May 31, 2024

Indianola Presbyterian Church

"What Love Does "
Sermon by Rev. Trip Porch

May 31, 2026                                                                                                                                                       Based on Ruth 1:1-22

Every year around this time, Brittany pulls out her family's recipe for strawberry rhubarb pie.
If you have never had it, here is what you need to know. Rhubarb on its own is almost inedible. It is tart and sharp and bracingly bitter. 
But something incredible happens when you put it next to strawberries.
The bitterness doesn't disappear -- it deepens. It gives the sweetness somewhere to go. The two together produce something neither one could produce alone.
I have been thinking about that pie this week, and not just because it’s in season and I’m craving it… I thought about it as I've sat with the book of Ruth. Because this is a story about bitterness and sweetness. About grief and loyalty. About what happens when someone chooses to stay right in the middle of the bitter parts -- not to fix them, not to sweeten them over, but just to stay.
Now… The Bible contains sixty-six books. In this library of books—they are written mostly by men, about men, preserved and interpreted mostly by men for most of Christian history -- just two books are named after women. Ruth is one of them. Esther is the other. I don't think that's an accident. I think the tradition preserved these stories because they matter. Because something in them is true in a way the rest of the library sometimes misses.
So I want to say plainly what we're doing this morning: we are reading a feminist text. The book of Ruth is a story about women -- their grief, their loyalty, their courage, their determination -- and I want us to read it that way. Not as a footnote to a man’s story. 
As the story itself.
The story begins in emptiness.
A famine comes to Bethlehem -- whose name ironically means "house of bread." 
Naomi and her husband Elimelech leave home searching for survival in Moab. 
Then tragedy compounds upon tragedy. 
Elimelech dies. Naomi's two sons die. 
Three women are left alone in a world where women had very little social protection apart from husbands or sons.
I think we sometimes read this story and turn Naomi and Ruth into saints before we've really met them.
But these are two ordinary women. A mother-in-law and a daughter-in-law -- not a romantic pair, not best friends by choice, but two people from different generations, different cultures, different gods, thrown together by marriage and now held together by grief. They almost certainly irritated each other at times. They almost certainly had friction. That's what in-laws do, across every culture and every century.
But now one of them has been hollowed out by loss. Naomi's grief is not pretty or manageable. She is not holding it together. She is so changed by what has happened to her that she doesn't want her own name anymore. She says: don't call me Naomi -- that means pleasant, and pleasant is not what I am. Call me Mara. Call me Bitter.
Bitter people are hard to be around. We know this. Grief that has curdled into bitterness can fill a room. It can make the people around it feel helpless, worn down, shut out. Naomi and Ruth’s story isn’t some buddy comedy. Naomi is not a lovable movie character working through her feelings on a charming road trip. She is a woman so gutted by loss that she has renamed herself after the worst taste in the world. And she tells Ruth to go home. She releases her -- go back to your own people, your own gods, your own future. I have nothing to offer you. I am empty. I am bitter. Leave.
But Ruth doesn't leave.
"Where you go, I will go. Where you lodge, I will lodge. Your people shall be my people, and your God my God. Where you die, I will die -- there will I be buried."
Brittany and I chose these words for our own wedding because we loved the depth of commitment in them. We loved that the Bible's most beautiful declaration of covenant faithfulness is not spoken between a husband and wife, but between two women -- a mother-in-law and a daughter-in-law who had probably driven each other a little crazy over the years.
Ruth is not swept up in sentiment here. She knows exactly what she is choosing. She is choosing a grieving, bitter, difficult woman who has nothing left to give. She is choosing to cross into a country where she will be a foreigner, an outsider, someone viewed with suspicion. She is giving up her homeland, her family, her future as she understood it. She had no obligation to do any of this. 
Naomi told her to go. That is exactly what makes this a story about chesed.
Chesed. 
It’s a beautiful Hebrew word that sits at the heart of this story and yet resists every attempt to translate it. Some Bibles render it "steadfast love” or “Covenant Love.” 
Others say "lovingkindness" or "faithful love" or "mercy." 
No one translation quite captures it. 
Scholars who have spent entire careers on this word still can't agree on a single English equivalent.
One scholar who wrote her doctoral dissertation on chesed at Harvard was asked later in her career how she would translate it. 
She said: I still don't exactly know. Here is the closest I can get. Chesed is love that stays. Love that acts. Love that refuses to disappear when things become inconvenient or costly. It is not a feeling -- it is a choice. Freely made. Enacted through sacrifice. It is the kind of love that looks at someone in their most bitter, difficult, hollowed-out season and says: I am not going anywhere.
 In the Psalms, chesed is the word used most often to describe what God does toward us. It is the signature quality of the divine. And in Ruth, it is what two ordinary women -- a difficult grieving mother-in-law and her foreign daughter-in-law -- do for each other. The book is suggesting those might be the same thing. That human love, when it is the real thing, reflects and enacts something divine.
The church itself has survived generation after generation because of the chesed of women whose names history often forgets but God never does. Women who taught Sunday school and organized meals and marched for justice. 
Women who kept congregations alive during hard seasons. Women who preached even when churches told them not to. 
Women who embodied the gospel long before institutions recognized their leadership.
The story of Ruth reminds us that faithful love is not secondary to God's work. Faithful love is God's work.
We live in a culture that often treats relationships as disposable. A culture built on transaction and individualism. A culture constantly asking: what do I get out of this?
Chesed asks a different question: how do I remain faithful to others… to the people I’ve chosen to be in community with? 
Not because it is easy. Not because it benefits us. But because chesed love itself is holy.
The men disappear almost immediately from chapter one. What remains standing in the wreckage is the resilient, faithful, courageous love of two complicated women holding one another up when the world collapses around them. Not a perfect friendship. Not an easy one. But a real one.
And isn't that so often how God works? Not through domination. Not through empire. Not through the loudest voice in the room. But through ordinary, complicated, sometimes difficult people 
who choose -- against all odds, at real cost -- to stay.
Strawberry rhubarb pie is not sweet despite the rhubarb. It is sweet because of it. The bitterness is part of what makes it extraordinary.
Ruth does not love Naomi despite her grief and bitterness. She loves her through it, stays with her in it. And somewhere in that staying, something begins to move.
That is chesed. That is what love does.
And that kind of love just might change the world.
Thanks be to God.

WE GATHER IN AWE AND PRAISE

PRELUDE                                       "My Shepherd Will Supply My Need"             arr. Douglas E. Wagner

INTROIT                                   “Sanctuary”            Randy Scruggs and John Thompson

sung by the IPC Children's ChoirWELCOME                                                                    Rev. Trip Porch

One: This is the day that the Lord has made

All: Let us rejoice and be glad in it.

*CALL TO WORSHIP

One: Something is growing.

All: Though, we may not be able to name it yet.

One: We may be in the middle of a hard season,

          or carrying grief we haven't found words for,

          Or hoping for a harvest we can't yet see.

All: But we believe love is already at work.

One: Come, let us pay attention.
All: Come, let us worship together.

*HYMN 393                             “O Day of Rest and Gladness”          ES FLOG EIN KLEINS WALDVÖGELEIN

*PRAYER OF CONFESSION                                                          Karen Crockett

Lord, we confess that we know what love asks of us and we often choose the easier road. We confess that we have left when we should have stayed. That we have offered comfort when honesty was needed. That we have been too busy, too afraid, too tired to show up the way we know how to.

Have mercy on us.

Remind us who we are called to be. And send us back into the world ready to love the way you love: faithfully, freely, without counting the cost. Amen.

*ASSURANCE OF PARDON

*RESPONSE OF PARDON582 “Glory to God, Whose Goodness Shines on Me” GLORY TO GOD

*PASSING OF THE PEACE

One: The peace of Christ be with you!

     All:      And also with you.

WE LISTEN FOR GOD’S WORD 

ANTHEM                          “With a Voice of Singing”                                             Martin Shaw

Nathan DeRodes, Student Conductor

CHILDREN’S MESSAGE                                                                      Trip Porch

PRAYER FOR ILLUMINATION

SCRIPTURERuth 1:1-22      CEB                                                                                                                                         

SERMON

WE RESPOND TO GOD’S WORD

*HYMN 324 “For All the Faithful Women”                                                               NYLAND

PRAYERS OF THE PEOPLE  followed by the Lord’s Prayer using debts and debtors.

TIME OF OFFERING   online giving is available at  www. indianolapres.org/give

OFFERTORY                                                  “If I Had a Drum”                                                                              Sally Kee

sung by the IPC Children's Choir

*OFFERTORY RESPONSE 709              “God, We Honor You”                                    ABUNDANT BLESSINGS

*PRAYER OF DEDICATION

God of Love, We don't always know what our faithfulness will grow into.

Ruth didn't either.

We give these gifts trusting that you are at work in ways we cannot yet name,

planting what we will not always see come to fruition,

moving through ordinary people doing faithful things.

Take these offerIngs and use them.

We trust you with the rest.

Amen.

*HYMN 543“God Be the Love to Search and Keep Me”                   GREEN TYLER

TIME OF COMMUNITY SHARING

CHARGE & BENEDICTION

CHORAL RESPONSE                  "Go Now in Peace"                                                       Anonymous

sung by the IPC Children's Choir

POSTLUDE                                     " I Am Resolved"                                                              arr. Jenifer Cook

Acknowledgments: Unless otherwise indicated, all texts and music are printed and broadcast under OneLicense.net license #A-702452