Ruth 1: The Least of These
Ephesians 2:19 So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God…
The book of Ruth has been called an idyllic, romantic story. It just begins with famine, exile, and death.
As the story begins, it is a time of famine. From Bethlehem, their home, a couple travel with their sons east and south across the Jordan Valley and down to the land of Moab east of the Dead Sea. There they live, with their two sons, for ten years. During that time both sons marry; but then all three men die. Left alive are one mature woman and two younger, who are apparently as yet without children and young enough so they can remarry and find safety and refuge in new homes with new husbands, in their native land. That is what their mother-in-law urges them to do.
One takes this sensible and commonplace advice and turns back to her family home. The other goes beyond the call of duty and stays beside her mother-in-law. Now who is the exile? And what hope does she have?
She is not the first to find herself on foreign soil, unknown and unfamiliar.
Abraham had said to the Hittites “I am a sojourner and foreigner among you.” (Gen 23:3-4) When Zipporah and Moses had a son, his father named him Gershom, (ger means stranger) saying, “I have been a stranger in a strange land.” (Ex 2.22) Now Ruth, without husband or home, is going to be the stranger.
For Naomi arriving in Bethlehem is a homecoming. Ruth ‘returned with her’ - but for Ruth it is to a land unknown. She is the stranger now.
What we know, that Ruth may not, is that this people to whom she has come has a tradition, a law even, about looking after the stranger and the widow, “for you were strangers once in Egypt.” (Ex 22.21, Lev 19.34)
She could not have come to a better place. Where she arrives as a foreigner - spoiler alert - she will find a home such as she has never known, thanks to the Lord, the God of Israel, under whose wings she has come for refuge. (Ruth 2.12b) He shall cover you, says the psalm, with his wings and you shall be safe under his feathers. (Ps 91.4a)
And the people of Bethlehem will soon say to Ruth, you are no longer a stranger nor an alien, but you are a member of the household of God… (Eph 2.19)
As the first chapter closes, the barley harvest begins. That means it is spring, around the equinox, about seven weeks before the wheat harvest festival that we will hear more about in future chapters.
Let’s take some time to think about the place where Ruth is arriving. It is at about the same elevation as the base of A mountain, where Tucson’s Birthplace Mission Garden stands. The climate was different. Here the traditional feast of the wheat harvest falls on San Ysidro day, in mid-May; while in ancient Israel, and therefore among Jews today, the wheat harvest festival, called Shavuot, begins on an evening in June, this year on the 11th. Ruth and Naomi have come to Bethlehem, before that festival, about seven weeks earlier.
Drawn by hope, or driven by fear, many people today travel across the desert places of the world: they may seek refuge, they may seek opportunity, but the journey is made every day, across the expanse of the Mediterranean (“water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink”) or through the desert south of Tucson. The people who reach us aren’t always in good shape. A young family could be comforting each other, husband and wife, as they mourn the loss of a daughter or son who just barely survived the journey but dies in a Tucson hospital; or a single woman who miscarried is left alone – and so an opportunity is lost for two people, a chance lost to start a new life.
In our story in the first chapter of the book of Ruth we see three women left without the protection of a husband or a safe place to live, in the midst of a famine that has lasted for 10 years. The story of Ruth is called an idyllic romance, but it begins with famine, exile, and the tragedies of death; it becomes a happy story only later, and later we will talk about those latter parts of the story, when the corner turns from trouble to glory, from past loss to future abundance. The empty shall become full, the foreigner family.
We may have crossed deserts of our own. We may have been accompanied, or we may have been alone. Or we may have been among those greeting others as they arrived.
What the challenge is for us is to become one people, one family; all under the protection, under the wings, as it were, of one God. Whether we begin as refugees or hosts, we are all called to come together as one. And to care for each other as one.
There is a strange story, another journey story, of journey away and then back again, that has long been in our common cultural heritage. I was not thinking of “The Hobbit” - though a good guess. I have been reading “The Odyssey” in a new translation. In it a veteran of the Trojan War, Odysseus aka Ulysses, is making his journey homeward. It is not easy: shipwreck, cannibals, the lure of satiety, and the loss of companions, all slow him down. Meanwhile his son has grown up and his wife is left to fend off suitors - who are after her not least for the land and wealth that would come with her hand.
Odysseus has limited trust in the gods he knows, the gods he knows too well to trust entirely. One accompanies him from time to time, in strange and shifting disguises that he slowly unpeels, and others appear from time to time as helper or obstruction. One in particular has it in for him, and others are neutral. This is the pagan world - and to us worldview - in which this ancient Greek operates. It is really all up to him. “You dogs!” he says to the suitors hanging around his wife, “You thought I’d never make it.”
For the women in our story, it is not all up to them. By their own efforts they would never make it. But they are never alone. They are reaching a community - a community of kindness - that is imbued with the gifts and graces of the knowledge of a living God. God is with them, not in disguise, but in the way in which people treat each other. In the laws and customs, and practices and choices, of the people they come to live among.
As in the story of Naomi and Ruth, so in parables of the sower and of the mustard seed, the good news is that small beginnings lead to greater ends.
Insignificant in its size a seed in the right ground germinates, and properly tended - by the unseen hand of God - yields abundance. God’s kingdom is present in minute, hidden form as seed … and therefore as already present. Unpromising beginnings, great endings.
The people who first relayed these stories to each other, with their simple symbolic pictures, passed on to us, carried the message to us, that there is hope for the future.
For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope. (Jer 29.11)
It is into that hopeful future that we, like Naomi and Ruth, shall journey together.
It is into that hopeful future that we, infused with faith and walking in the Spirit, shall arrive.
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Sermon Series: Ruth at Santa Cruz Lutheran Church, Tucson, Arizona.
https://fb.watch/sUdy79sLwy/ June 16th 2024.
JRL+
June 16 ELW #681 “We Plow the Fields and Scatter”(Wir pflugen)
First Reading: Ruth 1
Psalm: Psalm 146
Second Reading: 2 Corinthians 5:6-10 [11-13] 14-17
Gospel: Mark 4:26-34
June 23 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
June 30 ELW #612 “Healer of Our Every Ill” -
or ELW #733 "Great Is Thy Faithfulness" (one of these as closer?)
First Reading: Ruth 3
Canticle: Ecclesiastes 3:1-8
Second Reading: 2 Corinthians 8:7-15
Gospel: Mark 5:21-43
July 7 ELW #676 “Lord Speak to Us that We may Speak”
First Reading: Ruth 4
Psalm: Psalm 127
Second Reading: 2 Corinthians 12:2-10
Gospel: Mark 6:1-13
First reading is from the Revised English Bible [REB] (Cambridge/Oxford, 1989).
Santa Cruz Lutheran Church, Tucson. June 16th 2024. https://fb.watch/sUdy79sLwy/
