Rev. Betsy Aldrich Garland
November 1, 2009
Ruth 1:1-18

What Do You Love?

In his book, How, Then, shall We Live?, Wayne Muller tells the story about friends who came back from China with a collection of old clay teapots, some several hundred years old. The Chinese say that, after you have made tea for 100 years, the pot is thoroughly seasoned; you no longer need to add tea leaves to the pot. Just pour in hot water, and the pot itself makes the tea.

Muller goes on to say, “When we do what we love, again, and again, our life comes to hold the fragrance of that thing. When we hold something in our hands day after day, our hands conform to the shape of what we have held. We become what we have cared for; our lives are shaped by what we love.”1

Muller continues, “All we are, said the Buddha, is a result of what we have thought. He might also have added: All we are is a result of what we have loved. What we love draws us forward and shapes our destiny. Our love teaches us what to look for, where to aim, where to walk.With our every action, word, relationship, and commitment, we slowly and inevitably become what we love.”2

In the Book of Ruth, our lectionary text for this morning, we have the story of a family that is forced by famine to travel from their homeland into foreign territory to find food, immigrants in search of a better life, and they settle there. The husband dies and leaves his wife with two sons. When the sons grow up, they marry local Moabite women. And then the sons die. There is nothing left for Naomi, a bitter, childless widow, to do – in addition to complaining – but to return to Judah and her own people. Naomi counsels her daughters-in-law to return to their mothers’ houses and to find security in finding new husbands. They protest; they will go with her to Judah.

Imagine what these women have been through together. First the death of the head of the household, then the death of the sons. And no children to carry on the family name; no giggles and laughter to lighten the days. These women have stayed up nights together, pressing cool cloths to fevered brows, spooning broth between cracked lips – and when their efforts failed, washing the bodies of their loved ones; with water from the well mixing with their tears, they wrap the bodies for burial. These women were kin, as surely as if they were blood relatives.

But Oprah, the practical one, agrees to go back to her mother’s house; she decides to play it safe, to obey, to conform, but Ruth, her sister-in-law, clings to Naomi. “Where you go, I will go, and where you lodge, I will lodge. Your people shall become my people, and your God shall become my God, and not even death shall part us.”3

We know these words, a wedding favorite, but on those occasions, we hear them with fresh, romantic over-tones. We don’t realize the harsh circumstances under which they were uttered. Ruth’s words were the outpouring of seasoned love, born out of suffering, arising out of the experience of women who had lived through good times and bad times and would be there for each other, no matter what!

Ruth’s life has been shaped by her love for her mother-in-law; and she is willing to leave everything she has ever known, to risk a strange country, an unknown people, a foreign God, her very life itself, to accompany Naomi. And what of Naomi? She is returning to her home and kinsmen after many years; I expect she is anxious about how she will be received – let alone with an alien in tow! It would be easier for her to go without Ruth, a reminder of how broken her life is.

But the bonds between Naomi and Ruth are more powerful than life. They model for us a willingness to go beyond whatever custom and law require to stand with one in need. She and Ruth are tied together not only by tragedy but also by love.

“What do you love?” Muller asks his reader? He writes,

You gain courage from what you love. When you know where your treasure lies,
when you know what is, for you, sacred and right, then you are filled with a clarity of purpose and a breathtaking capacity to act on what you believe.4

What do you love? The memory of those whom we have memorialized this day? You are who you are through them. In your heart, they will live forever.

What do you love? Your family and friends? Your care for them is evidence of how God works with us through relationships.

What do you love? Your work? The gifts that God has given you to use in the world are the way you participate in God’s creation.

What do you love? The church? The pledge that you will make today is not simply a contribution to next year’s budget but, more especially, the way you wrap your arms around this congregation. “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also,” says Jesus of Nazareth.

Muller writes, “...when we encounter those things we truly love, we become awake, alive. We open ourselves to the gifts of wisdom and beauty of these things, because of our deep love for them.”

Now is the time to commit yourself to this church and its future. Wrap your hands around it like a warm cup of tea, and you will be blessed with a community of faith that will walk with you on your journey. Let this church be something you treasure – and you will discover that there will always be life in the midst of death.

Back in Judah with Naomi and her family, Ruth marries Naomi’s kinsman’s Boaz and bears a son who is a distant ancestor of King David, who, remember, is a distant ancestor of Jesus of Nazareth.

And so it is that Ruth’s love for Naomi shaped the story of the Hebrew people. And our love for each other over the years has shaped the story of this church – and will shape its future.

This love is the kind of love that lays the foundation for great nations – and great churches! May it be so for our community.

Amen

1. Wayne Muller, How, Then, Shall We Live? (New York: Bantam Books, 1996), p. 69-70.
2. Ibid, p. 70.
3. Paraphrase by Maren C. Tirabassi.
4. Ibid., p. 75.