Episodes
Sunday Jan 12, 2014
Losing Everything...but Love
Sunday Jan 12, 2014
Sunday Jan 12, 2014
Rev. Dean Snyder
Ruth 1:1-8; 16-22
It was the time of Judges in Israel before Israel adopted the monarchy.
Israel then was barely a nation. It was a loose confederation of 12 tribes, each tribe led by a Judge. Being a Judge was a part-time job ruling on serious disputes between families and raising a volunteer army when there was a military threat.
During the time of the Judges, as happened with some regularity in the ancient world in one region or another, a famine hit Israel. During a famine people did what they needed to do survive.
There was a man who lived in the town of Bethlehem in the region of Judah named Elimelech who was married to a woman named Naomi. They had two sons named Mahlon and Chilion.
Elimelech and Naomi did what they needed to do to survive in the time of famine. They moved to the country of Moab where there was food.
It may have been a difficult thing for them to do because Israelites as a people hated the Moabites more than anybody on the face of the earth, more even than the Egyptians who had enslaved them.
The Israelites blamed the Moabites for denying them food centuries earlier when they were in the wilderness on the way to the promised land. They blamed the Moabites because even thought they had plenty they would have allowed the Israelites to starve to death in the wilderness.
Years ago I knew a Yugoslavian United Methodist pastor. The failure of the Yugoslavian experiment devastated him. He wrote a book about it entitled Yugoslavian Inferno. The reason the Yugoslavian experiment to bring together the people of different ethnic groups in southeast Europe in the 2oth Century failed is this, he said. People of each ethnic group in every neighborhood, town and village would get together on a Saturday night to drink. As they drank, they would start rehearsing grievances and resentments against the other ethnic groups based on events that had happened 500 years ago. By Sunday morning when they went to their separate houses of worship, they hated each other again the way they did 500 years ago.
That is the way it was with Israel and the Moabites. On a Saturday night when they were drinking they rehearsed 500 year old grievances and hated the Moabites as thought it had happened yesterday.
Israel even passed a law and they put the law in the Bible. Deuteronomy 23:3-4 says: “No … Moabite shall be admitted to the Assembly of the Lord. Even to the tenth generation, none of their descendants shall be admitted to the assembly of the Lord because they did not meet you with food and water on your journey out of Egypt…”
Israel had very strict laws mandating that aliens and foreigners were to be treated well. It was called the law of the ger or alien. But someone had gotten an amendment passed that basically said the law of the ger shall not apply to the Moabites. Israel hated the Moabites.
But during a famine you do what you need to do so Elimelech, his wife Naomi and their sons Mahlon and Chilion moved from Bethlehem of Judah in Israel to Moab.
After they had lived there for a time Elimelech died. Naomi’s son’s married Moabite women.
In those days, most women were dependent upon men to provide for them. Even though her husband had died, Naomi was okay because she had two sons to provide for her. Until 10 years later when both her sons died.
Suddenly Naomi found herself alone, an Israelite woman with no husband and no sons, only two Moabite daughters-in-law, in the land of Moab. She believed God had cursed her.
After the funerals, Naomi sat down with her daughters-in-law Orpah and Ruth. Naomi told them that she was returning to Israel in the hope that some distant relative would take her in as a servant, a weak hope because she was old and had little to offer in the way of hard work. But it seemed to her best option out of many bad ones.
Naomi told Orpah and Ruth to go home to their parents’ houses and find new husbands while they were still young enough to get married again. Because a woman without a man was vulnerable, susceptible to all sorts of abuse and without a way to live. This was the only practical, sensible thing for them to do.
They wept together, these three women. Orpah kissed Naomi and did the only thing that made sense. She left Naomi and went back home to find a new husband.
Ruth would not leave Naomi. She begged Naomi not to make her go. Then she spoke the words that are such a deep statement of commitment that they have often been repeated in wedding ceremonies:
Ruth said to her mother-in-law Naomi: “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!” (Ruth 1:16-17)
Cheryl Anderson says in her book Ancient Laws sand Modern Controversies if this statement had been made by a man to a woman or a woman to a man in the Bible we would assume that it was an expression or romantic love and commitment and that it is only because we read the Bible with a heterosexist bias that we do not see this statement as an expression of romantic love.
“Where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God.”
Naomi and Ruth travel together to Bethlehem of Judea in Israel.
They survive by Ruth gleaning. Our junior high youth glean with the Society of St. Andrew every summer. This year during one of our great days of service we distributed thousands of pounds of potatoes gleaned by the Society of Saint Andrews to hunger programs here in Washington. After food has been harvested, famers voluntarily allow Society of Saint Andrews employees to do a second harvest of food that was not picked up by the harvesting machines farmers use. So they harvest the food that was too small for the machinery to pick up or that the machines missed for to her reasons and distribute the food to hungry people.
In ancient Israel gleaning was a law. Farmers were allowed to harvest their crops only one time. Any food they missed the first time had to be left in the field for poor and hungry people to gather so that they could survive - By law.
As a result of this law, farmers had become very proficient at harvesting almost everything the first time, leaving as little left over as possible.
When Naomi and Ruth arrived in Israel it was the time of the barley harvest. Ruth was gleaning wherever she could and she came into the fields of a rich farmer named Boaz who was a relative of her late father-in-law Elimelech.
Even though Moabites were hated, Boaz was kind to Ruth and allowed her to gather more grain than she could glean because he respected her commitment to care for Naomi.
Boaz said to Ruth: "All that you have done for your mother-in-law since the death of your husband has been fully told me, and how you left your father and mother and your native land and came to a people that you did not know before. 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!" (Ruth 2:11-12)
There was another law in Israel at the time called the law of leverite marriage. The law of leverite marriage said that if a married man died before his wife had had a child; his closest male relative should take the widow as his wife and have children with her.
Surely the law of leverite marriage would not apply to a Moabite woman. An Israelite would not be expected to take a Moabite widow of an Iraelite man as his wife. It would be unheard of.
But Naomi instructed Ruth to make the levrite claim to Boaz, and Boaz accepted and married her. And Boaz and Ruth had a son and Naomi moved into their home to become the baby’s nurse.
We are talking during the season of Epiphany this year about stories of strength and weakness in the Bible as part of our 6 month theme of Strengthening Our Core.
Two widowed women of two different nationalities and cultures and religions in the ancient Middle east were as weak and vulnerable as any two people could be.
But they had something that made them strong. Ruth had an absolute and unconditional and impractical love for Naomi. She would not let her go. She would give up everything to stay with her – her family, her nation, her religion. She had a powerful love.
Naomi had another strength, perhaps even a harder one. She had the strength to let Ruth love her.
The Bible says a very interesting thing. After Ruth made her vow -- “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” – the Bible says this:
“When Naomi saw that she was determined to go with her, she said no more to her.”
Naomi said no more to her. Allowing herself to be loved this much was hard for Naomi.
It may take as much strength to allow someone to love you as it does to love unconditionally.
It was Ruth’s unconditional love and Naomi’s willingness to allow Ruth to love her that saved them … that made it possible for them to survive and, more than to survive, to thrive.
We do not know what happened to Orpah, the daughter-in-law who did the practical, sensible thing and stayed in Moab. We do not know what impact or significance her life may have had.
But we do know about Naomi and Ruth.
Ruth and Boaz’s child was named Obed. Obed grew up and had a son Jessie. Jessie had a son named David who became Israel’s greatest king.
Ruth, the Moabite woman became the great-grandmother of Israelites greatest king. Because he was part Moabite by Israel’s own laws, David should not have been allowed to sit in the assembly of the Lord. God broke Israel’s own laws, what they assumed to be the Lord’s own law, when God anointed David king.
And for we who are Christians, especially we who are gentile Christians, when we read Jesus’ genealogy in the Gospel of Luke, we find this gentile Moabite woman named Ruth there, and we understand that Jesus belongs to us too.
When we have no other power, when we have no other resources, when we are weak and vulnerable, we still have a power than no one or nothing can take away from us. We have the power to love and to receive the love of another.
It reminds us that the community of Christ is not strong when the budget is strong or attendance is strong or its programs are strong. The community of Christ, the children of Naomi and Ruth, the community of Christ is strong when we are growing in love for one another and learning to let ourselves be loved.
Love somebody this week. Let somebody love you.
Comments (0)
To leave or reply to comments, please download free Podbean or
No Comments
To leave or reply to comments,
please download free Podbean App.