WHEREVER YOU GO, I WILL GO

Where You Go, I Will Go, a sermon preached by the Rev. Robert Lee Nichols, Jr. on November 11, 2012 in the traditional worship service and on November 18, 2012 in the contemporary service at the Fox Chapel Presbyterian Church                                

Ruth 1:15-22; Colossians 3:12-17

Good morning!   Grace to you and peace, from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. First of all, I want to say it’s great to be back from our four month sabbatical. Deb and I are very blessed. Thank you for allowing this to happen. Thank you for your kindness, patience and forbearance.

Thanks to Chris for his unfailing support throughout. Thanks to John Dykstra for doing such a magnificent job as our interim and to Joan and Cathie for so willingly filling in wherever needed. I’m grateful. Thanks to our Session.  The Administration and Personnel Committee.  And to all of the boards and committees that I work with for carrying on seamlessly.

You know, they say you should not take a vacation so long that they figure out they can do just fine without you. Well, I think we’re way past that point. You’re just fine. And I’m grateful for that too.

I want to talk about families this morning. There is sort of this perfect storm of things coming together.

First, we are a week and a half away from Thanksgiving. So, we have that to think about, this celebration that most folks believe to be the most important family holiday of the year.

Second, I don’t want to rehash all that we did on our sabbatical, but I do want to give you the overview and speak about the purpose, which was to enhance our marriage and family life, and tell you how that was accomplished.

Third, we have these great texts – Colossians on Christian love and this wonderful family story told in the book of Ruth, which Joan spoke to last week.

First, let’s just admit it. Let’s just put it out there that families are not easy. Being family is not easy! Here’s what our Pastor to the Presbytery wrote in his pastoral letter to us entitled “One Big Happy Family?” Sheldon says,

OK, let’s admit it – family gatherings present at least as many challenges as they do joys. Old Granddad is as ornery as ever. Aunt Mabel shows up a little tipsy yet again, Cousin Joseph is still a terror, and Sister Mary is more of a ninja at barbs-slinging than anyone remembers.

 It’s no wonder that when law enforcement officers begin investigating violent crimes, they immediately consider family members as their first line of suspects.

I bet my family is a lot like yours, and our times of reunion. We are so grateful to get together and see everybody and just be a family. And also grateful it only happens once a year. It won’t happen this year, but in a normal year our usual practice is for the Nichols family, all the in-laws and outlaws, to come together from across the country and gather at my sister’s ranch in central Oklahoma. It’s the one time of year we reconnect and just have fun together. Pretty wild and wooly – lots of young-us and lots of old-uns and everyone in between, Republicans and Democrats, Reds and Blues, city folk and ranchers. As some gather around the table this year they will be absolutely elated by the election results. Others are distraught and think this is the beginning of the end. You can imagine, it’s quite a scene!

Billy Graham once described heaven as kind of like a perpetual family reunion.  To which one cynic replied that that sounded more like a description of hell. Families can be difficult.

And they can be wonderful. Naomi had to leave her homeland of Israel because of a famine so she went to neighboring Moab, with her family. And while there she lost both her husband and her two sons to death.  It’s a tragedy and like most tragedies it brought about the necessity for change. She had to uproot her life once again and return to the place of her birth. There was a perpetual hatred between Israelites and Moabites. They could both traced their lineage to Lot, the nephew of Abraham,  so they were in effect cousins but because of conflicting claims to the same territory there was this enmity between the two. Ruth, the Moabite wife of one of the sons, makes the incredible decision to return with Naomi to Judah, the land of her enemy. Where you go, I will go, she says.

There are parts of this story that are instructive about the nature of all families. First, there is this sense of being thrown together without any choice or free will. We don’t choose our parents, our siblings, our aunts and uncles, our cousins.  We’re just thrown in by some higher power with these people and we all have to hope there’s some higher purpose and we have to figure out how to get along, they with us and us with them.  They are given unto us by God’s Providence. That was certainly the case with Ruth and Naomi.

Second, there certainly is choice involved in families too.  We choose mates.  We make choices in our life. Will I go this way or that way? Will I go with this person or that person?  Who will I be with?  We choose. We choose our attitudes, our words, and our actions. We choose how to relate to our family or families.

Third, there is this sense that every part of our welfare and well-being is tied up in family. Like with Ruth and Naomi, there is an economic reality and social and spiritual.  

Fourth, and the part that interests me most today, is how the way we act in families there is both a horizontal and a vertical dimension. Horizontal being the human relationships we have within a family. And vertical being the way this relates to our faith and our God. Listen to Ruth’s great words to Naomi.  

Do not press me to leave you or to turn back from following you! For 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. May the Lord do thus and so to me, and   more so well, if even death parts me from you!

Whew! Notice the horizontal and a vertical dimension to these words. It’s a commitment to another human being, her mother-in-law – and her words are wonderful. They are both admirable and touching. There is an important vertical dimension as Ruth is putting her faith into action.

Her words are a statement of faith, a confession of faith in the Living God, the God whom we worship today and the God who Naomi and Ruth worshiped thousands of years ago. And that’s the way it is for us, though we don’t think of it often, when we commit to our family and live and act in love we are doing something very important in terms of what we believe. Indeed, the way we act in families is an expression of our faith.  In our families we pass on the love of God and we experience the love of God.

I love the way our Christian nurture and our worship all seem to be fitting together right now and looking at these very themes as we learn and think about how we experience God and how our lives are lived out in faith and discipleship. To me it’s as if we are we are in a room with four walls with huge windows looking out onto beautiful views:

Chris is teaching a class on Wednesday evenings called Experiencing God: Knowing and Doing the Will of God.   They’re studying the ways God’s will, work and ways are revealed. And they are looking not at the academic as much as the experiential.  How do we know God in our lives?

In the Chapel, last week and this week right after worship, Dr. Dierdre King Hainsworth has been teaching as part of the Agape series and her topic has been on Vocational Calling – this wonderfully Presbyterian  belief that as Christians we express our faith through our work.

Vocational Calling. Whether we are preachers or teachers, lawyers or doctors, tradesmen or shop owners, whatever we do – we believe that when we practice our vocation well if it matches our gifts and talents and serves the common good – then it is an exercise of faith and an offering to God. Through our vocation we participate in the work of God in the world.  In our world.  This is part of our Presbyterian mind-set.

Deb and I lived in Alabama for a year before we came here. We call it the year of living dangerously.  We were amazed by how much those folks talked about their churches, usually Baptist.  This was a normal part of the culture. In that culture you wear your faith on your sleeve.

It’s not a bad thing.  But the Presbyterian ethos is different. We don’t wear our faith on our sleeves. We are much more inclined to quietly put our faith into action in our everyday life in a practical kind of way. It’s an incarnational faith that is mostly devoid of religiosity. We put what we believe into practice in our relationships and in our jobs and in our church and at school and in our families. 

Cathie has been leading an ongoing series downstairs in H2O entitled Vertical Habits. This is our third window into the ways of God. What she’s doing is taking words that are spoken in homes and families all the time, words such as these: I love you. I’m sorry. I’m listening. Thank you. How can I help? Bless you. Just everyday words we speak to each other in a normal day in a healthy household and relating these to our worship of God.   So, I’m sorry relates to confession.  I’m listening to prayer.  Thank you to praise. And so forth. The application of  the familial to the divine.  It’s a wonderful series.

This window is kind of like the mirror image of our sabbatical experience, the fourth window into the ways of God. What I was working on with on in study with Martha Robbins from Pittsburgh Seminary was a consideration of how the practices of family life can be the disciplines of the Christian faith.  So, for example, most of the time when we have a tiny baby in our home (remember those days?) sometimes you get so overwhelmed with the demands of a newborn that you forget you are practicing the love of God in loving this tiny human being who has been placed with you for safekeeping. Martin Luther talked about changing diapers for the glory of God. Not always foremost in your consciousness at the time!  But how enriching it can be to realize all that you are doing in raising that child is putting into practice what you most deeply believe about God, nurturing and treasuring this tiny life. When you are holding that child it is in the way that God embraces us. When you feed it, it is as God nurtures God’s people. When you comfort it, it is like the Good Shepherd.

Likewise, for those who are married, when you work like crazy to make it work, and it’s much more difficult than you imagined, when you practice the Christian disciplines of sacrifice, forgiveness, humility, faithfulness, patience, forbearance, kindness  – you are not just making this up on your own – you are taking what we’ve been taught about the nature of Christian love, about the nature of God, and applying those things in a conscious and systematic manner to the places that matter most. It’s an act of faith as well as an act of love.

When you are caring for a loved one who is sick or aged or whatever, you are caring for another as Christ cares for us. And so on throughout every dimension of our family life.

And in those families where there is terrible brokenness, all we can do as followers of Christ is to lead the way in reconciliation and peacemaking and pray for the Spirit to be with us.

There is a woman by the name of Mary Anne Oliver who is leading the way in expanding the traditional view of Christian spiritual practice beyond the church into the home.  She calls it “conjugal spirituality.” Very interesting stuff.

So, we will all soon be gathering around a table with our family and friends, enjoying the bounty of God’s creation and being aware of all that we have, all the blessings we enjoy by the grace of God.

My wish for you is this - that the table may be for you this year not just any table, no matter how well set, but a communion table, where you experience God’s grace through those who are gathered and where you know that grace in the deepest part of you.

My wish for you is that you realize, yes, how whacky these folks God has placed you with are, but more importantly, how precious and wonderful.