(Sermon by Pastor Michael D. Schultz 10/21/07)

INTRODUCTION:

Two weeks ago when we were in Wisconsin for the weekend, we attended St. Mark’s Lutheran in Watertown.  A choir of third and fourth graders merged with a high school choir to sing an old gospel song.  We could poke some fun at our neighbors to the north and recall that, yes, St. Mark’s is north of the Mason-Dixon line, and yet it was a snappy little jazzy version of the song.  The song was, “This Little Light of Mine” (I’m gonna let it shine).

The account of Ruth is set in the dark, dark days of the Judges, when Israel had no king and everyone did as he saw fit.  However, from a Christmas Eve service or a Good Friday Tenebrae service, you can probably remember what it’s like when the pitch darkness of a room is pierced by the light of a single candle.  Away from Israel, in the spiritually dark land of Moab, a little light shined.  In time, two little lights shined.  As events unfolded, there were two ladies who could easily have thought that they had been dealt the worst possible hand and that what they were doing couldn’t have made any possible kind of a difference whatsoever.

The Lord knew otherwise.  Would you take this fifteen to twenty minute journey with me once more and be reminded that when it appears that nothing lies before you other than dead ends, the Lord knows otherwise?

Let Your Light Shine &  Let God Take It From There

Let your light shine through hardship and tragedy.  Let it shine when the future seems bleak and let God take it from there.

You’d have to think that Naomi would just as soon have turned the pencil over and erased the last ten years of her life.  A famine forces a temporary move to a foreign heathen country.  She experiences what is arguably the highest source of stress a woman can experience when her husband dies.  Her two boys marry non-Israelite heathen women.  And then the highest source of stress repeats not once but twice – both of her sons die.

How are you supposed to let your light shine after a decade like that!  Isn’t that one of the most embarrassing, even one of the most shameful things to look back on?  How did I cope in a time of crisis?  Even if I did a fairly good job of concealing it when I was out in public, making it look like I was doing OK and being strong, I was screaming on the inside.  I was angry at God.  Why would he do this?  He had no right!  Then there were those times when I was alone and far enough away from people and it didn’t stay on the inside, when I yelled out loud, or cried, or threw things or punched things or tried to drink it away.  Don’t talk to me about this little light of mine.  You’ll never know unless you’ve been through it.  I had good reasons for not letting it shine!

Those, my fellow believers in Jesus, are the times when we were thinking or acting as if we weren’t believers in Jesus, as if on that spring Sunday morning Mary and the other women had actually found Jesus’ body still resting in Joseph’s tomb, as if his corpse were still there today.  Unbelief is a smelly, ugly, damning sin. 

How good is it that God the Father didn’t base his decision to send Jesus to keep the commandments for us and to die in our place on what he saw of us or what he saw in us!  No, there was something inside God himself that led him to send Jesus down from heaven as the bread of life.  There’s something in him that is unchanging and unwavering, something that remains constant no matter what he has seen us think or how he has seen us act.  It’s in the table prayer.  Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good; his mercy endures forever. 

Through the worst decade she had ever endured, God kept the never-flickering, always shining light of his grace and love before the eyes of Naomi, and through Naomi to Ruth.  They heard the same promises you hear.  Through hardship and tragedy and things you may never understand, God has shown you what is the anchor of your life – Jesus Christ crucified, Jesus Christ risen from the grave, your pardon, your way to heaven, your all.  When you hear Jesus tell you to let your light shine, it’s only because he let his light shine on you first, so that you know for a fact that you’re forgiven, so that you do not doubt that the Lord of lords loves you.

Naomi’s perseverance after three gut-wrenching funerals, her obvious kindness to her daughters-in-law, Ruth’s new faith in the true God, the incredible devotion she showed by leaving family, friends and home to cling to her mother-in-law, this magnificent string of promises to Naomi which people often pick for a wedding text, all these ways they were letting their light shine.  It all arose from how God let the light of his love shine on them, the love that is no different than but identical to the love he has shown to you.

Right straight through hardship and adversity, let your light shine and let God take it from there.  And did he take it from there!  Humanly speaking, returning to Bethlehem, prospects for the future were worse than bleak.  Naomi hadn’t lost the farm, she’d lost it all.  As a Moabite woman in Israel, Ruth could look forward to being a never-again-to-marry, poor, foreign, childless widow.  Yet chapters two through four are the story of how God provided for them physically through a well-to-do believer named Boaz, how Ruth was married to Boaz, and wonder of wonders, how Ruth became the great-grandmother of King David and the ancestress of Jesus Christ!

Amazing how it all turned out, huh?  Things don’t just turn out.  Nor are there always storybook endings, as with Ruth and Job.  But all things do work together for good for those who love God, because God promises that they will.  If you’re waiting for the circumstances of your life to change so that you can finally be happy, might I suggest a different course?  What if the things you think will finally let you be happy never show up?  There’s no guarantee they will.  But the Lord washing you clean through Jesus does carry a guarantee.  God guarantees a good result.

When the future seems bleak, let your light shine and let God take it from there.  He will take it where it needs to go.  It’s what he does.  Maybe you’ll actually see his solution tomorrow.  Maybe it will be a decade from now.  Maybe it will be when your time here ends and your eternity in heaven begins.  But every moment from now till then, the Lord is your light and your salvation.  That’s what gives you the little light of yours and God’s guaranteed goodness keeps you saying, “I’m gonna let it shine!”

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