Your God, My God: An Act of Love
Preached at Blue Ocean Faith Columbus on Sunday, June 28, 2026
Reminder: I never stick completely to my written sermon. This isn’t a transcript, but the written sermon I was using when I preached.
Friends, listen for a word from God in the Book of Ruth, the 1st Chapter, verses 1-18.
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. The 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. But Elimelech, the husband of Naomi, died, and she was left with her two sons. These took Moabite wives; the name of the one was Orpah and the name of the other Ruth. When they had lived there about ten years, both Mahlon and Chilion also died, so that the woman was left without her two sons and her husband.
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 considered his people and given them food. So 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. But Naomi said to her two daughters-in-law, “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. The Lord grant that you may find security, each of you in the house of your husband.” Then she kissed them, and they wept aloud. They said to her, “No, we will return with you to your people.” But Naomi said, “Turn back, my daughters. Why will you go with me? Do I still have sons in my womb that they may become your husbands? Turn 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, would 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.” Then they wept aloud again. Orpah kissed her mother-in-law goodbye, but Ruth clung to her.
So she said, “Look, your sister-in-law has gone back to her people and to her gods; return after your sister-in-law.” But Ruth said,
“Do not press me to leave you,
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.
Where you die, I will die,
and there will I be buried.
May the Lord do thus to me,
and more as well,
if even death parts me from you!”
When Naomi saw that she was determined to go with her, she said no more to her.
This is the word of God for the people of God.
I. The Road Out of Moab
Friends, the setting for our scripture tonight are a series of roads in and out of Moab.
A famine has emptied Bethlehem of its bread, Bethlehem, which literally means “house of bread.” A man named Elimelech packs up his family and heads to Moab, the foreign country across the Jordan. He’s looking for survival. What he finds is more loss. He dies. His two sons marry Moabite women, Orpah and Ruth, and then the sons die too. And now there are three widows standing at a crossroads: Naomi, who has lost her husband and both her sons in a foreign land, and Orpah and Ruth, who’ve lost their husbands and have no children to show for it.
In the ancient Near East, women were the property and under the protection of their closest living male relative. Daughters were subject to their fathers, wives to their husbands, and widows to their sons or the husbands of their daughters. A widow without a man to provide protection was in an extremely precarious position. She had no social safety net, no protection, no rights to inheritance, and on the margins of society in every conceivable way. A woman like Naomi had only two options available to her: she could try to live on her own which would likely mean begging or she could take her chances returning to her own family and to her father and brothers in the hopes that they would take pity on her and give her a place to live. They were under no religious, legal, or moral obligation to do so. Her position as a widow with dead sons was viewed as God’s judgement on her.
“Go back,” Naomi says, “each of you to your mother’s house.” She urges them to go back to their people, their gods, their chances of finding another husband. Go back to a life that might still hold something good, because Naomi has nothing left to give them.
Orpah weeps, kisses her mother-in-law, and turns back toward Moab. The text doesn’t condemn her. She makes the reasonable choice, the safe choice.
II. Do Not Press Me to Leave You
Ruth on the other hand clings to Naomi.
The Hebrew word for “cling” here is the same word used in Genesis 2:24 when a man leaves his parents and clings to his spouse. It’s the word for covenant binding. It’s the word for the kind of love that reorganizes your whole life.
Ruth speaks the declaration that she’s known for: “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.”
We need to spend time with this statement. Ruth is a Moabite woman speaking to a Hebrew woman. While she was married to Ruth’s son, a Hebrew man, she’s still crossing significant boundaries for the ancient world. She’s leaving her homeland, her religion, her culture, her safety net, and pledging her life to a grieving old woman who has just told her to leave. She’s not doing this for economic advantage. She’s not doing it because the odds look good. She’s doing it because of love. Because of the covenant she feels with Naomi. Because of the kind of stubborn, irreversible loyalty that looks at every reason to turn back and says: no. I’m staying.
The Queer community has claimed this text for generations. Along with David and Jonthan, Joseph, Paul, and eunuchs throughout the Bible, Ruth and Naomi are often held up as Queer characters.
The story reads like a love story because it is a love story. It doesn’t fit neatly into the categories the ancient world or even our world uses to organize relationships. It’s two women, bound to each other across every line that should have divided them, making a covenant that the text treats with the same gravity as marriage vows. Your people, my people. Your God, my God.
Where you go, I will go.
That’s testimony. That’s what it sounds like when love refuses to be stopped by geography, grief, or the reasonable advice of everyone around you.
And here’s another reason this love is so important and reading the Queer nature of the Ruth and Naomi’s love is consequential: their love has to happen for the Biblical narrative and the history of salvation to continue. We would be forgiven for remembering Ruth’s declaration in chapter 1, verses 16-17, but forgetting where Ruth stands in the longer history of salvation. By following Naomi back to Judah, Ruth becomes the wife of Boaz and mother of Obed, who is treated as a grandson of Naomi. Obed becomes the father of Jesse, who in turn becomes the father of David. Matthew 1:17 confirms that 28 generations from the birth of David or 30 generations after the time of Ruth, Jesus is born. Out of the love of Ruth for her mother-in-law Naomi comes the Messiah.
III. What the Church Did with Love Like That
Today we celebrate the last Sunday of Pride Month and the last Sunday in our “I Will Testify to Love” message series. We continue to testify not only to what love is, but what love can be in a broad Christian tradition which took a story like Ruth’s, a story brimming in cross-boundary covenant love, and for generations used the institution of religion to tell Queer people that our love was wrong. They said that we were broken. That God didn’t want us. That we needed to be fixed.
Not in vague, abstract ways. In direct, devastating, institutional ways.
Conversion therapy was endorsed, funded, and run by churches. Young people were sent away by their families, in the name of God, to be unmade. Many of them didn’t survive. Queer people were denied communion. Denied baptism for themselves and for their children. Denied the right to bring our whole selves to the table that Jesus set for everyone. We were told that our love was incompatible with membership, with leadership, with grace. We were removed from congregations we’d grown up in, sometimes publicly, sometimes quietly, but always with the message: you don’t belong here.
Families were torn apart. Parents told their children that they couldn’t come home unless they changed. And they did it quoting scripture. They did it in the name of the God who is love. They did it not only because of what they heard at church, but because of the church’s pressure to produce “ideal” children.
Is it any wonder that so many of us learned to associate the name of God with rejection? That for some of us, the smell of a sanctuary still carries the memory of being told we weren’t enough? That the word “church” lands in our chests like a bruise?
IV. But God Has Always Loved Us
Here’s what we need to remember. Here’s what the text is testifying to, and what this whole series has been building toward: God didn’t do that to us. God has always loved us.
Institutions, churches, and families got it wrong. The people who wielded scripture like a weapon got it wrong. The denominations that wrote exclusion into their constitutions got it wrong. But God, the God Ruth was claiming when she said “your God my God,” the God who wove steadfast love into the fabric of creation, that God has never stopped loving us.
Ruth doesn’t invoke God as a weapon. She invokes God as a witness to her love. “Your God, my God” isn’t a theological treatise. It’s a declaration: the God I’m choosing to follow is a God who shows up in covenants like this one. A God who moves across borders. A God who takes the side of widows and foreigners and people with nothing left. A God who looks at the ones the world has written off and says: I see you. I’m with you. You belong to me.
That has always been the character of God. Not the god that was used to harm us. The God who is love, who made us, who sees us, who has been present in every moment of every story of Queer survival, Queer joy, and Queer love.
When we were being told we were broken, God knew we weren’t.
When we were being excluded from the table, God was making room.
When we were learning to be ashamed of who we are, God was grieving the lie we’d been handed.
And when we found our way to communities that said, not as a compromise or a footnote but as a first principle: you are fully loved, fully welcome, fully seen, that wasn’t an accident. That was the love of God working through human hands, refusing to let us go.
V. The Healing Is Wide
And here’s something else the text won’t let us miss.
Ruth and Naomi aren’t a conventional family. They’re not exactly a couple, not a household the ancient world would have known how to name. They’re a mother-in-law and a daughter-in-law, both widowed, one foreign, walking toward an uncertain future with nothing but each other and the stubborn insistence that this counts. That this is enough. That love between two people who refuse to abandon each other is worth something, even when the world doesn’t have a category for it.
The church has been getting families wrong for a long time. Not just Queer families though, yes, especially queer families. But also families that changed when the partners separated and divorced, where two people tried and it didn’t hold, and the church handed them shame instead of compassion. The single parent who showed up on Sunday and felt the sidelong glances, the unspoken assumption that something must have gone wrong, particularly single mothers in general or single fathers raising daughters. Blended families navigating stepchildren and half-siblings and the sometimes-complicated love of people who chose each other across hard circumstances. The person who never married and was made to feel incomplete, as though love only counts when it comes in a particular form. The couple who couldn’t have children and sat through sermon after sermon that made family synonymous with parenthood. The grandparent raising grandchildren. The chosen family, the friends who became siblings, the neighbors who became kin, told that what they had wasn’t real family because there was no blood or legal document to ratify it.
The church built an imaginary norm and then spent generations telling everyone who didn’t fit it that they were less. That their love was less. That God’s blessing was reserved for a particular configuration of people in a particular kind of household and if you didn’t have that, you were somehow outside the circle of grace.
But look at this text. Look at who God shows up for in this story. Two women with nothing. A foreign widow who crosses every boundary of ethnicity and religion to pledge her life to a grieving old woman. A family that doesn’t fit any category the ancient world had — and God is not absent from this story. God is all over it.
The healing we’re talking about today isn’t only for one community. It’s for everyone who has ever been told that the love they carry, the family they’ve built, the commitment they’ve made, the life they’ve chosen, doesn’t measure up. If that’s you then this text is for you too. Ruth’s testimony is for you too. God’s relentless and total love is for you too.
VI. We Made It. We’re Still Here.
This is the last Sunday of Pride Month. And I want to say something clearly: celebrating Pride isn’t something we do once a year in June and then put away. Pride is a posture. It’s the ongoing act of refusing to be ashamed of who God made you to be. It’s the continuous work of building communities where the most marginalized among us are centered, not tolerated. It’s what Ruth was doing on that road out of Moab, refusing the world’s verdict on what her life was worth.
We celebrate in June because June has history, because the Stonewall Riots happened, because people who had nothing left to lose stood up and said: no more. But what we’re celebrating isn’t confined to a month. What we’re celebrating is survival. Resilience. The stubborn insistence on joy in the face of everything designed to crush it. The fact that we’re still here.
We made it.
Not because it was easy. Not because nobody tried to stop us. Not because people aren’t still trying to stop us. Not because the church got it right, or the culture got it right, or the laws have always protected us, they haven’t, and in many places they still don’t, and we can’t afford to pretend otherwise. We made it because love is stubborn. Because community holds. Because the God who was present on the road to Bethlehem has been present on every road we’ve walked since then.
And the testimony, the testimony that this whole series has been building toward, is simply this: we will testify to love.
Not in spite of what we’ve been through. Because of it. Because we know what it costs. Because we’ve felt the absence of love and we know exactly how rare, how necessary, and how holy it is when it shows up.
Ruth knew. She had watched her husband die. She had watched her father-in-law die. She had watched her mother-in-law dissolve into grief. She was standing at a crossroads with nothing, and she chose love anyway. She chose covenant anyway. She chose the God who was present in this small, broken, beautiful act of loyalty — and she testified to it out loud, on a dirt road, with her whole life.
VII. Your God, My God
So let this be our testimony too: your God, my God. Your people, my people. Where you go, I will go.
We are not the church’s verdict on us. We are not the damage that was done in God’s name. We are not the wounds. We are the ones who are still here, still loving, still building, still testifying, because the love of God is older than the harm and stronger than the institution and more stubborn than any rejection we’ve ever faced.
That’s the testimony. That’s what we’ve been saying all month, in four different ways, from four different corners of scripture. Love is the point. Love is the power. Love is what made Ruth cling to Naomi on that road. Love is what made communities like this one possible. Love is what keeps us here.
And love, stubborn, border-crossing, table-setting, wound-tending, Queer, holy, and uncontainable love, is what God has always had for us.
Amen.