Carla Pratt Keyes, pastor of Ginter Park Presbyterian Church in Richmond, begins this Sunday’s sermon with a quote from the poem, “Home,” by Warsan Shire: “No one leaves home unless/home is the mouth of a shark.” Shire, a British writer born to Somali parents in Kenya, continues, “You have to understand,/that no one puts their children in a boat/unless the water is safer than the land.” In today’s sermon from Ruth 1:1-18, Keyes compares the journey in Shire’s poem to the journey in the book of Ruth. “No one walks toward the territory of Moab. It was a place they believed to be hostile, even God-forsaken. No one takes their children to Moab unless home will not let them stay, and they have nowhere else to go.” The narrator of Ruth knows that sometimes, “God is most powerfully at work when we are least inclined to believe it.”
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Note: this sermon was originally released as B49: The Twenty-Third Sunday after Pentecost, Year B (2021)