This week’s readings are a gold mine for preachers. Among the really good options provided, I have a personal favorite, really personal.
When Ginger and I were dating, it became clear that we had some different aspirations for our lives. This is not terribly surprising. We just had different expectations about what the future should hold and how we should shape what came for our future family.
I had spent my growing up years in Atlanta, where I was born, and the suburbs of New York City, where my father had been transferred. I imagined an urban life.
Ginger who had a much more stable, even idyllic, childhood than I had grown up in a small town in South Carolina. It was a very small town. Ginger remembers when the red light was installed.
Not surprisingly, each of us imagined our roots also being our roadmap for what was to come. I know Ginger had some fear related to my dreams of where we would live out our lives. I didn’t name my feelings fear at the time, but in retrospect, I was just as afraid of a small town as she may have been of big city life. It isn’t a spoiler to say that our lives have mostly followed the big city course. Along the way we have made our home in Atlanta and New York, each more than once, and the truth is that we love both. It still makes me smile to think of the girl from small-town South Carolina running errands on the streets of New York City or driving me home from work up Madison Avenue. And, to tell you the truth, I have expanded my horizons, too. We love a small cottage we bought many years ago in the mountains of North Carolina. Our idea of a perfect life is the combination of both.
But the point of this really has nothing to do with the pluses or minuses of where to live. It has everything to do with what love means, in this case, that we make our own visions of what should be yield to the happiness of those we love. We risk our own happiness for theirs. One thing I have learned from Ginger along the way is that love means making someone else’s needs more important than your own.
That is exactly what Ruth did with her mother-in-law Naomi. After her husband had died, Ruth bound herself out of love to Naomi, even though, as Naomi pointed out, the prospects would have been better for Ruth if she hadn’t. Despite Naomi’s protestations, Ruth stuck with her. Along the way, she spoke these very memorable words. “Do not press me to leave you or to turn back from following you! Where you go, I will go; Where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God. Where you die, I will die—there will I be buried” (Ruth 1:16-17).
There’s a bit more to this story. Not only did Ruth give us a living example of what love means in her devotion to Naomi (Naomi called it determination), she accomplished more than she probably imagined she was going to. Ruth, you see, is one of three women mentioned by Matthew as an ancestor of Jesus in addition to Mary (Mt. 1:5). Whether you call it determination, devotion, or love, it is certainly an essential characteristic of God’s salvation of humanity.
Now the part I have not yet revealed is that Ginger recited Ruth’s words to me on our wedding day, August 11, 1979. I, in turn, recited what I hope is a similar commitment, but words of Shakespeare, not Scripture, from Sonnet 116 (“Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds”). Scripture’s story is more universal, but Shakespeare’s point strikes me as essentially the same.
And that commitment has produced a life, mostly a city life but with some country elements. I could not have asked for anything more.
Agape,
+Stacy
Bishop Stacy Sauls
Founder and President