Sunday 1 November 2015

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.

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