This Sunday’s readings include the passage in the first book of Samuel when people ask the prophet Samuel to ask God for a king like other nations to fight their battles for them; and when Samuel brings this request to the Lord, he’s told to tell them what to expect when they have a human king instead of relying on God is their king. They’re going to find themselves being taxed and required to work for him and have their sons and daughters serving the royal household.… and so the period of the Judges ends and the period of the Kings is about to begin.
There’s a short story in the Old Testament that fits in right at the end of the story of Judges, just before the beginning of the story of the Kings, and it is called Ruth.
Jewish communities chant the story of Ruth as part of the celebration of Shavuot, the wheat harvest festival, which begins, this year, on June 11th.
Ruth is at the outset a foreign widow, destitute in a time of famine, but by the end of the story, the community is hailing her as a matriarch named in the same breath as the wives of Jacob.
And indeed, in the epilogue to this four chapter story, we see that her grandson becomes the second king of Israel.
What ties these stories together for me is the net importance of loyalty, steadfastness, and kindness, over ethnic or other identity.
Who is my family? Who are my kin? In the gospels, Jesus says whoever serves God is his family. They are those who with me are obedient to an authority higher than any earthly authority. They do justice, love kindness, and care for both friend and stranger.
So here is a brief summary of the story of Ruth:
At a time of famine, a husband and wife set out from Bethlehem across the Jordan Valley to the land east of the Dead Sea called Moab.
This is somewhat unexpected. Moab will probably be sharing in the famine while Nile- watered Egypt probably will not.
But off they go and with them their two sons, who there in Moab find wives.
But tragedy hits the family. The mother of the two sons, Naomi, loses her husband and then her sons so she and her two daughters-in-law, Orpah and Ruth, are left widows.
She says to the younger women that she plans to return to Bethlehem; however, they should probably stay in their own homeland and find new husbands - and homes - there.
They are probably fairly young as there is no mention that either had had children.
One stays, takes that advice and stays in Moab; the other, however, exhibits an extraordinary character.
Ruth declares to her mother-in-law that she will go with her to Bethlehem and make her mother-in-law’s people her own.
Of course, this is not entirely up to her mother-in-law as the community will have to accept this foreigner, this widow from a foreign land, into their community.
They do, to make the story short.
When the two women arrive in Bethlehem, Naomi is welcomed home. They arrive at the time of the barley and wheat harvests. To provide for them both, Ruth begins to glean in the fields. She follows the harvesters and picks up the grain that they miss or drop between the sheaves, and brings the food home.
Her behavior, observed, leads to respect and to love, and she finds herself an honored wife of a new husband, and an honored mother and grandmother of what becomes an important family in the people of ancient Israel.
The virtues she shows, steadfast loyalty, and loving kindness, not race, are what people see, and prove to be more important than any ethnic origin.
And indeed the community to which she has cleaved has shown its virtues of loving kindness in the custom of gleaning, and of respect for the rights of the widow, both part of the Torah law. In addition we see the care for the widow and the stranger in their behavior, led by Boaz, toward the women newly arrived as refugees from across the Jordan Valley.
To us this story tells us something about how community is formed, in this community which becomes the nation of ancient Israel.
Not everyone who was of the people of God called ancient Israel were descendants of the people who escaped from slavery in Egypt. Some were descendants of the people who were already in the land and some were incorporated from other nations, but all became welcome in the tent of Abraham that is in the household of God that became known as Israel.
In our own day, our country, like many nations, has a sense of identity, and of common values that bring us together. As President Obama said in his second inaugural address, “what binds this nation together is not the colors of our skin or the tenets of our faith or the origins of our names. What makes us exceptional -- what makes us American -- is our allegiance to an idea articulated in a declaration made more than two centuries ago: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’”
All of us are created equal. That is our country. We do not claim to be ‘the people of God’ in the way that the ancient Hebrews - or others - did, as we affirm the separation of church and state; that is, the distinct allegiances to country and to the source of all being, the higher power that Christians, among others, affirm as God.
But we can learn from this ancient people. What binds us together, as it was what bound Ruth to her new identity in a nation new to her, is not national origin, race, or ethnic origin. She had not traveled with the newly emancipated from Egypt to the promised land. Her father was not a wandering Aramean. But Ruth became a child of Abraham, and more important was always and already a child of God, because she affirmed and embodied the steadfast loyalty and loving kindness that were core values of the people she became part of: indeed, becoming a matriarch among them.
By the end of the story of Ruth recounted in our Bible she is welcomed not only as friend, but as member, as one in the royal lineage that began with Sarah and Abraham, continuing through Tamar and Perez, Leah and Rachel, and through her beyond to her grandson David - and his heirs.
This is a story that shows identity and inclusion not as a result of surface attributes but from a deeper reality: the embrace of an all-loving God, and its embodiment in a people that seek to reflect that love in their behavior.
All of us are created equal. All of us are loved by God. All of us are called to show it.
June 9th 2024 JRL+
Third Sunday after Pentecost, BProper5 :
1 Samuel 8:4-11, (12-15), 16-20, (11:14-15)
Psalm 138
2 Corinthians 4:13-5:1
Mark 3:20-35
https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearB_RCL/Pentecost/BProp5_RCL.html
https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2013/01/21/inaugural-address-president-barack-obama
An edited version of this meditation appeared in the Arizona Daily Star on Sunday June 9th 2024, E3.
https://tucson.com/life-entertainment/local/faith-values/choose-loyalty-loving-kindness-above-all-else/article_b891113c-2296-11ef-9e05-cf2d57c0cf91.html
See also the YouTube video of the service for the 3rd Sunday after Pentecost at the Episcopal Church of Saint Matthew in Tucson. Sermon (17:51-30:33).
https://www.youtube.com/live/qWa5zURvIes?feature=shared
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