Sermon: Love Intertwined

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

Date: November 5, 2006

Rev. Dee Eisenhauer, EagleHarbor Congregational Church

            Before I say anything, I want you all to conjure up the memory of a lovely, warm hug.  It could be a garden variety, generic hug, or a specific hug that comes to mind of a time someone really showed their love for you with a hug.  Have you got it?  Let’s just enjoy the recollection of hugging for a moment.

            I’ve read a lot of Bible stories, and I don’t think hugging shows up in very many of them.  I don’t know if that’s because people didn’t hug so much in ancient days, or if it was just so common and ordinary that no one thought to mention it in a story.  But hugs and kisses show up in the part of the story of Ruth we just heard.  Poor Naomi and Ruth and Orpah have all suffered the very sad loss of their husbands.  Naomi’s husband died first; then her sons, who were Ruth and Orpah’s husbands, also died.  In those long-ago days, the men were sort of the glue that held the family together; since they were all dead, it was in the best interest of each of the women to find men who could take care of them and make sure they didn’t starve to death.  (Just going out and getting a job to take care of themselves wasn’t an option.)  For Ruth and Orpah, going back to their fathers was the safest bet, and that’s what Naomi tries to talk them into doing.  Naomi herself was going to go back to her homeland, but she wasn’t sure there would be anybody there who could take care of her.

            This is where the kissing and hugging comes in.  She kisses her daughters-in-law when she urges them to go back home.  They all cry.  They love each other; they don’t want to break up their family.  Finally Orpah agrees that it’s best to go back home, and she kisses Naomi good-bye and sets out for her father’s house.  But Ruth—this is where the hugging comes in—“clung to” Naomi.  And she says one of the sweetest, most loving speeches recorded in the Bible: “Where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God.”  I bet there was a lot more hugging and kissing and weeping after that. 

            The reason Ruth says that “your God will be my God” is that they were going to move from one country to another, and in those days everyone understood that that meant they were going to move from one god’s territory to another god’s territory.  It sounds strange to us, because we’re pretty used to thinking of just one God.  But back then, people thought there were lots of gods, and each particular god was honored in a particular place.  So when Ruth pledges her loyalty to Naomi, she pledges to be loyal to the god of Naomi’s homeland of Israel, who was known by the Hebrew name of Yahweh (in English, “I Am”).  That’s the God we still worship; as history went on, more and more people came to think of one God, even though different people still call that one God by different names. 

            I think Ruth already knew that one God by the time she pledged her loyalty to Naomi’s homeland god.  Because she knew love, and love connected her to God even if she didn’t realize it yet.   Love is not only the strongest bond we have with other human beings; it is the main way we connect with God and God connects with us.  When a loving hug connects two people, God is in the warm space between them, even if they don’t realize it. 

            Jesus knew that.  When he answered the question put to him about what was the greatest commandment out of all the 613 commandments in the Hebrew scriptures, he talks about loving the one God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength and loving our neighbors as ourselves.  He’s saying these are the two greatest commandments, and he’s putting them together because the love of God and the love of neighbor and self are all tangled up together.  They are intertwined with each other so completely that they can’t really be separated from each other.  And if you want to find God, you have to find love.

            Here’s a story told by John Powell, who was a Jesuit priest who taught university classes in the Theology of Faith.  One of his students in the 1960’s was a young man named Tommy, who Father Powell remembered was the first boy he’d ever seen with really long hair.  He said he filed Tommy in his mental file under “S” for “Strange” because of his long hippie hair.  Tommy turned out to be the “atheist in residence” in the Theology of Faith course.  He constantly objected to, smirked at, or whined about the possibility of an unconditionally loving God.  Father Powell said they got along together in relative peace during the course, although occasionally he was a pain in the back pew.  When he came up to the teacher’s desk at the end of the course, he asked in a slightly cynical tone, “Do you think I’ll ever find God?”

            Father Powell decided on a little shock therapy.  He answered emphatically, “No!”

            “Oh,” Tommy responded.  “I thought that was the product you were pushing.”  He turned and walked toward the door.  Just before he got there, Father Powell called out, “Tommy, I don’t think you’ll ever find God, but I’m absolutely certain God will find you!”  Tommy shrugged a little shrug and left the class without turning around.  Father Powell remembered his disappointment, thinking Tommy had missed his clever line.

            Later, he heard that Tom had graduated, and Father Powell was pretty sure he wouldn’t see him again.  But then he heard that Tommy had terminal cancer.  And before the teacher could seek out the student, Tommy came to see him.  When he walked into the office, his body was wasting away and all his long hair had fallen out because of the chemotherapy.  But his eyes were bright and his voice was strong.

            “Tommy, I’ve thought about you so often.  I hear you are sick,” Father Powell blurted out.

            “Oh, yes, very sick.  I have cancer in both lungs.  It’s a matter of weeks.”

            “Can you talk about it, Tom?”

            “Sure.  What would you like to know?”

            “What’s it like to be only twenty-four and dying?”

            “Well, it could be worse.”

            “Like what?”

            “Well, like being fifty and having no values or ideals, like being fifty and thinking that booze, seducing women, and making money are the real ‘biggies’ in life…But what I really came to see you about,” Tom said, “ is something you said to me on the last day of class.  I asked you if you thought I would ever find God, and you said, ‘No,’ which surprised me.  Then you said, ‘But God will find you.’  I thought about that a lot, even though my search for God was not all that intense at the time.

            “But when the doctor removed a lump from my groin and told me it was malignant, I got serious about locating God.  And when the malignancy spread to my vital organs, I really began banging my bloody fists against the bronze doors of heaven.  But God did not come out.  In fact, nothing happened.  Did you ever try anything for a long time with great effort and no success?  You get…fed up with trying.  Well, one day I woke up, and instead of throwing a few more futile appeals over that high brick wall to a God who may or may not be there, I just quit.  I decided that I didn’t really care…about God, about an afterlife, or anything like that.

            “I decided to spend what time I had left doing something more profitable.  I thought about you and your class and I remembered something else you had said: ‘The essential sadness is to go through life without loving.  But it would be almost equally sad to go through life and leave this world without ever telling those you loved that you had loved them.’  So I began with the hardest one: my dad.

            “He was reading the newspaper when I approached him.  ‘Dad?’  ‘Yes, what?’ he asked without lowering the newspaper.  ‘Dad, I would like to talk with you.’  ‘Well, talk.’  ‘I mean, it’s really important.’

            “The newspaper came down three slow inches.  ‘What is it?’  ‘Dad, I love you.  I just wanted you to know that.’

            Tom smiled at this point in the story, as though he felt a warm and secret joy flowing inside him.  “The newspaper fluttered to the floor.  Then my father did two things I could not remember him ever doing before.  He cried, and he hugged me.  We talked all night, even though he had to go to work the next morning.  It felt so good to be close to my father, to see his tears, to feel his hug, to hear him say that he loved me.

            “It was easier with my mother and little brother.  The cried with me, too, and we hugged each other and started saying nice things to each other.  We shared the things we had been keeping secret for so many years.  I was only sorry about one thing: that I had waited so long.  Here I was, in the shadow of death, and I was just beginning to open up to all the people I had actually been close to.

            “Then, one day I turned around, and God was there.  He didn’t come to me when I pleaded with him.  I guess I was like an animal trainer holding out a hoop, ‘C’mon, jump through.’  ‘C’mon, I’ll give you three days…three weeks…’  Apparently, God does things in his own way and at his own hour.

            “But the important thing is that he was there.  God found me.  You were right.  He found me even after I stopped looking for him.”

            “Tommy,” Father Powell practically gasped, “I think you are saying something very important and much more universal than you realize.  To me, at least, you are saying that the surest way to find God is not to make him a private possession, a problem-solver, or an instant consolation in time of need, but rather by opening to God’s love.”  He asked Tommy to come and tell his story to the current Theology and Faith class, and Tommy, though nervous, said he’d do it for God and for his teacher, but he died before he could keep the date.

            His love, though, his love didn’t die.  All our lives we hear a saying about how we have to leave everything behind when we die: “You can’t take it with you.”  That saying is mostly true.  The one thing that you can take with you when you die is love.  The love of your family and friends.  And the eternal, immortal love of God which becomes the highway on which we travel to the Heart of God both before and after we die—we take that with us wherever we go.

            It’s a beautiful mystery, this great Love that weaves through our lives.  Through love, we connect with those who have died even though we feel the pain of separation so sharply.  Through love, we connect deeply with those people who are given to us in family relationships and friendships and mutual service and the universal church that encircles both the living and the dead.  And whether we realize it at the time or not, through love we are bound to God who embraces us as we embrace our companions on the journey. 

Go back for a moment to the hug you remembered.  Feel the warmth of it.  Now imagine the warmth of God hugging you, right here, right now.  The commandment to love is not so much a commandment after all.  It is an invitation, an open invitation to step into the warmth of God’s loving arms.