The question for us today is: What does it mean for us to live steadfast in our faith, for us to risk faithfully as a congregation?

This is not a new question, or one unique to Unitarian Universalists. But the answer to this question almost always means going against conventional wisdom, bucking the social trends and the peer expectations.

If we look for proof of the age of this answer, we can find many stories from around the world. But the one I come back to, time and time again, is the Book of Ruth. See, the Book of Ruth begins with three women, Orpah, Ruth, and Naomi, who have lost everything—their husbands, their social status, their homes, their means to make a living, a chance for children. And in their society, this was clearly a sign that they were not blessed. In the society of this story, it was widely believed Orpah, Ruth, and Naomi must have sinned because God somehow forgot to buy them social security—in those days, a stable family, lots of children, and a means to make a living.

The thing was, that in that time and place Ruth and Orpah essentially belong to Naomi; they entered the family and they could not leave. Naomi could have demanded that they do everything in their power to make her comfortable and to care for her. But she didn’t. What she did was, in the last powerful act she could do, in the tiny space allotted to her, was to say to Orpah and Ruth, “Don’t stay with me, because that is not fair or right to you; the only future you have with me is slavery.” Naomi knew she had to return to her husband’s village and that along with his property, she would be sold to pay his debts. If Orpah and Ruth went with her, they would be sold too.

The question for Naomi is: What is a faithful act? To drag these suffering women with her into slavery or, in her last free moment, free them to follow their hearts and destinies? Set them on the road to deal with the social outcast status they would have, with its attendant shame and suffering, a status considered by many of the time worse than slavery, or invite them into a path of slavery, with its sufferings including the expectation that as women, they could be sexually used by others?

Orpah and Ruth both have to think about this troubling gift Naomi makes; they care about her. They are worried for her. They know the choices they are facing. To go home is to choose a path of suffering and to enter slavery is to choose a path of suffering; they could also have chosen to die. But then they listen to their hearts, following where their hearts call them. Orpah returns to her family and Ruth says to Naomi, “Whatever happens to you will happen to me.”

They each made a free choice; they make a choice for life and they choose the path they each can best approach. They each knew that they were bucking conventional wisdom in choosing to continue to live their lives with caring and love and following their hearts. They knew there would be sacrifice and work ahead of them, in following their choices, but the choice, even if the suffering was inevitable, was freely made. They were setting out in faith that goodness had to go beyond social convention. Their actions were demonstrating that they chose to live and deal with what life sent their way. What was holy and sacred for them was in making these choices. All three women were making generous, difficult, sacrificing choices.

After this, we lose Orpah’s side of the story and only follow Ruth and Naomi, as they head into sure slavery and degradation. They return to Naomi’s husband’s village, where they shelter inside the city wall and Ruth goes out to glean in the fields. Now, I don’t know how many of you have ever gleaned—it’s not much in vogue with these days of mechanical harvesters that take every last bit of grain, even from the edges of the fields. Gleaning is hard work. One is fighting with the birds and the mice for the spare strands of wheat that remain on the ground and behind the cutting. Gleaning also happens along the edges of the field, where one-tenth of the land is set aside for the needs of the destitute. This set-aside land is a sign that the owner of the field recognizes his religious obligation to care for the poor and the destitute.

Boaz, whose field we find Ruth gleaning, has dutifully set aside his tenth of land—a tenth of his income to let us know already that Boaz is a generous man who puts his money where his prayers are—to provide for the needs of the poor. He finds that Ruth works hard. He appreciates the choices she keeps making, choices he understands as being faith full, not just adhering to the letter of the law. He is so moved by Ruth’s choices that he makes a faith full choice, too. He shares how much he wants to help with Ruth. She becomes very excited about the possibility and tells Naomi, who also is excited by what Boaz offers.

But then, the next day is the day of the estate sale, where Ruth and Naomi are to be sold along with the rest of Elimelech’s estate. It is the end of hope for their freedom. But Boaz has another problem. See, Boaz doesn’t have the money to buy out Elimelech’s debt and set Ruth and Naomi free. He has to go ask his friend for help. Boaz’s friend is interested in Elimelech’s land, which he can use—maybe he has a lot of children to divide his estate when he dies. But he has no use for the women who are part of that package. So Boaz is given charge of them. Asking for help from his friends, asking for a friend to make a free choice for generosity, requires Boaz to stretch his pride and to be so generous as to incur a major social debt. But by doing so, his friend buys out Naomi’s husband’s debt, and Boaz sets both Naomi and Ruth free. This allows Boaz and Ruth to marry and provide a home to Naomi. Slavery turns around to freedom, death turns toward life, on the basis of free choices, generous hearts, and attending where we are needed. The choice, even when it meant hard work and sacrifice, was always for freedom to follow the heart where each person must go and act.

You have followed your own hearts to come to this place—whether you were raised Unitarian Universalist or in another tradition or in no specific tradition. You have made and continue to make a choice to buck conventional wisdom and work in this faith, to choose here for your hearts to thrive. Sometimes that free choice is translated as loyalty, but we have different cultural understandings about loyalty. Loyalty is the description usually given to Ruth. But when, today, we describe Ruth as loyal to Naomi we probably imagine something like a balloon on a string and the string just following that balloon around; we do not imagine the difficult choices and the choices required. In order for us to really grasp the meaning of loyalty in our faith, this element of choosing must be present, not just following a tether.

We may imagine affection, yet when we do so, if we settle into affection as eradicating the difficult choices involved, we dismiss how much courage, effort, and persistence is required all along by all the characters in this story, by Orpah, Ruth, Naomi, Boaz, and Boaz’s friend. Affection does not necessarily consider justice or responsibility or even ensuring no one is left behind or forgotten or consigned to terrible conditions because of birth, politics, or inheriting someone else’s debts.

Where do our hearts wish to be? In which conditions can we thrive? What must we do? How shall we embody and live steadfastly by and in this faith?

Our hearts wish us to live in ways we bring hope to each other, to pick up despair and hug it into tears, to continue to invite apathy to the party because oh, wow, isn’t our dancing good, and isn’t our music wonderful? We risk faithfully to create a world in which no one is consigned to suffering because of birth, or inheritance, or politics, or bigotry, or lies, or convenience, or because our hearts also enjoy a bit of comfort, as hearts will do. Our hearts are wrestling our choices, co-creating choices with our friends that might turn us towards greater justice and equity, opening ways that were foreclosed upon or denied from ignorance or greed, putting our whole bodies to the work of faithing, making this hope real.

Knowing our meaningful work, choices, and gifts to share are amazing, life-affirming blessings. It would be an amazing experience and a great gift if these choices happened only once in our lives. But even more generously, even more amazingly, they do not just happen once, but repeatedly, every time we are tested, and every time something about us changes.

When we go to the dry cleaners and someone asks about where we go to worship, do we make the choice to share our faith and how wonderful it is? When we meet a friend—or a stranger—as we go through our daily lives, as we commit to practices that make hope real in this world, are we sharing our why? Are we acting and speaking in unison?

What hope made real here and now needs of us is an ongoing spiritual practice and it requires courage and discipline.

When we consider who embodies courage and discipline, consider our youth. In this community, in this movement, we care about our youth. Our youth sometimes are the touch-point for how difficult living steadfastly by and in our faith can be; how many of our children and youth come home having lost their friends because our child does not believe in Hell and so has just been sent to Hell here on earth for that unbelief? How do we help our young people develop an identity, a rock of faith, from which they can live steadfastly, embody a heart-full, saving faith, take faithful risks, act meaningfully? We do so through worship and youth camps and YRUU—Young Religious Unitarian Universalists—and religious education programs. But we also do so by sharing our own embodiment of our faith with our youth, and appreciating and learning about their own developing faith, applauding the courage they show in living faith full lives, and in modeling that same courage and discipline we all need to follow through on heart and hope choices.

It is work. It is work for our teens and for our children and for our elders and for ourselves. Because living faith full lives requires courage and stamina. Courage because you’re bucking conventional wisdom just being here. The more you give yourself to hope and act on that, the more you’re working against the conventional wisdom.

The conventional wisdom says:

• Only a few people are worth caring about; get everything for yourself that you can;
• if you aren’t wealthy, it’s your fault;
• if you aren’t happy, it’s your fault;
• and you better hope to get to heaven some day.

You are here though, here where we say:

• Everyone is worth caring about, even if we have to struggle to see that;
• we can have enough money and time and give to others, too;
• there is such a thing as social inequity and we’re working to change that;
• happiness requires a great many things, and it begins here in human connection and caring;
• and heaven or not, we need to get to work here and now.

What we do here extends beyond these doors, throughout everything we do and touch in our entire lives. We are living faithfully even when we are not worshipping or studying or tending social justice. We are living faithfully the other six days of the week. We are embodying our faith and faithful risk that this world and the beings within it are worth risking for, worth loving, worth offering lives of dignity and rejoicing in our differences. We are embodying our faithful heart choices everywhere we go, every moment. We are making the choice constantly to be steadfast by and in this faith, and to make hope real.

Steadfast by and in this faith, we are living out what we say—that no punishment, nothing, is worse than conspiring in our own diminishment, conspiring in our own enslavement to a conventional wisdom that damns people not on merit and certainly without due process. We are making a choice for freedom. We are saying and dancing and witnessing that no victory is greater than when we work to enlarge the circle of who is included, when we reach out a hand and shoulder to one another, when we attend to those are hurting. When we move beyond the us/them to a truly universal we, when we open this circle, we are steadfast by and in this faith.

Every time you work for this community and write a check, add or delete a budget line, make no mistake about this: You are living your faith. Is your faith smaller or greater? Are we here as an enduring, real, growing presence of hope, making difficult decisions and risking and reaching out? Are we making the choices to follow our hearts, to find and expand freedom, to be loyal to our faith? Are we choosing freedom over slavery? Are we asking for help from our friends, finding some way where there is no apparent way? This is work, difficult work, as difficult as gleaning, as difficult as the choices of Ruth, Boaz, Orpah, and Naomi. Are we putting our money and our bodies where our mouth is?

Oh, that pesky money part!

…

Here is the truth: If you have the capacity to give generously, know that money is an important way to stand with this community and this faith. I used to recruit board members for non-profit organizations and when I was out there searching, I wanted three things to demonstrate that someone really was passionate and committed, that meaningful actions matter. I found that people who were passionate and committed gave time, invited strangers and friends to the community, and gave what money they could afford to give or raised it from others who could give. It is canvass time, when you’re thinking about your pledging and what you want from this Unitarian Universalist faith and from this community. We are not going to get there without you. We need each and every one of you to make hope real.

I know you have the passion. I can feel that.

I know your hearts have chosen this place. Here you are.

I know you have time and are committing that.

I know you are going to make the biggest financial commitment you can to support this faith that is supporting you.

I know you are making hope real each and every day.

Your hands are making hope real, your hands are gleaning hope from the fields of despair.

Your hands are changing this world.

Your hands are employing choices for this world, not deferring them for some heavenly payment.

Embodying our faith and faithful risks are up to you.

Separately, we can do a lot.

Together, we can make miracles happen.

©2004 by The Rev. Naftali King. Sermon delivered on February 22, 2004, to Horizon Unitarian Universalist Church, Carrollton, TX, while serving as their Ministerial Intern