Called to a Pilgrim Way-Station: A Place for Hospitality along the Journey
Ruth 1: 1-19

This is the third week in a series of sermons on the mission of this congregation. The first week I shared the foundation, Jesus Christ, our Lord. In a world of consumerist spirituality, we participate in God through Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit, who is present in the Word, in the Sacraments, and in the works of mercy. Last week we discovered that in a world where we are taught to belong, we are pilgrims, sojourners, aliens, engaged in this world with our end in God. This week we need to get more concrete what it means for us to live as pilgrims, people who don’t belong. In a world that teaches us that our faith allows us to detach ourselves from a particular space, God has called us here to care for the needs of the saints and show hospitality to strangers. We are a people to whom God has granted responsibility for this pilgrimage way-station and those who pass through and into it.

To say that place matters for our Christian pilgrimage sounds weird. Surely Christianity is a universal faith. Place doesn’t matter. We don’t belong; we’re pilgrims, right? Yet pilgrims, among all people, know that place matters. You don’t think place matters, talk to our Nuer brothers and sisters. They know that San Diego is not “natural”, but very particular, very strange. Pilgrims don’t belong to the place where they are in their journey. Pilgrims know that all places are particular, that there is no universal place – a general place that unites all places. They recognize the importance of the particular places that God gives them for rest where they might receive needed hospitality, care for bodies and souls, as they make their way to the end, the goal of their journey. It seems to me that we might find ourselves in the reading from the Book of Ruth today, a reading that emphasizes the importance of place for Christian pilgrims.

Place as the emphasis in Ruth? That sounds just bizarre. I wonder why? We live in a world that teaches that place is not significant, especially for living the Christian life over time. We’ve learned that we have to detach our lives from any particular place so that we might be accessible to a global market, career advancement, with no lasting moral ties to anyone. The market place is universal, abstract, not local and particular. By denying the particularity of place, all might supposedly belong, be absorbed into the producer-consumer cycle that continuously repeats, going no where.

This shapes how we think about the life of local congregations. We want to abstract them from particular places. Congregational settings become like Walmart – once you’ve been in one, you’ve been in them all. Place doesn’t matter; the services offered matter. Particular places might have some oddities to attract us – like old, decaying orange carpet, but such is seen not tied to a place, but to an ambiance that is the product being peddled. Faith in Jesus is lived out by an abstract, interior faith, not a loyalty lived in a messy concrete and stucco building that roaches seem to like to inhabit.

How different from the story we read in Ruth. The story begins in Bethlehem, a place which housed a nameless, voiceless woman earlier in Judges 19. Her body became raped and dismembered, a cause to incite Israel in a civil war. Food shortages in Bethlehem send Elimelech and Naomi on the road; they are pilgrims or refugees, trying to survive economic hard times. They travel to Moab. Their sons marry, only to have death take Elimelech and the two sons. The women become pilgrims, persons who do not belong according to the rules of the social system, are left in dire straights.

Place matters. Naomi recognizes it. “Go home, return to your people in Moab. The Lord’s hand has turned against me – go home, go where you belong.” But Ruth refuses to belong. “Where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people and your God my God.” Ruth will live out her life in the place with Naomi as a pilgrim. She will live and die as a stranger – but will live in the meantime worshipping Naomi’s God, the God of Israel. So they go to Bethlehem, a home that is no longer home. They go as people who no longer belong, but as pilgrims together, aliens looking for a place to find hospitality amid their journey. Weak, poor, unwanted, they travel to a particular place in hope of finding hospitality there.

They came to Bethlehem. Maybe you know the story. These women have skills, not skills from belonging, but survival skills, skills of the weak, how to live when one is not in control. They find a way to eat in Bethlehem; Ruth learns how to beg. On a threshing floor, under Naomi’s guidance, Ruth finds a way to survive as an alien, a pilgrim. She lives her life in Bethlehem as an alien – and from her, from her sojourn in Bethlehem, King David comes forth. From Ruth’s sojourn in Bethlehem, ultimately Jesus Christ comes into this world by another wandering woman, Mary. God brings forth God’s Word, born to a female sojourner in Bethlehem, just like his ancestress Ruth. God brings forth the redemption of a world, not in no place or any place, but in Bethlehem, the place where Ruth sojourns.

Can we find ourselves as Ruth? As Mary? Could we understand this place as a type of Bethlehem, a particular place whereby God brings forth God’s Word, a place to which God calls us as pilgrims in witness to the world? In the early days of this congregation, we didn’t think that we would ever have a place. Dr. David Whitelaw spoke of us as the wandering tabernacle. We moved from place to place, always on the move. This place had once been the University Avenue Church of the Nazarene, before a famine hit City Heights – the city cut off the neighborhood as I-15 was constructed. The building was turned over to an Apostolic Temple congregation. Years later they sought to move, and they offered the place to Dr. Ron Benefiel with a right of first refusal. We had no money; no means to care for it. We rented it for a year through a donation given to Ron, to give him a chance to raise money, to see what God had in store.

In the first several weeks, a man died of a heroin overdose on the sidewalk after shooting up in the rest room. I remember Robin, a prostitute, who would drop in for our bible studies to see if we might have some way of assisting her. Eddie Spaghetti, a Viet Nam vet who had lost his legs in the war, who begged and shot up in the area – and eventually was killed after being run over by a truck on University Avenue while begging. Aliens, strangers. God began gathering other congregations to the building from various places throughout the world – a Nazarene Spanish-language congregation and Cambodian congregation meeting in a nearby house. The Nuer soon joined us as well. We were approached by several Haitians in the area who had been meeting as a Church of the Nazarene that we didn’t even know. Ron worked with Point Loma Nazarene University to establish an urban center to give students first hand interaction with other aliens. The San Diego Coalition for the Homeless came in, Amity, a rehab group, rented space. Amani Kuumba, an African American college, joined us, the only African American college west of the Mississippi. After a year, Ron had miraculously raised a working budget and $250,000 and the Multicongregational Board purchased the building. God gathered a pilgrim people to this place – a pilgrimage way-station.

The neighborhood has continued to evolve, gentrifying, people processing in and out. The congregations have stayed to care for this place. Pastor Anthony’s family literally lived out of the building for several months when he lost his job as with a security company. We once had sewage backups for 6 out of 8 Sundays in a row in the middle of Sunday services until we discovered that plumbing had been placed into an old pipe that didn’t go anywhere. Many in the area don’t have what the US government calls “papers” – some of the children that have come to Sunday School have been placed in foster homes after their father or relatives had been deported. God has brought to us – and taken – persons like Crazy Mike and Bear, pilgrims on this earth just like us. I’ll never forget when Mike brought all the pennies that he had received from weeks of his work, begging at the ramp off I-15.

The Word has been proclaimed; the Sacraments celebrated; works of mercy have taken root in this place – Jesus Christ has become and becomes visibly present through the weak pilgrims that gather here. Our worship of Word and Sacrament continues in this Sanctuary – and it is a Sanctuary, not an auditorium or gymnasium. When it rains, we provide a refuge for those without shelter from the rain. Meals are served for those who live downtown through our congregation that meets on Tuesday nights at the Salvation Army. Friendships with members from other congregations slowly but deeply arise as we recognize that we too are aliens. Bread, produce, who know what else filters in and through the building for those who stretch to make it through the month, perhaps those who the government would capture and move against their will south across what they call a border. God provides here a small place of gathering and hospitality for pilgrims on their way through this age.

The place slowly shapes you by the Spirit’s witness. Of course, then you might discover that you don’t belong other places. When you see the world from a pilgrimage way-station, the rest of the world looks strange. The world seeks to belong to the world rather than find its end in God through Jesus Christ. It’s being immersed in the local, the particular place, this particular place through which God brings forth the virtues of perfect love of God and neighbor in us.

A pilgrimage way-station takes wisdom; it takes work; it takes funding. It takes committed persons to this particular place, to make it work. Just think what it would take for the Missionaries of Charity to keep their Home for the Dying alive with love – the cleaning, the caring, the medical expertise, the funding, organization, the joining of the sisters’ pilgrimage with the pilgrimage of those who come as the presence of the thirsty Jesus Christ to them. It takes participating in the God who is Triune Love through the presence of Jesus Christ in Word, Sacrament, and Works of Mercy engaged in through repentance and faith. Like Ruth’s pilgrimage through Bethlehem, God the Father brings forth the presence of Jesus Christ by power of the Holy Spirit in the world.

We are a pilgrim people; we are called to care for this pilgrimage way-station, and in Jesus Christ, find our eternal home. I remember one Maunday Thursday, we gathered for our foot washing service. God had brought Buni Joseph to us, a beautiful man who had been trained to serve as a nurse in a refugee camp by the United Nations, but whose credentials weren’t recognized here in the United States. Buni was an alien, a beautiful, gracious, joyous pilgrim. That night he took the basin, and as he knelt to wash feet, he said, “I give God thanks for tonight I finally am at home. If I was in the Sudan tonight, I would be doing the same thing as we are doing here tonight.” Buni’s life had found its home as a pilgrim in God, most evident in identifying with Jesus Christ in the washing of feet. I don’t think I’ll ever be worthy of saints like Buni Joseph who live as pilgrims with a joy that transcends the hard conditions of living life as aliens. But maybe, through participating in this place, this very particular place, as a stranger, a pilgrim, God’s Spirit may so cleanse me that I can live my live in this world thankful to God for God’s goodness amid my sojourn here.