Sermon: Salvation from the Margins

October 9, 2005
The John M. Reeves All Faiths Chapel
UNC Hospital, Chapel Hill, NC
Ruth 1:6-17

Salvation in the book of Ruth comes from the margins.

The story is an old and classic tale of a family, left vulnerable by poverty and old age and the indiscriminating force of death. Ruth is also the story of a refugee family bereft of home and driven to seek help in a strange and foreign land. The themes of grief, loneliness and dislocation make Ruth a profoundly human book, and a story to be read and wrestled with as we live our lives and lament our losses in this strange and foreign land we call UNC Hospital.

Driven by hard luck and the cruelty of nature Elimelech and his wife Naomi arrive in the land of the Moabites, seeking shelter from their storm. Though beset by adversity and loss they resign to make a life for themselves in the new land. Slowly the immigrants begin to piece their lives back together again, raising their sons and marrying them away to the Moabite women. After 10 years the family is finally beginning to come out of the woods.

And then tragedy strikes again.

In a cruel litany of losses Elimelech and the boys die in an unexplained and unexplainable succession of events. One, by one, by one the men of the house die and the women, Naomi and her two Moabite daughters-in-law Orpah and Ruth, are left widowed and vulnerable.

Like so many of us, Naomi is too proud and too polite to show her vulnerability; too trained in the habit of appearing strong to admit being weak. But hidden away in the agony of her grief she begins to wonder if life is really at all worth living any more. When Naomi’s husband and sons died her own dreams and her own self-worth died with them. She now begins to see herself as a burden on the girls and a burden on the world. So she decides she can no longer go on. Naomi prepares herself to return home and die the death of a poor and broken widow in the land of her fathers where memory of better times will be her only consolation.

As she begins to go, Naomi tells her daughters-in-law to forget about her troubles and to go and make a life for themselves while they still can. And in that beautiful response which now echoes throughout literature Ruth responds by boldly confessing her commitment to her mother-in-law, “Where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God.”

It was a bold declaration then and, in an age where youth and fertility and beauty are worshipped and our sick and our elderly are marginalized, it remains a very bold declaration for us today. I will be present with you in your pain, Ruth says. In the brokenness of your soul I will be here.

I’ll bet you somebody way back had second thoughts about canonizing the book of Ruth. After all Ruth was a “fer’ner”. She didn’t have the right kind of blood. Not to mention the fact that Ruth was a girl. What in the world can we learn from a story about a bunch of women anyway? Saner head prevailed, however. They prevailed because somewhere along the way someone very wise recognized the fact that in her act of commitment the very character of God was being made known in and through Ruth.

I cannot pretend to have the answers to Naomi’s suffering. Nor do I have the answer to your suffering. I refuse the temptation to rationalize pain, death and loss. God may or may not lighten the yoke of your affliction and I simply cannot say which or why.

I will say this however. God commits to be present with us in the dark night of our soul. The God of Ruth is a god who does not abandon us in the twilight of our years or the midnight of our grief. The God I believe in is a god who desires to honor and comfort and endure with us the pain and loneliness of sickness and death. The God I believe in goes before us, into our pain – into our Gethsemane - that we may not have to suffer alone.

Kent Nerburn, in his book Make Me an Instrument of Your Peace tells of his former life a cab driver and the night he was called to the apartment of an old woman in the middle of the night (Nerburn, Kent "Make Me an Instrument of Your Peace" HarperSanFrancisco (San Francisco: 1999), pp 57-64). It seems that the woman was dying and in need of a ride down to the hospice home where she would soon die. After Kent had packed her small suitcase into the trunk of his cab the woman asked if he wouldn’t mind taking the long way so she could see the town one last time. Knowing this was a sacred moment at the end of this woman’s life Kent turned off the meter and for two hours the two drove around the city looking at the significant places of the woman’s bygone past. They saw where she worked as an elevator operator and where she danced as a young girl and where she and her husband lived as newlyweds in those many years past.

In the darkness of that little cab Kent graced that woman with dignity. He helped her say goodbye well. And he helped her to know that yes, even now, her life mattered.

Your life matters. Like Ruth and Kent, God too cares enough to be with you in your pain and in your loneliness. No space is off limits to God. No subject is too taboo. No sin or doubt too hidden or too dark. As the psalmist says, “even the darkness will not be dark to you, for unto you even night is like day.”

Listen. Hear the invitation, “Where you go I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge.” God desires to take the long way home with you. To listen to you. To cry with you. To love you.

No. I will not rationalize your pain. But I trust there is a God who cares for you, and loves you and is coming to you - somewhere from beyond the edge of your suffering, beyond the margins, in the realm of we call hope.

The great drama of Ruth unfolds to reveal the fact that Boaz and Ruth go on to conceive a child Obed who fathers Jesse who in turn fathers David, the future King of Israel and its salvation in time of great division. And, as we know from the tradition of the New Testament, it is from the root of Jesse, through David, that the Messiah is to be born. Even amidst the loneliness and loss of Naomi, God was coming. With salvation, God was coming.

“And in the tender mercy of our Lord the dawn from on high breaks upon us, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death.”

In the name of the God who is with us now, and forever more, even unto the end of the age, Amen.