I preached this sermon at St. Lydia's on Sunday, June 13 as part of our five week exploration of the Book of Ruth. The text is Ruth 1:14-22.
My grandfather’s house was filled with clocks. He collected them everywhere: yard
sales and antique shops, church rummage sales. My grandfather was an electrician and I remember loving it
when I was allowed to go down into the basement of his house in Memphis. There was a high wooden
table that was his work bench, and he had old jars he had washed and filled
with screws, their lids glued to the tops of the wooden shelves he had cut
himself.
He liked things that he could take apart and put back
together. He liked simple machines
that were graceful and elegant. So
he loved clocks. They were in
every room of the house and every morning he would go from room to room winding
them all up.
But when I was visiting, I would sleep in the living room
and Grandpa would come in in the evening and go around the room and stop all
the pendulums. And just like that,
they would stop keeping time.
The book of Ruth is all about the swing of that pendulum,
steady and rhythmic,
as it oscillates from one extreme of its amplitude
to the other.
Ruth is a book of duality:
of the swing between the extremes of life.
There is the swing from Israel
to Moab,
and back again.
From homeland
to foreign land
and back again.
In the course of the book we swing
from the death of three fathers
to the birth of a child.
And finally, we have Naomi herself.
She tells us that she went away full,
but came back empty.
Her name means “pleasant,”
but now the pendulum has swung the other way,
and she wishes to be called Mara,
which means “bitter.”
Ruth and Naomi arrive in Bethlehem just in time for the
Barley harvest, which occurs around the time of Passover. The harvest itself is a living out of
the swing of the pendulum.
The planting of seeds,
the nurturing of the plant,
the turning of the season,
the harvest of the fields.
The harvest is life and death intertwined:
one life coming to fruition to provide food for another,
death that in turn makes life.
We can fight it as much as we like, but in the end, there is
a time and a season for all things under heaven (Ecclesiastes 3:1). Naomi’s blunt, plain acknowledgment that her pendulum has
swung from full to empty, from pleasant to bitter: there’s a sad sort of grace
in that.
She’s lucky that Ruth is there with her. For Ruth’s pendulum is swinging, for
whatever reason, to love and devotion.
Where you go, I will go.
Where you lodge, I will lodge.
Where you die, I will die.
God only knows why she loves Naomi with such ferocity, who
now seems nothing more than a shell of a person. God only knows why she feels compelled to link her life with
this woman whose life has become so bitter. And God only knows why Ruth, after all she has lost, is able
to sustain hope, love, and devotion.
But in God’s house, the hours don’t strike all at once.
The pendulums don’t swing in unison,
but in a unwieldy chaos from which pattern seems,
inexplicably,
to emerge.
When my pendulum swings to bitter,
God provides a foil:
someone who’s pendulum is swinging over to love.
And in this way, we bring each other though,
always in motion.
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