This sermon was preached for Sunday, November 10, 2024 at St. Andrew's, Ayer. The texts for this sermon were: Ruth 3:1-5; 4:13-17, Psalm 127, Hebrews 9:24-28 and Mark 12:38-44.
There are many reasons why you may have chosen to come to church today. Perhaps it is simply what you do each Sunday, or maybe you had a role to play in the service. Perhaps this is where you have found God before and this is where you most trust God to show up again.
Some of you have told me you needed to be here today because you are looking for a reason to hope. Others of you have told me you want to know you're not alone in your fear, anger, and sense of betrayal this week. I know others of you are here seeking solace in the midst of a grief that has nothing to do with big national events but everything to do with faith and hope and love.
It is also quite possible that you don’t know why you are here or what you need. Or whether you and God are on speaking terms right now.
There are three things I’d like you to remember: one, whatever reason brought you here, you are definitely not alone in it. Two, you are sharing pews with folks who are here for all kinds of very different reasons, who had all different kinds of weeks. And here’s the thing: a good pastor knows that these two things are both true each and every week, not just on Sundays following a consequential national event that stirred up a huge variety of strong emotions in a large swath of our community. Every Sunday, there is always someone in need of nourishment, someone desperate for good news, someone seeking solace and strength.
And somehow, mysteriously, each week there is Good News here for every one of us. There is space at the table for you.
And the third thing to know: I am glad you are here. I'm glad you came. Whether it was hard or easy or the most natural thing in the world.
The Book of Ruth begins in a string of hardship and tragedy for Naomi. First, there is a terrible famine and a desperate migration to a foreign land. Then Naomi’s husband dies. Then, unthinkably, both her sons. She is faced with becoming a refugee once again, fleeing back to Judah impoverished and alone. A widow without the protection of a husband, father, or son.
Naomi’s widowed daughter-in-law, Ruth, defies custom and expectation, and willingly takes responsibility for caring for her mother-in-law. We read these words last week: “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, and there will I be buried.” Ruth vows to stick by Naomi to the very end. I think for Naomi right then, leaving her home in grief, it really did feel like the end. The end of goodness and hope, the end of everything she had been working toward, and the end of the life she had built.
Sometimes, the morning after: after you receive a terrible diagnosis, or your worst fear comes true, or an unthinkable betrayal is revealed. After a death - any death -
There is a secondary minor shock upon waking the next day to discover that the world has just…continued on.
This has become more true for me since becoming a parent of young children - no matter what happened the day before, I wake to find to my shock that my toddlers still need their oatmeal, my dog still needs a walk, my teeth still need brushing. There are thousands of tiny acts of love and tending that still need doing. And so we do them.
Together, as poor refugees back in Bethlehem, Ruth and Naomi set about doing the tiny acts of love and tending that needed doing: gathering food where they could, depending on the generosity of Naomi’s kinsmen. They used all the resources available to them: Naomi’s connections, her ingenuity and cleverness, Ruth’s industriousness, her youth and beauty. Together, they make a life for themselves.
Boaz, for his part, does something extraordinary, too. He doesn’t just allow the poor young widow to glean the extra cast-offs of harvests as landowners would let beggars do. He, too, defies expectation and custom, and takes responsibility for caring for Ruth and Naomi as well. He protects them and feeds them. Then Boaz takes Ruth as his wife and even ensures Naomi’s late husband’s property returns to her.
Ruth and Naomi got creative. They persevered. And Naomi was blessed in a way she had thought impossible: a grandson, born to Ruth and Boaz. Obed. The one she nourishes with her own body nourishes her in her old age. Poverty, widowhood, the loss of her sons were not the end of Naomi’s story. Obed isn't even the end of her story. Christians read on to discover that Obed is the grandfather of David, the great king and savior of his people. And King David is the ancestor of Jesus, the Messiah and savior of all people. Ruth and Naomi’s perseverance and Boaz’s kindness doesn’t just save their own lives. These two refugee widows, one foreign and one Jewish, they are how God saved the world.
This is the Good News of Ruth and Naomi and Boaz: when you care for yourself and care for your loved ones, when you take responsibility for caring for the impoverished and the alien at the edge of your fields, you are already doing the work of bringing a new, kinder world into being. Ruth and Naomi didn’t set out to end all injustice forever and they didn’t bring down the patriarchy that oppressed their lives. They took unbearable circumstances and made bearable lives. In doing so, they played their crucial part in God's plan of salvation.
What is the part you have been given to play? Who have you been given responsibility to care for? How can you expand that circle of care just a bit further…and further still.
As we go about this work of tending and caring, of sticking together and persevering, Jesus has some words for us that might have particular resonance this morning. Beware the scribes, Jesus warns. The ones who devour the widows rather than caring for them. The ones who love to sit in the prominent seats, who love to make long speeches, who love to take your money and love to take credit for everything. The ones who have convinced themselves and maybe convinced you, too, that everything depends on them being in power - depends on you pouring your support, your money, your hope into their coffers. But our hope, our ultimate hope, doesn’t belong to any kingdom built by human hands. They don’t get to own our hope, no one does. Our hope belongs to God, and the kingdom of heaven.
Jesus didn't run around the Gospels telling people that the kingdom of heaven would only come if they did everything right or only if they gave him political power. He simply announced that the kingdom of heaven was already coming. That it was already here. Jesus invited people to be a part of the light and love already seeping into the world.
There is nothing, nothing anyone can do to stop the kingdom of heaven from breaking into this world. No movement, no policy, no misinformation campaign, can block out the light completely nor hold back the outpouring of God’s love.
If we look back in history for the saints, we can see them at work under every sort of circumstance and regime, in the wake of famine, disaster, and every kind of tragedy. They are the ones tearing down walls in times of isolation, letting in the light in times of darkness, spreading the warmth of God’s love in times of bitter cold. They are tending to the suffering and the afraid.
They are us.
If this Sunday feels more bleak and hopeless for you, if you feel more powerless and paralyzed, if you are more afraid for your safety or the safety of your loved ones than you were last Sunday - and even if you aren't, even if you are relieved and excited on this particular morning, I want you to remember this, because it will be true for you, someday, too.
You are allowed to be mad and sad and scared whenever the work of tending and caring gets harder. You are allowed to grieve and scream and cry whenever darkness and division and coldness and cruelty pile up against you. Even Naomi gets her moment to wail, “Call me no longer Naomi; call me Mara, for the Almighty has dealt bitterly with me, I went away full, but the Lord has brought me back empty; why call me Naomi when the Lord has dealt harshly with me and the Almighty has brought calamity upon me?”
You are allowed to be weary. You are allowed to lament.
But all that is not the same as despair. It is not the same as letting your hope be ripped away by the rise and fall of this world’s kings and kingdoms.
Listen, you are every bit as strong and as faithful as your ancestors: your grandmothers who couldn't vote, your grandfathers who endured under despots, the saints who tended farms through droughts, punched cards in factories, and built churches out of fieldstones. Who gave out of their poverty and showed up again and again.
There is work to be done, but there was always going to be work to be done this morning whether or not Tuesday’s vote went your favored candidate’s way or not. There was always going to be a part for each of us to play in the kingdom of heaven breaking into this world.
If you are wondering where to start, you already have. You came here today.
The world needs more of this, by the way - coming together.
In the days ahead, I hope you will keep showing up, here and for each other.
Do your tiny acts of loving and tending. Take responsibility for caring for the ones in your homes, your church, and the ones who arrive to glean in your fields. And if you still don’t know where to go from there, turn to page 304 in the Book of Common Prayer and read again the vows we reaffirmed here last Sunday.
Persevere in resisting evil. Proclaim Good News in word and deed. Seek and serve Christ in all persons. Love your neighbor as yourself. Strive for justice and peace among all people. Respect the dignity of every human being.
You won’t be doing this alone. We’ll be sticking by you. Your people are my people, your God is our God. And it is in God that we place our hope.
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