Sermon:  “Hold Fast to Love”

“Love” is such a loaded word, I almost hated to use it again today in a sermon title.  “Hold Fast to Love,” today’s title, could easily be a pop song, or a romantic comedy.  Some say the word “love” is trivialized by overuse.  But love is at the heart of this story from the Book of Ruth, even though the word “love” is not actually in the text.  Today’s Gospel lesson from Mark 12, which we read together in our call to worship, is loaded with love – in what Jesus called “The Great Commandment.”  “²⁹Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one;” and “³⁰you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.”  That great Jewish commandment to love God is in Deuteronomy 6 – they call it the shema – and it’s considered so important that even today, observant Jews will post it in the doorway of their house, and touch it in prayer when going in or out.  Love must be always remembered.

But we do remember the power of love, don’t we?  That why on All Saints Day, we read from the Book of Remembrance the names of loved ones we have lost.  Love is such a strong feeling, it can be hard to forget.  Mothers and Fathers remember the rush of emotion the first time we held our children – whether at the moment of birth or day of adoption.  Even old married people like me can remember what it was like when we first fell in love.  In fact, if you’ve heard this text from Ruth read before, it probably was at a wedding.  These words are so beautiful – I loved getting to hear my dear husband read it today!  But this text is not a sentimental love poem from a groom to his bride.  It is a powerful covenant of love and loyalty spoken by a daughter-in-law to her mother-in-law.  It testifies to the truth that sometimes the bonds of covenants made before God are as strong as (or stronger than) the bonds of blood. 

Throughout history, one bloody war after another, this truth has not always been obvious – as nations, or religious or ethnic groups fight, like siding with like.  In fact, in Ruth’s time the hatred between Judeans like Naomi and Elimilech and Moabites like Ruth and Orpah was legendary.  It makes today’s Red State/Blue State rivalries seem tame.  Genesis, to drive home the point, traces the origin of the unclean and despised Moabites to an act of incest between Lot and his daughter.[1] Just before Ruth, the book of Judges celebrates the slaughter of 10,000 Moabites.[2]  It was a long and ancient blood feud, not unlike the horrors of genocide around the world even now.  From later in today’s lesson from Isaiah 25 – what we read as our prayer of approach – the prophet tells as “good news” that Moabites would be “trodden down …as straw is trodden down in a dung-pit.”[3] 

So set against this terrible backdrop of hatred and brutality is this story of the redeeming love of Ruth for Naomi, former enemies brought together by marriage.  Covenant promises made under God are not so easily broken as the powers of this world might think.  Scholars see in the Book of Ruth an important endorsement of levirate law, which required a Jewish man’s nearest male relative to marry his widow and take in his children if he died.  In an age before life insurance, before there was any health care or welfare to reform, before women had any rights, this law – which might require a man to have more than one wife – was proclaimed by the priests of ancient Israel as God’s way of justice and compassion.  But the more profound truth of this text is in its endorsement of something that the Hebrew Scriptures in many other places (as in Ezra) condemns as abomination – intermarriage with the women of other nations and the mingling of races.[4]

So this story of Ruth urges us to do what we at the Congregational Church of Brookfield already do best as a church – make covenants that build strong and diverse relationships.  We “hold fast to love” by lifting up and calling sacred what Jesus called the “new covenant” of God’s unconditional love – love that in an “Open and Affirming” church like ours crosses the usual barriers this world puts in place, such as divisions of race, age, gender, sexual orientation, religion, ability or disability, class, or nationality.  Here we endorse relationships that cross boundaries that the world outside consider impossible, or even wrong, to cross.  Through the outpouring of his love, Jesus calls us to come together as one family at God’s table of grace. 

In families of faith, we are called to show the world what God’s love really looks like.  Here we do our best to provide what our United Church of Christ likes to call “extravagant welcome.”  I loved that the Nohes reintroduced us today to their old friends from Japan, because it reminded me of my last visit to my home church, when we had pastors visiting from Germany – from our UCC sister churches of the EKU.  They were asked to lead The Lord’s Prayer, and I have to say (as the daughter of a WWII veteran) it was shocking to hear in that familiar prayer, “fur dein ist der Reich.”  “Dein ist der Reich,” for “Thine is the Kingdom,” but it sounded so shocking.  And after church, the best thing was at coffee hour, when I saw them – these two fresh-faced 30-something pastors – sitting across the table from a couple of my dad’s friends, these great old veterans.  Because one of them I knew to be a guy who had worked with Oppenheimer on making the trigger for the atom bomb.  And there they were, passing a plate of cookies to each other.

In these ordinary acts, we in our churches make the Holy Spirit visible and real, and by doing that, we might hope to help others believe in the saving powering of God’s love, and to follow with us in his Way.  As we speak together words of covenant, as we did in receiving new members today, we unite ourselves into a new family of faith – Christ’s risen body living and serving in the world.  Now this is not a perfect family – because just as in biological families, we sometimes disagree, or hurt one another’s feelings – but it’s one that, however flawed, is a family that bears witness to a new way of living – with grace and forgiveness, in faithful love modeled after God’s steadfast love for us.

Like Ruth, I treasure the loving relationships built by so many Naomis among you, who have reached out to my family with real hospitality – that means a lot to me as a transplant to this land, a Southern belle married to a Spaniard from the Wild West living now in a Yankee state.  This is our homeland now.  It was great to have my neighbor Matthew Riddle run up my front walk in his Halloween costume last night shouting, “I go to your church!”  I sometimes embarrass my kids by hugging their church friends, because I claim all of our church kids as my own.  And you do the same for mine – they have so many new mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles and grandparents – and this is something we appreciate all the more since my kids have lost two grandparents since moving here in 2007.  When these bonds of love break – when a family leaves the church, or when someone dies in the community of the saints – it causes real pain. 

My prayer for us all, but especially for you new members, is that you will come to love and be loved enough that you will soon enough feel that depth of grief too, when we are called to part – as Orpah had to part from Naomi and Ruth.  When we experience God’s love made visible we never want to let it go.  We want to see more of it, and as we do, we come to trust it more and more – and we try to share it with others.  People of faith, let us continue to be a place where extravagant love is seen and lived out.  In Christ’s Church, what sustains us and gives us the strength to hold fast to love is a Love more powerful and permanent than any human love – the love of God in Jesus Christ our Lord.  

Thanks be to God for this Good News. Amen.

 

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Ruth 1:1-5. 7-11, 14-18, 22

In the days when the judges ruled, there was a famine in the land, and a certain man of Bethlehem in Judah went to live in the country of Moab, he and his wife and two sons. ²The name of the man was Elimelech and the name of his wife Naomi, and the names of his two sons were Mahlon and Chilion; they were Ephrathites from Bethlehem in Judah. They went into the country of Moab and remained there. ³But Elimelech, the husband of Naomi, died, and she was left with her two sons. ⁴These took Moabite wives; the name of the one was Orpah and the name of the other Ruth. When they had lived there about ten years, ⁵both Mahlon and Chilion also died, so that the woman was left without her two sons and her husband. …
⁷So she set out from the place where she had been living, she and her two daughters-in-law, and they went on their way to go back to the land of Judah. ⁸But Naomi said to her two daughters-in-law, “Go back each of you to your mother’s house. May the Lord deal kindly with you, as you have dealt with the dead and with me. ⁹The Lord grant that you may find security, each of you in the house of your husband.” Then she kissed them, and they wept aloud. ¹⁰They said to her, “No, we will return with you to your people.” ¹¹But Naomi said, “Turn back, my daughters, why will you go with me? Do I still have sons in my womb that they may become your husbands?...¹⁴Then they wept aloud again. Orpah kissed her mother-in-law, but Ruth clung to her. ¹⁵So she said, “See, your sister-in-law has gone back to her people and to her gods; return after your sister-in-law.” ¹⁶But Ruth said, “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. ¹⁷Where you die, I will die— there will I be buried. May the Lord do thus and so to me, and more as well, if even death parts me from you!” ¹⁸When Naomi saw that she was determined to go with her, she said no more to her. …²²So Naomi returned together with Ruth the Moabite, her daughter-in-law, who came back with her from the country of Moab.