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My favorite piece of the Bible may now be Ruth. The lectionary assigned the first chapter from Ruth for this past Sunday, and we continue it the story next week. Before preparing for my sermon, I don’t think I ever paid much attention to the details of the story. After careful reading, I have found so much to talk about in those few verses. Here’s the conclusion of the sermon so you can see if it’s at all something you’re interested in reading:

Church, I believe, is an experiment in God’s love. We come to know the God who is love as we incarnate that love for one another, and invite our neighbors into God’s love. But it’s a risk; the same sort of risk Ruth made when she said to Naomi: “Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people, and your God my God.”

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Title: Becoming Ruth. Date: Nov. 5th, 2006. Texts: Ruth 1:1-18; Psalm 146; Hebrews 9:11-14; Mark 12:28-34.

After Ruth’s husband dies, she makes a life-long commitment to her mother-in-law, Naomi. This is what she says to Naomi: “Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and with me, be it ever so severely, if anything but death separates you and me.” (1:16-17) That’s quite a commitment. It’s a commitment to a love that seems a bit outrageous, irresponsible, even tedious. It’s a story of love that helps us spell out Jesus’ command to “love your neighbor as yourself,” in Mark 12.

In our gospel passage, a teacher of the law seeks after Jesus’ wisdom. He asks, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?” (12:28). And Jesus responds by quoting from Deuteronomy 6: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.” But then Jesus adds a second—he links another commandment from Leviticus 19: Jesus says, “The second is this: Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment great than these.”

Now, this point I’m going to make isn’t very revolutionary—I’m going to make a very basic observation: it’s important to notice that Jesus links the love of God with the love of our neighbor. Loving God is also about loving each other. The two commandments are linked; Jesus ties those two seemingly distinct strands together into one cord—each flows into the other, and teaches us about the other.

If we love God, then we should love the things that God loves. And Psalm 146 gives us a pretty clear picture of what God’s loving-faithfulness looks like. I’ll read from verse 5: “Blessed are those whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the Lord their God, the maker of heaven and earth, the sea, and everything in them—the Lord, who remains faithful forever; who executes justice for the oppressed; who gives food to the hungry. The Lord sets the prisoner free; the Lord gives sight to the blind; the Lord lifts up those who are bowed down; the Lord loves the righteous. The Lord watches over the alien/stranger/foreigner and sustains the fatherless and the widow, but the way of the wicked he brings to ruin.”

It sounds like a rallying cry to get out of our self-centered life-styles and join in God’s love poured out for the world. The God we worship, the God in whom we trust, takes a stand with the oppressed and the vulnerable. And, the Psalm says, the Lord watches over the foreigners and sustains the fatherless and the widow. We can proclaim these words of hope, the hope of God’s social gospel, to the needy when we bring them food to eat, or visit prisoners, or reach out to the immigrants (illegal or otherwise) in our land.

But before I lose you, before your yawns spread like wildfire (I’m even tempted to yawn), before you decide this is the same old story about all the ways we need to be good and nice to poor and oppressed people (which I do think is very important). But before all that, let’s talk about the story of Ruth. I think that story complicates any neat and clean call to the good works of the gospel.

Naomi is stuck in a foreign land—Moab—without a man. And in that culture, that’s a big deal. Not only is she a foreigner, she doesn’t have a man—and a man was the necessary cog that links her into the world of economic and social stability. And Naomi’s two daughters-in-law—Orpah and Ruth—are no help at all, since they’ve been barren for the 10 years of marriage before their husbands died. Now all of them—Naomi, Orpah, and Ruth—are all widows without sons. All of them are now counted among the vulnerable. But Orpah and Ruth can change their situation—they can begin making the choices that put them back on that social ladder. They can return home to their family; there they can live in their father’s household, and maybe even find a husband among their own people.

But Naomi doesn’t really have any good possibilities. There isn’t a way out. Her situation is truly desperate. She can’t pick herself up by her boot-straps. It’s hard to imagine how she might be one of those ‘from rags to riches’ success stories. She’s destined to live off the generosity of others, never returning to the realm of self-sufficiency, to autonomy, to the place where she can get a hold of her destiny and begin to take steps to shape a future. The only decision she can make is to leave Moab and return to Judah, her homeland, and hope and pray that her people will live out those commands of the covenant to take care of the widows.

Here’s one question this part of the story puts to us is, Are we willing to be like Ruth? Naomi sets Ruth and Orpah free to go back to their households, back to their people, back to their land, back to a life full of wonderful possibilities. Orpah returns, but Ruth doesn’t. And, I think at this point Ruth teaches us something important about the gospel. She shows us that the good news can sometimes make our life difficult—you know, sorta like Jesus’ life. Ruth takes the low road, the unfamiliar path, the road less traveled. It’s not the path with the guarantees of security and peace. Ruth chooses a path that risks her future for the sake of an old woman, her mother-in-law. And this is where Ruth shows us the way of the Kingdom: Jesus leads us to our death, to the cross. And at that moment when we can do nothing for ourselves, God receives us into a life beyond our imagination, the resurrected life.

We make ourselves available to God’s new life when we give up the securities of life—all those things comfortable—and walk with the vulnerable, people like Naomi, into what seems like an uncertain future. And then we may come to realize that what is remarkable about the Christian life is that we believe that we live only by the grace of God—our future is not something we achieve, instead, it’s something we receive while we walk along the path Jesus shows us.

But there’s also a danger here. It’s too easy to say that the vulnerable ones, the people like Naomi, are out there waiting desperately for us to lend them a helping hand. It’s too easy to look at vulnerable and needy people with paternalistic eyes. That just goes to serve our savior complexes, our messianic complex, which I think has always been the high and mighty attitude of the affluent and powerful West. If you notice in the story, Naomi doesn’t seem to be very excited to have Ruth around. Naomi urges Ruth two times to go back home. But Ruth won’t do it. Finally, Naomi, possibly reluctantly, gives Ruth something like a passive acceptance. v18—“When Naomi realized that Ruth was determined to go with her, she stopped urging her.” There’s no sign of gratitude. Naomi doesn’t say or do anything to Ruth to make her feel like she’s done the right thing. It’s almost like just turned and walked down the path to Judah and let Ruth follow if she wanted.

Maybe it’s because Ruth is a foreigner, a stranger to Israel, a Moabite—a country with a checkered relationship with Judah. How would Naomi be received by her people if she brought back a Moabite woman? At the beginning of the story she left Bethlehem and her people, starving from a famine, and escaped into Moab, a foreign land with foreign gods. Naomi abandoned her people. And now she is returning when the times are better. And she comes back without her husband and two sons, the seeds of the people—instead she brings a foreign woman. That’s not a very good exchange.
Naomi does not receive Ruth as a gift, as a welcomed traveler, as a source of help. If we skip down a few verses, to the end of the chapter, this is what Naomi said to the women of Bethlehem when she arrived: “I went away full, but the Lord has brought me back empty” (v21). Even though Ruth is at her side, Naomi calls herself empty. Ruth is invisible to her.

Things now become a bit hazy, if we’re trying to figure out how to be like Ruth. Naomi doesn’t quite see how Ruth brings anything to the table. And we’re not quite sure what Ruth thought she could offer to begin with. The story doesn’t tell us. She’s just another vulnerable woman committing herself to a widow: Two needy women traveling into a dismal future. How is that any better?

At the very least, Ruth teaches us that what we think we can bring to the table, what we think we can offer is almost secondary—as I said, it’s not even mentioned in the story. What she gives Naomi is herself, her simple presence, and ultimately her body, her womb where she will bear a son, a descendant, for Naomi. In case you didn’t know, Ruth is one of the few women the gospel of Matthew (the first chapter) names in the lineage that births Jesus, the Messiah of Israel. It’s Ruth, a Moabite woman who seemingly has nothing to offer Naomi but her presence.

And that’s what we have to offer. We are a people, a church, that has plenty that we think we can offer our community. We have many skills and blessings we can share with others who don’t have as much as we have. But all that is secondary. Don’t get me wrong; sure, we should offer all that we can to the needy. We must not forget that the God we worship, the God of Psalm 146, is a God who cares about the vulnerable. But Ruth teaches us that the most important thing we can give the world is our presence, our existence. And this isn’t a call for pride—we must be careful about that. That’s not it at all. That’s what I mean when I say that all our reasons to think we have something great to offer—all those things we can think of are only secondary. And maybe, if we pay attention to the story of Ruth, most of the time we are quite wrong about what we think is so important about what we can offer—and we end up trying to help a Naomi who doesn’t think what we can offer is all that great, no matter what we think of ourselves.

The only reason we can say that our presence matters, and that it’s something to give, is because our existence doesn’t belong to us. We are not our own. We don’t possess ourselves. We belong to God, and find our self as we receive the gift of God’s presence. We meet together because God has breathed on our deadened lives the Holy Spirit. We come together because we are usually quite self-centered, and we need this time when we can open ourselves to God’s presence, and to each other, and receive the gifts of the Spirit, so we can offer this same presence to the world.

Church, I believe, is an experiment in God’s love. We come to know the God who is love as we incarnate that love for one another, and invite our neighbors into God’s love. But it’s a risk; the same sort of risk Ruth made when she said to Naomi: “Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people, and your God my God.”