In the thirteen and a half years I have served this congregation, we have gathered for worship after all manner of events. After Newtown, when the pain of that December atrocity mixed with the annual children’s Christmas pageant. After civil uprisings in Baltimore following the death of Freddie Gray, when the brokenness of our city felt close, raw. After the 2019 Special General Conference of the United Methodist Church, when the outrage was mixed with resolve, and through three other presidential elections. Each event and the subsequent worship, in their own way, came accompanied by a sense of the ground shifting, whether than shift included a reckoning with injustice, grief at deep loss or the call for change. Now we are here, the Sunday after the 2024 election. And the ground-shifting sense comes anew, in all its gravity, all our accompanying emotions. It comes with cries to listen, to notice, to feel and be attentive to how God might speak.
When I was a little girl and would, on occasion, find myself caught up in some type of chaos or another, I would approach my mother, seeking direction, consolation, or hope. Her remedy often would be to tell me a story of earlier times. Sometimes she’d remind me of the hardships of my grandparents, making do amid the Great Depression in the dust bowl of Oklahoma. Sometimes she’d speak of her decision to leave her hometown and settle in the new frontier that was Orlando, FL in the mid-1960’s. Sometimes she’d tell of the first time she heard my father’s deep voice on the phone, inviting her on a blind date. If I was really struggling, she’d retell the story of my birth, with its joy, waiting, struggle and love. There was an underlying message to all this story-telling. You have a family. You have a history. Here are the values that shaped us. Here is love, and all of this will see you through.
Holy scripture does the very same thing. It tells the overarching story of God’s loving kindness to us, God’s creatures, through series of stories about wandering in the wilderness, searching for freedom, about long-awaited children, dreams cast into the night sky, about feuding siblings and jealous spouses, about prophets speaking power to foolish kings, about a crucified redeemer, whose resurrection renews the world. Through all God’s gifts and our mistakes, through the triumphs and heartaches, the message beats a steady pulse. Here is your story. Don’t forget it: faithful God, wandering people, the honest struggles to live truthfully, a God who saves.
Today we hear one chapter of the story through the biblical book of Ruth, one of only two books in scripture named for a woman and a book in which two women, Ruth and her mother-in-law Naomi, are the primary characters. The story begins in Bethlehem and by its end will return to that beloved city of David, but to get there the story cuts a harsh path through famine and forced migration to the neighboring enemy country of Moab. Naomi’s family leaves their home because there is no food. Here in a hostile land, death comes quickly, claiming her husband and two sons, leaving behind three widows. Naomi is the oldest. Her daughters-in-law are young enough to marry again. I am bitter, states Naomi, and of course she is. She has lost the most precious pieces of her life. The structure of her society has worked against her. She is without property, protection, or a viable future.
With few other options, Naomi starts a return journey to Bethlehem, bidding her daughters-in-law to make their own treks back to their family homes. Ruth has other inclinations. “I will not leave you,” she cries. “Where you go, I will go also.”
It is a stirring declaration of loyalty; a pledge of companionship, whatever lies ahead. Read at weddings, the dialogue stirs up our covenantal ties, the binding of each of us to another. This alone is a key message of Ruth’s story. Relationships can save us. Being persistently, authentically, lovingly present to each other pushes back against despair. Through this message, scripture offers an ethical imperative. We belong to each other. New, life-giving paths are forged when we declare to another: whatever burden you’ve carried, I also, willingly, carry it. Let us walk this journey together.
But there is another dimension existing in this covenantal exchange; a dimension often unnoticed with our focus on the loyal devotion of Ruth to Naomi. It involves the cultural and political intersections created in the bond between, Naomi, a native of Bethlehem of Judea, and Ruth, a Moabite. Friendly relationships do not exist between Judea and Moab. Ruth is a foreigner. Her marriage to Naomi’s son is one made across ethnic lines. Ruth is offering to accompany Naomi into territory hostile to her people, herself, and her body. So the relationship that will save Naomi, in the end, comes not from within her expected, closed circle, but from someone beyond it. The foreign woman, who could have been classified an “other,” is revealed instead to be a channel of God’s grace.
One of the most disturbing aspects of this year’s presidential campaign has been the use of dehumanizing rhetoric, language that lies, insults, divides, and casts neighbors as enemies. Such speech pulls us apart, it moves us away from truth and from each other. Scripture draws us into a different direction. Ruth could have come up with all manner of reasons to turn her back on Naomi’s predicament. They were of different tribes. They were related by marriage, and the son/husband between them has died. Naomi, as an older, vulnerable widow, has nothing to offer Ruth. There is every disadvantage and no advantage in casting her future with her mother-in-law. Except for loyalty. Except for love. Ruth chooses to take the risk of radical connection, to believe we belong to each other. She chooses to absorb Naomi’s loss as her own loss, and in so doing, creates a path toward life. This is the call of the people of God. It is the model of living together that is needed for today, tomorrow, and all the days ahead. It is grounded in the truth of God. For we serve a radically inclusive, utterly free God, who wants to draw us closer, especially to those like Naomi who are vulnerable, over-looked and undefended in our society.
When Ruth and Naomi reach Bethlehem, it is harvesting time. Their only job opportunity is to go into the fields to glean the barley left behind after the formal reaping. It is lowly, back-breaking work. It leaves women open to harassment, and offers little beyond the food needed for one day. Naomi knows a more permanent solution is needed. So she enlists Ruth’s aid in calling her kinsmen to accountability, for Israelite law decreed a widow was to be cared for by the brother of the deceased man. A plan is hatched. Ruth risks again, and Boaz, a man within the extended family circle, takes Ruth as his wife. A son is conceived. A child of the future comes into Naomi’s world, one whose family line will one day give the world David, Israel’s most beloved leader. And so the story that began in death, displacement, fear, and despair ends with redemption, birth, and future hope.
How exactly does this redemption happen? Boaz plays his part, yes, but really it is Ruth and Naomi, figuring a way out of no way, bonding together, taking risks, calling others to accountability. Theirs is a survival story. It is a tale full of survival strategies. Don’t go it alone. Reject false categories of enmity or exclusion. Refuse to settle for any less than a life of love, belonging and service. It is in our willingness to belong to each other that steps are found from bitterness into birthing, from death into life.
Where is God in the story of Ruth? Like her sister biblical book, Esther, God seemingly operates in the background, hidden a bit, but not absent, not for a second. God sees all the pain, all the loss, all the feelings that the future is disappearing right before their eyes. God knows it all. And grace comes, hope comes, from unexpected sources. God acts through Ruth’s faithfulness to Naomi, through Naomi’s willingness to travel across boundaries and back, their joint willingness to be creative, strategic, and to claim a life of love, belonging and family is what God intends for us all. So in whatever emotions you are feeling in the wake of Trump’s re-election, in whatever fears, worries, and dreams you are turning over in your mind, claim the truths of this sacred story. It is our story. Our God is a God who redeems. Our God is a God who saves, through loving-kindness and wily survival skills. Our God is gracious in giving directions, offering unexpected rescue, even amid the harshness of an undesired path, providing options for life when it seems death has won. The stories of God began long before we were born and will continue long after we are gone, and also encircle us now. So live the truths of this story. We belong to God. We belong to each other. We will find the way home, praying, risking, and calling others into the story, until all know God’s ever-available option for good, faithful life. Amen.