A Sermon Delivered by The Rev. John D. Painter at Centenary United Methodist Church Metuchen, New Jersey
November 8, 2009

Text: Ruth 1:1-18; 3:1-5; 4:13-17
It is one of my favorite books in the entire Bible. It is a magnificent love story with re-markable overtones and subtleties that make it as rich and relevant today as it was when first told back in the post-Babylonian-exile days of Ezra and Nehemiah. It is the story of Ruth, and of her faithful and devoted love for her mother-in-law, Naomi. It begins where it will end, in Bethlehem of Judea, but it reaches across boundaries both political and social in its winding journey home.

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. —Ruth 1:1-18, NRSV

A well-known wedding song has emerged out of these opening verses of Ruth’s story. I always get a secret “kick” out of hearing it sung at a wedding when I remember that it is a pledge of fealty made by one woman to another…indeed, a pledge of love and loyalty by a daughter-in-law to her mother-in-law. It causes me to break out in a kind of knowing smirk. Many of you will know the song. It was first made famous by Les Paul and Mary Ford in 1954, and later sung by Perry Como, among others:

Whither thou goest, I will go.
Wherever thou lodgest, I will lodge.
Thy people will be my people my love,
Whither thou goest, I will go!
For as in that story, long ago,
The same sweet love story, now is so,
Thy people shall be my people my love,
Whither thou goest, I will go!

Well, back to Ruth’s story, following that mercifully brief musical interlude… Naomi and Ruth do indeed travel from distant Moab to Bethlehem, where they live on the edge of sur-vival in a patriarchal culture that has at least made some provisions for them. They survive largely from the generosity of Naomi’s kinsman, Boaz, as he follows the ancient laws of glean-ing. Boaz has specifically directed his field hands to be certain to leave enough barley behind when they are harvesting the fields so that Ruth can find adequate grain for her and Naomi to survive. When Boaz provides additional food to Ruth at a harvest lunch, she asks him why he is being so kind to her—especially because she is a “foreigner.” Boaz tells her he admires the devo-tion she has had for Naomi since the death of her own husband, and her willingness to leave her own family behind in Moab and travel here to a foreign land to live among people she does not know in order to provide support for her mother-in-law.

It’s a nice sentiment, but you begin to get the impression that Boaz is also kind of struck by the winsome beauty of this Moabite woman who spends numberless hours toiling among his ears of barley seeking to gather enough grains to provide bread for herself and her mother-in-law. Indeed, as Ruth’s story moves along, the plot (as they say) thickens:

Naomi her mother-in-law said to her, “My daughter, I need to seek some security for you, so that it may be well with you. Now here is our kinsman Boaz, with whose young women you have been working. See, he is winnowing barley tonight at the threshing floor. Now wash and anoint yourself, and put on your best clothes and go down to the threshing floor; but do not make yourself known to the man until he has finished eating and drinking. When he lies down, observe the place where he lies; then, go and uncover his feet and lie down; and he will tell you what to do.” She said to her, “All that you tell me I will do.”

So Boaz took Ruth and she became his wife. When they came together, the LORD made her conceive, and she bore a son. Then the women said to Naomi, “Blessed be the LORD, who has not left you this day without next-of-kin; and may his name be renowned in Israel! He shall be to you a restorer of life and a nourisher of your old age; for your daughter-in-law who loves you, who is more to you than seven sons, has borne him.” Then Naomi took the child and laid him in her bosom, and became his nurse. The women of the neighborhood gave him a name, say-ing, “A son has been born to Naomi.” They named him Obed; he became the father of Jesse, the father of David. —Ruth 3: :1-5; 4:13-17, NRSV

At first glance, the book of Ruth may seem to be the most inoffensive book in the whole Bible. Set in the early period of Israel’s history, long before Israel’s first king, it appears to be just a delightful little romance novelette. Or is it? As Nathan Nettleton has noted in his reflec-tions on the book of Ruth, Fiery Politics and the Romance Novel, “Sometimes a seemingly idyl-lic story can have a powerful sting in the tail—it all depends on what else is going on at the time the story is told.”

And a lot is going on when Ruth’s story was first told. Don’t just take my word for it. Pick up your Bibles later today and read Ezra 9:1-10:5 and Nehemiah 13:23-27. Because, al-though Ruth’s story was set in early Israel, it was first composed long after the time of King David. It was written during the years following the Babylonian Exile during the time of the prophets Ezra and Nehemiah when Israel and Jerusalem were being restored. It was during this period that Israel entered into a significant era of exclusivity. There was a desire to return to what people imagined had once been a “clearly defined, pure community.” (It was entirely in their imagination, for Israel’s blood lines had never been that “pure” and free from foreign “contami-nation,” if you will.) They believed that God had punished them with the years of exile because they had become impure; and, worse yet, during the time they spent in Babylonia, many Jews had intermarried—taking Persian wives and husbands.

Now, having returned to Jerusalem and Israel, new laws were being passed that were di-rected against those among them who were “alien.” Perhaps the most extreme and horrible ex-pression of this obsession with “purity” were the laws requiring compulsory divorce from for-eign wives (notice the laws didn’t mention foreign husbands), and the exiling of them and their children. Can you begin to imagine the kind of trauma, pain and needless suffering this would have caused families as they were torn apart and women and children left destitute, all in the name of religious zeal and ethnic purity?

In the book of Ruth…as well as the contemporary books of Jonah and Joel…there is clear evidence that those who championed ethnic cleansing did not have everything their own way. Dissenting voices were raised, and those voices cried out for a return to an earlier, more inclusive vision of what it meant to be a community that was faithful to God.

“Seen against this background, this lovely little romance novel becomes a radical critique of a dominant social vision and a clarion call to an alternative vision of faithfulness.” Ruth was a Moabite woman—one of the nationalities specifically condemned by Ezra and Nehemiah. However, she is portrayed in her story as being more faithful than seven Jewish sons and spells out how early Jewish laws of justice and welfare applied equally to foreigners such as her. “Thus, in her story, a Moabite woman is portrayed as the ideal ‘Jewish’ wife and the law is shown to not only accept her marriage to a Jewish man, but command another Jewish man to marry her when she is widowed. And to cap it off, it ends by telling us that from the offspring of this ‘foreign wife’ comes the all-time great Jewish hero, King David. In the face of this policy of ethnic cleansing and compulsory divorce, we hear the alternative view put into the mouth of Boaz when he answers Ruth’s question about why he would be kind to her, a foreigner, by point-ing to her faithfulness and saying, ‘May the LORD reward you for your deeds, and may you have a full reward from the LORD, the God of Israel, under whose wings you have come for refuge!’”

Nathan Nettleton points out that, “The purity of this earlier version then is the purity of what people do rather than the purity of their origins. Matthew has a similar emphasis in the ge-nealogy of Jesus at the start of his gospel [Matthew 1:1-17]. He lists all the fathers, but mentions just five mothers—Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba, and Mary. All five were either foreigners, or had some shadow of sexual scandal hanging over their heads, or both. Even the purity of the Messiah is not about the ethnic of moral purity of his origins. As Martin Luther King jr [sic] went on to put it, the dream is of a day when all people will be judged not by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.”

So now you can see how this seemingly idyllic little romance story winds up with quite a “sting in the tail,” as Nettleton puts it. It placed some significant challenges before its hearers in the period when Israel was hell-bent on maintaining ethnic purity at all costs. It reminded them that even the magnificent King David was “not a purebred Israelite, but had a Moabite great-grandmother of astonishing faith and love.”

But it isn’t enough to see how radical the book of Ruth was in the fourth century before Christ. The larger question for us is, what are we to make of its message in our own context nearly two-and-a-half millennia later? What vision of inclusion are we going to champion when so many around us would seek to draw boundaries of exclusion? What about our life together in the community of faith at large, and in this community of faith in particular? With so many of us here who have come from other lands, and who celebrate the unique richness of our multi-cultural diversity, how do we translate our vision of radical hospitality and inclusive community to the world out there?…a world that often does not value and celebrate such diversity.
Martin Copenhaver observes that, “The family and the church are both places where we have the opportunity to learn to live with people we did not choose. Our fidelity to those we are stuck with can be a reflection of the fidelity of a God who is stuck with us all.” We remember that Ruth had a choice to stay with her family; others may not have that possibility open to them, and the only road may be the road ahead to a new and different community. The church is a fam-ily of choice, and as such we have the invitation, the call—and, it would appear, the joyful re-sponsibility—to offer hospitality to those who have not known hospitality in their own lives. Kate Huey, a United Church of Christ Pastor, says, “I once had the privilege of watching Martin Copenhaver baptize a baby and then carry the child around the church, saying, ‘In this family of faith, water is thicker than blood.’ I remember those moving words to this day as a reminder of our baptismal ties to one another, and the covenant with one another in which we live.”

The covenant of caring and fidelity is at the heart of who we are as the church—the Body of Christ. G. Malcolm Sinclair has written a powerful commentary on Ruth in Feasting on the Word. He describes Ruth as “not a holy book in which ecclesiastical structures and systems abound. God, mentioned only in passing, is assumed to be the glue in life rather than some extra-neous royal being before whom all ordinary conversation stops.” In truth, you could draw the conclusion that God is “between the lines” of Ruth’s story, just as God is always present in our own lives, whether we recognize it or not.

Our God is an awesome God of abundance, generosity and inclusion. And God in-vites…nay compels…us to practice that same kind of generosity and inclusion with one another and with those outside the walls of this church. Just like the abundance of herself that Ruth of-fered to Naomi, so God asks us to offer persistent, unfailing and generous love to all. In these days some new babies will be entering the family of faith at Centenary. We haven’t seen them yet, but we are thinking about them as we consider how we will continue to offer a community of welcome, a home and a family where they will learn to think not only of their own welfare, but of the welfare and well-being of others. We will teach them to dream of a better world for all of God’s children. And in them…as the people of Ruth’s time did with her beloved son, Obed…we will thank God for the future, for unmitigated hope, and for all that is yet to be.

Amen.
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