High Fidelity - pt 1

Our Advent series at church this year centers on the Gospel in Ruth. Our Pastor, Justin, has opted to call this series "high fidelity: love & the gospel in ruth". You can hear the sermons from this series HERE as they become available.

I am thrilled to get to sit through a full month (intro week before advent, so we get 5 sermons in our Advent series!) of insight into this book. It is one of my favorites in the Bible. That's because it's short and easy to read, and compelling, and wraps up nicely, like my favorite fairy tales. It's not uncomfortable or upsetting. Or, rather, it wasn't.



Even though today was our first "real" sermon in the series, even the intro last week made me a bit uncomfortable. Justin talked about hesed, the Hebrew term for the kind of faithfulness we see in Ruth, and in Christ. The faithfulness that Ruth shows in her devotion to Naomi. The faithfulness that God shows us in his redemption of our brokenness. The kind of faithfulness we are supposed to show each other.

Faithfulness of this kind centers on two things, especially, he says: loving despite knowing, and choosing faithfulness.

Loving despite knowing
It's so hard. It's so hard to know someone and love them anyway. When you see the pretty outer depiction of a person, they are easy to love. It is easy to see the handsome guy who is well-groomed and wants to talk. It is hard to live with the one who gets all sweaty and silent. It's easy to love the friend who shows you her beautiful life on Instagram and through her Facebook feed. It's harder to love her when you get invited in to her messy marriage, as she is in need of advice. It seems to rub off the sheen. Make it, and her, and everything, a little less beautiful. Even this pretty thing can be sullied? What then?

Or does it? Sometimes, being "let in" causes us to draw near. Sometimes, it makes us give thanks for the fact that even the person who seems perfect has issues. Why doesn't it always work like that? Why is it easier to love the mess and the ugly in a friend, than it is to do the same with your spouse? Why are we so quick to let marriages go after a rough patch? I've been in those rough patches, friends. It is harder to stay. It is harder to know the difficulties you'll face and choose to hold hands through them. Choosing fidelity, choosing hesed is the realm of God-stuff. You can't do it without him. It won't work without someone to lean on, to give that hardness to.

Choosing faithfulness
We are often faced with the paradox of choice. Have you heard of this? The more options you feel like you have, the unhappier you are. Even though we think "if I just had a better choice, I'd be fine", it doesn't work like that. A quote I've read over and over again, often cited as coming from Voltaire, is that the perfect is the enemy of the good. If we are looking for perfection, we won't find it. There is no perfect option. But in searching for perfection, you throw out a LOT of good.

If you look for perfection in your spouse, you will obviously fail. If you look for it in your marriage, or your school, or your church, or your football team, or your moms group, you will not find it there either. But if all of those things fall short of perfect and we decide to abandon them? What is left?

Choosing love in spite of imperfection is brave. It is good and right and hard! It is what Jesus wanted us to do. He asks us to choose love. For each other. For the poor and weak and disenfranchised. For the people who are not like us. For the people who don't have our values. Choose love for our parents and our neighbors and our ENEMIES. He asks us to choose love. He did. For us. He chose love in such an extraordinary way that it changed the course of history. And countless lives. Until kingdom come.

And when we choose to be faithful to Christ's call for love, we will again see the beautiful in the ugly. Glennon Doyle Melton of Carry On, Warrior and momastery.com calls this the Brutiful part of life. Life is beautiful and brutal. It is broken and flawed and UGLY sometimes. But if we choose love and faithfulness, we see the beautiful part again.

Kintsukuroi - the Japanese art of mending a broken piece with gold,
as the piece is more beautiful for having been broken.

And that's what Ruth has to teach us. And that's the hard part that I'm looking forward to hearing. That we choose faithfulness and love in spite of all the tough. And in that lies our fairy tale ending. The one I've loved since I was little. The one that calls me back to this book again and again. It comes from faithfulness and love.

But Ruth said, "Do not urge me to leave you or turn back from following you; for where you go, I will go, and where you lodge, I will lodge. Your people shall be my people, and your God, my God.

~ Ruth 1:16