RCL
Proper 32B
8
November 2015
Saint
Faith’s Anglican Church
Vancouver
BC
Click here to listen to the Sermon as preached at the 10.00 Eucharist on Sunday the 8th of November.
When I was growing up, one of my
favourite programmes on television was the series of concerts for young people
produced by Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. These concerts introduce me to the world of
classical music and, in particular, to the works of American composers whose
music still remains high on my list of favourites. One of the composers I met through Leonard
Bernstein was George Gershwin.
One of Gershwin’s most famous works
is his opera, Porgy and Bess, first performed in 1935. Many of the songs are famous and have been
sung by various artists, both classical and popular. There is one song, sung by a disreputable
character, a man by the name of ‘Sportin’ Life’, which casts doubt on some of
the stories of the Bible.
It
ain’t necessarily so
It
ain’t necessarily so
The
ti’ings dat yo’ li’ble
To
read in de Bible,
It
ain’t necessarily so.
Sportin’ Life
casts doubts on the stories of David, Jonah, Moses, the Devil and
Methuselah. Some of his doubts many
people of faith probably share, but, if you know the opera, Sportin’ Life’s
motives are definitely questionable.
But when we hear the story of Ruth,
it is very tempting to begin to hum, ‘It ain’t necessarily so’. Here we have a wonderful story, almost a
fable, in which a Hebrew woman loses her husband and her sons. In despair she decides to return to her
homeland and the only thing she has to show for her long absence is a foreign
daughter-in-law. Now this
daughter-in-law is brave and loyal, but, if the truth be told, Ruth is a
liability in the Judah Naomi calls home.
Two widows who have no direct male family members upon whom to rely have
a limited future ahead of them. But
Naomi is determined and Ruth is willing to take risks. Boaz, a distant kinsman, becomes the object
of Naomi’s plans and, through Ruth, her goal is achieved: security in the here and now, security in the
future in the person of Obed, Ruth’s son by Boaz.
Underneath this story there is a
darker history that we must confront.
This short biblical book probably emerged at a time when the Jewish
people had returned to Judah and were re-building what the Babylonians had destroyed. Feelings were running high and, in the
biblical books we know as Ezra and Nehemiah, we read prohibitions against the
marriage of Judeans with any foreigners.
The crisis of the Babylonian Exile had led many to look inward and to
draw the circle of kinship smaller and smaller.
In the face of this closing of the
kinship circle Ruth bursts in like the fireworks of Halloween. This simple story makes a simple claim: the great-grandmother of Israel’s greatest
hero, King David, was a foreigner. By
the rules set forth in Ezra and Nehemiah, David would not have counted as a
Jew. The book of Ruth is an
eighty-five-verse-long rendition of ‘It ain’t necessarily so, Ezra! It ain’t necessarily so, Nehemiah!’ God’s saving purposes cannot be neatly
confined within select blood-lines.
I remember some years ago attending
the bar mitzvah of the son of a rabbinical colleagues here in Vancouver. As is the custom, the young person reads a
portion of the Torah and then offers a reflection on the text he or she has
just read. My colleague’s son stood up
and said, ‘I know that the rabbis have taught that this text means “x”, but I
don’t agree. I think that we can
understood it to mean “y”.’ My jaw fell
to the floor. Here was this young man in
his early teens daring to say ‘It ain’t necessarily so’ in front of
witnesses. How many of us would have the
courage to stand in front of a room full of adults and say, ‘I know that we've
always understood such and such a thing in this way. But I think we can understand it differently.’
Human beings have many gifts. We can build walls to protect us and we can
build bridges that link human communities.
In times of stress our natural tendency is to build walls so that ‘our
way of life’ and ‘our culture’ can be shielded from the threats that we
perceive put this way of life and this culture at risk. Building walls is not necessarily a bad
thing, but there is always the need to remain just a little bit skeptical about
our motives. In the poem, ‘Mending
Wall’, the American poet Robert Frost describes his neighbour and him mending
the stone wall that marks the boundary between their land. The neighbour remarks that ‘good fences make
good neighbours’, but Frost questions this:
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me ---
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good
neighbors."
For
example, there has been anguish throughout our country regarding the plight of
missing and murdered indigenous women.
In the north of our own province we have the notorious ‘Highway of
Tears’. Many have been calling for a
national inquiry, but in the polarized political climate of recent years, this
notion was hotly debated and no decision reached. Our new government has indicated that such an
inquiry will take place and, at the end of this week, the interim leader of the
Opposition, Ms Rona Ambrose, indicated that her party would support such a
proposal. She said that this was a
matter beyond partisanship. I applaud
her for building a bridge rather than a wall.
I think
that it is our vocation as Christians to ask whether we need to build walls or
whether we need to build bridges. After
all, we believe in a God who chose to come among us in human form, building a
bridge of flesh between heaven and earth.
We believe in a God who chooses to move in us through the Spirit to form
communities of real people, living in real places, facing real challenges. There are voices in our country and in the
Christian movement who urge the building of walls, because they see walls as
protecting us from whatever they describe as the ‘other’ or ‘them’. In times such as these we need to join our
voices to those of Sportin’ Life and Ruth.
Sportin’ Life may have been a scoundrel and Ruth may have been a
foreigner, but they certainly knew the right song to sing at the right
time: ‘It ain’t necessarily so!’
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