For Sunday, July 7th 2024, at Santa Cruz Lutheran Church, Tucson.
I was thinking about how people are related as family and remembered…
When I was a file clerk at the EPA Region IX office in San Francisco, I came across correspondence regarding a new water treatment plant to be sited near Grass Valley, California. The correspondence was stamped in bright red letters: HANDLE AS PRESIDENTIAL. The first item in the file was a letter from one Ruth Milhous, to her nephew Richard, complaining about what she had heard would be a ‘cesspool’ near her house. It was signed, “Aunt Ruth.” And to the letter was attached a note, “She really is his Aunt Ruth.” Subsequent correspondence politely reassured her of the facts of the matter. (It’s a modern wastewater treatment facility, not an open, stinking cesspool.) The takeaway is this, of course: She really was his Aunt Ruth. She was family.
In our story, which concludes today (aw gee!) …wait, not entirely: because Ruth really is his great-grandmother; ‘him’ being David, the son of Jesse, the son of Obed, the son of Boaz and Ruth. (The story will go on: turn the page and you are reading about the end of the time of judges and the beginning of the time of kings, in the first book of Samuel.)
One who had once been a stranger had become family indeed. But we have already noticed how Naomi referred to her daughter-in-law as ‘my daughter’ and even Boaz, Naomi’s kinsman, began by addressing her as ‘my daughter.’
She was what we call ‘married in’ but was hardly an outsider - following the laws and customs of that ancient time, family ties that had been frayed were strengthened, and the Lord, the hidden player in this drama, had been at work throughout, now revealed in the way that what was small and unpromising had been redeemed into something great and flourishing. Small beginnings, greater ends, seems to be the MO of our God.
https://www.pubhist.com/works/09/large/rembrandt_boaz_ruth.jpg
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