Series: January 2026
Speaker: Rob McClellan
Today's Sermon
“Try Biking"
Try Biking
A couple of summers ago, we traveled with friends in Spain. We were three families in all, including one who is from Barcelona. At the end of our trip, the dads were to take a gravel bike ride with a group from the local’s health club. I think it was slated for about 80 kilometers. There were two problems with this plan. First, we had to ride maybe 15- 20 kilometers to get to the starting point for the ride. Second, I’m not a cyclist.
I was determined to keep up with the group from the beginning, because I thought if I drop back, I’ll never catch up again. That plan was working early. Then our friend and host, Jorge, blew a tire. Jorge urged us to go on, and I started to, but Sam, the other dad, made the case for turning back. “Jorge said we should keep going,” I repeated.
Sam countered, “But what are we doing this for? This is what we came here for,” “this” not meaning the ride; this meaning the ride together. Sam is an ironman triathlete, but even more he is more of an ironman guy, ironclad character. He was not only a better rider, his priorities were better tuned.
We turned around. The group went on and we rode together from the back, way back. That’s where we stayed and it was great. Jorge and I dropped out 60-70 kilometers in and after our insistence Sam raced ahead and caught up with the leaders.
Why are we here? Who are we here to ride with? These are the questions we bring to today’s installment of our “On the Road” series. Sometimes our journey is as much about sticking with someone on the road as much as it is determining the speed or even direction. Maybe you have had the experience in a less trivial moment than I described, when you had to abruptly abort your plans because someone needed you. We explore such a moment with our sacred reading today. It’s a tale of incredible loyalty, sacrificing one’s own journey for another. It comes from the Older Testament book of Ruth. To set the stage, it features a woman Naomi who has become a widow in a foreign, even hostile land, Moab. She decides to move back to her native Judah where God and others will provide her a more stable and secure life. Hear how the drama unfolds:
(Ruth 1:1-18)
LECTOR: In the days when the judges ruled, there was a famine in the land, and a certain man of Bethlehem in Judah went to live in the country of Moab, he and his wife and two sons. 2The name of the man was Elimelech and the name of his wife Naomi, and the names of his two sons were Mahlon and Chilion; they were Ephrathites from Bethlehem in Judah. They went into the country of Moab and remained there. 3But Elimelech, the husband of Naomi, died, and she was left with her two sons. 4These took Moabite wives; the name of one was Orpah and the name of the other Ruth. When they had lived there for about ten years, 5both Mahlon and Chilion also died, so that the woman was left without her two sons or her husband.
6 Then she started to return with her daughters-in-law from the country of Moab, for she had heard in the country of Moab that the Lord had had consideration for his people and given them food. 7So she set out from the place where she had been living, she and her two daughters-in-law, and they went on their way to go back to the land of Judah. 8But Naomi said to her two daughters-in-law,
READER 1: ‘Go back each of you to your mother’s house. May the Lord deal kindly with you, as you have dealt with the dead and with me. 9The Lord grant that you may find security, each of you in the house of your husband.’
LECTOR: Then she kissed them, and they wept aloud. 10They said to her, ‘No, we will return with you to your people.’ 11But Naomi said,
READER 1: ‘Turn back, my daughters, why will you go with me? Do I still have sons in my womb that they may become your husbands? 12Turn back, my daughters, go your way, for I am too old to have a husband. Even if I thought there was hope for me, even if I should have a husband tonight and bear sons, 13would you then wait until they were grown? Would you then refrain from marrying? No, my daughters, it has been far more bitter for me than for you, because the hand of the Lord has turned against me.’
LECTOR: 14Then they wept aloud again. Orpah kissed her mother-in-law, but Ruth clung to her. 15 So she said,
READER 1: ‘See, your sister-in-law has gone back to her people and to her gods; return after your sister-in-law.’
LECTOR: 16But Ruth said,
PREACHER:
Do not press me to leave you
or to turn back from following you!
Where you go, I will go;
where you lodge, I will lodge;
your people shall be my people,
and your God my God.
17 Where you die, I will die—
there will I be buried.
May the Lord do thus and so to me,
and more as well,
if even death parts me from you!’
LECTOR: 18When Naomi saw that she was determined to go with her, she said no more to her.
Ruth’s loyalty is the stuff, quite literally, of legend. Her sister, by the way, has done nothing wrong. Orpah has made the culturally appropriate and otherwise sensible choice – go back among her people, back to her mother’s family, where she will have another chance at life. A woman’s existence depended on being a part of a family system, first the one of her origin, then the one of her husband. It’s hard for us to understand the magnitude of Ruth forgoing these in order to stay by Naomi’s side, especially since she will most likely outlive Naomi. But, if passing up the chance to find security in her family and homeland weren’t enough, Ruth also gives up the chance to choose at all. “Where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge, your people shall be my people” (16:16). These are future tense promises, what I will do for you. The next line, the most dramatic proclamation, actually lacks a verb, rendering it present, an already reality, “Your God, my God” (16:16). Talk about total loyalty.
Ruth makes the calculation it’s more important to see Naomi down Naomi’s path than it is to pursue her own at the cost of her own security, culture, family, even religion. I wish we honored the sacrifices people make for one another more. I was looking for hymns to match the message, and what I found is there are a lot of hymns about God’s faithfulness to us, a lot about the call for us to be faithful to God. Missing were hymns bearing witness to the sacrifices others have made for us, gratitude to the people who have been faithful to us, who stayed behind when they could have gone on to all sorts of things. My father, a professor, was also a skilled administrator. He taught his entire career at the same university. He had offers to go elsewhere, to take posts of higher prestige, to climb, but it was more important to him to give my brother and me the gift of stability. I never talked to him about it, but I doubt he gave it a second thought, though all the more powerful of a choice if he did, a sacrifice. Who has stayed behind for you? Are we even aware? What if we took a moment and called those people to mind?
-Silence-
And, now for whom have you pulled up, turned back, and stayed by? Have you honored what that choice meant for you, what you gave up? If we don’t honor those choices, we put ourselves at risk in our weaker moments of falling into resentment. Once the consequences of our choices set in, the opportunity costs, there is the risk we will punish those for whom we willingly made the choice. So, even though we know it’s the right choice, we have to let it hurt a little in the moment lest we let it fester for later. Similarly, we have to let others grieve the choices they make.
There is good news for us here. Painful choices for others also come with some liberation. It’s freeing to make your journey not all about you. It’s tiring to feel as though you have to maximize your own progress all the time, constantly pedaling forward because your mileage is the only measurement of your worth. This is where the road metaphor breaks down. I had a professor once say metaphors elucidate to a point and then they obfuscate. The road is a good image, but it has limits. It implies life is about getting from one place to another. Maybe life is about choosing who to be with, how to be with them, and how to be wherever you find yourself. There’s a lot of adventure to be had and memories to be made when you’re not singularly focused.
Let’s not, however, make this all about our own satisfaction. The story is undeniably about sacrifice. Ruth was at risk doing what she did, which you will discover if read on in the book of Ruth. By luck or fate or faith her vulnerability is protected by someone who could have taken advantage of it, but it could have gone very wrong. Likewise, the sacrifices we make by come with real risk, fair warning. Better we go into it with open eyes, though we go into it nonetheless.
Many of you know the name of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, great German theologian. He was part of the resistance from the beginning of Hitler’s authoritarian rise in Germany. He could see the writing on the wall and worked subversively to teach and preach the gospel. That’s a threat to any tyrant, which is why the church either caves or gets targeted. Bonhoeffer accepted a post at Union Seminary in New York in June of 1939 just before the war broke out. He lasted two weeks before realizing he had to go back to Germany, back to his people to face the growing threat in his land. In a now widely shared excerpt from a letter he wrote to famed theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, Bonhoeffer concluded: “I have made a mistake in coming to America. I must live through this difficult period in our national history with the Christian people of Germany. I will have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share the trials of this time with my people.”[1] He was a Ruth, the German Christians his Naomi. He knew the risk and chose the path anyway because he understood his people’s journey was more important than his own. Their salvation was his salvation, their rescue from tyranny his, the saving of his church the saving of his own soul. Bonhoeffer’s own road led to him to a concentration camp where in 1945 just a few weeks before the end of the war he was hanged.
It is no game, the Christian life. It is the path you have chosen. Last week, I sat in on the confirmation class for a few minutes. We talked about what it meant to choose the church, the faith, a choice that comes for the youth at the conclusion of the class. It’s no small choice. It’s not one that should be made for college applications or to appease parents. It’s about declaring who you are going to follow and where and for whom you’d stay behind.
As I said, there is nothing wrong with Orpah’s choice. I do believe there is a time to go, to run, to live to fight or survive another day. Sometimes we have to go and preserve what will be necessary to seed the restoration. This is the way of Orpah. We also need the way of Ruth, when we stare danger in the face and say, “I’m staying. Where you go, I will go.” We have both sisters within us. We have to learn to discern whose path to take in what moments.
If you really want to get far on this journey, you might train really hard—in prayer, in study, in community, in service, in discipline, in achievement, in responsibility, in savvy. Sometimes, that training gives you the strength to charge ahead. Other times it’s what prepares you to turn back and be among the lost or left behind. If you really want to be ready for the road, which can be quite gravely, you have to learn both to press on and to turn back. You have to be clear about what you’re doing here and what this is all about.
Amen.
[1] Bonhoeffer, Dietrich Letters and Papers from Prison ed. Eberhard Bethge. Translated Reginald H. Fuller et al. (New York: Touchstone/SCM Press, 1997), 4-5.