At age forty, I left corporate America to follow the call to ministry.
I was well educated, having been steeped in a refined broth of rationalism and critical reasoning, read all the appropriate European authors, perched my fanny on the erudite ruins at Delphi, and stumbled wide-eyed through Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem holocaust memorial. I was experienced as a world traveler who had skied the Alps, gone elbow to elbow with Chinese businessmen for platefuls of ugly fish in Kuala Lumpur restaurants, and lived amongst the “lost Woodstock generation” who shuffled around the west side of Greenwich Village in their Birkenstocks, avoiding exposure to the sun. I was even married with three young kids, the youngest a mumbo-jumbo yacking, couscous tossing extrovert.
I was ready for anything and knew it. What’s more, I knew that I knew it.
In seminary, professors work hard to relieve students of all their goofball, folkloric misconceptions about why and what we believe. They teach you that the Bible doesn’t really say what you think it says unless you’ve personally translated the old papyrus scrolls from the original Greek or Hebrew for yourself, dissected the grammar, and consulted all the scholars who’ve spent devoted and low paid lifetimes figuring out things like whether Paul actually wrote the letter to the Ephesians or if it was written by a follower or even an impostor.
Now I was really ready, theologically and Biblically locked and loaded.
And then began my hospital pastoral care rotation, clinical field work that could burn the corn-based wax shine off Helen of Troy’s golden apple. This is where you face the test of learning whether you can render all that theological and Biblical understanding into something meaningful in people’s lives. People who don’t care about the Greek or the Hebrew or the authorship of the letter to the Ephesians.
People who just want some answers.
The nurse administrator who ran the desk on the blood and organ diseases floor was sharp as a tack. Her smooth, perfect skin was somewhere between the color of maple syrup and green tea and her eyes never quite rose above the horizon of her reading glasses. She could see people like me coming before we’d even driven into the parking garage or waived our newly laminated security badges for the first time. She could eradicate that waxy shine from your golden apple faster than battery acid.
I introduced myself and asked for a patient list.
“Whatcha bring me?” she monotoned without looking up from her paperwork. There were several lists sitting on her desk.
“I, I beg your pardon? I’m sorry. Do you mean some kind of authorization or something?”
“I mean a muffin or a latte or something. But you don’t appear to have anything like that. Do you? No treat, no list.”
I stammered something unintelligible as she took a long drag off a diet soda.
“Go down this hall to room 41. Start there and work back. Pay attention.” She finished these gruff instructions by skewing her lower jaw slightly sideways and poking her tongue against her molars in a kind of disgusted way. I started down the hall.
Something I didn’t know about a diabetes patient on welfare is that either the person has feet or doesn’t and entering room 41, I immediately noticed that the sheets at the foot of the bed were curiously flat up to the knees. I swallowed and stepped forward to greet Irene with some sort of empathy not found in the doctrines of either Calvin or Luther. I was trying not to gaff and say something stupid like “How are you feeling?” or “I’m the chaplain today, is there something I can do for you?”
I spoke her name and asked where she was from. I asked about her family. I asked about her home and how she had gotten to the hospital. I asked when she might be released. I asked anything I could in order to avoid talking about her medical condition and her missing limbs. She was eighty-nine and lived in a small town in the mountains north of our city, had no children, a brother in a distant state, and no other family.
After a while, I asked if she wished to pray.
“No,” she mumbled weakly, taking long, slow breaths every couple of words. “It’s too late for prayer. I just want to know something. I want you to tell me something chaplain, pastor, whoever you are.”
“Okay,” I responded quietly, reluctantly.
“I just want to know why I’m still here. I’m sick and not gonna get better. Been in here three times this year. All they can do is amputate again.”
I said I was sorry and that she was probably still in the hospital because the doctors still had some hope.
“Those doctors don’t have hope. They’ve got walls full of degrees and microscopes and clean white jackets but they’ve got no hope. Anyway, I don’t want to know why I’m still in the hospital.”
Her eyes moistened and streams of tears silently slid down the sides of her ashen face and into her matted, white hair as she lay flat on her back.
“I want to know what only you can tell me, chaplain, pastor. What you have to tell me. I want to know why Jesus is leavin’ me here this way. Why won’t he just take me to heaven today, to be with my Mama?”
Showing posts with label family. Show all posts
Showing posts with label family. Show all posts
Friday, April 04, 2008
Tuesday, September 04, 2007
Sabbath Chores
Luke 13:10-17
Presenting Engagement: Sunday rules.
As a kid, I would spend about a month at my grandparents’ home every summer and every Sunday afternoon we’d go over to the next county to visit other folks in the family. They lived in a village of less than a thousand people nestled in the shadow of a low mountain range bordering a long Tennessee Valley Authority lake.
Still in church clothes, the grown ups would sit in green, straight back rockers on the front porch and talk about local gossip and wayward family members. I, still in church clothes, would sit on the front porch floor, pretty bored, playing with a toy car or I could shuffle down the privet-lined, gravel lane that ran from the house to the intersection with the main road down next to the court house. There were no buildings between the house and the corner so you could see the back of the court house as plain as day. And there in back of that building was a large sort of yard where men lounged all afternoon on summer Sundays.
Once I asked who those men were who always lounged there and I learned a major distinction about the front and back of any rural court house. The men who loitered in front of the court house, slicing chunks of tobacco from plugs of Reynolds Natural Leaf were citizens in good standing while the men who loitered in the fenced-in yard behind the building, slicing similar chunks from identical plugs of Reynolds Natural Leaf, were convicts. It seemed by definition, the rule was that good folks got to have their tobacco in front of the hall of justice but the desperados had to go around back.
Rules. Rules. Rules.
You can’t get away from the rules, no matter where you are or how you live or what day of the week it is and Sunday was a day when the rules were applied more enthusiastically than all the other days of the week.
In Fact, this indolent, summer time ritual of visiting the kin on Sunday afternoon was chocked full of rules. There were rules about what you could wear, where you could go, how grimy you could get, how noisy and boisterous you could be around adults. Of course life wasn’t any less strict for those adults because they weren’t allowed to do their work on Sunday and none of the adults I knew played golf because the local Baptists thought it was somehow related to dancing.
But not working on Sunday simply for the reason that it was Sunday made very little sense to me as a child. In other words, the “causistry” of Sunday sabbath regulations did not appear rational to my kid-sized brain.
So I eventually asked my grandfather about why the preacher worked on Sunday. Well, it seemed the preacher had a special sanction. I asked who was down at the T V A on Sunday making sure that the big dam didn’t burst and flood the town. It seemed that people called engineers had a special sanction too. Doctors had special sanction if there was an emergency and of course farmers had really special sanctions or else the splotched Guernsey dairy cattle would bloat all up and the pigs and chickens would die of thirst or starvation. The people with the biggest sanction of all on Sundays were moms and wives because without them, well without them all the men and boys would have starved including the farmers, doctors, engineers, preachers, and even court house jail guards. Not a pretty picture.
So, it seems only natural that if all these kinds of mere mortals get sanctions to work on Sabbath then Jesus of Nazareth ought to get a sanction too! But the synagogue leaders did not see things with the clarity of a child.
Their causistry was obscure, but rules were rules.
Biblical Context: Jesus’ controversy.
Now, when it came to the matter of how religious practices were mediated in Hebrew society Jesus was precocious as a child and confrontational as an adult. You recall how he was already unsettling the religious establishment as a twelve year old asking those embarassingly insightful questions to the Jerusalem temple elders. As minister who is the parent of a teenager, I know how that goes. It can be frustrating to say the least!
And as he became older, Jesus continued to speak truth. In fact, you could say he was a religious activist who had so many confrontations with religious leaders over the three years of his preaching and healing ministry that his activism ultimately was the presenting argument for putting him on the cross to die.
Part of that activism was that he never seemed to go along with the established causistry of religious regulations. In fact, he thought the religious establishment had gotten it all wrong and were misleading the people.
It wasn’t that Jesus disrespected human authority; it was that he respected God’s sovereign authority above all.
So there he was in one of the local synagogues one Sabbath day, teaching as a rabbi normally would. A woman entered with a crippling ailment that caused her back to bow right over so that she could not even stand up straight. Anyone with even a touch of osteo arthritis can understand exactly what she was going through.
Jesus saw her plight and unburdened her. Did you notice how Luke presents Jesus’ statement? “Woman, you are set free from your ailment.”[i]
Set free! Liberated! This claim is a direct, metaphorical reference to the Egyptian exodus when God set the Israelites free from slavery to the Pharaohs. Now Jesus has set this woman free from bondage to her crippling ailment.
But the synagogue leader did not think it was right to do miracles on the Sabbath because this leader, standing there in the same room with Jesus, spoke disparagingly about Jesus’ act of healing.
The description in the gospel makes the synagogue leader sound like a politician who is disgruntled over another politician’s stance in a debate. If you watch those debates, have you noticed how the candidates put eachother down without making honest eye contact with each other? They look at the debate moderator and the television camera but avoid looking at the person they are attempting to belittle with their answer. The strategy is to get the crowd on their side and make their opponent seem totally unworthy of recognition.
That is just what this particular synagogue leader wanted. He was outraged that Jesus the rabbi had come into the synagogue and healed someone on the Sabbath so instead of glaring at that rabbi, the leader addressed the crowd who were assembled there and quoted the Ten Commandments. “Don’t come in here on the Sabbath and expect to be healed and don’t follow anyone who does work on the Sabbath,” he’s saying.
But Jesus of Nazareth did not play to the crowd. He responded directly to the synagogue leader, looking him directly in the eye and saying: “You hypocrites!”[ii] Perhaps noting that special sanction for farmers, Jesus pointed out how even the oxen and donkeys get watered on the Sabbath. Wasn’t that work? Didn’t the synagogue leader do this work on the Sabbath too? And here was this Hebrew woman, a spiritual descendent of Abraham, a family member of God’s chosen people. Was her liberation less valuable than the watering of a donkey or an ox?
Explication of Text: What’s it all mean?
The resources of Hollywood could probably turn this exchange between Jesus and the synagogue leader into a cinematic blockbuster. It has all you could ask for: pathos, moral outrage, a hero who sticks up for the little person against the hard-hearted establishment. All that stuff that makes a great movie moment is right here in this gospel account by Luke.
There are actually two things going on in this story. First, this is a didactic moment, a teaching moment.
What Jesus was teaching that day was that scrupulous adherence to the letter of the Torah law[iii] pointed out a moral fallacy. It pointed out how these hypocritical people were so stuck in the rut of scriptural absolutism that they missed the fact that healing this woman was more righteous than ignoring her on account of the Sabbath.
Healing is divine work. Jesus was teaching the crowd and the leaders that doing God’s work takes place every single day of the week. Rest from your profit making labors on the Sabbath but don’t ever rest from your divine chores.
It is particularly significant that this woman’s crippling illness was thought to be the work of Satan. In the scriptures, we find that any debilitation was considered caused by evil spirits and so if you were leperous or crippled or bleeding from sores that would not close, you were ostracized from healthy society. No one would eat with you or touch you or befriend you in any way.
The healing of this woman was more than physical healing. Jesus was liberating her from a severe illness and at the same time he was reconciling her with her people, her kin, the other descendents of Abraham in that place. God’s will is the reconciliation and restoration of people each and every day of the week.
First, this is a didactic moment. Second, Jesus was a prophet and this is a prophetic moment.
The prophecy here is that the Kingdom of God is constantly breaking into this everyday world that we live in. This world thinks in terms of the concrete rather than the abstract. This world wants quantifiable performance results and test scores and metric analysis and church growth figures.
But the kingdom of God does not operate on these human terms. You can’t measure reconciliation. You can’t pick up a handful of restoration and put it in a test tube, fire up a bunson burner under it and find out at what temperature it boils.
Jesus’ prophecy tells me that the Kingdom of God is not found in the absolutism of doctrine. It is found in loving my neighbor as myself. It is found in the divine chores of liberation and healing. If I bury my head in the absolutism of the Sabbath regulations and don’t do my divine chores, then the Kingdom of God might pass right by me and I will have missed it.
Listener Context: How does this relate to my life?
I think it is often very difficult to parse God’s will in the Bible because much of scripture relates to the particular rather than the general. We look for universal truth in stories of particular situations in particular lives thousands of years ago. So it may be disconcerting and confusing when we come across a text like this one today because this particular story of this particular situation seems to contradict the particular divine commandment to observe the Sabbath that comes from another particular story a thousand years earlier.
The German scholar, Gunther Bornkamm wrote that Jesus’ offense in the synagogue that day was not an offense against the Sabbath itself. Jesus’ offence was against “Sabbath causistry” developed to excrutiating exactitude by a pedantic religious hierarchy.[iv] In other words, the commandment to observe the Sabbath wasn’t what Jesus objected to. He objected to the social custom that had been developed around the commandment. He objected to the fact that that social custom had obscured the original relevance of the Sabbath.
It is oh so easy to venture forth into a noble cause only to find that after time has passed we have forgotten our original intent, lost the original relevance of our endeavor. And when that happens, all we have left is a hollow ritual.
I think we can find this in any number of places in our lives. Perhaps we have turned lively and meaningful celebrations into routine procedures. We might have turned precious relationships into wooden associations. We might have turned interesting work into weekday routines just for the sake of a paycheck.
When that happens, it is unfortunate.
But when those rare moments happen in which the presence of the Kingdom of God flashes by and we miss it because we were too busy performing fossilized traditions out of some short sighted sense of formality, well that is more than unfortunate. It is isolating and hope denying.
Conclusion: What’s the Point?
Jesus Christ is our best hope in life and in death. Don’t miss his presence and lose that hope. Be watchful for signs that the Kingdom of God is present. You’ll know it when you see it.
You’ll know it when someone goes out of their way to do a senseless act of kindness for someone else.
You’ll know it when someone forgives someone else even though they are not obligated to.
You’ll know it when old enemies make peace.
You’ll know it when someone gives their time to tutor a child or visit a shut in or welcomes a stranger into the church or begins a recycling program or speaks some unpopular truth.
You might just see it while you’re sitting on the front porch in a green straight backed rocker conversing with your family on a Sunday afternoon in the summer in your church clothes.
For heaven’s sake, don’t miss it! Amen.
As a kid, I would spend about a month at my grandparents’ home every summer and every Sunday afternoon we’d go over to the next county to visit other folks in the family. They lived in a village of less than a thousand people nestled in the shadow of a low mountain range bordering a long Tennessee Valley Authority lake.
Still in church clothes, the grown ups would sit in green, straight back rockers on the front porch and talk about local gossip and wayward family members. I, still in church clothes, would sit on the front porch floor, pretty bored, playing with a toy car or I could shuffle down the privet-lined, gravel lane that ran from the house to the intersection with the main road down next to the court house. There were no buildings between the house and the corner so you could see the back of the court house as plain as day. And there in back of that building was a large sort of yard where men lounged all afternoon on summer Sundays.
Once I asked who those men were who always lounged there and I learned a major distinction about the front and back of any rural court house. The men who loitered in front of the court house, slicing chunks of tobacco from plugs of Reynolds Natural Leaf were citizens in good standing while the men who loitered in the fenced-in yard behind the building, slicing similar chunks from identical plugs of Reynolds Natural Leaf, were convicts. It seemed by definition, the rule was that good folks got to have their tobacco in front of the hall of justice but the desperados had to go around back.
Rules. Rules. Rules.
You can’t get away from the rules, no matter where you are or how you live or what day of the week it is and Sunday was a day when the rules were applied more enthusiastically than all the other days of the week.
In Fact, this indolent, summer time ritual of visiting the kin on Sunday afternoon was chocked full of rules. There were rules about what you could wear, where you could go, how grimy you could get, how noisy and boisterous you could be around adults. Of course life wasn’t any less strict for those adults because they weren’t allowed to do their work on Sunday and none of the adults I knew played golf because the local Baptists thought it was somehow related to dancing.
But not working on Sunday simply for the reason that it was Sunday made very little sense to me as a child. In other words, the “causistry” of Sunday sabbath regulations did not appear rational to my kid-sized brain.
So I eventually asked my grandfather about why the preacher worked on Sunday. Well, it seemed the preacher had a special sanction. I asked who was down at the T V A on Sunday making sure that the big dam didn’t burst and flood the town. It seemed that people called engineers had a special sanction too. Doctors had special sanction if there was an emergency and of course farmers had really special sanctions or else the splotched Guernsey dairy cattle would bloat all up and the pigs and chickens would die of thirst or starvation. The people with the biggest sanction of all on Sundays were moms and wives because without them, well without them all the men and boys would have starved including the farmers, doctors, engineers, preachers, and even court house jail guards. Not a pretty picture.
So, it seems only natural that if all these kinds of mere mortals get sanctions to work on Sabbath then Jesus of Nazareth ought to get a sanction too! But the synagogue leaders did not see things with the clarity of a child.
Their causistry was obscure, but rules were rules.
Biblical Context: Jesus’ controversy.
Now, when it came to the matter of how religious practices were mediated in Hebrew society Jesus was precocious as a child and confrontational as an adult. You recall how he was already unsettling the religious establishment as a twelve year old asking those embarassingly insightful questions to the Jerusalem temple elders. As minister who is the parent of a teenager, I know how that goes. It can be frustrating to say the least!
And as he became older, Jesus continued to speak truth. In fact, you could say he was a religious activist who had so many confrontations with religious leaders over the three years of his preaching and healing ministry that his activism ultimately was the presenting argument for putting him on the cross to die.
Part of that activism was that he never seemed to go along with the established causistry of religious regulations. In fact, he thought the religious establishment had gotten it all wrong and were misleading the people.
It wasn’t that Jesus disrespected human authority; it was that he respected God’s sovereign authority above all.
So there he was in one of the local synagogues one Sabbath day, teaching as a rabbi normally would. A woman entered with a crippling ailment that caused her back to bow right over so that she could not even stand up straight. Anyone with even a touch of osteo arthritis can understand exactly what she was going through.
Jesus saw her plight and unburdened her. Did you notice how Luke presents Jesus’ statement? “Woman, you are set free from your ailment.”[i]
Set free! Liberated! This claim is a direct, metaphorical reference to the Egyptian exodus when God set the Israelites free from slavery to the Pharaohs. Now Jesus has set this woman free from bondage to her crippling ailment.
But the synagogue leader did not think it was right to do miracles on the Sabbath because this leader, standing there in the same room with Jesus, spoke disparagingly about Jesus’ act of healing.
The description in the gospel makes the synagogue leader sound like a politician who is disgruntled over another politician’s stance in a debate. If you watch those debates, have you noticed how the candidates put eachother down without making honest eye contact with each other? They look at the debate moderator and the television camera but avoid looking at the person they are attempting to belittle with their answer. The strategy is to get the crowd on their side and make their opponent seem totally unworthy of recognition.
That is just what this particular synagogue leader wanted. He was outraged that Jesus the rabbi had come into the synagogue and healed someone on the Sabbath so instead of glaring at that rabbi, the leader addressed the crowd who were assembled there and quoted the Ten Commandments. “Don’t come in here on the Sabbath and expect to be healed and don’t follow anyone who does work on the Sabbath,” he’s saying.
But Jesus of Nazareth did not play to the crowd. He responded directly to the synagogue leader, looking him directly in the eye and saying: “You hypocrites!”[ii] Perhaps noting that special sanction for farmers, Jesus pointed out how even the oxen and donkeys get watered on the Sabbath. Wasn’t that work? Didn’t the synagogue leader do this work on the Sabbath too? And here was this Hebrew woman, a spiritual descendent of Abraham, a family member of God’s chosen people. Was her liberation less valuable than the watering of a donkey or an ox?
Explication of Text: What’s it all mean?
The resources of Hollywood could probably turn this exchange between Jesus and the synagogue leader into a cinematic blockbuster. It has all you could ask for: pathos, moral outrage, a hero who sticks up for the little person against the hard-hearted establishment. All that stuff that makes a great movie moment is right here in this gospel account by Luke.
There are actually two things going on in this story. First, this is a didactic moment, a teaching moment.
What Jesus was teaching that day was that scrupulous adherence to the letter of the Torah law[iii] pointed out a moral fallacy. It pointed out how these hypocritical people were so stuck in the rut of scriptural absolutism that they missed the fact that healing this woman was more righteous than ignoring her on account of the Sabbath.
Healing is divine work. Jesus was teaching the crowd and the leaders that doing God’s work takes place every single day of the week. Rest from your profit making labors on the Sabbath but don’t ever rest from your divine chores.
It is particularly significant that this woman’s crippling illness was thought to be the work of Satan. In the scriptures, we find that any debilitation was considered caused by evil spirits and so if you were leperous or crippled or bleeding from sores that would not close, you were ostracized from healthy society. No one would eat with you or touch you or befriend you in any way.
The healing of this woman was more than physical healing. Jesus was liberating her from a severe illness and at the same time he was reconciling her with her people, her kin, the other descendents of Abraham in that place. God’s will is the reconciliation and restoration of people each and every day of the week.
First, this is a didactic moment. Second, Jesus was a prophet and this is a prophetic moment.
The prophecy here is that the Kingdom of God is constantly breaking into this everyday world that we live in. This world thinks in terms of the concrete rather than the abstract. This world wants quantifiable performance results and test scores and metric analysis and church growth figures.
But the kingdom of God does not operate on these human terms. You can’t measure reconciliation. You can’t pick up a handful of restoration and put it in a test tube, fire up a bunson burner under it and find out at what temperature it boils.
Jesus’ prophecy tells me that the Kingdom of God is not found in the absolutism of doctrine. It is found in loving my neighbor as myself. It is found in the divine chores of liberation and healing. If I bury my head in the absolutism of the Sabbath regulations and don’t do my divine chores, then the Kingdom of God might pass right by me and I will have missed it.
Listener Context: How does this relate to my life?
I think it is often very difficult to parse God’s will in the Bible because much of scripture relates to the particular rather than the general. We look for universal truth in stories of particular situations in particular lives thousands of years ago. So it may be disconcerting and confusing when we come across a text like this one today because this particular story of this particular situation seems to contradict the particular divine commandment to observe the Sabbath that comes from another particular story a thousand years earlier.
The German scholar, Gunther Bornkamm wrote that Jesus’ offense in the synagogue that day was not an offense against the Sabbath itself. Jesus’ offence was against “Sabbath causistry” developed to excrutiating exactitude by a pedantic religious hierarchy.[iv] In other words, the commandment to observe the Sabbath wasn’t what Jesus objected to. He objected to the social custom that had been developed around the commandment. He objected to the fact that that social custom had obscured the original relevance of the Sabbath.
It is oh so easy to venture forth into a noble cause only to find that after time has passed we have forgotten our original intent, lost the original relevance of our endeavor. And when that happens, all we have left is a hollow ritual.
I think we can find this in any number of places in our lives. Perhaps we have turned lively and meaningful celebrations into routine procedures. We might have turned precious relationships into wooden associations. We might have turned interesting work into weekday routines just for the sake of a paycheck.
When that happens, it is unfortunate.
But when those rare moments happen in which the presence of the Kingdom of God flashes by and we miss it because we were too busy performing fossilized traditions out of some short sighted sense of formality, well that is more than unfortunate. It is isolating and hope denying.
Conclusion: What’s the Point?
Jesus Christ is our best hope in life and in death. Don’t miss his presence and lose that hope. Be watchful for signs that the Kingdom of God is present. You’ll know it when you see it.
You’ll know it when someone goes out of their way to do a senseless act of kindness for someone else.
You’ll know it when someone forgives someone else even though they are not obligated to.
You’ll know it when old enemies make peace.
You’ll know it when someone gives their time to tutor a child or visit a shut in or welcomes a stranger into the church or begins a recycling program or speaks some unpopular truth.
You might just see it while you’re sitting on the front porch in a green straight backed rocker conversing with your family on a Sunday afternoon in the summer in your church clothes.
For heaven’s sake, don’t miss it! Amen.
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
Ruth's Beautiful Faith
Ruth 1:6-18
Engaging Image: lost letters of lost souls.
I don’t know if you happened to see the Associated Press news story this week about a grocery bag full of letters that was found washing up on the beach near Atlantic City, New Jersey. It seems that a father and son who were fishing on the beach noticed this plastic bag, opened it, and found around 300 letters addressed to a Jersey City, NJ Baptist minister and marked “altar.”
The minister died several years ago at an advanced age and mysteriously this collection of letters ended up in the ocean over 100 miles away. Most were unopened.
Each writer hoped that his or her letter would be prayed over in a kind of prayer of supplication. Some of them dated back to 1973 and while a few writers asked for divine intervention in some matter like a lottery ticket, most were scribed in anguished ink.
There was a convict claiming innocence who desired liberation and the embrace of his family. Another was from a woman who suspected her boyfriend of abusing her young daughter. One woman prayed that the father of her soon to be born child would fall in love with her so they could marry and form a complete circle of family.
These were truly lost letters of lost souls who put their total confidence in the intervening action of a divinity they could not see or touch.
This story reminded me of the prayer practice of this congregation and many others in which specific concerns are given voice, specific children of God spoken for, specific anguish raised to God in the gathering of a worshipping community. Surely God Almighty already knows of these things, has already peered into all of our hearts, has laid a hand on our foreheads and gathered our thoughts.
A rationalist might interject that vocalizing our concerns is an entirely superstitious and irrelevant act. And yet there is something especially sacred about this practice of naming the pain of those among us in worship.
It is a beautiful practice. It is a confident practice. It is a practice of faith in the power and engagement of a god that we cannot see. As the writer of Hebrews declared, it is faith in what is unseen rather than in what is seen. It is like the faith of Ruth. It’s that beautiful faith of Ruth.
Application of Text: What’s happening inside the text?
Think about Ruth and Naomi trudging out of a land of tragedy into a land of uncertain peril. They live in a time when women have the social standing of property. They live in a society in which paternalistic patronage and the solid relationship to a clan and a tribe meant the difference between life and a destitute, certain death without identity.
With their husbands dead, Naomi, Ruth, and Orpah stand little chance of survival. So Naomi strikes out for Israel where her clan resides. Ruth and Orpah begin to follow her, but Naomi recognizes that going to Israel puts these Moabite women in even greater danger. Their families and clans are in Moab. Custom dictates that they should stay there.
Orpah, whose name translates as “back of the neck,” turns away to find her father’s people. Her name predestines and foretells her action and her adherence to the tangible and familiar social custom. She’s the obedient one.
Ruth, however, clings to Naomi and will not leave despite all urging and reasoning. By loyally staying with Naomi, Ruth puts her faith in what is intangible. She sacrifices the tangible and familiar in her life.
But what is she sacrificing the familiar for? Why would she possibly do it? What is to be gained? Her sacrifice is for the sake of companionship with Naomi. For the sake of something that has little benefit for herself. Ruth’s act is a selfless act of love drawn out of her own moment of despair and desperation.
Listener Context: How is the text beautiful?
You might say that Ruth’s devotion is certainly commendable and perhaps even noble, but how is it beautiful?
On one hand, the literary style of the story is beautiful. The symmetry is beautiful. Naomi has two daughters in law and their decisions are symmetrically opposite: one decides to stay in Moab while the other decides to leave with Naomi.
In the narrative that follows, Naomi and Ruth become an odd pairing on the road. Naomi, a foreigner in Moab traveling home. Ruth, a foreigner in Israel traveling away from home. How strange that in this perilous moment Naomi and Ruth remain symmetrically divergent according to their ethnicity even though they swap ethnic standing in society as their location changes.
This kind of stylistic organization is the beauty that the Greek philosophers described in the order and harmony of physical relationships. It’s the beauty of Greek architecture, its spacing and dimension and proportion. For them, beauty was the harmony of the designed function of every thing in the cosmos and the conformity of every thing to its designed purpose.
For us, it’s the harmonious order and proportion of the created world. It’s God’s organization of the light and the darkness in Genesis, the separation of the waters and the dry land. It’s the rotation of the planets in specific relation to one another. It’s the ebb and flow of the tide, the progression of the seasons, the cycle of life and death in nature. We’re struck by this beauty in our hearts, our feeling senses, our emotions.
But there is another kind of beauty in this story. We find it in Ruth’s speech of self-sacrificing loyalty to Naomi. It’s not the literary style in her prose. It’s not a matter of the eloquence of her vocabulary. Instead it is her benevolence toward Naomi that is expressed in that speech that we find beautiful:
“Where you go, I will go.
Where you lodge, I will lodge.
Your God will be my God.
Where you die, I will die.”
The beauty of what Ruth does is different from the objective beauty of the harmonious functioning of the order of things. It’s more than that. It’s more subjective than objective because it requires a decision.
Ruth knows that returning to her people, like Orpah, is the course that will benefit her the most. But she doesn’t do it and by stepping outside of her own best interests, she beautifully transcends herself. Her choice transcends her own security, her own sense of identity as a Moabite woman, transcends her own fear of going to live in a country where she will be considered an outcast.
This disposition to transcend herself for the benefit of someone else is real beauty because Ruth makes a moral decision that goes beyond the natural order. Goes beyond the designed harmony of natural relationships.
Listener Context: How does this relate to my life?
It’s a beauty we don’t usually see in daily life where people seem to be so caught up in protecting their own best interests. Where people vocally defend their right to a parking place. Where members from one political party demonize members from another political party. Where people judge and distrust each other. Where people do things for others because of a reward or expectation of return benefit.
But Ruth establishes a different relationship. She starts a community built on transcending personal interest. By devoting herself to Naomi’s welfare, Ruth starts a community that promotes the same mutual benefit. Not the individual benefit of two individuals but the mutual benefit of two people who depend on each other and support one another.
And there’s one significant thing further. Ruth accepts Naomi’s God, our God, as her God. She not only transcends her own interests for Naomi’s sake but transcends her own beliefs. She puts her faith in something beyond herself. She puts her life on the altar to be prayed over to Naomi’s God not knowing what will happen. This new community that she builds with Naomi dances around a central understanding that these women are part of something bigger than themselves. That mutuality, that community of common faith is beautiful.
Conclusion: What’s the Point?
So what’s the point? Why is it so important for us to take heed of Ruth’s story?
For one thing, we should pay attention to Ruth’s transcendent act of devotion, her beautiful act of faith because we need beauty in our lives. We need something to counter the base impulses of society. We need something to counter violence and pain and grief and the mundane toil of the day that can suck us in and steal the joyous essence of life itself.
And we need something to remind us of the true nature of the triune God- creator, redeemer, sustainer. In theology, there is a description of the holy trinity as an ideal community. Three equal members in one single godhead. No part of the trinity acts alone, no part has existence outside the others. This description is called perichoresis which comes from the Greek image of people dancing in a circle: creator, redeemer, sustainer joined in sacred dance.
This is a beautiful image that we can look to and model in our lives. It’s an image of what God wants for our lives. What God wants for our communities:
Worshipful communities whose members reveal God to each other in selfless acts of beautiful faith.
A beautiful faith that embraces a holy relationship through which we might live fully, joyfully, and with hope.
AMEN.
Engaging Image: lost letters of lost souls.
I don’t know if you happened to see the Associated Press news story this week about a grocery bag full of letters that was found washing up on the beach near Atlantic City, New Jersey. It seems that a father and son who were fishing on the beach noticed this plastic bag, opened it, and found around 300 letters addressed to a Jersey City, NJ Baptist minister and marked “altar.”
The minister died several years ago at an advanced age and mysteriously this collection of letters ended up in the ocean over 100 miles away. Most were unopened.
Each writer hoped that his or her letter would be prayed over in a kind of prayer of supplication. Some of them dated back to 1973 and while a few writers asked for divine intervention in some matter like a lottery ticket, most were scribed in anguished ink.
There was a convict claiming innocence who desired liberation and the embrace of his family. Another was from a woman who suspected her boyfriend of abusing her young daughter. One woman prayed that the father of her soon to be born child would fall in love with her so they could marry and form a complete circle of family.
These were truly lost letters of lost souls who put their total confidence in the intervening action of a divinity they could not see or touch.
This story reminded me of the prayer practice of this congregation and many others in which specific concerns are given voice, specific children of God spoken for, specific anguish raised to God in the gathering of a worshipping community. Surely God Almighty already knows of these things, has already peered into all of our hearts, has laid a hand on our foreheads and gathered our thoughts.
A rationalist might interject that vocalizing our concerns is an entirely superstitious and irrelevant act. And yet there is something especially sacred about this practice of naming the pain of those among us in worship.
It is a beautiful practice. It is a confident practice. It is a practice of faith in the power and engagement of a god that we cannot see. As the writer of Hebrews declared, it is faith in what is unseen rather than in what is seen. It is like the faith of Ruth. It’s that beautiful faith of Ruth.
Application of Text: What’s happening inside the text?
Think about Ruth and Naomi trudging out of a land of tragedy into a land of uncertain peril. They live in a time when women have the social standing of property. They live in a society in which paternalistic patronage and the solid relationship to a clan and a tribe meant the difference between life and a destitute, certain death without identity.
With their husbands dead, Naomi, Ruth, and Orpah stand little chance of survival. So Naomi strikes out for Israel where her clan resides. Ruth and Orpah begin to follow her, but Naomi recognizes that going to Israel puts these Moabite women in even greater danger. Their families and clans are in Moab. Custom dictates that they should stay there.
Orpah, whose name translates as “back of the neck,” turns away to find her father’s people. Her name predestines and foretells her action and her adherence to the tangible and familiar social custom. She’s the obedient one.
Ruth, however, clings to Naomi and will not leave despite all urging and reasoning. By loyally staying with Naomi, Ruth puts her faith in what is intangible. She sacrifices the tangible and familiar in her life.
But what is she sacrificing the familiar for? Why would she possibly do it? What is to be gained? Her sacrifice is for the sake of companionship with Naomi. For the sake of something that has little benefit for herself. Ruth’s act is a selfless act of love drawn out of her own moment of despair and desperation.
Listener Context: How is the text beautiful?
You might say that Ruth’s devotion is certainly commendable and perhaps even noble, but how is it beautiful?
On one hand, the literary style of the story is beautiful. The symmetry is beautiful. Naomi has two daughters in law and their decisions are symmetrically opposite: one decides to stay in Moab while the other decides to leave with Naomi.
In the narrative that follows, Naomi and Ruth become an odd pairing on the road. Naomi, a foreigner in Moab traveling home. Ruth, a foreigner in Israel traveling away from home. How strange that in this perilous moment Naomi and Ruth remain symmetrically divergent according to their ethnicity even though they swap ethnic standing in society as their location changes.
This kind of stylistic organization is the beauty that the Greek philosophers described in the order and harmony of physical relationships. It’s the beauty of Greek architecture, its spacing and dimension and proportion. For them, beauty was the harmony of the designed function of every thing in the cosmos and the conformity of every thing to its designed purpose.
For us, it’s the harmonious order and proportion of the created world. It’s God’s organization of the light and the darkness in Genesis, the separation of the waters and the dry land. It’s the rotation of the planets in specific relation to one another. It’s the ebb and flow of the tide, the progression of the seasons, the cycle of life and death in nature. We’re struck by this beauty in our hearts, our feeling senses, our emotions.
But there is another kind of beauty in this story. We find it in Ruth’s speech of self-sacrificing loyalty to Naomi. It’s not the literary style in her prose. It’s not a matter of the eloquence of her vocabulary. Instead it is her benevolence toward Naomi that is expressed in that speech that we find beautiful:
“Where you go, I will go.
Where you lodge, I will lodge.
Your God will be my God.
Where you die, I will die.”
The beauty of what Ruth does is different from the objective beauty of the harmonious functioning of the order of things. It’s more than that. It’s more subjective than objective because it requires a decision.
Ruth knows that returning to her people, like Orpah, is the course that will benefit her the most. But she doesn’t do it and by stepping outside of her own best interests, she beautifully transcends herself. Her choice transcends her own security, her own sense of identity as a Moabite woman, transcends her own fear of going to live in a country where she will be considered an outcast.
This disposition to transcend herself for the benefit of someone else is real beauty because Ruth makes a moral decision that goes beyond the natural order. Goes beyond the designed harmony of natural relationships.
Listener Context: How does this relate to my life?
It’s a beauty we don’t usually see in daily life where people seem to be so caught up in protecting their own best interests. Where people vocally defend their right to a parking place. Where members from one political party demonize members from another political party. Where people judge and distrust each other. Where people do things for others because of a reward or expectation of return benefit.
But Ruth establishes a different relationship. She starts a community built on transcending personal interest. By devoting herself to Naomi’s welfare, Ruth starts a community that promotes the same mutual benefit. Not the individual benefit of two individuals but the mutual benefit of two people who depend on each other and support one another.
And there’s one significant thing further. Ruth accepts Naomi’s God, our God, as her God. She not only transcends her own interests for Naomi’s sake but transcends her own beliefs. She puts her faith in something beyond herself. She puts her life on the altar to be prayed over to Naomi’s God not knowing what will happen. This new community that she builds with Naomi dances around a central understanding that these women are part of something bigger than themselves. That mutuality, that community of common faith is beautiful.
Conclusion: What’s the Point?
So what’s the point? Why is it so important for us to take heed of Ruth’s story?
For one thing, we should pay attention to Ruth’s transcendent act of devotion, her beautiful act of faith because we need beauty in our lives. We need something to counter the base impulses of society. We need something to counter violence and pain and grief and the mundane toil of the day that can suck us in and steal the joyous essence of life itself.
And we need something to remind us of the true nature of the triune God- creator, redeemer, sustainer. In theology, there is a description of the holy trinity as an ideal community. Three equal members in one single godhead. No part of the trinity acts alone, no part has existence outside the others. This description is called perichoresis which comes from the Greek image of people dancing in a circle: creator, redeemer, sustainer joined in sacred dance.
This is a beautiful image that we can look to and model in our lives. It’s an image of what God wants for our lives. What God wants for our communities:
Worshipful communities whose members reveal God to each other in selfless acts of beautiful faith.
A beautiful faith that embraces a holy relationship through which we might live fully, joyfully, and with hope.
AMEN.
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