Where You Go, I Will Go

Scripture Lessons: Hebrews 9: 11-14 and Ruth 1: 1-18 Sermon Title: Where You Go, I Will Go Preached on October 31, 2021 It’s our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities. If you’ve read the Harry Potter books, or read them to your kids or grandkids, then you may know that line. It’s a good one, and I believe it’s true. In this Second Scripture Lesson from the book of Ruth, Ruth chose love, and that choice reveals so much about her. It also brings light and hope to the book. So powerful is her choice that it brings light and hope to us today despite all the tragedy that’s in there. Ruth is a sad book, and the tragedy starts from the first line: In the days when the judges ruled, there was a famine in the land. Desperate to survive, a man of Bethlehem went to live in the country of Moab. He took with him his wife Naomi and two sons. Then the man died. The sons married Moabite women named Orpah and Ruth. When they had lived there about 10 years, the sons died. Having buried her husband, now her sons, Naomi decided to go back home, out of Moab and to Judah. Assuming her daughters-in-law would want to stay in their homeland of Moab, she kissed them goodbye. Orpah returned her kiss and left, but Ruth clung to her. That’s the choice. Ruth chose love over self-preservation. Not everyone always does. One of the saddest books you can read is Night by Elie Wiesel. It’s an account of his personal experience in a concentration camp. The scene I’ll always remember is the one where his father dies. Together they were running to escape, but his father, weaker and slower, was holding Elie back. When his father finally fell, unable to go on, Elie found within himself not tears, but “In the recesses of my weakened conscience, could I have searched it, I might perhaps have found something like – free at last.” This impulse towards self-preservation is inside of us. This desire to leave someone behind so that we can move on ahead is always lurking in our minds. Sometimes we give into it. Sometimes we even desire keeping someone down or pushing them down so that we can get ahead. Elie Wiesel said that the greatest cruelty that the Nazi’s inflicted on him was that they revealed to him this selfishness within himself. He looked in the mirror and found that he was relieved that his father died. Giving into this impulse gives evil it’s power, and this impulse is inside all of us, yet, in lesser and greater ways, the impulse towards selfless love is also inside of us. So, today we look to Ruth and stand in awe and wonder at a woman who could have left her mother-in-law behind but chose instead to cling to her. Inspired by her devotion, very often a couple will ask me to read what Ruth says to Naomi at their wedding: 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. Where you die, I will die – there I will be buried. May the Lord do thus and so to me, and more as well, If even death parts me from you! Notice the punctuation. So rarely does the Bible use exclamation points, but there they are to make Ruth’s point. In this moment of tragedy, tragedy upon tragedy really, Ruth says to Naomi, “I choose you.” Have you ever made that kind of a choice? Almost 19 years ago I looked in Sara’s eyes and I said: In plenty and in want. In joy and in sorrow. In sickness and in health. Forsaking all others. As long as we both shall live. I choose you. And it’s our choices that show what we truly are. Should we choose to love we can change the world. We defy the power of evil. But that desire to love is always at odds with the desire to survive, and so Ruth Bell Graham, who was married to that great evangelist Billy Graham, was once asked if she’d ever considered divorce. “Divorce, never,” she said, “However, I often considered murder.” She didn’t do it, but she considered it, because the desire to leave is inside us all. And sometimes leaving is the right thing. I can think of plenty of good reasons to get divorced. I can even think of a few good reasons to murder, but the choice to love must be behind all our choices. If it isn’t we may live, but we’ll live to regret our decisions. It’s hard to do, however, because the desire to love is always at odds with these other impulses. Ruth surely felt a series of other emotions in addition to love when she chose to stay with Naomi. In addition to love I imagine she felt regret, wondering to herself, “can I really leave my homeland?” Or remorse, “what will my mother say?” Anxiety: “is there any food for us in this Bethlehem?” And on top of that, any of you who have spent a long road trip with your mother-in-law, know that these emotions coursed through her only to be followed by annoyance: why does she have to stop to use the bathroom so often? Like a lot of things, emotions move through you. Anger, desire, fear, shame, even a crisis will move through you. On the other hand, the choices that we make during a crisis will outlast even this pandemic, so choose wisely. Chose based on love. How many, overcome by setback have been chosen permanent solutions temporary problems? How many, out of momentary frustration, have done long lasting damage? How many felt anger and did irreparable harm. It’s not our emotions that define us or that even last all that long. No. It’s our choices. And there are beautiful choices, self-less choices, sacrificial choices, that echo through history. As Ruth chose to love Naomi, Martin Luther chose to stand for truth. On this day in 1517, nailing his 95 Theses to the church door in Wittenberg, Germany, Martin Luther made a choice that echoes through history. These 95 revolutionary opinions, most of them complaints against the pope, started the Protestant Reformation, which resulted in the formation of the Presbyterian Church, eventually. This choice brought with it suffering. First, he had to debate dispatched theologians from Rome. Refusing to recant his views, he was excommunicated by the pope and was labeled a heretic. What’s more is that the punishment for heresy at that time was being burned at the stake, and so he had to run for his life. All said, the price he paid for choosing to make public his conviction that in Christ Jesus was freedom and grace, was to live in hiding in Warburg Castle under another name. Still, when ordered to recant, he responded: “I cannot and will not recant anything, for it is dangerous and a threat to salvation to act against one’s conscience. Here I stand, I can do no other, God help me. Amen,” for having made his choice he was willing to die for it. Having made her choice, Ruth was willing to die as well, saying: Where you die, I will die – there I will be buried. May the Lord do thus and so to me, and more as well, If even death parts me from you! That’s some choice. It’s a choice like that which can make all the difference in a world of chaos and despair. I mentioned the Holocaust before. Yesterday I watched a movie with our daughter Lily, “Life is Beautiful.” Have you seen it? It’s the story of a well born Italian woman who falls in love with a Jewish man. As anti-Semitism grows and grows, her husband and young son are arrested and loaded onto a train car. Before the train leaves the station, this woman goes to the Nazi Officer in charge and declares, “There’s been a mistake.” Looking at his logbook and seeing the woman’s husband and son on his list he responds, “No mam. Your husband is a Jew. Your son is half-Jewish. They belong on this train. You are Italian and you should go home.” “No, there’s been a mistake,” she says. “If my husband and my son are on that train, I should be on it with them.” That’s a choice. And that choice reveals so much about her. It’s the choice to love, even if loving requires you to suffer. It’s the choice to act based on your faith and not your fear. It’s the choice to stand on your conviction rather than your emotions. That was Ruth’s choice and it’s a choice that changes the history of the world. That’s true. Just as Martin Luther’s choice to stand on his convictions started the Great Reformation, just as this wife chose to suffer with her family rather than save herself is the kind of thing that defies evil in all its forms, Ruth and Naomi go back to Bethlehem where Ruth marries again. She and Boaz have children. Ruth’s children have children. Eventually, Ruth becomes the great-grandmother of King David, the greatest of Israel’s kings. More than that, her choice leads us to the genealogy in the first chapter of the Gospel of Matthew, there Ruth is listed as one in the line of the Redeemer King, Jesus Christ our Lord. This is how Ruth’s choice changed the world. What about his choice? In our First Scripture Lesson from the book of Hebrews we read, “not with the blood of goats and calves, but with his own blood” we are sanctified, for when Christ had the choice between abandoning us and saving himself, When the had the choice between standing on his convictions or giving into fear, When he had the choice between leaving us and living or staying with us and dying, he chose death. With such a sacrifice, having made such a choice, he says to you and me, just as Ruth said to Naomi: Even death will not part me from you! How do you respond when someone makes a choice like that? How do you respond when someone chooses you? I tell you this, He has committed to us. How will you live for him? May we choose him just as he chose us, saying: Where you go, I will follow. Your people, no matter who they are, how they look or where they come from, shall be my people, For, as you have died for me, even death will not part me from you! Thanks be to God. Amen.