Her name was Vibia Perpetua. She was 22 in the year 202. She lived the privileged life of an aristocrat in the North African city of Carthage. She was still newly married and had only recently given birth to a son. By all accounts she could have lived out her life as her mother and her mother’s mother before her, with genial grace and everyday ease. She would be the envy of many young women. She became a saint instead.

Like all saints, she didn’t set out to be one, and she never knew she was one.  It would have embarrassed her as much as blessed her to have people think of her that way. What she thought about was simply being true to a love that had seized her heart, a love that was greater than any she had known, a love worth dying for.  Perpetua, as we have come to her in church history, was taken by the love of Christ. She resolved to be baptized, along with four others, at least two of them slaves whom she came to view as her sisters. In a pagan culture that protected its culture by protecting its gods against outsiders, Perpetua was arrested, imprisoned, and sentenced to be torn apart by wild beasts in a public arena — a fate usually reserved only for slaves.

She left behind a diary from prison that records her encounter with her honored gray-haired father, who arrived in the prison amid deep shame at what scandal had befallen his noble family through his daughter’s actions. He pleaded with her to give up her stubborn pride, to remember his love for her, to note the scorn the family was enduring, and to renounce faith in this new religion. She answered him: “‘Father,’ … ‘do you see this vessel, or waterpot, or whatever it is?’ ‘Yes, I do,’ he said. ‘Could it be called by any other name than what it is?’ I asked; and he said, ‘No.’ ‘Well, so too, I cannot be called anything other than what I am, Christian.’”

Her father returned again and again to turn her away from her Christian family of faith to her pagan family of blood. He even brought her child and held him out to her at the time of her execution, until the governor had him beaten for the spectacle he was making of himself. But Perpetua went to her grave believing that she belonged to the eternal family of God, and that her deepest loyalty lay there.  She belongs to it still in the communion of saints, and especially on this day, we honor her and others like her. [Elaine Pagels, Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas (Random House: 2003), pp.11-12.]

Others, like the Moabite woman, Ruth, gave us some of the loveliest lines in the Bible. We hear them sometimes in weddings: Entreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.  Sometimes you just have to go back to that old King James, don’t you know?!

The story of Ruth is an Old Testament treasure. But it can hardly be overstated how astonishing were these words, not only to Naomi’s ears but also to all the family of God that has heard them since. To get a fresh sense of why that is so, we have to go back and visit the story again.

The book of Ruth comes in the Bible right after Judges. Right after the book where Israel operated without a king and didn’t need one because God was their king. They believed it they kept to themselves and kept outsiders and their gods outside, all would be well. By the end of Judges, things had gone terribly bad among the tribes. When the Book of Ruth opens, the connection is clear. In the time when the judges ruled there was a famine in the land. A catastrophe had hit, as if punishment for the people’s sin. A certain man, Elimelech — whose name means “God is my King,” leaves Bethlehem — which means “House of Bread,” because there is no bread there. He takes his wife, Naomi — whose name means “my pleasantness,” although her lot was bitter, and two sons with equally suggestive names I won’t go into.  They go to Moab, to outsiders whose culture and behavior was so abhorrent to Israel that no Moabite was allowed in the assembly of Israel. While there, Elimelech dies, and now in another way, and in a foreign land, Naomi, representing the family of God, is without her “God is my king.”

Naomi’s boys have married Moabite women. Orpah is one. Oprah is misnamed after her, because her mother couldn’t spell too well. Her name means “back of the neck,” which is all you see of her as she walks away. The other was Ruth, whose name means “satiation.”  Which suggests that if Mick Jaggar had met Ruth, he might have got some satisfaction. After ten years, Naomi’s sons die, too, and it’s just the Ya Ya Sisterhood left.

Well, Naomi decides to go home. She hears word there’s bread now in the House of Bread. She returns to her people. But Naomi knows the chances of her daughters-in-law for a better life are better back in Moab, where they can find husbands and have kids. Orpah loves Naomi, but finally agrees to stay behind. No shame in that, just nothing to write Bible about, either.  Ruth cleaves to Naomi and refuses to leave her. Both the word leave and the word cleave recall the Genesis account of Adam and Eve that one should leave father and mother and cleave to one’s spouse, becoming one flesh. Well, Ruth does not mean to marry her mother-in-law, of course — which makes it a little dicey sometimes reading her entreat me not to leave thee words at a wedding. But she determines to go with her and throws her lot in with her family of marriage that had also become her family of faith.

Ruth, you see, in saying that Naomi’s God would be her God, turned her back on the orthodoxy she was raised with, just as Perpetua had done.    Spiritual decisions always have social consequences. You get a new family when you get a new God. Now, orthodoxy is the religious version of orthodontia: it purports to put corrective braces onto crooked thinking about God. But orthodoxy always has to be questioned, lest it become a straitjacket that prevents the truth from moving freely. Perpetua had to become a pagan heretic to be a Christian, Ruth a Moabite heretic to become a worshiper of Israel’s God.

Heresy comes from the Greek word hairesis, meaning “to choose for oneself.” In this sense heretics choose what they will believe; they do not simply accept what others tell them is true. This is why Baptists have often been called heretics — because we insist on people choosing their faith and their family of faith. It cannot just be handed down.

And yet to be a Christian is to acknowledge that we don’t make up the truth ourselves; we only choose to remain true to our divine chosenness.  I mean, when Perpetua or Ruth made their choices, they were free to do so in one sense, but they were not free in another sense. They could no sooner choose to deny the love that had gripped them than to choose to be someone they no longer were.

Have you ever been so surprised by a love that has changed you that you could let it go without denying your very being? Well, this is what happens to those who truly “get it” about what God has done for us. We know we belong to the family of God, that our baptism is something real that has shaped us for good and for good!

Which is why living against our baptismal identities is such a mystery.  Like the policeman who sat behind a car at a stoplight one day. The man in front of him was behind a woman who did not go when the light turned green. A green light is not a suggestion to go or permission; it is a command! Well, the woman would not move. So the man started honking his horn and screaming at her out the window and pounding his fist on the wheel until the light turned red again.  The policeman got out of his car and arrested the man. When they got him into the police station, he was soon released. The angry man protested that he should never have been arrested for hollering in his own car. The officer replied: I didn’t arrest you for shouting in your car. I was directly behind you at the light. I saw you screaming and beating your steering wheel, and I said to myself, ‘What a jerk. But there is nothing I can do to him for throwing a fit in his own car. Then I noticed a cross hanging from your rearview mirror, the fish on the trunk lid and the My Boss Is a Jewish Carpenter and the Jesus Is Coming Soon bumper stickers, and I thought you must have stolen that car from a Christian.

Saints are people who choose to act according to the new nature they have received in the love of God that has invaded them. It may seem counter-cultural at times, and it usually doesn’t end in martyrdom, but there is something in them that attracts. There is a residual luster about them that makes you not want to ask them if they have talked to God lately, but rather, “What did God say when you last spoke?” They have a kind of borrowed glory about them, borrowed from perpetual encounter with God.  And it’s a something that makes them inclusive more than exclusive: they can embrace outsiders because of the one who is inside of them.

Jesus told the scribes that the greatest commandment is to love God and to love your neighbor as yourself. We must be open to our neighbor, because it might just mean our salvation. Ruth found that with Naomi, and Naomi with Ruth, even though there were times when in all of Israel the orthodoxy was to keep to your own kind and keep outsiders outside.

In a day when churches are fortifying the walls to keep outsiders outside instead of making them more porous to welcome them in; in a day when immigration laws are tightening and fear of the stranger is testing our love of neighbor, this is still a prophetic word to us. What if we Gentiles did not admit a Jewish savior into our lives? What if God did not allow humanity into the divine heart?  Remember that Ruth ended up marrying Boaz, and they begat Obed, the father of Jesse, the father of King David, the ancestor of Jesus.

The story was predictable at first.  Edward Norton played a neo-Nazi skinhead who brutally killed a black burglar who was breaking into his car.  The movie was American History X.  Throughout his teenage years he had cultivated hatred for everyone he considered an outsider in America.  His rage continued to boil in prison until a black inmate in the laundry, where he was assigned to work, befriended him. This fellow inmate helped him survive in prison and allowed him to find courage to stand up to those who had taught him hatred and bigotry on the outside.

Sometimes God uses just the people we least expect to be agents of our salvation. The ultraconservative pastor of the First Baptist Church of Atlanta, Charles Stanley, admitted last week that Southern Baptists have made a tragic mistake in limiting the role of women in the church. Stanley himself was saved under the preaching of a woman. And I wonder how many others might have been saved if we had allowed other women to exercise the gifts the Holy Spirit has given them. But think about your own life. Who are outsiders to you? Who are the people you least expect God could use to bring healing and new life to you when you most need it? Is your heart open to them or closed?

Look around you this morning.  Anyone you don’t know yet? What if they are just the people we need for this church to become what God wants it to be? Would you be able to say to them what that heretic Ruth did to Naomi? Entreat me not to leave thee … your people shall be my people and your God my God. You life may depend upon it, not to mention your salvation.