April 12th, 2026 - "Double Vision: Love Boldly" - Rev. Dr. Michelle Morris

Matt Nelson: Welcome to the sermon podcast for First United Methodist

Church in downtown Bentonville.

If you have questions related to what you hear today or just want to find

out more about the ministries at First United Methodist Church, please visit us

online at fumcbentonville.org, or check us out on Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok.

Rev. Dr. Michelle Morris: I'm Michelle Morris, I'm the lead pastor here, and

I'm joyed to welcome you in worship.

And we are in a series in which we are looking at some challenges that

our bishops have put before us.

The series is called Double Vision, and today we will talking about love boldly.

And I'm gonna read from Ruth.

Ruth is a very short book in the Bible, and I encourage

everyone to read the whole story.

But where we're gonna pick up at this point, there's a woman, Naomi, who had

two sons and a husband, and her sons married women named Orpah and Ruth.

And both Naomi's husband and sons die, leaving all of the

women in the story widowed.

And Naomi is choosing to return back home to her Israelite heritage, and

her daughters-in-law must face their choice as to whether they go home

to their family of origin or not.

So hear now this word: "Turn back, my daughters.

Why would you go with me?

Will there again be sons in my womb, that they would be husbands for you?

Turn back, my daughters.

Go.

I am too old for a husband.

If I were to say that I have hope, even if I had a husband tonight, and

even more, if I were to bear sons, would you wait until they grew up?

Would you refrain from having a husband?

No, my daughters.

This is more bitter for me than for you since the Lord's will has come out

against me." Then they lifted up their voices and wept again. Orpah kissed her

mother-in-law, but Ruth stayed with her. Naomi said, "Look, your sister-in-law is

returning to her people and to her gods.

Turn back after your sister-in-law." But Ruth replied, "Don't urge

me to abandon you, to turn back from following after you.

Wherever you go, I will go, and wherever you stay, I will stay.

Your people will be my people, and your God will be my God.

Wherever you die, I will die, and there I will be buried.

May the Lord do this to me, and more so, if even death separates me from you."

When Naomi saw that Ruth was determined to go with her, she

stopped speaking to her about it.

This is the Word of God for the people of God.

Thanks be to God.

Let us pray.

Lord, open our hearts, our minds, and our eyes that we might see and know

the word you have for us this day.

In your holy name we pray, amen.

Ah, this passage.

I have written one of the very best sermons I've ever written on this passage.

Spoiler alert, it's not this one

But it's definitely the best sermon that I wrote that I never got to deliver.

I wrote it for my friends Andrea and Amanda's wedding in 2018 when

I could not do their wedding.

It was such an interesting wedding because there was a crowd of

United Methodist pastors there.

There was me sitting on the second row listening to a pastor from

another denomination deliver my wedding homily to them.

There was another United Methodist pastor there playing music.

There was another United Methodist pastor there offering a prayer.

None of us could do the wedding

There were also a number of people who were invited to the wedding that

I love dearly who chose not to go because they didn't agree with it

I found myself reflecting on love, sitting there listening to my words and thinking,

"I don't feel very good about love today.

I don't think I'm doing it very well.

I'm trying to love my friends and my church and my parishioners who are

absent, and I'm trying to love my God.

And I really feel like I'm loving no one, not fully."

I share that story with you today because I think many of you find yourself

feeling the same way a lot these days

You find yourself stuck trying to love all of these people, people

who vehemently disagree with each other, some people who won't even

be in the same room with each other.

You're trying to love all of these people,

and you're maybe even wondering, should you even try to love some of them?

As our ideologies get more and more extreme, it seems harder and

harder and harder to love boldly.

And yet that is what our bishops have put before us, this challenge to love boldly.

I gave one of them a hard time about it just a minute ago.

So I thought of these words.

They are one of the most bold statements of love in the entire Bible, and I

thought, "I'm gonna go to these words and see what they tell me." And this is what

I found, that loving boldly comes not from a place of power, but from vulnerability

The most vulnerable among us are oftentimes the best at showing love.

Now, just because you're vulnerable does not mean you're choosing to love and does

not mean that you choose to exhibit love.

Naomi, in this story, will choose bitterness.

She will change her name to Mara, which means bitter.

That is what she will choose

But so often those who have experienced real hardship are so profound at loving.

I have a friend who's also a pastor.

He's been a pastor a lot longer than I have, and he says that over the course

of his history and, and pastoring all of these people, the kindest

people among us have almost always been through the very worst things.

And I think that they are choosing kindness for two reasons.

One, because they know what it meant when they were going through something

awful for someone to be kind to them, the lifeline that it threw them.

But I think also they do not want to have any part in evil in this world and will

do everything they can to love instead.

So often when we come from a position of power and privilege,

we think we don't need love, and we certainly don't need to exhibit it.

We've got other things that protect us out there.

But the vulnerable, I mean, think about Ruth.

She's a widow who is agreeing to become an immigrant

There is hardly a more vulnerable position in the ancient Near East than that.

And she is a widow.

She didn't choose that, but she is choosing to be an immigrant.

And she is choosing that to be an expression of her love.

And love is what she has.

In the midst of a space of destitution, she has love, and expressing

that love expresses her dignity.

Sharing that love shares her power.

And exhibiting that love marks her personhood

She, in her most vulnerable state, can be so loving.

And as I said, I think sometimes that drives from the absence of love.

My friends were so kind to me when I could not be there fully for them.

They made space for that.

And I think it's because they have spent much of their life people not

making space for them and they know how it hurts, so they were going to

make space for me in my brokenness.

And they also made space for my son.

And this goes to another piece of bold love, which is accepting people where they

are and agreeing to walk alongside them in the midst of that brokenness and in the

midst of being the person that they are.

So we're at the wedding and my son has bought two masks to wear at the wedding.

My son, I love him deeply, but he is weirdo.

And, and so he, he brought these two masks and we are standing, like, right outside

the wedding and he's debating which mask he's gonna wear at the ceremony and which

mask he's gonna wear at the reception.

And I'm gonna let him wear a mask at the reception, but I'm like, "No, you

cannot wear a mask at the ceremony.

This is a formal event.

We do not wear masks at ceremonies." And my friends overhear and they

step around the corner and say, "Absolutely he will wear a mask.

Absolutely he will wear a mask at our wedding." So there are pictures of that

wedding and you can see my son sitting on the second row wearing a Guy Fawkes mask.

Now, that's the creepy white mask with the thin mustache, looks like a serial killer.

On the second row of their wedding, in their wedding pictures

And then at the reception, he wore a banana mask.

So

and they wanted him to know he was welcome as he is

And I'm welcome as I am.

And Ruth wanted Naomi to know that whatever life held for her,

she was gonna walk alongside her.

She was going to be there with her.

"Your people will be my people. Your God will be my God. I am going to walk

with you." And maybe it's because she was welcomed into Naomi's family that

she knew how to choose that welcome, but maybe it's just she knows how to love.

Or I should say, she knows how to choose to love.

Because love is always a choice, and loving boldly is always a choice.

Ruth makes that choice.

And we don't know the fullness of what was behind it.

We don't know if her family of origin was safe or not, but

the story doesn't seem to care.

The story lets us know that she has chosen this very brave and bold way of loving.

She chose it.

Orpah didn't.

And no, there's no criticism of Orpah.

She did what was as expected.

Ruth chose very differently, though.

We always have a choice to love or not

And sometimes those spaces are easy,

and sometimes they are in the midst of conflict.

In the midst of conflict, we have to choose to love

And love boldly.

You know, the United Methodist Church is really, really good

at standing in the middle.

That's where we live, in the middle.

So we're uniquely suited to stand here in the midst of conflict, in the midst of it.

And this church is also uniquely suited to stand in the midst

because we have this welcome statement that says all are welcome.

No matter what you think or believe, who you are, how you identify,

you are all welcome in this space.

So because we are in this midst, in the middle, some people will

say we don't stand for anything because we don't take a position.

That is a position.

We are standing firm on loving everyone

And that is an expectation we have.

And that does mean that we do reject ideologies of harm.

Ruth chooses to go into a culture that at least proclaims that they

will protect widows and immigrants.

We see from her story that it is not perfectly lived out, that ideal,

but she chooses an ideology of value for her and a value for others.

And so we can make stands against ideologies like racism

and sexism and nationalism and exceptionalism and ableism.

We can make stands against ideologies that value one group of people

over another group of people.

In fact, we have an imperative to make a stand against those ideologies

to be the people that we are.

However, even as we reject those ideologies, the people who adhere

to those ideologies must be loved

Reject the ideology.

Love the people

A lot of days that feels weak to me

A lot of days it feels like a failure because when I am standing so firm to

love people, when I'm standing so firm to making sure that everyone is welcome,

sometimes I don't have the space to confront the ideologies that people hold.

And so their ideology goes unchecked because I want the person to be welcome

And that feels weak, and history will not be kind to me for it

So in the midst of that reality, I'm going to trust God to work it out.

I'm gonna trust that as long as I choose to love and love the people,

I'm gonna trust that God's got a way in the midst of this to make

miraculous, surprising things happen.

Ruth and Naomi make some interesting choices, choices of love and care

for each other that are not exactly the way things are usually done

But Ruth does get pregnant and has a baby, and his name is Obed.

And Obed becomes a father to Jesse

And Jesse becomes a father to David, and Ruth is David's great-grandmother

Who saw that coming?

And David's lineage gives rise to Jesus Christ

In the midst of a very messy situation, God's salvation breaks through.

God's love breaks through.

That's what I trust in.

I am still friends with Amanda and Andrea.

In fact, I'm on vacation for the latter half of this week.

I'm meeting them.

We're gonna go dig for diamonds in Murfreesboro.

I'll let you know.

I'll tithe if I get a diamond.

And I am still serving this church that now would let me do that wedding, and

that makes allowances for people who are still uncomfortable with such a wedding.

It's awkward.

It's incomplete.

It's bumbling.

It's foolish, this love

And yet, it may still give rise to God's boldest act of love yet.

Thanks be to God.

Amen.

Matt Nelson: Thanks for listening to the Sermon Podcast from First United

Methodist Church in downtown Bentonville.

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Grace and peace.