Clinging to Faith

Clinging to Faith

A Sermon on Ruth (Ruth 1:16-17)

by Griff Martin

On the Third Sunday of Advent (Dec 17, 2017)

For the Beloveds of First Austin: a baptist community of faith

Please pray with me:

Incarnate God, we ask that you once again take the Word and transform it into a living and breathing Resurrected reality we can all together experience. Be present here in this space and in these words God for if you are present here then nothing else will matter, but if you are not present here then nothing else will matter. In the name of the Creator, the Risen Christ and the Comforter.  Amen.

I always find it so intriguing when people choose Scripture for special events, it is very telling on how little we pay attention to context when we select Scripture.

Take a graduation for instance. Every graduate is going to get several graduation cards (hopefully with money inside) that are based on Jeremiah 29:11- For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord…. 

It’s a great verse- a thoughtful sentence, but if you put it into context, it’s an awful message. Putting it into context, it’s a message from God to a people in exile. living away from home, basically saying this, “Most of you are going to die here, away from your land. You are stuck here, away from home for quite some time, in fact- plant gardens because you will be here long enough to see them produce. But don’t worry there are plans and somewhere down the road- generations down the road, things are going to get better.” 

It was not something the original audience put on Hallmark cards to give to other members of their community or a saying they cross-stitched for above the mantle. 

Or take a parent child dedication. I know that when I ask parents a verse they want to give to their child, the standard answer is going to be 1 Samuel 1:27. “For this child I prayed, and the Lord heard my prayer.”

As the pastor, this always makes me quite nervous because I know the rest of that verse and story. Hannah is going to finish that by giving the child back to her pastor to raise, Samuel is not her child anymore- it’s Eli’s.

As a parent, it’s not necessarily a parenting model that any of us want to follow- give you baby to the preachers to raise.  Trust me here. 

Or a wedding text, I can’t count the number of weddings I have done where the couple has asked me to use this Ruth text. It’s the Old Testament parallel of 1 Corinthians 13. 

“Do not urge me to leave you or to return from following you. For where you go I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge. Your people shall be my people, and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there will I be buried. May the Lord do so to me and more also if anything but death parts me from you.”

But is this a great marriage text? Beside the obvious that it’s actually a promise made to a mother in law, which would stop many couples right there.  But beneath that, it’s a most desperate promise made in the darkest and most difficult hours. 

The poetry here is wonderful- breathtaking really, but beneath the poetry… hear what is really being said, “I don’t have anything left, all I have is you, and I am trusting you completely with everything that I have. You- yes, you- are my only hope. I believe and give everything to you. All my faith is in you.”

So on second thought, it actually might be a most perfect marriage text because a marriage is not about that perfect wedding but is instead about those moments when you are not sure if you can keep on going and in difficult days, this promise is what you have to hold onto:

“I don’t have anything left, all I have is you, and I am trusting you completely with everything that I have. You- yes, you- are my only hope. I believe and give everything to you. All my faith is in you.”

It’s a commitment of faith, a covenant. And in Scripture covenants are serious business.

Because sometimes it’s in those dark days, those troubling days, are not the days we need to be questioning our commitment, those are the days we need to be clinging to our commitment to one another. As Abby has taught me, it’s best not to go grocery shopping when you are hungry- you don’t make good decisions, you come home with a pizza to throw in the oven and Cheetos to hold you over until the pizza is done and then a tub or two of Blue Bell Christmas Cookie to wash it all down. 

The same is probably true for our spiritual and emotional hunger as well, those are not the times to be asking questions of covenant and commitment- these days, our current days, are not the days to be asking questions of covenantal and commitment. 

I have recently become quite taken with the work of Esther Perel, a relationship therapist who studies and teaches erotic intelligence, which makes for very interesting airplane reading and conversation. I think much of her work is important beyond it’s immediate field of relationship, I think she is giving us pictures of why we as a people are less faithful to relationships to spouses, friends, institutions, really everything. 

She says that most of us enter into significant relationships for one of two reasons: safety or passion. This person brings us safety and gives us a feeling of security (here we use words like dependable, stability and predicability,) or this person is an object of our passion (here we use words like awe, mystery, risk, adventure) and sometimes its a mixture of both. After studying relationships she has found that often passion and safety seems to fade (both for very different reasons) and when they fade our commitments fade as well because we know passion and we know safety, but we don’t know commitment. 

And faith is a commitment. 

Faith is not just theological ideas we hold, faith is looking someone in the eye and saying we are in this together, I am not going anywhere, I am here for you and with you. 

And it sure seems that this was the perfect story for Mary to tell Jesus over and over and over. 

Mary who must have already known how difficult Jesus’ life was going to be, you can’t be a mother singing about your newborn baby and how that baby is going to knock the tyrants off their high horses, pull victims out of the mud, feed the starving poor while leaving the rich outside… a song about a new way of living, a life that is social gospel based… a life that will probably not be real popular, that will cause you threats, that will involve very little security and that will anger just about anyone who will listen if they listen past simply being offended. 

Mary knew Jesus’ life was not going to be the life most mothers wish for their children, this is not a life of you are going to go to a great school, you are going to receive an incredible education, you are going to save up for a great retirement with a second home, you are going to marry the perfect spouse and have the perfect family. That is not what is promised to Mary, Mary’s promise is a child who will pierce her own soul. 

Mary did you know? Yeah she knew. 

And she knew that Jesus was going to need faith like none other. So she told him this story about his grandmother who lost everything, who was a stranger in a land, who had no future yet who made a promise and stuck to that promise. Because this was not a love story, this was a faith story and Mary knew Jesus was going to need a faith story.

Mary understood that faith was not something you had, faith was something you did. Faith is not something you hold, faith is something you do. 

Faith is when nothing makes sense and you still keep going.

Faith is when all the odds seems stacked against you and you don’t turn around. 

Faith is when everything looks like death and you choose to believe in resurrection.

Faith is what you do when it looks like you have no option.

And Mary knew that there were going to come many times in Jesus’ life where faith was going to be all he could have. So she told him the story of Ruth and how when it looked like her best option was to turn around and go back to the things she knew best, she choose instead to live in faith and create a new reality for herself and for future generations. 

I wonder this morning what Ruth and Mary would teach us today? When we are here and it seems that we really are on the edge of everything and it seems that we are being called to leap off into the unknown, what do Ruth and Mary teach us? 

You see as a people we might need to rethink faith. For a long time the church has taught faith as an act of believing in a set of things…. the Nicene Creed, a Baptist Faith and Message Statement, even Jesus himself…. and that is not faith at all. Our great theologian Paul Tillich wrote of faith decades ago, that faith is one of “those words that belong to the terms that need healing before than cay be used for the healing of men.” Ultimately in his work Tillich redefines faith as  “an act of a finite being who is grasped and turned to the infinite.” For Tillich faith is a relationship, a covenant. 

Faith is not something you hold or believe or have, faith is something you do, faith is something you are in, faith is a relationship. 

Faith is what centers you when all the religious leaders of the day look at your theology and call you crazy, when all the political leaders of the day are angry because your ideas make things new and fair, when those on the margins love you and those in power despise you, when you feel totally alone, when your closest friends desert you, and when your family starts to question you and does not understand you. It’s in those moments that I think Jesus remembered Ruth and her story of faithfulness and that gave him the faith to take one more step. 

It was then Jesus though back to Ruth who could have just let things be, gone back to the old world and old way, but she had seen there was so much more possibility, so she made a promise, a covenant and she was faithful…. and that memory gave him just what he needed for the next step. 

It will for us as well. 

Faith is standing at the edge of everything and letting go because something more, something new is waiting to be born. The words of First Austin poet Linda Miller Raff guide us once again…..

We are at the edge of everything,

at the very edge where

then and now and what if

all stand trembling together,

waiting for us to decide.

The temptation is to drop to the ground,

flatten ourselves against the edge we know

and just hang on.

It’s (relatively) safe here.

We know what’s behind us-

we’ve trod that ground before.

And we can always turn back

if this edge, our own made edge,

feels too dangerous.

To go elsewhere might be too far.

So we can stay. Until we decide. Waiting.

For….?

What if, what if though,

at the very edge of everything,

we fill our lungs 

and decided to leverage what is right beneath us-

the holy ground of our then and now-

to push off and reach out and into

what is next.

What if, despite our fear,

we let go of the edge a little-

faith filled that the void will not swallow us up completely

and rise up from the crouch of safety

to discover what and who

is urgently calling us on.

Then and now and what if standing together,

no longer trembling.

That is ours to decide. And we must.

Because we are at the edge of everything. 

May we have the faith of Ruth, of Mary, and Jesus. Because that kind of faith will hold us as we change the world.