RUTH Chapter 1 (begin by reading Chapter 1)

The first chapter of Ruth is a story of famine and migration, one of journeying, death loss and inter-marriage. There are powerful examples of people searching for a sense of belonging, experiences of embracing new cultures as well as feelings of bitterness and emptiness. The family unit of the widow Naomi and her two widowed daughters-in-law Orpah and Ruth is quite an unusual family unit. Your own experience may reveal that the relationship between mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law can often be tense and strained. Rabbi Jonathan Sachs spoke on “Thought for the Day” recently about the story of Ruth and said it was essentially about kindness. It is a demonstration of the Hebrew word “hesed” which we tend to translate as loving kindness in English which is manifested in deeds rather than romantic or sentimental displays.

Ruth travels with Naomi back to Bethlehem and finds kindness. So, in order to get inside the issues of the story of Ruth, I wonder if you have much experience of moving to a new place. Have you ever moved to a new place? How did it feel to move from the familiar to an unfamiliar place? I have often moved during my life and being a Methodist minister has meant I have lived in five different circuits in the last 29 years. But this is nothing compared with some people.! My grandmother (albeit in in a very different time in the 1920’s) moved about nine times in her long life and this included moving three times in three years to different farms as her husband, my grandfather, took tenancies on ever slightly larger farms. It wasn’t just the two of them moving, it was with an increasing large family of children also. They did eventually settle at a farm of 119 acres for about twenty years before my grandad retired from farming at the age of 76. Most of the moving was within two neighbouring parishes of Egton and Glaisdale in the North York Moors, so there were not cultural challenges as far as I know!

Sometimes moves for people involve different countries and cultures. My aunt, who married a Warrant Officer in the RAF in 1940, a few years later sailed by boat to Singapore with two young children which took weeks to get there. She had a house-maid in Singapore. A couple of years later she moved back to the UK with three children and on to numerous RAF Stations until her husband came out of the RAF and they settled in York!

Traditionally the history of the world often involves women and children moving due to the man in their life changing jobs. I have a cousin who as a child moved five times in the first seven years of her life, as my uncle moved from farm to farm finding sometimes annual work. The story of this area involves many migrations of people from Ireland, Scotland, Cornwall and other parts of the UK to work in the coal mines of the Durham Coalfield. Often people were moving as industries declined, in their home areas, in search of better prospects. Contact with family in the old place was often only possible by letter in those days.

Mass emigration from Commonwealth countries to the UK in the 1950’s and 60’s is a story of often not finding a welcome. “No Irish, no blacks, no dogs” was a common sign displayed in boarding houses that did not wish to rent rooms to certain people. The Windrush generation was not welcomed with open arms here in this country. It was all too often a story of discrimination and racism. Kindness has not always been shown to everyone. The events of the last week or so in USA following the death of George Flyd in Minneapolis have sparked much outpouring and tension over racial discrimination in the US. It would seem that the old wounds of the 1960’s and segregation, which many naively belived were overcome, are still endemic within that society. Many of the deep issues of racial justice seem not yet to be resolved. Whilst we do not live in the US, issues of racial justice and the related issues of welcome and belonging may well be concerns that our own society has not fully addressed. And the Covid19 pandemic has revealed we are not all equally susceptible to the virus, but black and Asian citizens are at a higher risk of being infected by the virus.

So, let us think about that sense of belonging that is a powerful force. What makes you feel you belong somewhere? I don’t just mean a geographical place, I also mean to a group or organisation, perhaps the church.

Ruth decides to move with her mother-in-law Naomi back to Bethlehem, “where you go, I will go”. How good are we at welcoming those who come among us from other places? All too often we might give the impression that new people must become like us when they join in our group, and that they must leave behind their roots. A better way would be to see what they bring and allow those qualities to enrich the community they become part of.

In the life of the Church belonging is a very strong emotion. It is often more powerful than believing. People feel a strong sense that they belong to a particular church community and this often comes before they really grasp what it is that that particular denomination’s doctrines are. It may be to do with the relationships with other people, or the style of worship. Sometimes we might give the impression that new people are welcome but there might be a slightly hidden agenda that to fit in the new people must become just like us, think like us, share all our views and even prejudices. For some it might be the only church they have ever known, whilst others choose from a range of options. People sometimes talk of feeling they have come “home” even if they have never been there before! (sometimes our roots might be in a particular place even if we have never lived there ourselves but our forbears may have and we feel attached a place because of family members who we visited there in the past. In an ideal world, church should give us a sense of belonging as well as the community in which we live, whether we were born there or not. It does however take effort to get to that position.

Moving on and making changes is not always easy. Perhaps the Coronavirus has enabled many of us to engage in new hobbies. If you believe all you hear from people like, Kirstie Allsop and Grayson Perry, we are told that many people are crafting, sewing, creating and discovering or re-discovering talents they either never knew they had, or are bringing out what has laid dormant.

It may well be the case that some expressions of kindness have laid dormant within us. We may need to find them and demonstrate them more fully and effectively. We may well be inter-acting with our neighbours in a new and deeper way.

I wonder what issues from Ruth Chapter 1 you have discovered.

“Be kind” is a phrase I have heard often during recent weeks. Be kind when shopping so as not to take more than we need, mindful of those more vulnerable than ourselves. Being kind by being more aware of our neighbours perhaps and their needs, checking they have all they need. Being kind by being more aware of those in our communities who are in need. These are some examples of that outworking of the Hebrew concept of Hesed, loving kindness. We are going to sing a hymn about kindness in terms of Jesus hands and our hands, that some of you will remember from times past

Jesus hands were kind hands.

And another hymn about thanking God for people friends and others who help us, challenge us, shape us and transform us as we journey through life

Thanks for friends….

“All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, ‘What does this mean?’” Acts 2:12 

“Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they might be one, as we are one.”  John 17:11 

John 14. 15-21

v20 “I am in the Father, you in me and I in you”

Do you remember learning about Venn diagrams at school? I vaguely do. Using my compass and a pencil drawing those concentric circles interlocking with each other. Jesus’ words here sound a little like a Venn diagram, I think. He and the Father are intimately connected he says, as are we disciples and Jesus himself. And St Paul’s words at Athens recorded in Acts 17. 28 (another lectionary reading for today) remind us that “in God we live and love and have our being”. You cannot easily separate the three circles, for we and Jesus our Lord are all held together in the over-arching love of God. This is a representation of inter-connectedness. Perhaps the Coronavirus epidemic has reminded us that we are all in this together.

Methodists should need no reminding that we are all part of a connexion (the word spelled with an x as it was in seventeenth century English and it was used to describe people and preachers who were connected to John Wesley, so we sometimes speak of Methodist ministers as one of John Wesley’s preachers). The origins of the word connexion are about sharing a common purpose, being joined together (as many of Charles Wesley’s hymns emphasize eg “All praise to our redeeming Lord who joins us by his grace” HAP 753/StF 608).  Just as we have been reminded that we are all in this lockdown together in regard to the Coronavirus, so we might need to be remember that we are in this business of living the Christian life together with other disciples of Christ. We are not solitary individuals even if we have been socially isolating!

There is something in the prevailing culture here in the West Durham Circuit which speaks frequently of “chapels”. I know that some (not all) of our buildings have that word carved in stone over the lintel from a date in the nineteenth century. As a Darlington District boy I am familiar from my childhood with the word “chapel”, but something about it troubles me. The over-use of the word “chapel” in our vocabulary could be seen as painting an unhelpful picture. A “chapel” might be construed as less than a “church”, a less significant place of worship. It can often be used to distinguish and divide, so for generations people know whether they are “Church” or “Chapel”.  But chapels are sometimes found as private buildings as in a large country house or a Bishop’s Palace or  in a school or college.

Some of our assumptions however do not bear the weight of the story. In the early days of the Methodist movement,  the Methodists who gathered in Methodist preaching houses for hearing a sermon with two hymns only, were still expected to attend the Parish Church. Indeed furthermore,  John Wesley forbade Methodist meetings at a time which clashed with the Parish Church Service time. For the first Methodists attendance at preaching services was to supplement their faithfulness, in theory at least, as loyal Anglicans, and regular attenders at the Parish Church. They were not seen as separate but integrally connected. So, the first registrations for Methodist preaching houses by magistrates was a mixed picture from county to county as different magistrates ruled variously whether the Methodists were dissenters or part of the CofE, because it appeared to some that the Methodist leaders were so evidently  two Anglican clergymen, John and Charles Wesley!  The only way to register the buildings they used, if registration was deemed necessary, was through the Dissenting Toleration Act of 1689. Charles Wesley wrote on the back of the first registration “I protest” because he refused to see himself as a “Dissenter”!  He regarded himself as a loyal Anglican to his dying day, and sent for his parish priest on his deathbed. Of course, there is a lot of water that has flowed down the river since those days. The use of the words “church” and “chapel” to describe our buildings has been varied according to what period of history we consider and which branches of the Methodist family we are referring to.

Since the Methodist Church Act of 1976 we have been using more regularly that very word “church” to describe our buildings.  I do remember the significance of that Act in our family because my father came home from the last ever Trustees’ Meeting under the old system and declared it was “the end of an era” as a new system and structure was brought into being by an Act of Parliament. Out went the terms Society Stewards, Chapel Stewards (who looked after the property), Poor Stewards who looked after the arrangements for the Lord’s Supper and collection for the Poor Fund, out went the Trustees’ Meeting (who held the custodian trusteeship) and the Society Meeting in favour of new terms- Church Stewards (note the title), Property Stewards and Communion Stewards, and the Church Council (again note the word) as managing (not custodian) trustees. Out went the Quarterly Meeting and in came the Circuit Meeting.

Let’s not forget the Venn diagram! Over the years I have encountered many people who seemed to care passionately about their “chapel” but seemed less interested in what happens in other places of worship, be it other Methodist “chapels” or churches of other denominations. And more than once or twice I have been left wondering whether they ever really believed in “the Church”, by which I mean that which we profess in the words of the Creed, “the holy catholic Church”. People, I often find, might betray their rather small-mindedness (and weak ecclesiology) by spelling the word Church always with a small c! Of course, I recognise that other disciples of Christ can be frustrating, sometimes they seem to think differently to me, but they are probably thinking the same the other way! Our baptism into Christ’s flock and into that “rag bag of saints and fatheads” as one Bishop once famously put it, reminds us that we are a mixed bag of folk, but we are all supposed to be trying to follow Christ. We may well see things differently but there is something that binds us together that is profound. We have to learn to get along with each other. We need to work at realising and manifesting our inter-connection as churches and as individual Christians with other Christians. In a circuit we are connected together whether we like it or not. We are diverse (probably not enough) but we should encourage each other and build each other up (another famous phrase of Charles Wesley).

John 14.18 speaks of the Holy Spirit as an Advocate. Now the Scottish legal system still has this title in common usage. It contains within it that sense that an advocate stands alongside you pleading your cause, making the case, defending you in a court of law. Jesus seems to be saying that this is part of the role of the Spirit, who will be with us , alongside us, on our side, for us, not aloof or distant. Indeed Jesus says the Spirit of Truth will be with you and in you ( v 17). The indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the believer is a powerful force. How do we experience this today, I wonder as we find ourselves awaiting the Feast of Pentecost.

Jesus also promises not to leave us orphaned. I have no experience of being an orphan but my mother died when I was 18 and my father when I was 37. I have to admit that it did feel quite strange at that relatively young age to become the senior member of the family. Jesus goes on to say “in a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me”. The ascension of our Lord was yet to happen but he does seem to indicate that we, who are his followers, will still “see” him. But how? We will see Christ in the signs of his presence at work in the world, in the life of the Church, in our communities and in our own lives and those around us. This surely reminds us that we are to keep our eyes open so we do not fail to spot the action of our Lord. “There’s a spirit in the air, telling Christians everywhere, praise the love that Christ revealed, living, working in our world” (326 HAP/ 398 StF).

As we prepare to celebrate the Ascension of our Lord (21 May), Aldersgate (24 May) and Pentecost (31 May) may we give some attention to the relationships we have, to our inter-dependence as we strive to discern, name and bear witness to the signs of the kingdom of Christ among us.  If it helps try drawing a Venn diagram of those people you most relate to.

And whatever Venn diagrams you come up with, may we always strive to love Christ and keep his commandments (v21); or if you prefer in the words of Charles Wesley “he bids us build each other up and gathered into one, to our high calling’s glorious hope, we hand in hand go on” (HAP 753/StF 608)

Grace, love and peace,

Christopher Humble