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The Truth
From Ruth
by Reverend Rich Smith
November 12, 2006
Ruth 1:1-18
The story of Ruth comes up in the lectionary for two
Sundays in a row once every three years, but in looking back over my
files, this is the first time I have preached on it since 1995. That
means that since coming to Westmoreland five years ago, and for six
years before that, my preaching has been Ruth-less! So it’s time to
remedy the situation!
While it’s possible to do a whole sermon series on Ruth, one sermon for
each of its four chapters, and while the lectionary gives it two
Sundays, today I am going to follow the Jewish tradition, which is to
look at the story as a whole.
When I was a little boy, and would often spend weekends at my
grandparents house, I liked to listen to my grandmother tell stories.
Mostly they were about growing up on the farm in Missouri, walking
several miles to school in the snow, that sort of thing; and sometimes
right before bed, she would read me Bible stories, about Noah and the
ark, Jonah and the Whale, Jacob at the well....and of course this story
of Ruth. So it is not difficult for me to imagine that, as some
scholars suggest, this particular story arose from women story-tellers.
It is about how two women make their way in a man's world. And it was
probably told for centuries, likely by women, before it was finally
written down and became part of the Bible.
The story itself is set in the time of the judges, a couple of
generations before David became Israel's first monarch, and it's
outline is familiar to most of us. During a time of famine in Israel, a
certain man, Elimelech, his pleasant wife Naomi and their two sons went
looking for greener pastures and enough to eat, and they made their way
to the land of Moab, where the sons grew up and married two of the
local girls, Orpah and Ruth, but not before this certain man,
Elimelech, died. Sometime later, the two sons also died, leaving Naomi
alone with her two daughters-in-law, she a Jew, and they Moabites. When
Naomi heard that the famine was at last past, she decided to go back to
her homeland, at first taking Orpah and Ruth with her, but then
realizing that they would probably be better off if they stayed in
their own land, for at least there they would have a good chance of
finding new husbands and a better life. Orpah agreed, and stayed behind
as her mother-in-law suggested, but Ruth refused to leave Naomi, and
declared her commitment to her. We've heard the words many times, which
are no doubt one of the high water marks of ancient literature: KJV –
"Entreat me not to leave 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...." So they returned to Israel together, to Bethlehem,
actually, where Naomi was greeted by her old friends and relatives,
bemoaning her misfortunes, and even trying to change her name from
Naomi which means "sweet" to Mara, which means "bitter".
Naomi is concerned about her daughters-in-law, concerned that they find
husbands. In ancient Israel, if a married man died without any
children, it was the duty of the man's brother to sire children by the
widow, children who would legally be offspring of the dead man. How do
you think that would work in your family??? It doesn’t even work on
most soap operas! Back then it was called the law of levirite marriage,
and it served to keep wealth from becoming too concentrated and to
protect the interests of the powerless and those on the margins, widows
being about as powerless as you could get in that patriarchal society.
Naomi felt she should have been able to offer more sons to her widowed
daughters-in-law. But, she said, I don't have a husband, and even if I
got one today and conceived sons tonight (which I'm too old to do),
would you wait for them to grow up? Of course not! Save yourselves, go
home, you'll be better off. Given the context of the times, she is
behaving in a practical and compassionate manner in sending them away.
But of course, who is more compassionate in this story than Ruth
herself, in refusing to abandon this human being, her mother-in-law, to
whom she had no legal obligation, and in committing herself to the
point of joining her mother-in-law's people and worshiping her God?
This “till-death-do-us-part” moment is evoked so often at weddings,
those beautiful words, "Wither thou goest....", and it’s easy to forget
that they were not spoken by a wife to a husband, but by a young woman
to her mother-in-law. Imagine that kind of commitment! We make a lot of
jokes about in-laws, and equate them with out-laws. This story shows it
needn't be so! It shows that we do have obligations to one another that
in a moral sense go beyond what the law requires.
That's where the lesson for today ends. Even by itself, it makes a
great story of how people become connected to one another, and about
caring and commitment, which should be at the heart of every family,
and church as well. In fact, I think it’s this sense of connection and
caring that really determines why people stay in a church and how much
people give to the church – more than budgets or programs or even
economic realities. Are we really connected to one another and to
Something or Some One larger than ourselves?
But of course that's not the end of it! As Paul Harvey would say,
you've got to hear the rest of the story!
As it continues, Ruth, among a strange people in a strange country,
takes up that role often reserved for aliens – She becomes a farm
worker. The scriptures say she went out to the fields to glean barley.
Gleaning was an ancient practice, yet another way of taking care of the
have-nots, a sort of primitive welfare system that worked fairly well.
After a field was harvested by the initial pickers, it was then opened
to anyone who had need of the produce, who were allowed to go in and
pick freely of whatever was left behind. In fact, in some cases
Levitical law mandates that a couple fo rows be left un-picked,
reserved for the gleaners! This was one way the commitment of early
Israelite society to protect the poor and disadvantaged was carried
out. Ruth, a refugee, an immigrant on the margins of society, a widow,
with a mother-in-law who was also a widow, qualified, and so she went
out into the fields to glean.
Now the field in which she was gleaning belonged to a wealthy, older
relative of Naomi's dead husband, a man named Boaz. It doesn't say so
in the story, but elsewhere in the Bible you discover that Boaz had a
rather famous--or infamous--mother, Rahab the Harlot, whose main claim
to fame was that she became a spy for Joshua and greatly assisted his
conquest of Jericho, where the walls came tumblin’ down, and for that
her life and family were spared. Anyway, Boaz by now had apparently
turned his family's spoils of war into a sizable estate and was now
wealthy. He noticed Ruth out there in the field, gleaning the left-over
barley, and took a special interest in her, taking steps to look out
for her security and well being, and causing Ruth to exclaim, "Why have
I found favor in your eyes, when I am a foreigner?" You see, she
expected a kind of prejudice to be displayed towards her, what we would
call “xenophobia.” But Boaz, said, no, he'd heard all about the
kindness and loyalty Ruth had shown toward her widowed mother-in-law,
and now that she had taken refuge under the wings of the God of Israel,
she would receive protection.
Boaz is portrayed as a hero here, just as Ruth was in the previous
chapter. Where Ruth went beyond the bounds of what was required, did
the unexpected thing in remaining with her mother-in-law when she would
have been better off going home, so Boaz also goes beyond the bounds of
required duty, in accepting and extending care towards this foreign
woman.
There was a time when it took a lot of courage to tell this story,
because during the fifth century before Christ, xenophobia was a
national passion. The governor, a man by the name of Nehemiah, was
trying desperately to restore Israelite society following the period of
Babylonian captivity, to bring back the good old days, rebuild the
temple. And he was fairly successful, except that one of his policies
was that Jewish men who had married foreign women must divorce them,
disown their half-breed children, and marry good Jewish girls. He
insisted on purity of bloodlines, with disastrous human and social
consequences. In that climate this story was told, about a wonderfully
faithful foreign woman, Ruth, and a wealthy man, Boaz, who cared for
her, even though she was foreign. It became not just a lovely parable
of human compassion and loyalty and ties that bind, but a political
statement, aimed at the xenophobic policies of the governor. It’s the
kind of story echoed in Jesus’ own parables and actions, as when he
befriended and dined with outcasts, or told a story in which the hero
was a Samaritan, a despised foreigner. It’s the kind of story that it
took courage to tell, and it still does!
Out in Arizona where illegal immigration is a huge issue, and where
Congress has authorized the building of a border wall, election results
were mixed. A couple of ballot measures that make it tougher on
immigrants passed, such as a measure that makes English the “official
language” of the state (purportedly to save on “printing costs” - and
pitting environmentalists against immigrant rights advocates - an easy
ploy to see through!) At the same time a congressman who has taken a
rather hard line on the matter was defeated, as was a hard-line
candidate in the district where I used to live. We always need
reminding that people are human beings before they are foreigners, and
that God cares for them as well.
Ruth was a foreigner. And yet Boaz reached out to her, offered her
protection and kindness. As it turns out, that is not all he had to
offer, for when Naomi found out about it, she gave Ruth some lessons in
how to seduce him, which she did, and he offered to marry her. You'll
have to read that part for yourself---it's in the third chapter. They
married and had a child, named him Obed. and the story closes with the
village women all gathered around Naomi, doing her grandmotherly duty
and swelling with grandmotherly pride. And they all lived happily ever
after.
But just so the point wouldn't be lost, the story-teller adds a punch
line. It's a short genealogy, the kind of thing we often over look,
because we think they’re boring. But it's worth hearing: "Now these are
the descendants of Perez: Perez became the father of Hezron, Hezron the
father of Ram, Ram of Amminadab, Amminadab of Nahshon, Nahshon of
Salmon, Salmon of Boaz, Boaz of Obed, Obed of Jesse, and Jesse of
David."
Yes, that David! Israel's first and greatest King! David had Ruth, a
foreigner, for his great-grandmother! So much for the
purity-of-bloodlines argument!
And centuries later, another Biblical writer, a story-teller of sorts
would repeat this same genealogy, only he wouldn't stop with David. He
would trace it all the way down to one Jesus of Nazareth, who likewise
had this foreigner for an ancestor. Amazing stuff.
The truth about Ruth is the truth about King David and about Jesus and
about us too! It’s a truth about commitment to one another, and
community, and the universality of God’s family, and finally, it’s
about hope, and how two women made their way in a seemingly hopeless
situation.
U.S. Senator and UCC member Barak Obama tells of this kind of thing in
his new book, The Audacity of Hope. He tells of people he met on the
campaign trail in 2004 – a couple in rural Illinois “trying to figure
out how to get their teenage son the liver transplant he needed....a
young man in East Moline....who was on his way to Iraq – the desire he
had to serve his country, the look of pride and apprehension on the
face of his father....the young black woman in East St. Louis who told
me of her efforts to attend college even though no one I her family had
ever graduated from high school.”
And he writes, “It wasn’t just the struggles of these men and women
that had moved me. Rather it was their determination, their
self-reliance, a relentless optimism in the face of hardship. It
brought to mind a phrase that my pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, had once
used in a sermon.
“The audacity of hope.
“That was the best of the American spirit, I thought – having the
audacity to believe despite all the evidence to the contrary that we
could restore a sense of community to a nation torn by conflict; the
gall to believe that despite personal setbacks....we had some
control–and therefore responsibility–over our own fate.
“It was that audacity, I thought, that joined us as one people. It was
that pervasive spirit of hope that tied my own family’s story to the
larger American story, and my own story to those of the voters I sought
to represent.”
Walter Brueggemann says that hopelessness is a lack of a future. The
story of Ruth begins in apparent hopelessness, with two women on – even
outside – the margins of society. But Ruth’s audacity and Boaz’
generosity combined to open up a future, not only for themselves, but
for all Israel.... and all of us!
As Jesus himself would have said when concluding a parable, "Whoever
has ears to hear, let them hear!"
Last updated Wednesday, Februrary 29, 2008
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