Grandma Ruth

Midweek Worship

Twenty-Third Week after Pentecost

A Reading from the Book of Ruth:

In the days when the judges ruled, there was a famine in the land, and a certain man of Bethlehem in Judah went to live in the country of Moab, he and his wife and two sons. The name of the man was Elimelech and the name of his wife Naomi, and the names of his two sons were Mahlon and Chilion; they were Ephrathites from Bethlehem in Judah. They went into the country of Moab and remained there. But Elimelech, the husband of Naomi, died, and she was left with her two sons. These took Moabite wives; the name of the one was Orpah and the name of the other Ruth. When they had lived there about ten years, both Mahlon and Chilion also died, so that the woman was left without her two sons and her husband. Then she started to return with her daughters-in-law from the country of Moab, for she had heard in the country of Moab that the LORD had considered his people and given them food.

So she set out from the place where she had been living, she and her two daughters-in-law, and they went on their way to go back to the land of Judah. But Naomi said to her two daughters-in-law, “Go back each of you to your mother's house. May the LORD deal kindly with you, as you have dealt with the dead and with me. The LORD grant that you may find security, each of you in the house of your husband.” Then she kissed them, and they wept aloud. They said to her, “No, we will return with you to your people.” But Naomi said, “Turn back, my daughters, why will you go with me? Do I still have sons in my womb that they may become your husbands? Turn back, my daughters, go your way, for I am too old to have a husband. Even if I thought there was hope for me, even if I should have a husband tonight and bear sons, would you then wait until they were grown? Would you then refrain from marrying? No, my daughters, it has been far more bitter for me than for you, because the hand of the LORD has turned against me.”

Then they wept aloud again. Orpah kissed her mother-in-law, but Ruth clung to her. So she said, “See, your sister-in-law has gone back to her people and to her gods; return after your sister-in-law.” But Ruth said, “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!” When Naomi saw that she was determined to go with her, she said no more to her.

The Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Context is everything. If you really want to know what it is that you’re reading, you have to know when and why it was written. You have to know its voice, its genre. We don’t read scientific papers, epic poetry, historical novels, and pop song lyrics all in the same way, now do we? The same rules apply, especially so, to the Bible.

The Bible did not descend to us from heaven inscribed upon golden plates. Rather, it is incarnational. It comes to us through human hands, at the behest of human minds. It is not one book so much as it is an entire library. The Bible is the record of one people’s ongoing, evolving relationship with God. As such, it is a conversation, often an argument, written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, from the pens at least 50 authors over the course of some thousand years.

And this is important to understand, as we tackle the Book of Ruth.

I like Ruth. I am partial to it. And not just because it was my mother’s-mother’s name. Ruth is a brief yet deeply human story of love, loss, grief, and restoration; of both tragedy and comedy. There are no bad people in the Book of Ruth, no villains. There are just varying degrees of decency—of love, generosity, fidelity. It is idyllic, in that sense: hard times, good people. It was written rather late within the Hebrew corpus, even though the author tried to make it sound older, sound archaic.

But that’s harder to do than you might think. Try writing a book in Shakespearean English. See how well you do, whether you can fool folks who know what to look for. So why do that in the first place? Why write Ruth in such a way as to try to make it sound more classical? Hmm.

Well, first things first: what’s the story? The Book of Ruth is set in the time of the Judges; that is, in that sort of tribal period between Moses and David, after the Exodus but before the kings. That’s why our Bibles place the book where they do. During a famine in the land of Israel, a man takes his family—his wife and two sons—and they move Moab, an address that would raise any Israelite’s eyebrows. The Moabites were ancient enemies of Israel, among the worst of the worst. They were relatives, of course, but they’d kicked Israel when Israel was down. And it’s hard to forgive betrayal when it comes from a cousin, isn’t it?

The Torah, specifically Deuteronomy, forbids a Moabite from ever becoming part of the assembly of Israel, the people of God, even down to the tenth generation. The scribe Ezra, who has his own book of the Bible, and who led many of the Exiles out from Persia and Babylon back to the land of Israel, forbade them from intermarrying—indeed, forcing them to give up foreign wives—for fear that Israel would be assimilated, absorbed back into the surrounding peoples of the area.

Moabites are named explicitly. Do not marry them; divorce them if you have.

So right off the bat, the Book of Ruth toes the line by having Elimelech and his wife Naomi move out to Moab; then crosses it, by having their sons marry Moabite women. The scandal of it all! Alas, Elimelech dies. So do both of his sons. And all we have left are a trio of widows: Naomi and her daughters-in-law, Ruth and Orpah. They love each other, clearly. But what future does a widow have, without provision, without protection, without the support of family or clan?

Naomi tells the girls that she plans to return to Israel, to her homeland, but that they should go back to the houses of their fathers, where they might have hope for remarriage. It is a tearful farewell. Orpah obeys Naomi, and goes on her way. But Ruth will not be parted from her mother-in-law. “Where you go, I will go,” she swears to Naomi. “Your people shall be my people, and your god my god.” Even though Naomi has nothing left to offer her, Ruth will not abandon her.

Long story short, they go back to Israel, destitute, and Ruth’s loyalty toward Naomi—her refusal to part with her, and her willingness to beg, to gather the gleanings of a harvested field, all to feed her mother-in-law—catch the eye of a wealthy relative. Here is Ruth, this foreigner, this Moabite, this enemy, showing steadfast love and friendship toward Naomi, a woman with no support, no prospects, no hopes. Because of this obvious goodness, Boaz, the wealthy relative, marries Ruth.

And the child they have together is recognized as the continuation of Naomi’s line. What’s more, that child goes on to be the grandfather of David, greatest of the Israelite kings—and through David, he is the ancestor even of the Messiah. Ruth, the Moabite, therefore, is the nth-great-grandmother of the promised Christ. And so a small story of small women becomes crucial to the cosmic history of salvation!

When was this written? How old is the Book of Ruth? Well, it’s not from the time of the Judges, I’m afraid, despite efforts to make it sound like it. Ruth was probably written around the time of the Exile and Return—some half a millennium after David, but right about the same time that Ezra and Nehemiah were leading exiled Israelites back to the Promised Land. And it’s really not all that long after Deuteronomy was written, in the time of King Josiah, long after the reign of David had reached its bloody conclusion.

See, there are parts of the Bible quite concerned with purity, books like Deuteronomy and Ezra that tell the Israelites to keep in the family, not to marry sinful foreigners. Ruth is a direct refutation of that; she is the embodiment of faithfulness, of steadfast loving-kindness. And she a Moabite! Now, we don’t know, we honestly don’t, whether this was an invented story or a re-presentation of an older tale.

Maybe David did have a Moabite great-grandmother. Or maybe it was just useful to give him one. Either way, the point of the book is clear: purity of blood means nothing; purity of heart is everything! Do away with the trope of the dirty, nasty foreigner. You have a great-grandmother somewhere along the line who was an immigrant, and she was fantastic—man, she was the bee’s knees, maybe the best part of you. Sure, you can hate an alien, but who amongst us can despise his or her own grandma?

Funny how you can go back two and a half millennia and hear the same old stereotypes, the same old blood-and-soil purity, that same fear of the immigrant and the other. Funny just how long the Bible has been telling us that we’re all human, and that your real neighbor is the one who shows love, rather than the one who just looks and sounds like you. Jesus speaks to us of the Good Samaritan, at a time when Samaritans were about as popular as Moabites once had been.

Anyway, you get the idea. I’d best wrap this up or I’ll have nothing more to say next week. But isn’t it wonderful that David had an ancestor named Ruth? Or even if he didn’t, he certainly has one now. And we, I think, are all the better for it.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.