Ruth 2 : a harvest home

Rembrandt - Boaz Meeting Ruth in His Fields

https://www.pubhist.com/works/20/large/rembrandt_boaz_ruth_fields.jpg

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f3/Rembrandt_Christ_in_the_Storm_on_the_Lake_of_Galilee.jpg

“Don’t you even care?” “Have you no faith?”

And yet when the storm waters are still, there is still need for faith, perhaps a quieter kind. Impoverished and far from home, our faithful Ruth shows a quiet confidence, a faith that means she persists; she persists when she is among the poor and hungry who follow the harvesters as they reap and gather the grain. 

Whatever her status was back home in Moab, now in Bethlehem she is serving and servant, a faithful daughter, though daughter-in-law, and will not give up. She quietly continues in her service ministry to her mother-in-law. What benefit the day’s work may yield beyond a nightly staving off hunger she probably cannot know. 

There is a prayer, For Quiet Confidence:

O God of peace, who has taught us that in returning and rest we will be saved, in quietness and confidence will be our strength: [Free us from want; free us from fear.] By the might of your Spirit lift us, we pray, to your presence, where we may be still and know that you are God; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

This is one prayer we each may need from time to time. Sure sometimes “sit down, sit down, you’re rocking the boat!” may be what we need to hear (or sing) but there are quieter times, even more desperate times, when hope takes quieter forms, love takes quieter forms, and faith is in the quiet work of a humble task. 

As we have taken note in the past, gleaning was a custom, even a law, among the people of the ancient Bethlehem community in which Ruth found herself. Mandated in the Torah books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy, it was common custom enough to figure in the writings and the prophets of later Israel. A simple practice, it was not straightforward charity, not a hand out or a hand up, as the saying would have it. Gleaning was as much about not-selfishness, about not taking it all for yourself as if it was yours by right; and as much about abundance and dependence on God, in good times and bad, as keeping the Sabbath. 

Remember the story of Elijah and the widow and her son? In later times than the time of Ruth and Naomi, another famine had come to the land, and the fugitive prophet Elijah had fetched up at the humble, hardscrabble home of a widow. They were desperate for food: the story goes on to indicate that God’s provision alone kept them alive. 

But isn’t that always the case? Are we not always dependent on God for - our daily bread? In times of prosperity we may not feel so need-driven dependent but we all always live by the grace of God.

(Perhaps Boaz realized that, and lived that way. He certainly doesn’t seem to think the harvest all belongs to him, and that he should run off anyone in need. Certainly Ruth is an exemplar, modeling the best behavior of a gleaner; not all are so attractive in piety or persistence.) 

But it is there all the same. Deserve has nothing to do with it; except all deserve as all depend. We all live by the grace and generosity of God. Give us today our daily bread, as you have given it to Ruth and Naomi, Boaz and the harvest hands and gleaners, from their time and before, to this day.

In the food banks of the church and of our community organizations, the custom and practice, the blessing and benefit, of gleaning continues; whether we are donor or recipient we take part in this ancient happy custom.

(In Tucson: Interfaith Community Services, Community Food Bank - and its many partners, and gleaners! at Iskashitaa Refugee Network.)

“Grief is love without a place to land” – Jennifer Harvey, ‘Grief and Love in a Difficult World: A Public Theology of “Now What?”’ [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xB3TJZrDdeY&t=1490s]

What does love look like when it lacks a place to land? 

That would seem to describe Naomi well enough as she was left without husband or sons - menfolk - in Moab, in exile from her homeland. She is grieving. But she is not alone. She has two daughters-in-law; one does the conventional thing and goes back to her mother’s house; the other does something extraordinary, heroic: she accompanies her mother-in-law back to a land that is foreign to her and to whom she is foreigner. 

As Pastor Bob Jones pointed out in his June newsletter to Santa Cruz Lutheran Church, she becomes more than friend, she is adopted into full membership in the community. 

Witness how Naomi keeps referring to Boaz as “our kinsman” - not “mine” but “ours” - something is afoot. Naomi and Ruth cling, or cleave, to each other, even after the menfolk who initially bound them together are gone. Grief is love without a place to land. 

And so in contrast the grief they share becomes love that does have a place to land: with each other, with community, with family reformed and renewed. 

"Justice is what love looks like in public" – Reggie Willams, ‘MLK, America, & Abolition’ [https://youtu.be/rj4I_bmV8bo?feature=shared] quoting Cornel West [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGqP7S_WO6o]

And one step toward that is the public embodiment, enactment, of justice, in the gleaning. It is a custom and a law, here followed with love. "Justice is what love looks like in public." Gleaning is a public revelation of what love looks like: justice. 

‘When you reap your harvest in your field and forget a sheaf in the field, you shall not go back to get it; it shall be left for the alien, the orphan, and the widow, so that the Lord your God may bless you in all your undertakings.’ (Deuteronomy 24:19)

That is justice. And beyond justice, as indeed we learn with Jesus. A full measure, tamped down and spilling over, of not just what convention and custom, the letter of the law, demands; but a generous overspilling abundance of the spirit of the law. God provides; providence is God’s business. 

We join in that holy task as we support or patronize food banks, and other sharing services, as we work for a world free from want, free from fear.

There is an old word from the old world we may want to revive: harvest home. Harvest home is both the work of gathering and gleaning, the threshing and winnowing, and the festival celebration when day is done.

As the parable of the sower taught us last week, the seed germinates and grows, the farmer knows not how: God tends the tender plant. And we rejoice in the harvest-home.

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JRL+

Santa Cruz Lutheran Church, Tucson, Arizona. Sunday 23 June 2024. https://www.facebook.com/1236072680/videos/1623012738554437/

https://www.iskashitaa.org/

https://www.communityfoodbank.org/

https://www.icstucson.org/ 

2024 June 23 Hymn of the Day: ELW #597 “My Hope is Built on Nothing Less”  

First Reading: Ruth 2. Psalm: Psalm 147. Second Reading: 2 Corinthians 6:1-13. Gospel: Mark 4:35-41 

when someone is baptised, it is very serious

We’d had the crowds with us all day. He preached to them, sitting in the boat, as they grouped along the lakeshore.

Let us go across to the other side, he said. So we took him along with us in the boat – he was already sitting in the stern, after all, making himself comfortable. He slept. The waves came up – as if stirred by some god or goddess of the Romans.

It got bad. We woke him up!

We are all going to die! Don’t you even care?

He woke up all right. Then, he rebuked the wind and said to the sea,

Peace! Be still.

Why are you afraid? Don’t you trust me yet? How about a little faith?

We asked ourselves a question, then: Who is this whom even the wind and sea obey?


Who indeed?

O Lord God of hosts, who is like you? :
your power and your faithfulness are all about you.
You rule the raging of the sea :
when its waves surge, you still them. (Psalm 89:8-9)

Who stilled the raging of the seas, the roaring of the waves :
and the tumult of the peoples. (Psalm 65:6)

Then they cried to the Lord in their distress :
and he took them out of their trouble.
He calmed the storm to a silence :
and the waves of the sea were stilled.
Then they were glad because they were quiet :
and he brought them to the haven they longed for. (Psalm 107:28-30)

He spoke; and, while he spoke, he smooth'd the sea,
Dispell'd the darkness, and restor'd the day.
Cymothoe, Triton, and the sea-green train
Of beauteous nymphs, the daughters of the main,
Clear from the rocks the vessels with their hands:
The god himself with ready trident stands,
And opes the deep, and spreads the moving sands;
Then heaves them off the shoals. Where'er he guides
His finny coursers and in triumph rides,
The waves unruffle and the sea subsides. (Aeneid, Book One, John Dryden trans.)

They were afraid. Trembling – fearful – anticipating death, there on the sea. They forgot about Jesus. They forgot he was even going with them, until he said something. Then he slept, and they forgot him completely – until the storm came.

Until the storm came, they were ready to go it alone. They did not need Jesus. They were doing fine. Until the storm came.

Then, they knew that they were on a terrible journey – one they would not be on, if it was not for him! He’s the one who said, let’s go to the other side.

What a Jonah! What will he do, if he has to travel in the belly of a whale? If he is swallowed by death, will he ever see the light of day again?

And what about us?

There is he, calming the storm – where there was doubt, he sowed faith; where there was trouble, he brought peace; where there was danger, and he saw them safely to other shore.

It is not that Jesus does not care – or that he sends us off on our own. He is with us; we sometimes forget he is along for the whole journey. We leave port, headed to an unknown shore – in life, in death, every step of our souls’ journey – and he is always by our side.

It is not that we do not go through the waters – of life, of death.

We are immersed in the waters of baptism, symbolizing our death to self. The old life is gone.

We are raised from the waters of baptism, symbolizing our rebirth into eternal life. The new life has begun.

Let us have a little faith – and put our trust in the man who stilled the waters, the one who calmed the sea.

As we affirm our own faith alongside the newly baptized, we have done it again – we have once again reminded ourselves, and one another, that when somebody is baptized, it is very serious: it is like dying. And life.


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