(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.
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