Sermon 7/23/17
Ruth 1:1-18, Ruth 3:1-5, Ruth 4:13-17
Women of the Bible: Ruth and Naomi
The most common passage people ask
me to read at their weddings is 1 Corinthians 13: Love is patient, love is kind
… love never ends. For obvious reasons, it makes a good text for folks starting
out in marriage together, as the apostle Paul calls us to love in a way that
puts the other before the self, always. Of course, I remind folks when I’m
talking to them about this text that Paul wasn’t talking about love in a way
that was meant only for married couples to share. Paul actually wants us to
love everyone in this selfless way,
not just spouses!
One of the next most-popular verses for weddings comes from our text for
today. “Do not press me to leave you or to turn back from following you! Where
you go, I will go; Where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my
people, and your God my God. Where you die, I will die— there will I be buried.
May the Lord do thus and so to me, and more as well, if even death parts me
from you!” Often, when I’m sharing with couples possible verses for their
wedding, I’ll read this passage, and the couple will say, “Yes, that’s the one,
that’s the passage we want.” And then I have to explain that again, this text
isn’t about love between spouses. This text describes the relationship between
a mother-in-law and daughter-in-law. It’s unusual, certainly. Still, though,
most couples I meet with recognize that this kind of devotion and commitment is
indeed something they want to find in their married life together.
So what is the story of Ruth and Naomi? The opening verses tell us that
Ruth’s story is set in the time of the judges, the time period we talked about
last Sunday, between the Israelites coming into the Promised Land and the time
when they were ruled by earthly kings. During this time, there is a famine in
the land, and a man from Bethlehem – yes, that
Bethlehem – leaves Judah to go live in Moab. Bethlehem literally means
“house of bread,” and biblical authors were not blind to irony, certainly.
There’s a famine in the House of Bread. So this man Elimelech from Bethlehem
leaves to live in Moab with his wife, Naomi and his two sons, Mahlon and
Chilion. Mahlon and Chilion’s names mean literally “diseased” and “dying.” Yes,
this is biblical foreshadowing! Mahlon and Chilion marry women from among the
Moabite people. The Moabites haves a common heritage with the Israelites, but
they are a different nation, with different religious traditions. They worship
different gods than the Israelites. The Moabite women are named Ruth and Orpah
(not Oprah!) But after about 10 years in Moab, Elimelech, Mahlon, and Chilion
all die. Naomi, Ruth, and Orpah are all left widows.
Naomi, an Israelite, hears that at
last there is food in her homeland again – the famine has ended, and people are
saying that “God has considered” the people and their plight. She sets out with
her daughters-in-law to head back to where she was living before she left home
with her husband. She, Ruth, and Orpah are vulnerable, at risk as widows in a
patriarchal society. They have little to no social standing as they are, no one
to provide for them, few legal protections. And as Naomi thinks on that, she
encourages Ruth and Orpah to return to their families in Moab, to find security
in the home of a new husband. “Go back each of you to your mother’s house,” she
says, “May God deal kindly with you, as you have dealt with the dead and with
me.” They weep together, and both women say they will stay with Naomi. But
Naomi insists she cannot provide for them. If Naomi were to remarry and have
more sons – could her daughters-in-law wait until they were grown to marry
them? Of course not. It would be foolish for them to not remarry. Naomi feels
like God has turned against her. Her husband and sons have died. In a culture
where a family line means so much, Naomi feels bitter, like a failure. In fact
she will eventually adopt the name Mara for herself, which means bitter. Orpah decides
to go back to Moab. But Ruth still chooses to remain with Naomi. And that’s
when she says the words that are a vow, a commitment: I will follow you. I’m
going where you’re going. I’m making my home where you’re making your home. I’m
making your people my people. I’m choosing your God as my God. And if I don’t
honor this vow, let God do to me what God will!
Ruth honors her vow, and she and Naomi return to Naomi’s
home, where Naomi works hard to secure a good life for Ruth, and where Ruth
remains focused on making sure Naomi is cared for too. Naomi helps Ruth connect
to a kinsman, Boaz, who fulfills his role as “redeemer,” for the family line,
marrying Ruth. And when Ruth gives birth to a child, Obed, Naomi serves as wet
nurse. The women of Naomi’s community say to her: “Blessed be the Lord, who has
not left you this day without next-of-kin … He shall be to you a restorer of
life … for your daughter-in-law who loves you, who is more to you than seven
sons, has borne [a son].” They say of the baby Obed, “A son has been born to
Naomi.” Our reading closes with the author letting us know that Obed becomes
the father of Jesse, father to David, most beloved of the kings of Israel.
The Book of Ruth is a favorite book of many Bible readers.
After all, compared with the violence of war and Jael and her tent peg we read
about last week, Ruth’s story has a lot to recommend it. No wars. A bit of
romance. A story of devotion and commitment. A young woman, devoted to her
mother-in-law. A man willing to step up and protect those who are vulnerable. But
even though the story is drastically different than last week’s, our driving
question still is the same: what’s the good news in the Book of Ruth? Some
biblical scholars think Ruth was written to counter books of the Bible like
Ezra and Nehemiah, which include serious statements against intermarriage, a marriage
between Israelites and people of other faith traditions. Here is Ruth, a
non-Israelite, who nonetheless commits her life to following the God of Israel,
who becomes the great-grandmother of King David. And certainly, I think there’s
something to the hopefully-now-unsurprising fact that God works through the
story of an unexpected figure like Ruth. We talked last week about God using
unexpected people to accomplish God’s work. Here, we find a Moabite, a foreign
woman, a refugee, a widow, and her commitment Naomi leads to her being the
right person at God’s right time to continue God’s covenant for generations to
come. Phyllis Trible (1) notes that Ruth’s story is a bit like Abraham’s story
in the degree of their radical life-changing decisions. Both leave home and
country to go to a completely new place. Abraham has an explicit call from God
to do so. Ruth doesn’t have an explicit call from God. But throughout the text,
Naomi and Boaz both note that Ruth behaves with loving-kindness. The word has a
sense of practicing loving-kindness toward someone even when they have no
rightful claim on your compassion. The call on Ruth’s life that drives her to a
new place is the call of loving-kindness, of compassion, and it changes her
life as much as God’s more direct call changes Abraham’s.
But I am most moved by Ruth and Naomi’s move forward in spite of what can only feel
like utter disaster and failure in their lives. For Naomi, everything is lost.
Where once she had a whole family, now she will have no descendants at all. For
Ruth, though, there’s an escape plan. She can leave. This wouldn’t do anything
for Naomi, but for Ruth, how easy would it be to just go back home and start
over again? I don’t mean to malign Orpah’s decision. It was certainly a
sensible choice, and Naomi didn’t seem to begrudge her path. But what on earth
motivates Ruth to persevere and stay with Naomi despite what seems like a dead
end?
Samuel Wells preached on this passage at a Baccalaureate
service at Duke several years ago (2), and it struck me as an odd choice of
text at first. But Wells in his message speaks to the students about failure
that will inevitably be part of their lives. He writes, “I’m thinking right now
of young man who left college 10 years ago. He went into consulting work on the
East Coast. He spent a bit of time on Wall Street, and … [three] or four years
ago he and a couple of others set up their own company. It was tough at first
but soon it became quite a success … That company was his life, his identity,
his pride, his joy.
“January just past it all went wrong. The company slid into
bankruptcy like a sandcastle engulfed by the incoming tide. The young man saw
his dream disappear and his security, prestige, and self-esteem melt away with
it. Four months later, to my knowledge, his mother and sister have yet to find
a way even gently to refer to the subject with him. His life is shrouded in
silence and dominated by the f-word: failure.”
Wells continues, saying that in our culture, where we judge
and are judged constantly, there are “a thousand ways to fail. We come to fear
earthly failure in the same way we fear death -- in fact failure becomes a kind
of equivalent of death -- which is why the young man’s mother and sister found
they couldn’t even mention the subject to him. Our earthly successes become our
quest for immortality, and if we fail, it’s like a double dose of death.”
But Ruth, in the face of “poverty and possible death says
that, for her, there’s something that means more than self-preservation and
survival. That something is loyalty and love. In showing such steadfast love
against all expectations, she shows us the face of God in a way we might never
have seen it if she’d been lucky and successful.” It’s the same perseverance
that we find in Christ’s death, and the ultimate victory of life over death.
Who would continue to have hope after the seeming failure of Jesus’ death on
the cross?
While Wells was spending time in
Northern Ireland, he spoke with a priest there who had dedicated his life to
working for peace after decades of strife and violence. The priest had
experienced failure after failure. But he persisted, dedicated to his work. He
told Wells, “It’s better to fail in a cause that will finally succeed than to
succeed in a cause that will finally fail.”
Ruth and Naomi experience utter
devastation. But they bind themselves to each other, and to a path with God’s
people that will last them beyond the hopelessness of their present
circumstances. I can only imagine that when Ruth makes her decision to stay
with Naomi, she makes her choice not only out of loving-kindness, but also with
her eyes set on the horizon, into a future longer than her immediate suffering,
into a plan and path that is grander than she can see in that moment.
What about us? What is God’s call to
us in the midst our failures, in the midst of our suffering? Without a doubt,
we will encounter times in our lives, seasons when it feels like we have come
to a dead end, and the only thing we can do is go back to the beginning and
start all over. When we find ourselves in such a place, what will we do? Like
Ruth, maybe we can turn our pain into compassion, into loving-kindness that
keeps us thinking of others instead of ourselves, even in our pain. And like
Ruth, we can remember that we have committed our lives to serving God’s cause,
and even when we are failing, God’s
cause is the one that finally succeeds. Let’s stick with that path, even if we
can’t see that far down the road just yet.
Remember, I told you that Naomi
asked to be called Mara, which means bitter? No one ever calls her that.
Because the bitterness is for a season. The toughest season of her life. But Naomi means pleasure. And through Ruth’s
loving-kindness, Naomi holds a child in her arms that brings her joy beyond the
future she could see. Thanks be to God. Amen.
(1) Phyllis Trible, https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/ruth-bible
(2) Samuel Wells, Baccalaureate address to Duke in
2009, https://www.faithandleadership.com/sermons/the-word-we-don%E2%80%99t-mention?t-mention%3Fpage=0%2C0
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