Ruth 1:1-18
“Yours, Mine and Ours”
November 4, 2018
Just two days ago, two men who had previously been strangers to each other got together in a hotel coffee shop and in spite of never having met, Jeffrey Myers and Eric Manning embraced warmly as one does with family you haven’t seen in a long time. The coffee shop was in Pittsburgh and Jeffrey Myers is the rabbi who leads Tree of Life Synagogue and the Rev. Eric Manning is the leader of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Their bond, now forever, will be that they both lead congregations where deadly shootings took place, one by a man with a long history of anti-Semitism who spouted that hatred even as he killed 11 and wounded 6 last Saturday during weekly Shabbat services. The other man now leads Mother Emanuel Church where 77 shots were fired during an evening Bible study, killing 9 people, by Dylann Roof who shouted racist hate-filled speech as the slaughter was happening. Rev. Manning succeeded Rev. Clementa Pinckney who was the first to be shot on that terrible night in June 2015.
When the final funeral for the Tree of Life victims took place later on this past Friday, Rabbi Myers asked Rev. Manning to offer the 23rd Psalm and speak to the mourners whose grief he knew all too well. “Your people will be my people and your God my God.”
As you probably know, a religious leader is not allowed nor should they be able to tell people how to vote. With Election Day on Tuesday, I will continue to follow that wisdom and the law so as not to put our tax-exempt status in jeopardy but what I will offer today is that when you go to the polls on Tuesday to be a part of one of the great privileges that this 242 year old experiment in democracy affords us, I would encourage you to take your love to the polls with you. I’m not talking about your sweetheart but rather take the love that is our only mandate from the God we worship as lived out in Jesus’ example.
Instead of viewing candidates as the lesser of two evils, consider where the love for our neighbors – the poor and rich ones as well as the in-between, the young and not so young and young at heart, those born here as well as the flat-landers who came from somewhere else can be found in the issues they support, the policies they want to implement and the respect with which they treat people who can’t do anything for them. In the midst of terrible news and ugliness on a national scale which pains the hearts of so many of us, there is no room to look out only for ourselves. We need to go out on a limb and vote our love for God’s people. God loves us and stands by us regardless of how much of a mess we make of things. As writer Anne Lamott recently said, “I know that my belovedness and inclusion in this precious community of All of Us are due to God having such low standards and…against all odds…if we stick together, take care of the poor and the very old, get thirsty people water, including our own worried self-obsessed selves, we can dramatically reduce our viral load. We can be Love with skin on.” (radicaldiscipleship.net, 11/3/18)
Today we have heard again one of the greatest stories of love in the Bible. Some have questioned why this book, which is so frequently used in weddings, is even in the Bible. Where is God? Yes, God is invoked when Ruth says the line that is quoted so often and with such awe and reverence, “Where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people and your God my God.” But here is the amazing part. Ruth, as we are often reminded, is from the tribe known as Moabites who are regarded as less than by Naomi’s people. Moabites were people who worshipped fertility gods and the Hebrew prophets had very little good to say about them. This God to which Ruth is pledging her life and being is the singular one great God that Ruth knows very little about and yet because her sense of steadfast love for the mother of her dead husband is so rich and deep and strong she is wanting to continue to be family to Naomi and to adopt that God as her own. What she is embracing with eyes wide open but probably not fully aware of all that she is letting herself in for, is a love that knows no bounds. Here she is willing to live in a land where she will most likely be shunned and treated as an outsider– ethnically, religiously, language-wise and culturally. She is stretching herself way beyond anyone’s expectation of comfort. And why? She could have just done what her sister-in-law Orpah did an took the path that Naomi encouraged, the one that sent her back to her own familiar surroundings, back to the family and home where she is known. But she didn’t.
There is here a loving kindness filled with unconditional acts of grace and mercy that is lived out by Ruth and that is where Naomi and we, who are to learn and grow from this story, experience God. Ruth gave up all of the security and relative ease that would have come from staying with her family of birth in Moab and instead set off on a course following love of family and love of this new found God.
Two widowed women making their way out of no way, one older and one younger, were bound to suffer. This was a patriarchal society that assumed all power and influence lay in the hands of men. But Ruth lived an unexpected life, demonstrating a power and loyalty that would have been unfathomable to most of those around her. The love of Ruth for Naomi was not going to eliminate her suffering but instead she was willing to share in it. She was willing to labor mightily beside her in her poverty. This is the love of God, who when we want to ask where is such a God in tragedy, God is there in the midst of it. Not waving a magic wand and eliminating it but journeying with and through the hard times, the grief, the loss and the struggle.
It can be so much easier to wall ourselves off and keep our love to a small circle of immediate family and close friends but this is not how we are to live out the expansive and never-ending love that God surrounds us with. So take your love, not your hate and not your fear, with you to the polls on Tuesday. We are, with God’s love, intended to be repairers of the breach for as Rev. Martin Luther King lifted up, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate. Only love can do that.”
In our deep desire for love to have the last word, as we prepare now to eat at the table of love, hear then these 800 year-old thoughts from St. Thomas Aquinas:
How is it they live for eons in such harmony-
the billions of stars –
when most men can barely go a minute
without declaring war in their mind against someone they know.
There are wars where no one marches with a flag,
though that does not keep casualties
from mounting.
Our hearts irrigate this earth.
we are fields before
each other.
How can we live in harmony?
First we need to
know
We are all madly in love
with the same
God. Amen.
(“We Are Fields Before Each Other,” Love Poems from God, 129)