Faith of a Neighbor

Sermon given at Bardstown Road Presbyterian Church
Louisville, KY

Sunday, November 4th, 2012

Readings:

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

Our lectionary readings today are probably quite familiar - the Greatest Commandment to love God and neighbor and also one of the most beautiful stories of friendship in the Hebrew Bible, expressed by Ruth and Naomi. 

In approaching these popular Scripture readings I wanted to focus on as aspect I was less familar with.  I wanted to look more deeply at something I hadn’t considered before.  And for me, that was Ruth’s conversion. 

I was especially interested in Ruth’s conversion experience because in one of my seminary courses we’ve been looking at the experience of conversion during the evangelical revival movements in North America.  These movements during the 19th and 20th centuries were known as the Great Awakenings, based on a new religious fervor among the laity.

The mode of worship was open air tent revivals, which stirred up waves of emotion and religious passion with thousands of people being “saved” or converted with each sermon. 

To bring it closer to home, in Bourbon County Kentucky in 1801 the Cane Ridge Revival became renowned for the massive conversion of somewhere between 10-25,000 people, each claiming a life-changing encounter with the Holy Spirit. 

On the east coast near where I’m from, a similar wave of spiritual enthusiasm spread across Western New York in what was known as the “burned-over” district.  And I love this term, it just gives the image of all this raging activity of the soul that it “burns out” the entire region.   

 I describe this period of Protestant history, known as the Second Great Awakening, because it is quite different than what Ruth experienced.  For Ruth there was no revival tent, no preacher on horseback riding from town to town, no moveable pulpit stand that you could place in a corn field, and more profoundly, there was no radical message of the blessings of the converted soul.

In fact, we don’t really hear many details about Ruth’s actual conversion to Judaism.  What we do know is that she is in a desperate place.  Her husband has died and also her father-in-law.  Only the women remain and her mother-in-law Naomi has planned to move back to her home to the land of Judah. 

Naomi implores Ruth to follow her sister-in-law, Orpah, to go back to her people and to her gods.  But Ruth is insistent about staying.  She declares, without budging, “Where you go, I will go; where you lodge I will lodge.”  And in a simple passing phrase, Ruth announces her conversion by saying, “Your people shall be my people, Your God my God.” 

When I hear this declaration from Ruth, she sounds so convicted and confident, self assured and self-aware.  She has chosen to not follow Orpah and return to her family, but instead embarks on a journey with Naomi to her homeland in Judah and a journey into the faith of the people of Israel. 

This extremely grounded and eloquently expressed moment of conversion is far from what was known during the Protestant revival period as the “anxious bench.” During the revival movement in North America, individuals considering conversion would be placed on the “hot seat” directly in front of the preacher, where they would be covered with prayer and a receive a high dose of peer pressure.

Ruth is obviously not affected by pressure, or else she would have followed Naomi’s demand to leave her side, and she would have taken the lead of her sister-in-law to return home.

So why is it that Ruth adopts the faith of Naomi?  Why does she convert?

I’ll ask you to ponder this as we turn to our New Testament reading in Mark.  Here we encounter that beloved passage of the Greatest Commandment.  When asked which Commandment is the first, Jesus responds as a good follower of the Torah and quotes the famous Jewish prayer from Deuteronomy:

“You 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.” 

And of course we know that Jesus does not stop here but adds the next most important commandment, to love your neighbor as yourself.

Now, remember our question, why does Ruth adopt the faith of Naomi?  Why does she convert?

As we are introduced to Ruth’s life and her story, all we really know about Ruth is based on her relationship with Naomi.  Or you might say, we know her through her dealings with family, or more accurately her neighbor.  You see after Ruth’s husband dies, there is no longer anything binding her to Naomi.  Family ties have been eliminated, the legal marriage ties the previously bound them together no longer protect them.  

The only thing they have in common now, in addition to their shared grief, is where they live, at least for the moment.  While I would like to hope that Naomi and Ruth are indeed friends, based on Naomi’s harsh instruction for Ruth to leave, it sure doesn’t seem to be reciprocal - at least during this early point in the story.

Therefore, I can’t assume that Ruth’s conversion is based on a mutual friendship with Naomi.  Instead, I find that at best, I can assume that they, at this point, are no more than neighbors, albeit neighbors with a significant history. 

It is at this point that Jesus’ directive to love one’s neighbor as oneself becomes apparent.  Even if Naomi is unable to recognize the importance of her relationship with Ruth, it is Ruth who finds something extremely worthwhile in nurturing that bond with Naomi.  No longer bound by legal ties and family connections, Ruth continues to believe in their shared destiny.  

 Maybe this is out of desperation, economic need or sheer loneliness, someone to share in her loss.  Or maybe it is out of deep loyalty and commitment to someone who has become a mother figure for her.  We don’t quite know what Ruth’s intentions are.  But we do see that she has a vision for a shared future.  And a shared faith.

Ruth forgoes the worship of the local gods of her own people and claims allegiance to the One Holy God of Israel.  It might seem like a hasty decision, that Ruth suddenly changes her religious affiliation.  It might even seem arbitrary, considering that we don’t know her previous encounters with the Jewish faith, other than marrying into a family from Bethlehem.

Now I want to turn to all of you?  I want you to consider your own religious history, or even your conversion story if you have one.  What was it that drew you to this faith, either Christianity or specifically the Presbyterian Church?  More importantly, what has kept you here?

Rev. Lieberman recently shared with me an interesting conversion story of a long-time church member, Al Clark, which I’m sure many of you are familiar with.  According to BRPC legend, Al took a walk one Sunday looking for a church to attend and came upon our church.  Turns out he would soon meet his wife, and of course he stayed and the rest is history.  I take it that Al played this story up a bit, saying that had he been on the other side of the street that day he would’ve been Baptist.   

In many ways, my conversion story is somewhat similar.  I’ll admit that I do not have a dramatic conversion experience to share with you all.  I used to feel somewhat embarrassed by this, wondering if my faith wasn’t real or strong enough.  A few years ago, while working at a rescue mission in New York, one of my colleagues innocently asked me “so, when were you saved?” 

I froze at the question feeling somewhat inadequate that I didn’t have a fiery moment in which my soul reoriented itself, when I unequivocally accepted Jesus as Savior.  I hesitated to respond, fearing that my co-workers would think I didn’t have faith.  I had always been part of the Presbyterian Church and never felt the need to leave it.  I considered my faith journey a gradual process in which my trust and faith in God continually deepen.  No anxious bench, no crowded tent, no epic soul jumping moment. 

This incident sparked some curiosity about my faith roots.  So one day, I asked my Mom how our family became Presbyterian.  I had sort of hoped that it would involve some direct link to John Calvin, with my ancestors being courageous refugees in Geneva, Switzerland.  But my relatives were a mixture of German Lutheran, Anglican and Irish Catholic.  No long heritage of Presbyterianism to claim, which I secretly longed for.

The truth is I became Presbyterian by default, by a fluke.  You see my mother’s grandparents were a blend of Lutheran and Catholic, raising their children in Albany, NY in the 1920’s.  These blended Protestant-Catholic marriages were becoming more common, but that didn’t mean there was an obvious consensus in how to raise their children.  My great-grandparents came up with an interesting solution, with the boys being raised Catholic by their father and my grandmother and her sisters being raised Lutheran like their mother. 

The Catholic side of this equation was successful - my grandmother’s brother went to Catechism and has raised his own family in the Catholic Church.  My great-grandmother however wasn’t much of a church-goer and never brought the girls to the Lutheran church.  Her husband demanded that the girls go somewhere, and if they didn’t he’d bring them along with him to the Catholic Church.  A committed enough Protestant to not allow that, my great-grandmother scrambled to solve the problem, enlisting a neighbor down the street to bring the girls to the local Presbyterian church.

Now remember this… a neighbor.  A neighbor…

My grandmother became an active member of Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church, and in her adulthood was even the moderator of the Presbyterian Women.  Eventually, my parents were married in that church.  However, it wasn’t completely set that my parents would remain Presbyterian.  In fact, early in their marriage my mom began exploring my Dad’s Catholic faith. 

Once again, the question came up, how will we raise the kids?  They had agreed to raise my brother and I in the Catholic Church, something my Mom to this day says she was comfortable with.  However, just a few months before my older brother was born, my Dad, in his own moment of conversion, said to my Mom, “I want to raise our children in your church.”

There you have it.  Sounds somewhat arbitrary doesn’t it?  No long line of Calvinists, no dramatic conversion moment.  What I see in these two aspects of my faith history, is that spiritual and religious identity came through relationship.  My grandmother’s initial entry into the Presbyterian tradition was through none other than a neighbor.  For my Dad, it was my mom.  For Al, it was meeting his wife.  

This might be a new take on Jesus’ directive to “Love your neighbor as yourself.” 

I think it’s so interesting that in the case of my own history and also that of Ruth, the Commandment that held the most weight was love of neighbor.  For Ruth it was her own devotion to Naomi that drew her into relationship with the God of Israel.  It was through that relationship that Ruth arrived at that first Commandment, that is to love God.  For me, it was through love of neighbor back in my grandmother’s childhood that I entered into this tradition and our love of God.

When you think about your own faith journey, I’m curious which of you has a similar convoluted way of arriving at your faith?  Maybe you’ve had a personal, life-changing moment of awareness and recognition of the Holy in your midst.  Or maybe you do have direct lineage to the Protestant Reformation. 

Still some of you have a friend or a loved one who first shared their faith with you and invited you into a relationship with God.  Regardless of how you came to your faith, I hope that you will consider how love of neighbor affected that faith journey.  What encounters have you had that allowed your faith to grow, to deepen or to change?

In what ways can we be more like Ruth?  When we have an encounter with a neighbor, or a stranger even, in what ways can we identify with their faith even if it doesn’t look like ours.  How can we affirm the many expressions of faith that we see, and maybe even take the risk of renewing or even changing the way that we see God based on our encounters with others?  We don’t have to give up our precious understandings and beliefs, but if we truly enter into relationship with our neighbor, might we be open to expanding our understanding of God?

So I challenge you today to a bit of a Scriptural reversal.  Instead of following the particular order of the two commandments prescribed by Jesus, might we to do it backwards.  Start first with love our neighbor.  Start first with learning who they are.  Start first with a curiosity about their faith journey and how they experience God.  Through this act of genuine relationship, might we encounter God in an entirely new way. 

Instead of applying our own understanding of God first, resting in the safety and familiarity of our preferred image of God, might we expand our notion of God as we encounter our neighbor.  

Rather than approaching our neighbor with an agenda of sharing Your God, or My God, may our love of neighbor allow us to share the same God, echoing Ruth in her courageous statement of faith “Your people shall be my people, your God, my God. “

Amen.