Sermons

“Where You Go, I Will Go”

2 Corinthians 5:16-21; Ruth 1:6-18 – Rev. Rebecca Littlejohn

Vista La Mesa Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), La Mesa, California – February 21, 2016

Holy God, bless the speaking and the hearing of these words, that our hearts might be filled with your compassion and our lives become a witness to your love, your peace and your reconciling power. We pray in the name of Jesus, Amen.

The day is finally here! Today begins our celebration of the ministry of Week of Compassion, which we’ve been anticipating for a few weeks now. Last month, we heard a Faith Story about the history of Week of Compassion and the children got their coin boxes. We heard how it grew from roots of caring for those displaced and harmed by World War II into a global, ever-responding ministry. The kids got a moment to think about the people who might live in the refugee tents their coin boxes are designed to bring to mind.

But just in case you’re not quite caught up, let me take just a moment to cover the basics. Week of Compassion is a ministry of our denomination, what we sometimes call the wider church, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). Its purpose is to provide us a way to be present in situations of need around the world, to provide disaster relief and humanitarian development assistance. Week of Compassion, like the Disciples in general, is not the biggest ministry of its kind, but because of our practice of working with partners and aiming at the work rather than the headlines, it has an outsize impact. Working with partners, especially local partners on the ground, means that we are more likely to fund the things that really need doing, not some project chosen by a committee in a faraway board room. Being small makes us nimble and efficient. Every dollar you give to the offering we will receive today and next Sunday will go directly to providing help to someone in need. This is a donation you can feel good about.

Every year in February, Disciples congregations around the church take these two weeks to lift up the ministry of Week of Compassion and receive this offering to support its work. While you can give to Week of Compassion any time – and they frequently receive designated donations in the aftermath of specific tragedies – this annual celebration represents the bulk of their budget. Every year, they offer preachers a Biblical theme and all sorts of other materials to help us interpret the work they are doing in our name. For the first time in my fifteen years of ministry, the theme this year focuses our attention on one specific part of what Week of Compassion does. Out of all the things Week of Compassion does – help re-building after tornadoes and hurricanes and fires, digging wells, trauma counseling for children affected by war – our focus this year is on refugees. Usually, when we’re promoting Week of Compassion, part of what we do is talk about the incredible breadth of the ministry – all the many, many different ways that we help people re-build and improve their lives. But this year, the focus is narrow. This year, we’re talking about refugees. And we need to think about why. To help us understand this decision, we’re going to watch another short video.

We are living in the midst of the biggest global refugee crisis since World War II. Sixty million people have been displaced by war, violence, persecution and natural disasters. Almost half of them are children under 18.   Two thirds of those people are displaced within their own countries, but 20 million of them have fled to other countries for safety. Twenty million people – that’s over half the population of the state of California. That is why the good folks at Week of Compassion are asking us to focus on refugees this year.

Okay, so it’s a really big problem, and here we are, giving you a chance to write a check and help out. We could, in theory, leave it at that. Except those wily preachers running Week of Compassion had to go and bring the Bible into it. Specifically, they interjected those powerful words from the first chapter of the Book of Ruth. “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.”

Now you may be asking yourself what a relationship between a widow and her daughter-in-law has to do with a refugee crisis. But it’s not like this is the first time these words have been taken out of context to great dramatic effect. People use this passage at weddings all the time, and they’re not being said to anyone’s mother-in-law! But if we look a little closer at the story, we can see that this is, in fact, a refugee story, and it has something important to tell us, not just about the current state of the world’s refugees, but about our connection to it as followers of Jesus.

From our very first introduction to Naomi, it is explained that she is a refugee. She and her husband Elimelech and their two sons had come to the land of Moab from Bethlehem, because there was a severe famine back home. They left everything and everyone they knew behind and traveled far away in search of a better life. They settled down, the boys grew up and got married. But as the story begins, Naomi is thrown into crisis again. Her husband died not too long after they arrived in Moab. But her sons grow up and get married, so she should have been alright. But then both of her sons die too. If you’re Naomi in this situation, it’s starting to feel like you’ve got nothing and nobody. She is convinced that her calamity is so great it must have come straight from God. Naomi is kind of a double refugee in this story. There is nothing for her anymore in Moab, and she’s heard that the famine in Judah has ended, so she decides to head home, hoping someone there will take pity on her and take her in.

Except what happens? Her daughter-in-law intervenes. Ruth decides to come with her. And this is where we really need to start paying attention. Who is this Ruth? She’s a Moabite, so if she heads to Judah, she becomes the one leaving behind everything she knows. She’s young; she had her whole life in front of her. She could have easily married again and had a pretty good life there in Moab. She has no societal obligation to accompany Naomi back to Bethlehem. Did you hear that? No obligation.

And yet – and yet instead of what makes sense, we have this beautiful declaration of loyalty and love: “Where you go, I will go. … Where you die, I will die.” Why did she do it? Because she could and because Naomi needed her. And because of that decision, she ended up becoming the great-grandmother of King David, and thus, an ancestor of Jesus. Because she could, and because Naomi needed her, Ruth herself became a refugee, risking starting life all over again in a strange, new land.

We could just get out our checkbooks, make a donation and call it a day. But don’t you feel like the story of Ruth is calling us to something more? We are under no obligation, but neither was Ruth. What her story sets in front of us is the life-changing spiritual practice of solidarity. Solidarity is a much deeper thing than mere financial support. Solidarity is a heart practice; it’s a recognition of our unbreakable connection with all of humanity, an opening of our hearts to the suffering of others and a consequent unwillingness to let their plight go ignored. I’m not saying we all have to drop what we’re doing and go volunteer in a refugee camp in Jordan, but once we write those checks, Christian solidarity demands that we not consider ourselves done and free to move on.

So often, I think, with stories of dire suffering in other parts of the world, our subconscious self-defense mechanisms kick in, and we somehow think of the people affected as being a different kind of people than us. Because it is too frightening to imagine how we ourselves would handle such calamity, we tell ourselves that they’re more used to living without clean water or proper sanitation, and that their cultures were more violent to begin with, so it’s probably not as traumatic as it would be for us. We know that humans are supremely adaptable, so it doesn’t occur to us to compare how much one night of bad sleep can mess up our day with the cumulative burden of trying to get rest in a 9×9 tent in the middle of 20,000 other tents.

Christian solidarity demands that we let go of these protective mind games and allow the suffering of our fellow humans enter fully into our consciousness. Christian solidarity demands that, at least at a spiritual level, we go where they go, because we can and they need us. It means that we write the check, but that we also believe Jesus when he tells us that where our treasure goes, our hearts must also go. We write the check because we’re willing to invest our hearts in the plight of refugees, not because we want the conversation to be over.

The Christian discipline of solidarity is closely related to the spiritual practice of reconciliation that Paul writes about in Second Corinthians. Remember how we heard that almost half of those 60 million refugees are children? Children whose lives have been shaped by violence and deprivation and hardship? Is there any mind game that could make us okay with that? Is there any way to deny that they desperately need a world that is gentler than the one they’ve experienced so far? Is there any way we could believe they don’t need us to live out our calling as ambassadors of reconciliation?

The spiritual practices of solidarity and reconciliation are at the heart of our Christian faith. They are at the heart of the ministry of Week of Compassion. Responding to the plight of refugees is our heritage and our calling. Doing it with our hearts as well as our wallets is what it means to follow Jesus. Letting their stories touch us deeply and responding as though those truly are our children is what it means to be the Body of Christ. We are called to go where those in need have been forced to flee. We are called to lodge our hearts in their tents. We are called to recognize that their people are our people. For their God is our God. May we be faithful to our calling. Amen.