Naomi, Ruth and The Perry Fairy: A Drama in Three Acts

Preached at Family of Christ Presbyterian Church, Greeley Colorado, 10/10/10

A couple of weeks ago, Jenn, Nate and I were sitting at the picnic table out in front of the church talking about a bunch of things, including this month’s emphasis on world Christianity.  I was excited because World Christianity was one of the best classes I had in seminary and I am always anxious to share what I learned with others. Then they invited me to preach this Sunday and I had to figure out how to put all that excitement and information into a sermon.

This is what I came up with, “Naomi, Ruth and The Perry Fairy: A Drama in Three Acts.”

But before we get to act one, I should introduce you to our three characters:

First come the two that we met in the scripture reading, Naomi and her daughter-in-law, Ruth. But who is this mysterious third character, The Perry Fairy?

I could tell you that the Perry Fairy is a mystical creature that travels through the world, bring Christianity to new places and new people, and, in a way, it is.

My fellow students and I first learned about the Perry Fairy in our Eucharist and Church Mission class the second semester of our first year, and then returned to meet the Perry Fairy one more time in our World Christianity course the second semester of our final year.

What those classes had in common was a professor named Carlos Cardoza-Orlandi, who at the time was the World Christianity professor at Columbia.

I think Dr. Cardoza-Orlandi may be the best lecturer I have ever had, but there were moments when his accent made it difficult to decipher exactly what he was saying.

Perry Fairy is an example of that that stuck with us through the years, It’s simply the way that Dr. Cardoza-Orlandi pronounced the word, “periphery.” And when you take a class from him, you hear a lot about the periphery.

Now that you know the players, Naomi, Ruth and the periphery, let us begin our play.

Act I:  Transmission

Naomi didn’t set out to be a missionary, she didn’t leave her home, her family and her friends so that she could spread the good news or convert the heathens.

No, she went because her husband went, because there was a famine in Judah and they had heard there was work and food to be found on the plateau of Moab.

When I imagined a world Christianity class, I made the assumption that I think a lot of people would make, that it would be about different styles of worship and church life. We’d learn about what the church looks like in other places, how people in Africa, Asia, South America and other places order their lives and their worship.

Well, some of the class was about those kinds of things, but by far they were not the most important things that we studied and learned.

Much more important was learning about how Christianity got to those places, How it moves from the center out to our friend the periphery, that is to say, we studied mission.

What is the mission of the church?  Through the years, the answer to that question has come from the end of the Book of Matthew and Christ’s Great Commission:  “Go forth and make disciples of all nations.”

Through the centuries, the church has responded to that commission in different ways.  From the time of Constantine onward through the crusades and into the time of the Conquistadors in Latin America, it was done with military might.  The government and the church worked together to spread the Gospel at the end of sword and through the barrel of a gun.  Christendom ruled large swaths of the world.

But, starting with the Protestant Reformation, and continuing through the America Revolution and the Enlightenment, Christendom lost much of its power and the church’s way of responding to the Great Commission had to change.

Enter the missionary, The person who goes out, sent by a church to the heathens, to deepest, darkest Africa to show those people what they are doing wrong and get them onto the right path.

The missionary is an iconic image in our culture, from David Livingstone, of “Dr. Livingstone, I presume” fame to Rose Sayer, Katherine Hepburn’s character in the African Queen to countless missionary and cannibal jokes.

In World Christianity, we looked at how the missionary process has functioned and where it has gone wrong.