform this world.

Long may the foolish dream of our wounded king haunt us. Long may it grow like the tender shoots at Koinonia farm, sprouting up in the cracks and crevices of our worldly logic. Long may it drive out fear and lure us to love.

Long live our king and the kingdom of his dreams. Amen. 

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[1] Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, “Clarence Jordan and God’s Movement Today.” http://www.patheos.com/blogs/jonathanwilsonhartgrove/2012/07/clarence-jordan-and-gods-movement-today/. Accessed Nov 17, 2015. 

[2] I’m mindful of the fact that Clarence did not confront the “empire” of America in quite the same way as Jesus. His interracial farming community was not illegal and did not confront the United States in the same way that Jesus confronted Rome. Even so, I do interpret his experience as a confrontation between truth and empire inasmuch as the legal statues of segregation embodied an implicit racism, one that becomes all the more explicit when one recalls that the KKK included among its membership a number of men involved in the government and ruling businesses of the time. 

[3] Clarence Jordan, Cotton Patch Gospel: Matthew and John (Macon, GA: Smyth & Helwys, 2004), xviii. 

[4] Cf. N. T. Wright, John for Everyone, Part 2: Chapters 11-21 (Westminster John Knox, 2004), 114-115. 

[5] Cf. Matt 10:39; Mark 8:36; Luke 17:33; John 12:25. 

[6] Cf. Matt 25:34-40; Heb 13:2. 

[7] Clarence Jordan, The Substance of Faith: And Other Cotton Patch Sermons (ed. Dallas Lee; Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2005), 176.

The American Dream Revisited (1 Sam 2:1-10)

(Homily for Gayton Road Christian Church's Sunday Worship on Nov 15, 2015)

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The Self-Made Individual

During my three years or so abroad, there was one question that I was asked more than any other: “Why did you come here to study?” It was a question overloaded with curiosity and disbelief. Underneath it lay the presupposition that however good English universities were, the schools in America were just as good—if not better. The real question, in other words, was this: “Why travel all the way across the ocean for a degree when you could have gotten a better one in your own backyard?” Needless to say, this question exposed me to the high regard with which America is often held…even by the British, although their pride for tea and the queen and pubs and the most indirect way of asking a question typically masks the begrudging interest or envy that they show toward their younger, if now bigger, brother.

Besides this question and its constant reminder of my Americanness, I also noticed that certain other international students treated me as a symbolic extension of the country of their dreams. They almost made me feel like a superhero, like I were wearing a star-spangled cape and carrying Old Glory in my hand, like “Yankee Doodle” was playing triumphantly in the background anytime I entered the room. For instance, my Lithuanian neighbor never failed to mention something about America when we bumped into each other. “Is it true that you have streets lined with restaurants?” he would ask. “How many dollars would a burger cost?” “Does everybody drive a car in America?”

This infatuation with America opened my eyes to the reality of the American Dream. For many people, both here and abroad, America symbolizes the freedom and the possibility to make yourself whoever you want to be. It’s a dream that we teach in our schools and in our businesses: it’s the dream of the self-made individual, a dream that we’ve all heard presidential candidates gush about again and again. If you put your mind to something, if you expend the effort, then the sky’s the limit. Anything’s possible. In America, you don’t have to get lucky. You make your own luck. You can make yourself whoever you want to be.

America’s Split-Personality Consciousness

This is by now deeply ingrained in the American consciousness. But it’s not all that makes up our national psyche. There’s another impulse within the American consciousness, an opposing impulse that gives this nation what we might call a split personality, a Jekyll-and-Hyde consciousness. In just a week and a half, millions across the country will take a day off work to celebrate Thanksgiving. Now Thanksgiving has a checkered history, and there are many sides to its story. But at its best, it proclaims a message of gratefulness. Not for what we have done, not for how we have made ourselves—that would be like thanking ourselves, which is not how thanks is done. It’s a message of gratefulness for what has happened to us, for what has happened upon us—as though by chance. And while Thanksgiving rightfully steers clear of religious affiliations, it suggests that behind this chance is a goodness, divine or otherwise, that is somehow getting itself done in our lives.

Contrary to the message of the American Dream, which is the message that we are our own masters, that we can prevail upon the world, is the message of Thanksgiving, which is the message that we are not in complete control of our lives, that from birth onward we are always already “thrown” about by circumstances not of our own choosing,[1] and that, sometimes, the best things in our lives are the things that prevail upon us, that come out of nowhere, without our asking, like a gift. Isn’t this what family and friendship are? Isn’t this what forgiveness and hope are, the things that reconcile us in a way no glue or nailgun or advanced diplomacy ever could?

“Not by Might Does One Prevail”

Although over two thousand years of history and thousands of miles separate our text today from the American tradition of Thanksgiving, even so there is a peculiar resonance between them. In the scripture, Hannah sings a song of thanksgiving. She, who was formerly without child and presumably barren, has given birth to a son. (The story is much juicier than that simple synopsis, and it’s just a chapter long, so if you’re interested, you should bookmark 1 Samuel 1 for later reading.) Her story happens at roughly the same time as the story of Ruth, which we’ve read the last couple weeks. And like the story of Ruth, the story of Hannah exhibits a sense of wonder and appreciation for a God who lives among ordinary people and gifts them with life. In both stories, a child kicking within the womb symbolizes this gift of life—a gift that we receive too, baby or not, the kind of life that kicks within our own spirits whenever faithful relationships carry us through loss, whenever hope sustains us in times of trouble.

And at the heart of these stories is the bold message that Hannah proclaims, a message of gratitude that challenges the American Dream: “Not by might does one prevail” (2:9). And so it is that Hannah sings of crazy reversals, of the hungry becoming fat and the satisfied becoming hungry, of the strong becoming weak and the weak becoming strong (2:4-5). These reversals, she would suggest, are evidence of the reality that we are not our own masters, that there is something else going on in our lives that can determine our paths more than we can ourselves.

Perhaps in America more than in any other place, we live our lives under the illusion that we can prevail over our surroundings and our circumstances. But the gospel of Hannah, her good news for us, is a good news that dethrones the American Dream. It is the good news that, ultimately, it’s not a question of our prevailing: it’s a question of our being prevailed upon.

A Power Working on the Womb of the World:

The Divine Dream That Prevails upon Us

All of which might bring to mind a rather traditional view of God as the omnipotent, white-haired grandpa, seated on his throne above us somewhere, accomplishing feats of power through the clouds of our sky with the flick of a finger here, a nod there. So what exactly is Hannah saying? That we are to wait for God to prevail upon our lives with good things? Is hers a message of fatalism? “God will do what God will do”?

I don’t think so. These reversals of hers—the hungry finding food, the barren conceiving and bearing children, the poor and lowly raised up—they call to mind another story in the Bible. Not long from now, actually, we’ll remember the story of a woman who is said to have miraculously conceived and borne a baby in Bethlehem. And this baby will grow up and lead a host of reversals himself: he will give pride of place to widows with just a couple coins to their name and to the children who get in the way, he will preach good news to the poor and the imprisoned, he will feed the hungry, he will welcome the company of the unwelcome, the prostitutes and the unclean. All the while, many who are privileged with riches and who wear long robes and who sit in seats of power will miss out on love and grace because they will not be able to accept that life is a gift and not the work of their own hands.

The power of Jesus is not the power of the American Dream. His power was not to prevail upon the world around him by forcibly manipulating the reversals that Hannah describes. It was rather a powerless power, like the power of an invitation, or like the power of an uninvited dream that prevails upon you and makes you restless. It is the power that works not upon the material world but upon the womb of the world, where things are getting conceived; it is the power that works not upon the surface of things but upon the heart. It is the power of loving your enemies, forgiving those who persecute you, welcoming the unwelcomable, living peace amid violence. It is not a ruthless power that gets its own way but a selfless power that makes a way where there is none. The power of Jesus is a difficult power, some might even say impossible, especially in the wake of Paris, Beirut, and Baghdad. It is a power that does not manipulate or control life but gives life.

Within the good news of Hannah, then, is the gospel of Jesus Christ. Within her message is not the American Dream but the dream of God, or the God who is an uninvited dream that prevails upon us whenever we are visited with the inexplicable urge to show love to the lonely or the bitter, to build someone up with a smile or a hug or a simple word, whenever our hearts tug on us with concern for the woman begging at the corner or the old man who has no family to check in on him or the child who is forlorn in his own home. Within Hannah’s message is not only a sense of Thanksgiving—which we all of us will celebrate soon—but also the restless spirit of Christ, which intrudes on us uninvited, like a thief in the night, filling us with the memory of how he overturned the tables of this world, conceiving within us and our communities the gift of new life, which of course is a gift we do not make but rather receive. We are not self-made individuals prevailing upon the world, but rather a people prevailed upon by God, by the dream of God, by the God who is a dream of unconditional love, forgiveness, and welcome.

Prayer

We feel new life kicking within us, God. We feel it every time hope points to the future, every time love leavens our flat lives, every time forgiveness breaks us free from chains of debt and cycles of retribution. May your sacred dreams prevail upon us today, God, and may we share them with the world. May we courageously answer the death and fear and terror of our world with the grace of new life that comes from love, forgiveness, and peace. May we bear the dream of your powerless power, a power that does not coerce or manipulate life but rather conceives life in the womb of the world. In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ: Amen.

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[1] See Heidegger’s idea of “thrownness” in Division 1, Chapter 5 of Being and Time. The simplest example of our thrownness is our birth, namely that we are born into a particular time and place and experience without our consent. As Kierkegaard pithily puts it, “Why was I not asked about it? … Is there no manager? To whom shall I make my complaint?” Kierkegaard’s Writings, VI, Fear and Trembling and Repetition (trans. and ed. Howard and Edna Hong; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 200. Simon Critchley offers a helpful outline of Heidegger’s concept of thrownness in “Being and Time, Part 4: Thrown into This World,” http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2009/jun/29/religion-philosophy. Accessed Nov 13, 2015.

"I Cannot Imagine Life Without..." (Ruth 3:1-5; 4:13-17)

(Homily for Gayton Road Christian Church's Sunday Worship on Nov 8, 2015)

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The Dizzying Motion of Life

It was Friday, the end of a long and lonely week. I got a text from my friend Stephen, asking if I’d like to meet up at the pub. Stephen is a Scouser, a big, cheery Liverpool lad born and bred, and we had bonded quickly over our shared love of the same soccer team, Liverpool. When I got the text, I figured that what Stephen had in mind was just a little catch-up between the two of us. Liverpool had a big game the next day, so we’d have plenty to talk about. I said, Yes, I’ll see you there.

I walked down to the pub, which was little more crowded than to my liking, and I found Stephen upstairs at a table…with eleven or twelve other strangers whom I’d never seen before. Which was a good deal more not to my liking. I’d been hoping for just a quiet pint and a little chit-chat…. (Milk. In case you were wondering.) But I stuck around and tried my hand at being sociable. The folks there were friendly. But how much can you really connect with strangers in one evening? Well, as the night wound down and I made my way to the opposite end of the table, I introduced myself to the final stranger. A Romanian student named Vlad.

That was about three years ago. In the last three years, I have shared a flat with Vlad, I have visited his home in Bucharest, I have made plans with him for the great American road trip should he ever find his way across the Atlantic. We’ve gotten lost together, discovered underground coffee shops together, tromped miles through the snow together. We’ve puzzled over our different upbringings and the ever-changing calibrations of our hearts and our beliefs. And even though it’s only been three years, now I cannot imagine life without Vlad.

Ours is a deep friendship. And just as deep is my sense of wonder that we should even be friends. Because everything came from nothing: A chance encounter with a stranger. An evening when I said “Yes” to an invitation that I would have declined had I known more.

When I look back on it now, I cannot help but feel dizzy.

The Dizzying Life of Naomi and Ruth

I share that story because I think that Naomi and Ruth and the characters of their story all have that same dizzying feeling at the end of the story, when the women proclaim, “Blessed be the Lord” (4:13). It is an exclamation of wonder and surprise. Because earlier in the story, circumstances had been quite different. Earlier in the story, Naomi—whose name means “pleasant”—had said to these women, “Call me no longer Naomi, but call me [Bitter], for the Almighty has dealt bitterly with me. I went away full but the Lord has brought me back empty” (1:20-21).

And life had indeed been bitter for Naomi. First, she had lost her husband. Then, she had lost her two sons. And after that, she was left living in a foreign land with little more than a penny to her name.

And yet it was precisely in the midst of this loss that the dizzying whirlwind of life, which is another way of saying the unforeseeable currents of God’s grace, had swept her up into life again. Loss had somehow become life, and all through the least noteworthy people and the least favorable circumstances. The deaths of her husband and son had left her living with a nobody, a daughter-in-law who was a Moabite, which is to say, a person who would have been unwelcome in many an Israelite home. And yet from this unlikely pairing evolves an unfailing friendship. Together the grieving widows return to Israel, destitute and distressed. And yet it is their destitution that leads them to take the bold risk of seeking the hospitality of a man who seemed like maybe, just maybe, he would help.

And so it is that the women of the town proclaim their amazement, their joy, their dizzying sensation: amid all the bitter twists and turns of loss and grief, Naomi and Ruth have somehow found life, or life has somehow found them.

God?

This is all very good, you may think—“but why tell this story in a church?” There’s hardly a mention of God. Isn’t this the kind of story you could just as well hear on Oprah, or the sort of tale you might overhear in a coffeeshop or at the park? What does this story have to do with our faith?

If the book of Ruth could talk, I think it would respond incredulously, “What doesn’t this story have to do with faith?” The special truth of Ruth, a truth that the churches and temples and mosques of our world all too often forget, is that faith, if it has to do with anything at all, has to do with the everyday. The story of Ruth takes place before there is a king of Israel, before there is an institutional religion. In other words, before there was a Temple, before there were priests who administer sacrifices in an orderly way, before there were kings and advisors and royal intrigue—before all that power and prestige and pious presumption, there were people on the ground like Ruth and Naomi, people who felt the brunt of a brutal existence, people who encountered God not among long robes or sacrifices or prescribed piety but among the commonplace, among cooking and cleaning and working and looking for work…and even among tragedy. For people like Ruth and Naomi, God was not up in the clouds, waiting to be appeased; God was not living in some holy box in the Temple, keeping record of sacrifices. God was the breath of life, the gift of life that they discovered in their dizzying story. It was the gift of life found in a baby borne of an unlikely marriage, a marriage that came about only because of untimely deaths in an unfamiliar land which led to an unbelievable partnership between two unsettled widows, one an Israelite, the other a Moabite.[1]

The God Without Whom We Cannot Imagine Life…

The story of Ruth is the story of people like you and me. It’s a story about the everyday. Before we come to church, before we open the pages of a Bible, before utter a prayer with our lips—before all of that, God is on the ground, among the crowds, in the hustle and bustle. God is the call of life, the invitation to life that has drawn forth the most dizzying storylines of our lives. What I said earlier about my friendship with Vlad, what Naomi and Ruth may have said about one another—“I cannot imagine life without…”—is another way of saying that life is a gift and that its giftedness is wrapped up in the grace of chance meetings and dizzying proceedings.

About whom would you say, “I cannot imagine life without…”? What dizzying turn of events has gifted you with life? In what plain clothes, around what corner, through what empty or bitter or tragic circumstance has God walked into your life?

Do You Believe in Life After Loss?

The book of Ruth ends on a happy note. But the point—I think—is not that life is a fairy tale and we will all live happily ever after. The point is that, wherever it is, however much we have of it, life is a gift and its giftedness is bundled up in the unforeseeable relationships and unbelievable twists and turns that continually inspire and encourage and comfort and provoke us. The point is that the great gift-Giver is somewhere in every story, even the most tragic; that the Giver’s gifts are to be found within the ordinary clothes of ordinary people, that the Giver is always redeeming and restoring life, always regifting it afresh, even at the very moment that life is lost.

Do you believe in life after loss? The storyteller of Ruth, I know, would say yes, and would go a step further to say, “And I believe in life amid loss.”

And I dare say we would agree. In the few months since I’ve been here, I’ve heard stories of heart attacks and cancer and other significant setbacks. Most recently our hearts have been drawn into the story of Autumn, Emily’s baby niece who immediately on birth struggled just to breathe. And each and every one of these stories shares one thing in common: at the heart of them beats the pulse of life. Not just the biological life that has endured through these struggles, but the gift of life that we have found in each other. Struggle and heartache has brought us together, where we have found life in the prayer and support and hope and joy of one another.

The dizzying gift of life does not mean the absence of loss. It means the gift of life amid loss, despite loss, redeeming what remains after loss, what grows out of loss. It means that we cannot imagine life any differently than the gift that life in all its crazy glory already is….

Prayer

God, we cannot imagine life without each other…without family, without friends, without the strangers and chance happenings that mark our lives with a goodness we could never see coming. Before we knew how to pray, before we knew the ways of church, before any of that—even without any of that—there You are, giving us life, a gift packaged with the grace of moments that lift us up and carry us forward, moments that dry our tears and bring smiles to our faces. Thank you. May the gift we receive be a gift that we share unconditionally. Amen.

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[1] When the women celebrate with Naomi at the end of the book, there is a curious confusion as to the identity of whom or what exactly they celebrate. Listen to their words: “Blessed be the Lord, who has not left you this day without [a child]; and may his name”—whose? God’s? the child’s?—“may his name be renowned in Israel! He shall be to you a restorer of life and a nourisher of your old age”—again, who is the restorer and nourisher? God? the child?—“for your daughter-in-law who loves you, who is more to you than seven sons, has borne him” (4:14-15). So they start by blessing the Lord who has given life, and yet by the end of their words, God the life-giver has transformed into the baby who restores and nourishes life. It’s a delightful disorder that speaks truth in a way that no certainty ever could. Life is a gift. From whom? God? Each other? Yes, exactly.  And perhaps this untraceability of the gift is the point.  Perhas what matters is not to whom or what we trace the gift but that we recognize life as a gift and we receive it as such.

How Life Finds Us (Ruth 1:1-18)

(Homily for Gayton Road Christian Church's Sunday Worship on Nov 1, 2015, All Saints' Day)

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Life as a Scavenger Hunt

For the young girl, life was a like a scavenger hunt. She searched for happiness and found it in different places. As a young child, she found it among her family’s livestock. She would feed the goats every day. She would lie on her back and contemplate the clouds beside the grazing cattle. She even befriended the skittish sheep. As she grew, she found happiness in the approval and affirmation of her mother. So she learned how to knit and how to cook and how to be a good host for guests. She wanted to prove her worth as a young woman. When she felt that she accomplished this, she turned her attention to the next item on the scavenger list: a husband. In her culture, a young woman was not a complete person until she had married and had children. So she began to take extra care with her appearance when she went to draw water from the well nearby. It was not long before young men in the village were inquiring about her. But it was not a young man from the village who had caught her eye. It was an immigrant, a kind man with a strange accent. An aura of the unknown hung around him, and so quite naturally, she wanted to know more.

Before the next harvest, she was married. And happy. For a full ten years. Until all of the sudden, life happened. Which is another way of saying that the unexpected happened—and everything changed. Her husband died. And for the first time in her life, the girl was lost. There were no items left on her scavenger list.

Just as her husband had been kind, so too was her mother-in-law. The grieving widow took comfort in her company. But her mother-in-law soon told her that she would be leaving to go back home: she had no family left in the land, and she had heard that things were better back in her hometown. So the young woman, Ruth, decided to go with her mother-in-law, Naomi. The words that she spoke to her mother-in-law are by now a timeless declaration of commitment: “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. [Even death shall not part us]” (1:16-17).

The Course That We Determine, Determines Us

I’ve embellished the story, of course. We don’t know anything about Ruth’s early life. All we know is that she was a Moabite woman who married an Israelite man, Mahlon, and that she later made the immortalized decision to leave her homeland and to follow her mother-in-law back to ancient Israel.

Even though we don’t know much, I think it’s safe to assume that Ruth’s early life was a scavenger hunt. Because that’s what life is for everyone, at least most of the time. We look for what will make us happy. We look forward to what we think will make us happy. Sometimes the scavenger hunt is as mundane as looking forward to the weekend, when we’ll outsource a considerable portion of our emotional energy into a group of 11 sweaty men who wear our colors and fight for our bragging rights. Sometimes the scavenger hunt is a bit more serious. Sometimes what’s next on the list is an item that we know will take time to find: maybe a vocation or a relationship or a place.

So whether Ruth was a tomboy or a little princess, or some inimitable mix of both, it is almost certain that she—like us—went looking for happiness in a variety of places.

But if life is a scavenger hunt, that is only one side of the story. When Ruth said to her mother-in-law, “Where you go, I will go…. [Even death will not part us]” (1:16-17), she was exposing herself to the other side of the story of life, to the side where we do not go looking for life but rather recognize that life comes to us. And we all have followed her example, whether we know it or not. There are some choices that we make, that make us even more in return. There are some moments that, whether or not we realize it, are crossroads in our lives. And the course that we will determine becomes a course that will determine us.

The most obvious example to point to would be marriage. There is a sense in which a person marries not only a husband or wife but also an entire family. You “marry into” a family. And suddenly, whether you like it or not, that family becomes a part of you. Their lives become your life. Their traditions become your traditions. Their habits of speech become your habits of speech. What Ruth says to Naomi is what gets said at almost every wedding—or at least it gets said between the lines: “Your people will be my people” (1:16).

A Long, Beautiful, Mysterious Inheritance:

Christ Lives in Us

Following Christ is another crossroads in our lives, another moment in our lives when we do not so much look for life as we let new life come to us, another choice we make that makes us even more in return. Suddenly, whether we like it or not, an entire history of Christ-followers—countless souls, most of whom we will never know by either face or name—becomes a part of us. Alexander Campbell and Barton Stone. Martin Luther. Martin Luther King. Saint Augustine. Even death cannot separate them from us. Their stories become our story. Their words become our words.

Have you ever noticed yourself adopting the expressions or mannerisms of a close friend or family member? The same thing happens with our faith.

There is a sense in which our shared faith is a language. If you think about it, nobody can claim ownership to the language they speak. Nobody owns the words they say. If anything, it’s the other way around. Language owns us. It existed before we ever did. And after we are born, language shapes us: it determines what we can say, it molds the way we think. In the same way, the faith of the Christ-followers who have gone before us—the personal saints who have blessed our lives and the many others whose memories live on in us unbeknownst—their faith shapes and molds ours. Think for a moment about the best parts of yourself. From which personal saints do those habits or inclinations come? (And maybe it’s someone for whom you lit a candle earlier today.)

All of this—I think—explains what Paul means all those times where he says that “Christ lives in us.”[1] He’s not declaring some holy magic or divine wizardry. He’s talking about how the way of Christ has found a way into our lives by a long, beautiful, mysterious inheritance. The words and deeds of Christ echo in our lives through the lives of people—whom we might call saints. This is seen in a beautiful story of our own. Betty Taylor’s husband, David, once received a teddy bear from a random saint when he was in the hospital and not feeling well. The gift lifted his spirits beyond words. And the gift lives on. This deed of love, this Christlike care, has inspired a lovely and creative repetition that we call D. D.’s Bears, in which our church gives teddy bears to hospital patients. The joy and hope that was shared first with David, we now share with other hospital patients. And so it is that the Christ who walked into David’s hospital room now walks into other hospital rooms. So it is that Christ lives in us.

The Saints Who Walk Us Down the Aisle

The good news of Ruth and the gospel of Jesus Christ is that, while our personal scavenger hunts may leave us in despair like the widowed Ruth, while we may never quite find the life we are looking for—even here, by the grace of God, life may find us…through the lives of others. Life found Ruth when she trusted in the goodness of her mother-in-law and committed to making her mother-in-law’s people her people. And life finds us through the lives of innumerable Christ-followers. When we decide to follow Christ—and it’s a decision we must make every day—we are deciding to marry into a way of life. We become, as Jesus and Paul both suggest, the bride of Christ.[2] And if we are the bride of Christ, then it’s the saints who are walking us down the aisle. Their best habits and traits, their timeless words and acts of love: their lives live on in us and lead us to walk forward into life with Christ. All of which is just another way of saying that Christ walks into our life through theirs.

Prayer

What a mystery, God, what a gift, that we should know the love of Jesus Christ. That we should see his face, feel his touch, hear his words of devotion and forgiveness. And not through some special knowledge or some secret trick, but through the personal saints who have graced our lives. Thank you for them. Thank you for all the ways they have pointed us to your Kingdom, for all the ways they have lived out your good news. Fill us and inspire us today with memories of their Christlike love. Open our hearts to the Christ who lived in theirs. Lead us by their steps down the aisle into an adventurous, abundant, and enchantingly unforeseeable life with Christ. Amen.

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[1] Cf. Rom 8:10; Col 1:27; Gal 2:20.


[2] Cf. Mark 2:19; John 3:29; 2 Cor 11:2.