If you really want to push my buttons, get me to talk about the state of Christian music over the past twenty or so years. When I was a teenager, I listened to bands and singers like Petra and Michael W. Smith constantly. But as I grew older, two things happened. One, I matured in my faith and, to be blunt, the music got dumber.
Ok, maybe that’s a little harsh. Perhaps, it would be better to say that the messages and the theology of Christian music did not keep up with my own spiritual development. I largely outgrew it. It no longer related to my life as I was experiencing it. It no longer related to the faith that I held. It seemed so detached from real life.
One of the reasons I became such a fanatical fan of bands like The Choir and singers like Michael Card is because their music wasn’t detached from my experience of life and faith. Everything pieced together. Everything was integrated. Everything was interconnected and made sense.
The Choir could sing a song like “Between Bare Trees,” which is a romantic love song between a husband and his wife. It didn’t become less “Christian” because of that, because romance is a part of life. Michael Card could sing of the complexity of paradox and ambiguity in faith in a song like “God’s Own Fool,” because real faith isn’t always a simple thing nor is Jesus all that easy to grasp all the time. Life isn’t just one thing. It’s a little bit of everything: joy, sorrow, love, pain, confusion, certainty, complexity, simplicity, all jumbled up together.
Which is one of the reasons why I so appreciate that stories like today’s passage from the Old Testament book of Ruth exist. It seems there’s nothing terribly profound in this text; no great theological truths being revealed. It’s very ordinary. And THAT’S the point.
It’s real life.
Ruth is a love story. It’s a story of friendship between Ruth and Naomi, her mother-in-law. It’s a story of loyalty and fidelity. It’s a story of romance between Ruth and Boaz, a romance that would lead to both King David and Jesus Christ.
It doesn’t feel like a Bible story should. It’s not about God. It’s not about our salvation or God’s promises. And that’s okay. It’s about people like us. You can, in your mind’s imagination, see how Boaz becomes attracted to Ruth and how he pursues her in an effort to woo her. How many of us did the same with our own crushes when we were younger? How many of us have a story just like this in our lives?
It’s real life.
Faith is a part of life, not something separate from it. When we are living our day to day lives, as complicated and as ordinary as they are, our faith does not sit on a shelf, tucked away until we need it. It’s a part of us and a part of everything we do. It’s quite appropriate to think of love and romance and work and family and meals and friendship and all this other ordinary everyday things as a part of our faith journey, because they are. Everything is interconnected. Everything is integrated. It’s all part of a larger whole we call life.
Faith isn’t just something we just do on Sunday morning. It infuses every part of our lives. When we are romancing our spouse, faith is a part of that. When we are raising our children, faith is a part of that. When we are working our jobs, faith is a part of that. When we are enjoying our hobbies, faith is a part of that. Faith is a part of all those things, because faith is life and life is faith. They exist together, never apart.
Ruth’s story reminds us of that. Here, in the midst of God’s Holy Word, is the simple story of a woman and man who fall in love. It’s real life. It’s real faith. It’s all jumbled up together, as it’s meant to be.
No comments:
Post a Comment