Sermons from the Pulpit

Preached to the Congregational Church in Exeter, U. C. C., on the Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost, November 5, 2000, by Michael L. C. Henderson, pastor.

Ruth 1:1-18; Mark 12:28-34

You are not far from the kingdom of God.
-Mark 12:34

     Naomi could see how determined Ruth was to go with her, and she stopped trying to talk her out of it. I think Naomi was very wise. Who knows but what one more word of resistance from Naomi would have been enough to make Ruth turn around and go home to Moab? And that would have been a great loss to both of them, not to mention that Ruth would never have married Naomi's kinsman Boaz, and would never have given birth to their son Obed, who was the father of Jesse, who was the father of David, who was Israel's greatest king and the ancestor ultimately of Jesus of Nazareth. The whole history of Israel and the whole basis of the Gospel would have come unraveled, and we would not be sitting here. Such is the power of fragile human connections to shape our world.

     But why would Ruth not leave Naomi? The Book of Ruth does not say why, and I take that silence as an invitation to our imaginations. Why would you saddle yourself with your alien mother-in-law, especially when she herself asks you not to do it? Ruth had nothing in common with Naomi except the memory of two dead men, father and son, their husbands. No children to raise, no shared home town, no tribe or clan that claimed them both - they were not even of the same nationality!

     Naomi told Ruth and Orpah three times to go back, and three times she called them "my daughters." Orpah finally decided that she could not really be Naomi's daughter, because Naomi would not have told her real daughter to turn back, and so she went home, though she wept to do it. But for Ruth it was the other way around: She saw that her home was not in Moab anymore, because this foreign woman would not stop calling her daughter.

     It's not that Naomi wanted to get rid of them, we can see that. She was trying to help them. They might have a future back in Moab: another man, another marriage, a family. They had nothing to look forward to with her. That's how it was for a widow in that day and age. It was for their sakes, not her own, that she told them to turn back, because she loved them as if they were her own. Her own self-interest was beside the point.

     Orpah listened to Naomi's good and sensible advice and took it to heart, which is exactly what Naomi wanted her to do. Ruth listened to Naomi's astonishing love for her and took that to heart, and it drowned out all her good and sensible advice. It would not be fair to either of them to ask which of them was right and which was wrong, and we have no business glorifying Ruth's choice just because she got lucky down the road and bumped into a great guy like Boaz and everything turned out swell.

     Do not go home thinking that if you take risks, as Ruth did, for the sake of love and loyalty, God will reward you, like Ruth, with good fortune and prosperity. It may not be true. The bond between Ruth and Naomi must be a treasure in its own right, regardless of the consequences, or it is no treasure at all. This is very important.

     We might like to have a God who rewards us with a little tidbit of happiness every time we do what God wants, like the guys and gals who feed those tasty little fishies to the trained seals and dolphins at Sea World. But we don't have that kind of God. In fact, we don't have a God at all. There is a God who has us. And made us what we are, and entrusted life and world to us to manage as well as we can, which is a huge challenge.

     So this Scribe comes barging up to Jesus, the only good Scribe in all of Mark's Gospel, and he asks Jesus a question, not to trick him but to learn from him: Which commandment is the first of all? Which one is the most important? You need to know that the Scribes and scholars of the Law had carefully added up all the commandments in the Torah, and the count came to 610 of them, two thirds of which were prohibitions, Thou shalt nots, and one third of which were prescriptions, Thou shalts. And they sat back and said to each other, Wow! That's a lot of commandments! How can anyone mind them all? And this led quite naturally to a discussion about how God would rank them relative to each other, so that people with short attention spans and limited self-discipline would know where to focus their energies. This became a hot topic among the rabbis of the day, and that included Jesus - how to summarize God's Law.

     Now these are not seals and dolphins looking to increase their intake of tasty tidbits. They know that the Torah, God's Law, is not a repertoire of tricks to perform or hoops to jump through, it's a gift and a blessing, no less than the gift and blessing of life itself, the air they breathe, the lungs they breathe it with, the bread, the wine, friends, companions, kin, joy and sadness, a hand to hold, a harvest to tend and reap, the whole nine yards. It's all of a piece, and it's Torah that pulls it all together. We translate Torah as law, but it might be truer to call it Instruction, or Guidance, and it is absolutely necessary to understand it as gift and blessing.

     So the Scribe's question is not: Which of the commandments can we afford to ignore? but rather: How can we take maximum advantage of God's wonderful but overwhelming gift of Torah? Do you see the difference?

     And Jesus and this Scribe agree about the answer: Let your keeping of the commandments be controlled by these central ones, let them be the lens through which you read and interpret all the others, focus on these, and all the rest are just elaboration and commentary: You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength, and your neighbor as yourself. Jesus and this Scribe were not the only ones to come up with that answer, nor were they the first. Jesus is not announcing a departure from Jewish tradition here, he's affirming continuity.

     You ask for the one greatest commandment and you get two because the two are inseparable. Any fool can see that God loves your neighbor as much as God loves you, even though your neighbor is a jerk and thinks you are a jerk, so how can you love God and not love your neighbor whom God loves? If you love God, you can't help loving neighbor. St. Augustine put it beautifully, dramatically and radically: He said, "Love God and do as you like!" Therein are contained all the Law and the prophets, including the prophet Ruth.

     Amen