I’ve Been Meaning to Ask: Where Do We Go From Here?
Ruth 1:1-22
June 20, 2021
Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley
Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DBUxxyAnIQ
In the first church where I served as pastor, there were a number of WWII veterans. I learned things from them that I never got in history classes in school. For example, I learned some of the impact on their families. I heard the stories about the fathers who were complete strangers to their two- and three-year old children. I heard that it took a long time for the children to get over their fears of the strange men now living in their homes. In history classes, I had learned the years when the war officially began and ended. In reality, the war ended in different times for different people as they took up life without combat again.
Juneteenth observances are another example of how there are not always clear demarcations between war and peace, between enslavement and liberation, between then and now. There is a process, an unfolding transition as we navigate the space between Before and After. That is the space in which we find ourselves right now.
I was in a Stewart’s shop this week. I don’t think I have been in one for more than a year. It was also the first time I walked into any store without a face mask. No one else was wearing one either. The man who went in ahead of me held the door open behind him and we came very close to each other on the threshold. Two years ago, if I had entered a store and found everyone wearing masks, I would probably have thought I had walked in on a robbery. But this week, when no one was wearing masks, I thought how strange that was and just for a minute, I felt a little unsafe.
We are in the space between Before and After and the question “where do we go from here” is present at all kinds of levels.
Naomi is in that space. In the Before, she might have been happy, or at least content, living with her husband, raising two sons in a foreign country. But then her husband died. Before she was a wife. After she is a widow. Within the next 10 years, she lost first one son and then the other. Before she was a mother. After? . . . After, she doesn’t know what she is. She has daughters-in-law and no way to provide for them. After she is childless and old and far from home, living in a foreign country with no access to any safety net. Before, she was Naomi, which means Pleasant. After, she says, “call me Mara” which means Bitter.
We meet Naomi at the end of her life in Moab. But the whole story is really about how she and Ruth get from that place of defeat and hopeless to a new beginning. The four chapters of the book of Ruth are the story of the transition, the space between Before and After.
It is a great story, quite possibly my favorite in the Hebrew Bible. If you haven’t read it in a while, you might want to do that this afternoon. It won’t take long.
What I want to hold up from that story today are Ruth’s faithfulness and courage. As we navigate this space, coming out of pandemic into whatever is ahead of us, I want to be personally faithful and courageous, and I hope we as a church will strive to be faithful and courageous too.
For the last 4 Sundays, I’ve been asking you open-ended questions and you have been great about responding, giving us a little way to listen to each other as those have been shared each week. This week, I asked a multiple choice question. I asked you to pick your love language from a list of 5. And that question, the one where you had ready-made answers, that one was the trickiest of them all. When I asked this question, I thought that maybe the answers would reveal that many of us have the same preferred love language. I thought that would be an interesting finding. Or I thought it might reveal that we are all over the place in terms of what conveys love to us most effectively. That would also have been an interesting finding. What I did not expect was that you would take apart the question. But that’s what many of you did.
You didn’t like having to pick just one answer. You explained that what conveys love to you is different in different contexts. You mentioned ways that you had been disappointed or deceived by the use of one or more of the love languages in the past and so you didn’t trust them anymore. My take-away is that love can be received by the same person in different ways in different contexts, and that there is no easy one-size-fits all. As some young people in my life used to say, “Duh, M’am”. It’s a Captain Obvious finding, but especially significant in this moment.
Strong relationships adapt for context. Loving people pay attention to the wants and needs of this moment as well as what came before. They bend and flex and understand that After may require loving actions that are very different from those needed Before.
Where do we go from here? Rev. Brooks-Johnson spoke about learning new languages. During the last year, some of us have been learning a new language about church. We are learning to talk about the inherited church or the gathered church which is the term to describe Emmanuel as it exists now, which is a good and precious thing. And we are learning to speak of the sent church, the fresh expression of church in this time. We use a different love language to speak to those in the fresh expression of church because one size doesn’t fit all and context matters.
Let me give you a real-life example. In another church in another state, as the lockdown of pandemic was lifting, the leaders reached out to every household. They checked in to see how people were doing and if and when they might return to worship. They heard one repeated message from a number of households, especially households with young children. These were all households that had been strongly engaged and active in church life Before the pandemic. But now, in the After, the adults in these households said that they had stepped away from church during the pandemic, that they had gone on with their lives without it, and they didn’t miss it. They don’t plan to return. One of my colleagues shared that last week.
The pandemic experience has revealed many things and this is one of them. Multiple generations of people had stepped away from church before the pandemic. This is not new. But perhaps this time, we can see it with new eyes. Perhaps what can be different this time is our faithful and courageous response.
When Naomi tries to tell her daughter-in-law that she is done, that her engagement with them is over, Ruth says “OK, but I’m here for you anyway.” Ruth does not insist that Naomi stay in the place where Ruth is at home, but instead Ruth accompanies Naomi to a foreign land. Ruth steps out of her own comfort zone to go where Naomi wants to be. In the process, Ruth will learn the customs and culture of another people. That adaptation, that accompaniment, that bending and flexing of relationship, is the love language that Ruth offers to Naomi.
We may also hear that some have left our gathering and are not coming back. And we may also realize that we had missed the opportunity for relationship with many others in the Before. I wonder, instead of being distressed or anxious for ourselves, can we imagine the language that we might speak to send the message “We’re here for you anyway?” Can we step out of the places where we are at home to learn customs and cultures of others? Can we do this with faithfulness and courage for Jesus’ sake?
This, I believe, is one answer to our question – Where do we go from here? We keep on speaking the language of love. Love is expansive and adaptive. It contains all the ways that we communicated God’s love in the Before AND it recognizes that we may need new ways to communicate for new relationships. One size doesn’t fit all.
I am not the only one offering this answer. About 25 of you responded to the Pastoral Relations Committee survey this month. That was a fantastic response – thank you. In answer to the question about future priorities, you spoke over and over again about looking outward. Some of you mentioned Fresh Expressions specifically. What all of that means, we don’t know yet. It is still unfolding, but this is a conversation we will intentionally pursue in the next weeks and months.
Another priority you identified on that survey was justice. You spoke of ministry with the poor and concerns about gun violence and racism. Again, I would hold up Ruth as a story that is interwoven with justice. Ruth is bold, audacious even, as she works the system to get what she and Naomi need. If you only read one chapter this afternoon, read chapter 3 and allow yourself to see how bold and scandalous Ruth’s actions are.
One of our answers to “where do we go from here?” is that we continue pursuing justice. For the next 5 years, and beyond, we have committed ourselves to becoming an anti-racist community. This will mean listening carefully to each other, probably confronting hard truths about ourselves. It will mean understanding how the systems of white supremacy work in our culture and in our church, seeing the weight of oppression and evil in those systems (just like Ruth did) and working to defeat them. There is no simple Before and After to racism, but we have accepted the task of resistance as long as we live in this time where not everyone is free.
Where do we go from here? We go together, together, to seek relationship with those who are here and those who we might yet join. We go with faithfulness to Christ who is with us and ahead of us. We go forward together with courage . . . and all for the sake of love. Thanks be to God.