Well, I was walking around as a suburban kid in Dayton, Ohio in the early 70s singing this song, if you can imagine.

Motherless children have a hard time when their mother is gone. Motherless children have it so hard when their mother is gone. Motherless children have a very hard time. All that weeping, all that crying. Motherless children have it so hard when their mother is gone. Oh, people say that a sister will do when the mother is gone. People say that a sister will do when the mother is gone. Oh, people say that a sister will do. She’ll get married, turn her back on you. Motherless children have it so hard when the mother is gone.

Okay, it’s kind of dumb to think about a suburban kid walking around singing that, I guess, because I was in high school and I was interested in rock and roll, and I came across that song because when you played a guitar and you sang, girls came around. Be honest, that’s about the only reason at that age you’re playing a guitar.

I started singing James Taylor. I courted Vicky with it. And that’s why she’s fond of saying now, “I thought I was marrying James Taylor and I ended up with Ricky Skaggs.”

So today we’re talking the James Taylor turned out to be Ricky Skaggs blues. Life doesn’t go the way we play. It doesn’t turn out the way we planned.

And if we’re not careful, we will begin to think that when life goes badly, or when there is disaster, or we wind up as a motherless child—which we all probably will do someday—that we don’t think that there is something spiritually defective. There’s just something wrong in the gospel spirituality that we sometimes set forth in this success culture that says it is always about everything getting better and better every day and looking better and appearing better and getting wealthier and getting more successful and somehow then we can just talk about all the blessings that God has given us.

And if we’re not careful, we leave out a lot of truth. A lot of truth. The truth that is at home that we don’t bring to church. The truth that is inside our hearts that we never share. The truth that is in the pain of our relationships that only goes occasionally to somebody that we pay to listen to us. It’s real easy for us to shut it out.

Years ago it got put out as blues. Now, back during my time, we bought a lot of vinyl. Young people, if you look on the Wikipedia, you’ll find out what that was. Uh, that’s five generations ago. It was vinyl, eight-tracks, cassettes, CDs, and downloads. We really didn’t have downloads in those days. Download was when you handed something downstairs to somebody. And back then you bought it and you played it on a record player, sometimes with a quarter taped on the top to make it play through the scratchy parts. And uh, I got that song from Steve Miller, the Steve Miller Band. Uh, he wrote a lot of junky stuff back in the 80s, but when he started early, he was kind of a blues and rock musician and his early stuff was really good, and he had that song on his fourth album.

So I came across it and I thought maybe he’d written it. And it was a long time before I discovered that he didn’t. And Eric Clapton didn’t write it either. Eric Clapton got it from the blues players. But Eric Clapton was somebody who knew his own mother had left him in shame to be raised by his own grandparents, pretending to be his parents. It was a song that was covered by hundreds of artists, and it was covered by the Carter Family and sung originally by a fellow by the name of Blind Willie Johnson.

Blind Willie was born in Marlin, Texas, and he grew up in great poverty. His mother died right after he was born and his father remarried shortly after, as men tend to do. One day after a horrific fight that his mother and stepmother and father had, in a fit of rage, she took lye and threw it in Blind Willie’s face, blinding him for the rest of his life so that she could get revenge on the man she was so angry with. And so now, unable to work in the fields, he would go out with his guitar every day and sit there and play and sing, and he learned to sing about suffering and pain and being motherless. And he became a great blues musician.

I have a wonderful little thing that somebody uh sent to me. We have a- some listeners on the radio that uh sent me a note one day and they- they included in their little- a little plaque that I’ve got in my office. It says, “Jesus loves you, but He loves me best.”

We’d like to think that’s true and there are all sorts of little sayings like that. Life is good. You know, life is good, isn’t it? And life is also painful. And life is laughter and life is tears. And life is hard and life is easy. It’s all true. But if you put it into little compartments and try to make it all one of those compartments, you’re not going to have a real life. You’re not going to have a real prayer life, you’re not going to have a real spiritual life. It has to be a place in which the whole thing is open to God and as you waddle and meander and thrash your way through it in all the pain and the agony that goes with it, it’s an honest living and in that place, God can do something. Do something really good.

So the blues are part of this journey of faith. This is a wonderful story because what happens in the story is that uh, Ruth basically throws her lot with her- her mother-in-law, but the story really begins before that when Naomi and her husband have left and gone to Moab. Now Moab is considered an enemy of Israel and the Moabites are people who worship a foreign god and so they go to this alien culture because, well, they’ve just heard that the schools were better there.

And there was an opportunity to really advance in that culture. There were hard times back home and so they did what people always do: they moved somewhere else because there are- there’re better possibilities there and we can advance and- and surely everything is going to work out in that life. Well, everything goes wrong for Naomi. So the woman whose name means pleasantness found herself without a husband and having lost both of her children and now headed back home a failure. The green pastures turned out to be full of barbed wire and dead grass. And now everything had gone wrong and she headed home.

So what do we do with that? Well, she comes back home and in that place, they are reduced to begging for food. And so Ruth goes out and she sends her out and part of the Israelite law was, whenever you’re harvesting, you- you need to leave enough behind for the poor. I mean, that’s what God wants us to do. Uh, there are some folks that no matter what they do in this life are never going to have quite enough and so the Lord said to His people, “You need to share. Those of you that have been blessed need to share with people that haven’t had quite as much as you have, and that’s going to make you better people and it’s going to make you please Me. It’s what I want. It’s just the way it is.”

And so they would go out and they- they’d harvest along, but they’d leave a little bit here, a little bit there, and then the poor folks would come in and they’d get to pick that up and take it home. And so Ruth was out there doing that and uh she came upon a- a kinsman named Boaz, for whom the city is named up north of here. Boaz was a wealthy man. He had a big shopping center.

And so uh this woman, young woman, caught his eye. I- you know, as- as happens. And so he said, “Leave a little more for her. Make sure she gets plenty.” And as it goes along, eventually he falls in love with Ruth. They decide to marry and there is a happy ending to the story.

Now here’s the thing: it is so tempting for us to talk about our spiritual life only in glowing terms. And I’m not sure why that is. But I think one of the most powerful places in this text is in that 21st verse when Naomi says, “I went away full, but the Lord has brought me back empty. Why call me Naomi when the Lord has dealt harshly with me, and God has brought calamity upon me?” Now that wasn’t true.

God was still with her. But she told the truth about where she was. And God can do something with us when we are found there. When we sort of lay it out and say uh, “You know, despite my piety, this is really the way I feel about what’s going on. This is where I find myself today. My life is an absolute mess and I need Your help.”

As I was preparing for this series of sermons, I was a little disturbed and worried to find out how many blues singers started out as Baptist preachers. And they fell off in the world. A whole bunch of them. A whole bunch of them were Baptist preachers and then fell off in the world. And a lot of the rest of them grew up in Baptist churches. What is it about us that we created so much blues back there? I don’t know.

But I have a suspicion that part of it is there was always more to tell than what we told on Sunday morning. There was always more to knowing who we really are than what we presented when we cleaned up and went to church. That this is a world that is not easy and there are some hard things you and I will have to live through. And if we’re willing to go in that place, God can get us through.

When we’ve lost in life, whether the loss of position or income or loved ones or health or lost our hopes and our dreams, it throws us into a crisis and for a little while, we have to sing that song that Naomi was singing. It sure looks like life has turned against me. And there the blues are born.

Now we don’t stay there, because we really are not without resources even in the most desperate of times. We still have a lot of things. We still have ourselves. I mean, when you have nothing else, you still have yourself. You may say, “Well, that’s no prize, preacher.” Well, I don’t know you that well, but I would say this: that the way God looks at you, you’ve still got something when everything else is gone. When you’ve lost your job or you’ve lost your income or you’ve lost some dream that you had in your life or some position in the community, uh, you still have yourself. You’re still here.

I mean, I thought about that one day when I was thinking about the environmental issue, and I thought, “What’s going to back when gas was getting so expensive?” Uh, I said, “Well, what are we going to do when we run out of gas?” And I thought, “Well, we’ll still be here.” That was- that was comforting to me. We won’t be moving around, but we’ll all still be here. And so I reckon we’ll hitch some of us up to a plow and we’ll figure out a way to get the ground plowed and make some food or do whatever we got to do. It’s kind of a sad thought really, and the mules are not happy about it at all.

But we’ll still be here. You see, sometimes when we go through loss, disorientation, change of status, we are thrown back from all those artificial things that give us temporary security in life, back to those elemental places where we have to turn into our souls again and ask ourselves, “Who am I, really? What is my life really about?”

Jesus told us, He said, “It’s not what’s on the outside that makes you holy or not; it’s what comes from inside you.” I think there’s a lot of truth that we need to think about there: that when we come to those times of crisis, we are thrown back in that place to the essence of who we are and what our life is about.

Secondly, we still have each other if we will accept the gift of community. Pride can keep us from that because we worship total self-reliance and needing nobody else in this culture. Nobody makes it without other people. Nobody. Don’t kid yourself. Even the richest man in the world needs customers. Nobody is self-reliant. If we’re going to make it, we have to be driven back to need each other.

Ruth is such a wonderful story. It’s- it’s a passage that winds up in weddings all the time, but it’s really in a situation where the husband has died and they- she is going back to her homeland and this young woman, with nowhere else to go, casts her future with her mother-in-law, somebody that she’s not required by law to be with anymore. Some would find that choice surprising. But she has chosen to be with this person because she loves her. There is something about Naomi that draws her. We still have each other if we will accept it.

We still have places to return to if we are not too proud to go there. Naomi goes back home. The place that she left a long time ago when it was hard times and she and her husband and her sons were going off to make their way in the world. And so they went, but now they come back with tail tucked between their legs. It is home. There are places like that in our lives where we find our spiritual roots and our foundations again. That is always God’s place. We say when we go through hard times, it’s time to get back to some basics. Time to get back to those basic things in my life that for some reason I’ve just gotten too busy or I’ve gotten too involved in too many things or I’ve been doing some things in my life that- that have sort of pulled me away from the things that I used to give a lot of time to: the reading of the scriptures or uh a time of prayer with God in the mornings or whatever it has been, those places where we sometimes have to humbly walk back home again and come to that place that we have long ago thought we can move on from.

And then finally we still have hope if we’re willing to hold on to it. Even when we sing the blues. And we have God’s grace. And God’s grace really is this: that God’s truth is always long truth. It is long truth. What do I mean? I mean that you’re not going to figure it out by looking at what just happened.

Here’s the long truth: Ruth, a Moabite, an outsider, comes along back to Bethlehem only because she loves this mother-in-law and for some mysterious and unknown reason. I’m sure her family talked about this at the reunion for years. “Wonder what ever happened to her? She went back over there with the Jewish people, and what was that all about? Was she taking her medication? What is she doing over there with those people? These are her people. She needs to come back over here with us.”

She launched out in faith and yet in that, something wonderful happened. We read in the fourth chapter: So Boaz took Ruth and she became his wife. When they came together, the Lord made her conceive and she bore a son. Then the women said to Naomi, “Blessed be the Lord who has not left you this day without next of kin and may his name be renowned in Israel. He shall be to you a restorer of life and a nourisher of your old age, for your daughter-in-law who loves you, who is more to you than seven sons, has borne him.”

Then Naomi took the child and laid him in her bosom and became his nurse and the women of the neighborhood gave him a name, saying, “A son has been born to Naomi,” and they called him Obed. He became the father of Jesse, who was the father of David. Y’all remember David? And when we come to the New Testament, in the genealogy of Jesus—for those of you that love read genealogies—there are only four women in it and one of them is this little Moabite girl, Ruth.

That’s God’s long truth about your life and my life and everybody else’s life. And that’s why Jesus said, “Judge not.” Don’t judge people. Y’all don’t know anything. You don’t know anything about my child over there. You don’t know anything about that person that you drive by and judge with one glance to be worthless. You don’t know the long truth. God’s truth is long truth.

And don’t you judge yourself that way either. You don’t know how valuable you are and you don’t get to say. Only God knows the long truth of your life, so let it go. And don’t listen to stupid things other people say. There is just this stupid gene that we have that causes stupid things to come out of our mouths. When we get anxious, it sets off the stupid gene. And stupid things come out.

And so when your child dies, some- some well-meaning person, operating out of their stupid gene, will come up and say stupid things to you about what this means. “Oh, this was the will of God. God has a plan in this for you.” Let me tell you something: God has a plan and not one of us is privy to it. And so you stand back in humility when someone grieves and you leave them be and you hug them and you take them food and you be kind.

And I’ll tell you this: someday God’s long truth will be revealed. But it isn’t for you to be in charge of it. But in those most terrible times, it is true that if you will wait long enough, you will see what God is doing. David Gerrold did a comic moment, said uh something that became a bumper sticker and T-shirts; he said, “Life is hard then you die.” Uh, that might be a good description of blues, I don’t know. And there’s more to it than that, but I’ll amend that.  The biblical story is more like this: 

          Life is hard, life is easy,  life makes sense, life has no reasons.

          life is bitter, life is sweet. 

          Sometimes you laugh, sometimes you weep.

          Rejoice, despair, rage or sigh,

          You must do them all before you die. 

          But one thing never changes here. 

          Pleasant, bitter, familiar, odd,

          in every moment there is God. 

          With us in the hopelessness,

          listening to us as we confess,

          Loving presence, lose or win,

          waiting for us at the end.

          In faith as never left alone

          By God who finally brings us home.

Bibliography

            Bankson, Marjory Zoet, “Seasons of Friendship,” The Living Pulpit, 2004.

            Baylis, Charles P., “Naomi in the Book of Ruth in Light of the Mosaic Covenant,” Bibliotheca Sacra, 2004.

            Brenner, Athalya, “Naomi and Ruth,” Vetus Testamentum, 1983.

            Sr. Joan Chittister,  “The Story of Ruth: Moments of Loss and Faith,” 30 Good Minutes, Chicago Sunday Evening Club, 2001.

            Copenhaver, Martin B., “The Only Thing To Do,” The Christian Century, 1994.

            Howell, James C., “Ruth 1:1-18,” Interpretation, 1997.

            Korzenik, Emily Faust, “The Child in Judaism and in Jewish Life,” The Living Pulpit, 2003.

            Nichols, Stephen J.  Getting the Blues: What Blues Music Teaches Us About Suffering & Salvation.  Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2008.

            Smith, Mark S., “‘Your People Shall Be My People’: Family and Covenant in Ruth 1:16-17,” The Catholic Biblical Quarterly, 2007.

            Walkup, Robert H., “But Ruth Clung to Her: A Sermon on Ruth 1:1-18,” Journal of Family Ministry, 2004.