This sermon was preached at the Evangelical Covenant Church in Lafayette, IN on November 8, 2015. This church has been supporting us from the beginning, in 1993 and before that they supported my parents even before I was born.
Ruth 3:1-5; 4:13-17
The story of Ruth and Naomi is one that we cherish in the church. We tell it over and over again, in Sunday school, in sermons, in bible studies and more. A beautiful story of love, faithfulness, and redemption. It’s a profoundly encouraging story of people facing incredible odds and yet eventually finding redemption, salvation and true happiness.
Pastor Tatsuya Kogure and I are co-workers in Japan. Tatsuya and his family were the first ones to ever attempt to live on top of Mt. Akagi and manage the Akagi Bible Camp. They did so when the housing was very, very substandard and completely inadequate for the harsh winters at 4,500 ft. They did so when their daughter Akari wasn’t even ten years old yet and the closest elementary school was 30 minutes and 75 hairpin turns down the mountain with no school bus service. And yet they made the choice to serve in that capacity as a part of their commitment to serve Christ and the church. Choosing that ministry involved leaving a successful pastorate in another church, changing denominations, and taking a huge cut in salary. But his primary motivation was simple. He wanted to move back to his home town so he could be closer to his aging parents and spend more time sharing the good news of Jesus Christ with them.
Tatsuya grew up in a typical non-Christian Japanese family. It was during his college years that he met Christ and committed his life to being a follower and disciple of Jesus. By the time he graduated from college he felt the call to full time ministry and went on to seminary. His parents were disappointed and didn’t expect him to stay on that course for very long. But he did! That was thirty years ago!
Recently in a sermon he reflected on his first pastorate. It was a church plant not far from his parent’s home. It’s hard to stress how different church planting in Japan is from this country. There was no startup team, no support staff, no group of core members who joined him. It was just Tatsuya, in a rented room in a run-down building that looked ready for demolition. Publicity only came by walking the neighborhood streets and passing out invitations. Predictably almost no one came, and I don’t use the term “no-one” figuratively here. On a good day maybe two or three people; and often no one at all showed up. Nevertheless he summoned his courage and invited his parents. After some persuading they finally came one Sunday morning. I’m not sure if they were the only ones that day or if a couple others showed up. Tatsuya bravely preached the gospel and prayed that somehow his parents’ hearts would be changed. But after the service his dad commented that he was sort of glad people weren’t coming because he found the entire scene to be rather embarrassing! Of course Tatsuya laughed as he shared this story, willingly admitting that his father was probably justified in feeling that way.
That church plant never really took off, but eventually Tatsuya received a call to another church in a distant city and accepted it. There he faithfully served for over ten years and was blessed to see the church grow. It was an answer to prayer and a wonderful ministry. And in many ways he probably felt vindicated in the face of his father’s skepticism. Yet he never forgot about his parents, and eventually made the huge decision to give up that job and come home so he could be closer to them and share the love of Christ with them on a daily basis. The assignment to live at and manage the Akagi Bible Camp was his ticket back home, even though the perks were sorely lacking. By then his father was retired from his job at city hall, and within a year or two of Tatsuya’s return home his father was diagnosed with late stage prostate cancer. Tatsuya and his family faithfully cared for him and showered him with the love of Jesus. On his death bed Tatsuya’s father accepted Jesus as his lord and savior and received baptism. A story of love, commitment, redemption and salvation.
And as a subtext, today Hydi and I are living at Akagi Bible Camp, in far more friendly and comfortable conditions and joyfully seeing God touching lives thru that awesome ministry. Pastor Tatsuya Kogure is one of our closest friends and co-workers and a stalwart supporter of the ministry even today.
And yet the story of Ruth and Naomi has a much darker side to it. Naomi her husband and two little boys were forced to leave their homeland as refugees of a famine. They landed in Moab, enemy territory. They survived, the boys grew up and both married local women. But father Elimelek died and tragically, so did both of his sons, leaving their wives as childless widows, and leaving Naomi with no one to carry on their family name. They were all cruelly caught in the middle; outcastes in Moab and outcastes in Judah. Life’s cruel circumstances left them with the prospect of dire poverty and no good options. Even ever faithful Naomi can only conclude that she was cursed by God. (1:13)
I don’t know if any of you have ever felt that way, but the sad truth is that our world is full of people who have faced similarly cruel and unfortunate circumstances. On March 11th, 2011 Japan experienced one of the largest earthquakes ever recorded and the resulting tsunami was larger than any to hit Japan in over a thousand years. Three hundred and fifty miles of coastline was ravaged by the waves that washed ashore, destroying everything in their path. Homes, schools, businesses, entire villages, towns and cities, simply washed away. In the end over 18,000 lives were lost, 45,700 buildings destroyed, 230,000 vehicles damaged or destroyed, with total damages estimated in the tens of billions of dollars. Within days we were there and have continued to serve in relief ministries ever since.
Japan is known for its incredible commitment to community, and Japanese people know how to selflessly pull for one another especially in the face of natural disasters. And yet we saw communities torn apart. Some of our earliest work was with the people whose homes had been spared. The waters only rose so far, often leaving the lower half of towns and villages completely in ruins while the upper half was unscathed. Nevertheless those people’s lives were pretty much devastated, having lost jobs, transportation, electricity, water and gas, and much of what they had considered to be their home. The schools, stores, hospitals and so much more was simply gone. Local government was overwhelmed in caring for those who had lost their homes and in the midst of that they simply didn’t have the capacity to care for those who were still in their homes, often stranded without food, water or heat. So we did what we could to help them, but some of the most heartbreaking stories we heard were of how the unfair nature of the disaster had torn their communities apart. Those who had lost their homes resented the fact that neighbors and friends still had theirs. Lifelong friendships were obliterated just like everything else. Life can be so incredibly unfair.
And yet in the midst of all that pain and horror we have experienced countless stories of rebirth and restoration. God is at work in the midst of all the horror and suffering, just as God was in the lives of Ruth and Naomi.
While these are the easy points of connection in today’s Bible story, if we read it carefully we see something surprisingly subversive as well. Elimelek and Naomi had abandoned their homeland, the Promised Land given to their ancestors by God. In a foreign and pagan land they had allowed their sons to marry foreigners, an act that was strictly forbidden in God’s law and punishable by death. Furthermore, when Naomi’s fortunes turn sour she finally comes home, and hopes to survive off the generosity of others. You might even be able to say she plays the system, encouraging her daughter in law to not only take advantage of a rich relative, but to sexually seduce him when he’s had too much to drink. Naomi was guilty of abusing the Torah, Jewish law based on God’s law, on so many counts.
Toward the end of the 19th century there were large numbers of Japanese who left their homeland in search of greater fortunes and ended up in North and South America. In particular many of them landed in Brazil and other Latin American countries. But the circumstances were tough and in recent years many of their third and fourth generation descendants have come back to Japan in search of work. Regardless of their heritage they are treated as outsiders. The path to citizenship is impossibly tough and getting work visas is never easy. In large part they end up with the least desirable jobs if any, receiving the lowest wages, and yet they have few good options. The city of Isesaki, less than an hour from our home on Mt. Akagi has one of the largest Latino populations of any in Japan. These are often people with last names like Tanaka, Suzuki or Nakamura and yet their first names give them away… Julio, Eduardo, or Gabriela. They aren’t even allowed to write their last names in traditional Japanese characters but are required to use the “other” alphabet reserved for foreign words. In Japanese society at large there is little appreciation or sympathy for this growing segment of the population. After all, their ancestors left when the going got tough and now they are back, hoping to benefit from a robust society that was built by those who didn’t abandon the homeland.
One of our Covenant churches is in the city of Isesaki. Thru a series of painful circumstances this little church of about twenty people has been led to minister to a group of local teenagers, almost all of whom come from broken families that include at least one Latino parent. It hasn’t been easy, but I am thrilled to report to you that Jesus’ love is touching and changing the hearts of many of these youth. They are outsiders in every sense of the word, and yet they are finding that in Christ they are equally loved by God and his people. They are finding redemption in the body of Christ.
There’s no doubt that the story of Ruth and Naomi is subversive. Yet it seems to proclaim a powerful message that lives on thru time. When it comes to obeying God’s law and practicing the love of Jesus we are called on to be flexible and accepting. Scripture speaks again and again of the need to accept outsiders in love. The story of Ruth and Naomi states powerfuly that the essence of following God’s law is compassion and flexibility, where outsider becomes insider and all become one. We constantly grieve over the state of the family in this nation just as Jewish people did when they saw families like Naomi’s. To be sure, the Bible consistently affirms the basic role of the family in survival, but it is seldom the family we think of when we hear of “family values”.
Just think of all the messed up families in the Bible, broken by sin. Families broken by sibling murder, spousal infidelity, a father on his death bed deceived by his son to get a blessing, polygamy and all the hatred it spawns, father and son on opposite sides of the battle line, brothers selling a brother into slavery; the list goes on and on. The truth is that the family is a complex thing, and most often not in line with what we consider to be healthy and proper standards.
Like Jesus’ story, the book of Ruth is subversive, suggesting that the Law is best interpreted flexibly, with an eye to the destitute and the excluded. And so what we see in this story and in the ministries around us is that God is not the least bit hesitant to be present and engaged in the messes we’ve created. In fact it seems that God gets no greater joy than comes from being glorified in the very midst of all that grunge.
You’ve probably seen it right here in your midst. We are continually seeing it in Japan. So I make a plea to you today. Please continue to support the ministries in Japan thru your prayers and gifts as we seek to live out our commitment to Jesus Christ and share the good news of redemption and salvation with whomever we encounter.
Creator God, may your kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven; right here in this place and in Japan.
Amen
Speaking the Word 