Ruth’s loyalty and commitment
offers a good model for our thinking about what it means to be part of the
church. Ruth was ready to give up everything she knew in order to
maintain her commitment to Naomi. We can’t know how different it was
between living in Moab and living in Israel, but, for sure, she left behind her
friends and family. She left behind the places she knew, the customs
she knew, even the worship she knew. Wherever you go, I will go;
wherever you live, I will live; your people will be my people, and your God
will be my God. Easy to say, not so easy to do. But
Ruth was determined. Verse 18 – when Naomi saw that Ruth was
determined to go with her, she said nothing more. Ruth
wasn’t worried about the differences. Her concern was to respond to
the call. What we need to be about as church is not doing what we
want, but doing what God is calling us to do.
That can take us to
some unexpected, and perhaps quite challenging, places. I ministered
in Islington through most of the eighties and one of the interesting challenges
that took quite a bit of time over a number of months was a variety of refugee
crises, particularly a large influx of Kurdish refugees to Hackney and
Islington at one point. It is interesting that some of the problems,
and some of the crises, just keep on coming. I always remember the
Sunday afternoon when I got a phone call asking if we could temporarily put up
a group of Kurdish men in the church. Thank goodness that health and
safety hadn’t got going quite as it has now in those days. Thank God for
a congregation that lived with the wild and wonderful decisions of their
minister. Because as the faithful arrived for Sunday
evening worship, so did about thirty Kurdish men, some of whom were going to
end up using our church premises as home for up to three months. Over
the weeks that followed, I, and others, befriended these men and helped with
the provision of food and clothes, despite the lack of a common
language.
I remember one
particular Sunday some weeks later. I had messed up big time in my
preparation for Sunday morning worship. I had only realised about
fifteen minutes before the service that it was scheduled as all-age worship and
so jettisoned my carefully prepared sermon and was very much making it up as I
went along. Shortly after the service began, one of my Kurdish
friends, Halil, decided to come into the service. He entered the
sanctuary and looked around to see where to sit. Well, it is always
good to sit beside someone you know – and the person he knew best was me so,
despite the fact that everyone else was, more or less facing one way – we were
probably in something of a semi circle, rather than straight rows – and I was
doing the opposite, sitting pretty well facing everybody else, he came and sat
beside me and, despite the language barrier, proceeded to interrupt the time I
was trying to use to think about what I was going to do next, by asking me
various things about the service, mainly how to pronounce words that he didn’t
understand but saw in the hymn book. But, despite all this going on,
so far as the congregation was concerned, nobody gave any indication that it
was anything other than perfectly normal for someone to come in and sit down
beside the worship leader – and, fortunately, they didn’t know just how much I
wished I was not having those distractions on that particular Sunday.
Being the church
today is not easy. We live in a society that is overwhelmingly
secular and the demands of our consumer culture are written large. It
is often a case of being a stranger in a strange land, and that is not
easy. Indeed it can be scary – but it can also be a great
adventure. It’s challenging, but it’s possible.
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