ECCLESIOLOGICAL ETCHINGS
May 28, 2025
Since Christmas, I have started and restarted reading the book, “Dinners With Ruth” by Nina Totenberg. It wasn’t that I found the book boring. Just the opposite! I was enjoying it, but there were always more pressing things to read in preparation for a sermon or a study. Much of the book is about this amazing friendship between the NPR reporter, Nina Totenberg (who I have always admired), and the Supreme Court Justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg (who I also admired). When you know someone simply by their professional persona, you sort of tell yourself that there is probably much more to the person’s personality, but most of us won’t see those parts. The two of them met before Nina worked for NPR and while Ruth was still a professor. Their friendship had many wonderful and funny moments, but they also walked together through some incredibly painful experiences, including the death of both of their spouses. Nina’s first husband died when she was still relatively young, and so a few years later, she started dating. She had not told anyone, including her good friend, Ruth. One evening, the two of them were walking together, and Nina decided to share the news. It was described this way in the book…
[Ruth] “and I were walking side by side down a hallway, and I said, ‘Ruth, I am dating somebody.’ She stopped, and it was as if her head swiveled around. She looked at me very intently and said, ‘Details. I want details.’”
I don’t know about you, but Ruth’s request sounds like something from a giddy teenager, not a Supreme Court Justice. Yet like I have learned in reading numerous biographies, there is another side to historical figures, especially those we sort of see as one-dimensional. I apply that same thinking to the characters I come across in the Bible. For so many of them, the details that would provide insight into their personalities are limited or even nonexistent. We have often made them caricatures, based on their most heroic or deplorable moments. Yet if they are more than just a character on a page, then I imagine they had moments like all of us, even moments when they acted out of the narrow character we might have assumed, even acting like a giddy teenager when hanging out with a good friend and sharing special news.
Though the stories of Scripture are beautiful and powerful, help me to imagine more complexity and depth to each one of the characters. You created us all, Holy One, and there is no single person that can be summarized in a few verses or chapters. Help us to always see that even the unnamed characters who receive nothing but a passing comment are, in fact, full of life, emotions, and experiences. Amen.
