St. Paul’s United
Church Sunday,
November 12, 2006
Telling Our Family Story – Rev. David Mundy
Ruth 3:1-5: 4:3-17 Mark 12:38-44
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I wasn’t
sure who she was the first couple of weeks she sat in the congregation. The
elderly woman was not familiar to me but eventually we chatted and I discovered
that she had moved from rural Manitoba to Halifax in order to be near one of
her sons and his family. I went to visit her and commented on her British
accent. How had she ended up on a farm in Manitoba?
She paused
slightly, as though she was pondering how much of the story to tell me, then
smiled as she began. As a young woman in wartime Britain she met a Canadian
soldier who captured her heart. They fell in love and decided to marry before
he and his regiment left for France. Sadly, he was killed in battle and to make
life more complicated she discovered that she was pregnant.
She gave birth to a son but of course her husband’s family was in a distant
land.
After the
war she came to the conclusion that she would make the lengthy and expensive
journey to Canada so that her child’s grandparents and other family members
could meet him. She admitted that if she had known how difficult it would be
and how far she would have to travel she probably
wouldn’t have set out in the first place. But after weeks of travel by ship and
train she arrived in Manitoba.
Not only
were the grandparents welcoming, there was an outcome to the visit she could
never have anticipated. Her husband had a brother, the one who was allowed to
stay home and tend the farm during the war. They fell “in like” and then “in
love” and in the end she didn’t go home to Britain. She married the other
brother and they had a son who became both a cousin and a brother to the little
boy she had brought with her to the “promised land.”
We didn’t
talk about God a great deal that day, but there was a sense that God had been
with her through the improbable circumstances of this earlier stage of her
life. Sometimes it’s only when we look back that we see how God has been with us
in both the mundane and the challenging moments. For me as the minister,
looking out at the congregation, I saw a pleasant elderly woman. Until she told
me her family story I couldn’t have imagined the courage and resourceful of the
young woman she had once been.
The bible
gives us some glimpses into the lives of people who may not seem heroic at one
level but yet through their courage and faithfulness become extraordinary
figures who help shape their own destiny rather than living as victims of fate.
Today we
listened to the second installment of the story about
Ruth, a woman who wasn’t a member of any of the tribes
of Israel yet became an honoured member of the lineage of Israel’s greatest
king, David, and Jesus, the Christ.
Ruth was a
Moabite, which meant that she lived in a land on the other side of the Dead Sea
from Bethlehem. Bethlehem was originally home to her husband and his family but
all the men from this clan died. While we are given no intimation of Ruth’s
loss and that of her mother-in-law, Naomi in the book, we can imagine them
grieving together. Suddenly they are both widows and the future is dim. Naomi
comes to the only conclusion which makes sense for her. She decides to return
to her homeland and her extended family. Ruth makes a remarkable decision.
Rather than return to the shelter of her kin, which was the predictable choice,
Ruth insists that she will go with Naomi. To quote from last week’s passage.
Where
you go, I will go: where you lodge, I will lodge;
your
people shall be my people,
and
your God my God.
When Naomi
realizes that Ruth was is determined, she relents and
allows her to return with her to Bethlehem. But as we heard today, this was not
the end of their worries. Ruth does not have the protection of her male-kinfolk
or a husband, so she is very vulnerable. She is forced to glean leftover grain
in the fields, the crude form of welfare in those days. Naomi looks over the
eligible bachelors of Bethlehem and picks out a nice guy named Boaz for Ruth, a
generous act considering that Ruth had been married to one of her sons. We
won’t explore too deeply the impression that Ruth was encouraged by Naomi to
use all the feminine wiles possible to catch Boaz’s attention. Since we tend to
leave seduction out of our family stories when we share them with others we
will do the same for Ruth!
In the end
Boaz and Ruth marry, and they have a child named Obed,
and, well, they live happily ever after. Because this baby was born Ruth, the
foreigner, was the great-grandmother of King David.
I am
partial to the biblical Ruth because I married a Ruth and a passage from the
book was read at our wedding. But why should we bother with this rather
inconsequential story from one of the smaller books of the bible? There are no
stirring battles, no epic journeys (the distance from Moab to Bethlehem was
only a hundred kilometres or so) no great revelations from God with a voice
speaking from above. Yet Ruth the book
of the bible and Ruth the person remind
us that while we might not always be noticed in the grander scheme of things we
can choose to live with dignity and to trust in God’s presence in a heroic way.
In our
family stories there is so much that is good and worth celebrating, but it
doesn’t mean that we are without challenges which can strain all of our
resources, including our faith in a loving and caring God. Our church family
here at St. Paul’s is a well adjusted and reasonably stable bunch but it
doesn’t mean that life is perfect by any stretch of the imagination. I made a
quick list of the things some of you have faced in the last year:
consequences
of serious accidents
unexpected
diagnoses for serious illnesses
job
losses because of “downsizing” or corporate takeover
relocation
because of job transfer or job opportunity
end
of long-term relationships
children
who do not fulfil our hopes and expectations
dramatic
changes in financial security
increasing
roles in supporting elderly family members
adjustment
to retirement
death
of loved ones and friends
I decided
to stop at ten items for this list so we wouldn’t get too depressed! Many of
you could look at this and find at least one of these that applies
to you. Some of you might be able to yell “bingo” because you have a full card!
The
remarkable reality is that while we have collectively faced all this and more,
we manage to carry on, usually with courage and dignity. We may be inclined to
point out the spiritual scars to show that this hasn’t been easy but even
though we are battered and bruised we are not crushed. And we do look back in life and wonder how we
were able to carry on through the difficult times.
Some of
that comes from our personal resiliency. But we also draw on our relationship
with God to give us the strength that we cannot muster on our own. John Newton
was a slave-trader in the seventeenth century who underwent a conversion
experience to Christianity. We know him best because he wrote the hymn Amazing
Grace as a testimony to what had happened in his life, but he wrote other
things as well. Listen:
I compare the troubles which we have to undergo in the course of the year to a great bundle of sticks, far too large for us to lift. But God does not require us to carry the whole at once. He mercifully unties the bundle, and gives us first one stick, which we are to carry today, and then another, which we are to carry tomorrow, and so on. -- John Newton
What Newton does not say is that when we get to the point where we are sure that we are just too tired and too sore to bend over for one more “stick” of life’s cares we become aware of the person beside us, the friend or even the person we don’t really know that well who leans down and helps us pick up the next one.
There are many good reasons for us to be part of a church
family, but one is the essential work of bearing one another’s burdens. Naomi
and Ruth looked at one another and knew that their shared experience and their
love for one another would make them stronger. Rather than looking for the big splashy stories
we can pay careful attention to the everyday heroes who are all around us. In
our gospel lesson this morning we heard about another widow in another time who could easily have been lost in the crowds of the temple
mount. Jesus noticed her though. He sees her as she puts two small coins in the
temple treasury and points out her generosity to his disciples. As a teacher
Jesus wants his students to learn from the simple acts of caring and trust that
they could easily miss. We can learn that same lesson.
You may
have heard that a group of more than 200 war brides boarded a train sponsored
by VIA rail this past week and made a sentimental journey back to Halifax and
Pier 21 where they had first arrived in Canada after WWII. If you have listened
to the interviews, you’ll know that most of them had no idea what they were in
for when they arrived in this country. But they made the best of their
circumstances.
Three years
ago I told you our family “war-bride” story, but I hope you won’t mind if I
tell it again. My late mother-in-law whom I never met because she died of
cancer at a relatively young age was one of those 40,000 young women who
bravely came to a new land. She married my father-in-law in Britain where he
was serving as a chaplain in the Canadian army. When Pier 21 opened as a museum
for immigration a few years ago my Ruth became curious as to where her mother
landed in Canada after her ocean journey. She dug into a box of her mother’s
diaries and found the entry for the day her ship sailed into Halifax harbour.
Her mother was excited and she wrote about the Salvation Army Band playing O
Canada and Here Comes the Bride as the ship docked. Where would my Ruth be and where would I be
without her courage?
Where would
any of us be without our family stories, which can always include God? We can
be thankful that God in Christ is always waiting to travel with us.