Every Saturday night, my house church gathers and practices what it looks like to worship God together in unity. I’d like to imagine that this is what churches from the New Testament looked like—people from different backgrounds, cultures, and experiences all gathering into someone’s house and worshiping God.
I always wonder how difficult it must have been to worship in unity for the ancient world. Following Christ would have been so new to them. I imagine people coming from Judaism, trying to wrap their minds around the Messiah that they had been waiting for so long. I imagine people from Greco-Roman cultures who were deciphering what it looked like to leave behind their gods and follow Christ, finding themselves drawn to the message of Jesus and craving more. I imagine Paul’s letters to different churches were needed to reflect the different contexts, because he knew what each church community needed to hear.
My imagination has led me to think through what in particular helps create spaces of authentic community and fellowship. If I’m being honest, as an extroverted people-lover, creating community has not always been difficult for me. But sometimes I wonder if it is always authentic. In a broken world that continually longs for restoration, it feels more exhausting to truly listen to someone who you do not necessarily agree with. It might even be harder to connect with someone that differs even slightly in background, culture, and experiences.
As a PhD student of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, I have the privilege of studying Scripture as a job, but it is not always easy to appreciate the Word in the midst of busy reading and writing. God truly works through all outlets though and, for that, I am thankful. It was during my time of reflection and meditation on community that God spoke through the book of Ruth.
But Ruth replied, “Don’t ask me to leave you and turn back. Wherever you go, I will go; wherever you live, I will live. 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 punish me severely if I allow anything but death to separate us!”
Ruth 1:16–17 NLT
The story of Ruth has always inspired me. Ruth decides to leave her land, her people, and even her gods to follow her mother-in-law Naomi back to Bethlehem. Not only this, but Ruth is now most likely a poor, widowed foreigner in Bethlehem and, as a woman of ancient times, extremely vulnerable because of all these reasons. But Ruth knows that leaving Naomi would leave her widowed mother-in-law vulnerable, so Ruth takes it upon herself to stay with Naomi and become a piece of community for her.
Naomi had even already encouraged her daughters-in-law to stay back: “Go back to your mothers’ homes. And may the LORD reward you for your kindness to your husbands and to me. May the LORD bless you with the security of another marriage” (Ruth 1:8–9 NLT).
The word that gets translated as “kindness” is the Hebrew word chesed. The word chesed is meant to convey loyalty. It is often used of God when talking about covenant loyalty, or in the Psalms, it gets used to talk about God’s goodness and faithfulness to people, especially during a time of need. This word can be translated as “kindness,” “benevolence,” or “faithfulness.” In Ruth, it is being used to refer to the “kindness” that Ruth and Orpah have shown to Naomi’s Israelite family in the Moabite land. It is a deeper kindness, one that reflects loyalty and goodness.
It’s significant that this word gets used in reference to Ruth. I think it’s the reason why Ruth decides to stay with Naomi. Ruth’s kindness is shown through loyalty and obligation, not because of anything Naomi can do or provide for Ruth, but simply because Ruth wishes to show chesed. It even mirrors the chesed that God has for the Israelite people: even when they break the covenant and turn away, God patiently and faithfully waits for their return.
Ruth even decides to turn away from her own gods to follow Naomi’s God! Ruth tells Naomi: “Your people will be my people, and your God will be my God” (Ruth 1:16 NLT). Ruth does not let her differences in background, culture, or experience with Naomi prevent her from showing kindness. The community in Bethlehem that Ruth does not know and did not grow up in is now hers, and so is Naomi’s God.
Ruth’s chesed reminds me of what Jesus tells one of the Pharisees about the law:
“Teacher, which is the most important commandment in the law of Moses?”
Jesus replied, “‘You must love the LORD your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. A second is equally important: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ The entire law and all the demands of the prophets are based on these two commandments.” (Matthew 22:36-40 NLT)
It is a loving-loyalty to both God and neighbor. The first and greatest commandment cannot be separated from the second; they work in tandem together. And the entire story of Ruth plays out by the decisions she makes to honor both Naomi as her neighbor and the God of the Israelites as hers. Ruth’s faithfulness ends with God’s blessings, and she is honored as a matriarch in Jesus’s lineage.1
Ruth as a model for chesed has prompted me to meditate on what it would look like to show a deeper, loyal kindness that reflects God’s to my very community, even and especially to those that are different from me. What would fellowship look like if we loved people the way that Ruth loved Naomi? What would it look like to offer up a loyalty to our community, even and especially to those who do not agree with us? It would mean stripping ourselves of things like pride, security, and certainty, to love our most vulnerable neighbor, the same way that Ruth stripped herself of the security she would have had by staying back in Moab, to love her vulnerable widowed mother-in-law. It reflects the way that Jesus loved his most vulnerable neighbors too.
Loving both God and neighbor empowers us to create authentic community. Once we realize that we cannot separate these two commandments, we realize that loving our community reflects our love of God.
Community might look different for each of us. For some, it is our church home. For others, it might be our workplace, school, or even the neighborhood that we live in. Each person in each of these communities has a story, and sometimes the stories may even shock us. By remaining in community with people who look and think differently than us, we are encouraged to build authenticity and love through our relationships. And maybe, just maybe, by showing that type of deeper kindness, we invite others not only to leave “other gods” and follow Jesus, but we invite those who already follow Jesus to live more like him.
Whenever people ask me about my community, about my house church, I answer them earnestly: “If I was ever stuck on the side of the road, I know I could call any one of them, and they would immediately come to my rescue.” But it’s not just kindness shown through action—I know that each one of them holds my story with great care, and they pray for me even when I don’t know it. I think that is part of chesed. That is authentic community.
Notes
- Matthew 1:1–17. ↩︎
Photo credit: Sarah Brossart
Michelle E. Navarrete is the daughter of Mexican immigrants from the suburbs of Chicago, IL. She currently lives in the most diverse square mile of the United States in Clarkston, GA, where she attends a house church through Proskuneo Ministries, a nonprofit committed to multicultural, multilingual worship. As a PhD student of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament at Emory University, she is passionate about bridging spaces of the church and academy more fully.
