Awakened Hope: Ruth 2:1-23

Sermon given at Brunswick Presbyterian Church in Troy, NY on 2007-08-09 and 2007-08-12.

Last week Judy Wilson introduced us to the book of Ruth, and the ways in
which its sweet idyllic nature contrasts with the dark and bloody book of
Judges. It is difficult to follow Judy, not only because of the skill and
grace with which she delivered her sermon, but also because of the nature
of the text; it’s awkward to be a man delivering a message based on one
of the few books in the Bible where a woman is allowed to take center
stage.

It is a rare situation we are dealing with. Ruth is one of only two books
named after women in our Bible; the other is Esther, and it is
interesting that both books deal with the positive aspects of
intermarriage, a concept that runs against the current of much of the
Hebrew Scriptures.

When we read a book like Ruth it is important to have a sense of the time
and place in which it was written, and the attitudes and assumptions of
the original audience. When we read that Ruth is a Moabite, it causes us
no alarm; what is a Moabite to us?

Likewise the fact that Ruth is a woman does not create the expectations
for us that it would have for the original audience, so it is difficult
for us to immediately grasp how daring this story is, how drastically it
inverts traditional expectations.

In fact, when we look at Ruth in the context of the Old Testament, and
especially in its place in the canon following the violence of Judges
and much of the Pentateuch, it seems to involve a challenge to many of
the assumptions that might come from reading these earlier books.

Books like Ruth, Jonah, Job, Ecclesiastes, these are books that run
against expectations, books that offer counter-traditions that contrast
with what could otherwise seem to be unchallenged assumptions: that men
are normative, and women are the deficient other, that God’s concerns to
not go beyond Israel, that a moral and obedient life always results in
prosperity and well being.

Ecclesiastes tells us that even if God does bless you with riches; it can
be a curse in disguise. Job tells us that an honest life may earn
calamity, Jonah is about how God’s love and concern extend beyond Israel.
Ruth counters expectations about gender and about the stranger among us.

The Bible is a complex book. It contains texts composed over a great span
of time, with themes and narratives that interweave, double back, sharply
contrast, and overlay each other: it’s a type of mosaic. As with any
mosaic you have to step back a bit and try and take in the whole thing to
understand what it is depicting.

So it is with the Bible’s attitude toward women. The charge is often made
that the Bible is a patriarchal text that oppresses and degrades women.
The Bible has certainly been used for that purpose, even as it has been
used to defend slavery, warfare, and the oppression of various
minorities. There are at least two responses to this that are common,
logical, and wrong.

The first is to embrace the patriarchy as God ordained; to proclaim that God made man to lead, and women to follow, preferably three steps behind. In these media savvy times this stance is
rarely made so blatantly.  Whatever language is used, however, the basic
message is the same: that the male dominated social structure of ancient
Israel is the universal norm for all people everywhere. The other error
agrees that the Bible advances notions of male dominance and superiority,
but concludes that this invalidates its worth; this approach could be said to throw the baby out with the
bathwater, even as the first approach could said to drown the baby in the
bathwater.

Both of these errors result from failing to account for the voices of dissent that occur within the Bible. Books like Ruth act as self correcting mechanisms that cause us to reevaluate assumptions that we might otherwise make. The very fact that we have a book named after a woman, a book where two women are the central characters, is jarring.

Tom Stoppard wrote a well known play called Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
are Dead, which retells the story of Hamlet from the vantage point of two
minor characters; that which was peripheral moves to center stage, and it
changes how perceive characters and relationships. Having a biblical
story that revolves around two women has the same effect. And this is a
story about two women: in fact the characters of Elimlech, Mahlon, and
Killian are so minor that they pass away without saying a word, and we
know nothing of them other than there names. We don’t even know which
brother Ruth was married to until the last chapter.

Ruth is going to have something new and unique to say about gender. But
that is not all; the story also has much to say about the stranger, the
alien.

Many scholars believe that Ruth was written in the post exilic period of
Ezra and Nehemiah. You may remember the story; after years of exile, the
Israelites are permitted to return to their homeland and rebuild their
temple and the walls of their city. You may remember that we did a sermon
series on this period a few years ago; there was a lot of emphasis on the
wall, and I kept wondering anyone was going to work Pink Floyd into their
sermon, but it never happened.

There was a remnant of Israelites who had never gone into captivity, and
many of these men took gentile wives and had children with them during
the period of the exile. After they were reunited with the majority of
Israel and the rebuilding had begun, there was a movement to purify the
people from foreign influences, including the worship of strange Gods.
The gentile wives and their children were seen as bad influences, and
their Israelite husbands and father were ordered to divorce and disown
them. The wives and children were sent away, essentially abandoned. A
similar situation took place in the middle Ages, when the medieval church
ruled that priests should be celibate; priests who were married were
forced to abandon their wives and children. A horrendous scene, when you
think about it.

The Book of Ruth may be a reaction to the expulsion of gentile wives. It
can be seen as an argument that gentile women have value in God’s eyes
that God is more gracious than his followers want him to be. You find a
similar theme in the book of Jonah; although it gets lost in debates
about how literal or historical the story is supposed to be. The theme of
Jonah has little to do with marine biology; it is a satirical story about
how God’s grace extends beyond Israel. For this reason many scholars also
place the composition of Jonah around the post exilic period.

We can see Ruth as a subversive argument for the value of the outsider,
the despised, the rejected; a foreshadowing of the teachings and actions
of Christ. In his conversation with the Samaritan woman at the well, in
his telling of the story of the Good Samaritan,  in his indemnification
without the undesirable elements of society and his free association with
women: ”A Rabbi teaching women? “Unheard of, absurd!” Christ was making
the same point as the book of Ruth, only in a much more direct and
confrontational fashion. Movement in the Bible is in the direction of
including more and more formerly excluded peoples, people who were
excluded because they were thought sinful, impure, or inferior; if these
themes only become explicit in the Gospels, they were present in implicit
forms in the Old Testament.

Throughout the book of Ruth her ancestry is emphasized. She is not a
generic foreigner; she is a Moabite. The descendents of Moab were
despised above almost all other gentiles by the Israelites; they were
said to be descended from the incestuous coupling of Lot with his
daughters after the destruction of Sodom. The Israelites believed that
Moabites were disposed toward perversion because of this, and that as
descendents of the city of Sodom they had inherited that town’s notorious
inhospitality. These reputations were reinforced during the long trek
from Egypt to the Promised Land, where the early Israelites had several
run-ins with the Moabites.

So not only is this story about a woman, this is a story about a woman
from a despised race, a poor woman from a despised race. Some of the Old
Testament stories can give off a whiff of “Health and Wealth” theology,
the idea that if you play by the rules God is obligated to reward you
financially and physically. Christ countered this argument saying that it
his kingdom the first would be last and the last would be first, Ruth
will follow suite.

In chapter two, we begin to see just what kind of person Ruth is; and
surprise, she counters all of the stereotypes about women. Ruth is in a
predicament, and what does she do? She comes up with a plan. Women were
not supposed to be problem solvers. They were not supposed to take the
initiative. They were supposed to be helpless and hopeless without
husbands, fathers, or sons to take care of them and make decisions for
them.

The Sunday school picture that you often get of Ruth, standing up there
on the flannelgraph, concentrates on her loyalty, and she is indeed
loyalty, in contrast to the stereotype of the inhospitable and
treacherous Moabite. This can be emphasized to the point, however, that
she almost becomes someone you want to apt on the head. Good Ruth, good
girl. She can come off in these depictions as clingy, sentimental and
weepy, as in those famous lines from John n Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale

Perhaps the selfsame song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn

I don’t see a weepy Ruth here, and I don’t see a lapdog here. I see a
Ruth who is too busy ripping through fields of leftover grain to stand in
tears. Boaz’s servant says that she has been working all day without
stopping. If she has any homesickness, she doesn’t stop to dwell on it.

She is the soul of practicality. Have you ever noticed how women are so
much more practical than men? Men are helpless Romantics. Women may be
the primary consumers of Romance novels and soaps operas but they know
how to compartmentalize; OK, that was fantasy – now back to work. Men
have a much harder time separating their daydreams from reality, and they
and their families often pay a high price because of it.

Ruth takes a clear headed look at the situation and runs her plan of
action by Naomi. If she lived in our time she might take advantage of
some government program for widows to gain the skills to land a decent
paying job and lift herself and Naomi out of poverty. Those options were
not available to her, so she took advantage of the opportunities that
were. She instead plans to engage in gleaning, a early form of welfare
whereby the destitute had the right to take whatever crops were missed by
the professional harvesters, as well as crops in the corners of the
fields, crops that landowners were forbidden to harvest for just this
reason. Interesting that Ruth, a recent convert to Judaism, would be
familiar with this practice; there was no equivalent in the surrounding
cultures. She must have done her homework. Again, in our time she would
have taken steps to land a good paying job, in her time the only escape
from poverty is marriage, so she tells Naomi that she plans to glean
behind someone “...in whose eyes I may find favor”.

There was no dewy eyes romanticism in the ancient world’s understanding
of marriage. It is not about "love", or not what we call love. An ancient
Israelite who was presented with a look at our customs and the
sentimentality with which we view the institution and courtship, the
sheer volume of love songs, romance novels, love stories, romantic
comedies would be as flabbergasted as Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof, who
struggles to grasp the idea that his daughters want to marry for
love..."Love, " he tells Golden, "It's a new style?" Ruth is not looking
for a Romeo to sweep her off of her feet, she is struggling for survival
in a world where a woman’s only means of avoiding severe poverty and
possible starvation was in attaching to a man.

Ruth’s intentions are pragmatic; her physical attractiveness is just
another tool to help dig her and Naomi out of their predicament. As it
turns out, it will be her character rather than her appearance that
causes her future husband to swoon.

Character before appearance! Men are often judged this way, but even in
our own time of trophy wives and female newscasters who dare not age a
day over 40 this is eye opening.

Sometimes Ruth is referred to as a love story, and it is, but not in the
sense that we are accustomed to. It is not a boy meets girl story,
although that does happen. The focus of the story is on the female
characters, and the only real declaration of love in the story (as
opposed to declarations of worth) is the one made by Ruth to Naomi back
in the first chapter, a declaration so passionate that it is often used
as a wedding vow:

Whither thou goest I will go, where thou lodgest I will lodge, thy
people shall be my people, and thy god  my god, where thou diest, will I
die, and there will I be buried: the Lord do so to me, and more also, if
ought but death part thee and me. 

Sorry for the King James, but contemporary translations don’t do that
passage justice. The love relationship at the center of this story is the
one that bounds the two women so tightly; they identify so closely with
each other that by the end of the book Ruth seems to be acting as a
surrogate who carries Naomi’s lost dreams of motherhood for her. We are
told that Ruth cleaves to her, the word cleave being the same word used
in the book of Genesis when we are told that men should leave their
father and mother and cleave to their wife. Here it is Ruth who has left
father and mother, and in this as in so many other ways, she has taken
the male role in this story. This is not to suggest that there is any
erotic nature to their relationship; Eros is only one form of love,
although, again, our love stories and songs tend to give it an
inappropriate amount of attention, perhaps because it is the only form of
Love that can be used to sell products.

In a time when women were property (notice Boaz asks, ‘who’s girl is
this?’) and marriage was a contractual exchange of goods, it is not
surprising that some women might find a soul mate in another woman, even
one of her in-laws, as opposed to the man the are bound to, and that
seems to be what has happened here.

Ruth and Naomi’s relationship puts a spin on other earlier Biblical
traditions as well. Most of the relationships between women seem to be
competitive. Sarah abuses Hagar, Leah is jealous of Rachel. Constant bickering, “just like women”. The bickering usually involves a man, but here there is no love triangle between Naomi,
Ruth, and Boaz. There is no sense of jealousy between the two women,
because Boaz is not a goal for either of them; he is instead a means to a
goal. The real goals are there survival, there remaining together, and
the ability to continue the family line.

If sometimes women in the Old Testament seem to exist to further a family
line, in this story once again, Ruth seems to be playing this role, using
Boaz to achieve her goal of bring feelings of worth back to Naomi by
indirectly continuing the line of Elimilech.

Meanwhile, God is at work behind the scenes, through the fortunate circumstance, the
chance encounter, the unconscious motivation. But we also see the work of
God being done by the conscious decision of people to act.

This is a story about people going above and beyond. Ruth going beyond her required
loyalties, Boaz going beyond what is required of him. God does not cause
a spring to miraculously appear out of the ground, he does not feed Ruth
and Naomi manna...this is not that kind of bible story. In this story God
works through circumstance and through the willingness of human agents to
grow and follow their best inclinations.

Boaz does that here. His appraisal of Ruth does not even seem to take
into account her Moabite origins. He only registers the quality of her
character. He foreshadows Christ in this, as Christ always welcomed the
tax collector, the Samaritan, the leper, based on the worth that he saw
in them, the potential, not what society saw.

Christ’s teachings might have resulted from the seed planted by this
story, a story that he would have learned as a child. For that matter,
Christ himself was a product of the events described in this story, as
was King David. This had to be a difficult concept for the original
audience to deal with: how can you judge people by their ancestors when
your greatest king was descended from one of those dreadful Moabites?

Contemporary Christians Also might be given pause by the thought of Our
Savior being descended from all sorts of undesirables, from Ruth the
Moabite to Rahab the prostitute to Jacob the liar and thief.

Of course, in our time the presence of a female protagonist doesn’t catch
us off guard, and most of us would be fine with Moabites living next
door, but the lessons from this book still reverberate. Sexism is not
dead, although we have come a long way. Less than a century ago, women
had almost no legal rights, no property rights, and no right to vote, as
late as 1918  Texas  law stated that everyone had the right to vote except
“idiots, imbeciles, aliens, the insane, and women.” Now there is a real
possibility that the next president of the United States could be a woman
(although I doubt she’ll get many votes in Texas”) unfortunately, most of
the strongest opposition to woman’s rights comes from some areas of the
church. We don’t fear Moabites, but we each have  our own set of people
who we see as “the other”: people of different political convictions, of
different ethnicities, different faiths, different lifestyles.

In any group that makes us uncomfortable there are going to be people who
are just as we feared; and there are people who are nothing like we
expect. We don’t have to agree with everybody on everything, and we don’t
have to relax our standards…Jesus didn’t; but he accepted everyone. There
is a fine line between acceptance and approval, but that line exists.

Finding subversive counter-traditions like we see here in Ruth opens the
Bible up, and opens us up to the unexpected. It empowers us to know that
things are not frozen, there is change, God continue to speak in ways we
never expect, though those that we would think unlikely. Philosopher and
psychological pioneer Carl Jung called God “the name by which I designate
all things which cross my willful path violently and recklessly, all
things which upset my subjective views, plans, and intentions and change
the course of my life for better or worse."

Our God is a dangerous God, a troublemaker, an undesirable. He moves into
neighborhoods where he’s not wanted and makes such a racket tat no one
can get to sleep. Maybe this God is calling you to some uncomfortable
place, to some new vantage point that will change your perception and
expectations. Maybe you are being called to action as Ruth was, some work
to be doe, some need to be met. Maybe you need to break out of a role
that other people see you in, a role that is not you at all.. There is a
Ruth in all of us, an alien, disposed and discounted, lost in a strange
land and counted as worthless, but with the potential to achieve
unimagined greatness. The same God who gave opportunity to Ruth gives us
opportunity to us today; it is up to us to answer the call.