10/31/21 - Matters of the Heart and Mind - Westminster Presbyterian Church Westminster Presbyterian Church | Serving God and others with open mind, hands and heart - 10/31/21

10/31/21 – Matters of the Heart and Mind

MATTERS OF THE HEART AND MIND

October 31, 2021
Reformation Sunday
Ruth 1:1-18: Ps. 146; Heb. 9:11-15 Mk.: 12:28-34
Rev. Denise Clark-Jones

Today we celebrate Reformation Sunday. It might seem this is a triumphant sneer at Roman Catholicism, but that should not be the sentiment. Human institutions are always in need of reformation. As a firm believer in the doctrine of Original Sin, I maintain institutions always become corrupted over time. You might think of reform as a complete change, but it is most often motivated by a desire to return to the original good intentions of doctrine and institutions.

Martin Luther and the other Protestant reformers did not start out to divide the Church in Western Europe into Roman Catholics and Protestants. Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of the Wittenberg chapel as demand for changing what had gone wrong with the Church. Jesus challenged the religious leaders – the priests, the Pharisees, and the scribes—over abuses of power and espousing obedience to rules over love, justice, and mercy. This was also the motivation behind the Reformers protesting the Roman church’s religious leaders for their abuses of power and putting Church doctrine above Scripture. With the invention of the printing press and the widespread distribution of the bible translated from Latin into the native tongues of the people, more and more laypeople could read the Scriptures and challenge the authority of priests, bishops, and even the Pope.

Throughout the bible, God subverts our expectations, our prejudices, and our values. The story of Ruth is an example of challenging traditional thinking. The author makes a point of referring to Ruth, repeatedly, as a Moabite. Although they were ethnically closely related, there was long-standing enmity between Israel and Moab. The book of Genesis tells us the Moabites were descended from Lot’s son and Abraham’s nephew, Moab. Whereas Israel’s national god was Yahweh, the Moabite’s national god was Chemosh. The Israelites forbade marriage to foreign women. How wonderfully odd that this story was placed in the Hebrew Bible along with the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, which called for the expulsion of foreign wives from Israel. Like many societies throughout the history of the world, including contemporary America, the Israelites feared the pollution of their superior nation with foreigners. When Ruth followed Naomi to Israel, she would have expected to be treated like Muslims in this country after 9/11. The original audience would have been scandalized that the heroine of the story was a Moabite and that she married, not one, but two Israelite men. Even more shocking, this Moabite woman gives birth to the grandfather of David, the most revered king of Israel.

The beginning of the story creates a scene of great loss. A family from Bethlehem travels to a foreign country because they cannot survive in their homeland, which is plagued by drought and famine. Like contemporary immigrants around the world, they left their homeland because they could not survive there. It would have made more sense for them to go to Egypt, yet they crossed the Dead Sea to get to the enemy territory of Moab. Once in Moab, Naomi and Elimelech’s two sons marry Moabite women, Orpah and Ruth. The men all die, leaving three widows. Because of her devotion to Naomi and Naomi’s God, Ruth leaves her homeland to accompany Naomi back to Bethlehem. After some clever scheming by Naomi, Ruth eventually marries a relative of her first husband. By grace, providence, faithfulness, and love, the tragic beginning of Ruth is transformed into a great celebration of abundance at the end of the story. What a great and unforeseen consequence of reforming the tradition of forbidding mixed marriages.

We see here an example of how God works through two marginalized people -Ruth and Naomi were widows – to break down the walls that divided Moabites from Israelites. Ruth’s steadfast love for Naomi was not constrained by religious, ethnic, or national boundaries. In this story, love redefines what was traditionally defined as a family and reforms what is valued by a community.

Contemporary pastor and biblical scholar, Gary Charles has noted that like Ruth “clung” to Naomi, Jesus asked his Jewish disciples to “cling” to him and let go of all the assumptions they had about race, and ethnicity, and socioeconomic status.

(Gary W. Charles, Feasting on the Word, Year B, Volume 4, p. 244.) Jesus summed up how they were to live in our gospel reading. When Jesus is asked by a scribe what is the greatest commandment. Jesus answers the scribe’s question simply; it’s to love God and love your neighbor. To love God entails a complete giving of oneself to God: Our heart, our mind, our spirit, everything about us is to love God, and God’s children – our “neighbors.”

Jesus lived and fulfilled his ministry during a period of time, which could be called the Jewish Reformation. It was during this period of history that rabbinic Judaism was born. Jesus was known as a rabbi, a teacher. In Jesus’ time, the era of priests moved into rabbinic Judaism as it is practiced today. The author of Hebrews reflects the change in his analogies of Jesus as the new “high priest.” Jesus never saw himself as the founder of a new religion, he saw himself as a reformer, a teacher who would lead the Jewish people back to its foundation, back to obedience to God and love of neighbor written in the Torah and the writings of the prophets. The prophets of the Hebrew bible informed Jesus’ ministry. Jesus was teaching that his people should be following that law God ‘wrote on their hearts,’ not claiming righteousness for adhering to rituals while failing to ‘do unto others as they would have others do unto them.’

On this day of remembering the Protestant Reformation, the scriptures remind us that the ultimate reformer in the church is always the same – the Living Christ. He reformed a sixteenth-century German priest, Martin Luther, as he studied scripture. He led a scholarly French lawyer, John Calvin, who had once studied for the priesthood, to the conclusion that this idea of grace alone, faith alone, scripture alone, which Martin Luther had gleaned from Paul’s epistles, was the truth. They saw the Church moving away from God and from the Gospel. These reformers disputed the idea that church doctrine reigned supreme over God’s Word. They came to firmly believe that God is the authority over all things, not only the church but in government, business, and the world. John Calvin described God’s call with the words: “He made my heart teachable.”

These days when our society is engaged in culture wars and intransigent political stances, we could use reform. Our society would greatly benefit from treating our neighbors with the love, grace, and mercy God has shown us in Jesus Christ.

Christ is constantly at work calling the church back to its radical, reforming roots. Christ works in and through us to give us not only a Church reformed, but lives that are reformed and always being reformed, according to the Word of God and the leading of the Holy Spirit.

Amen. May it be so!

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