A sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church
Sunday 15th October 2023
Ruth 1.1-17
We’re in the season of Harvest at the moment,
and it’s no accident that our reading this week is from the book of Ruth,
which is a story set at harvest time,
with most of its action taking place either in the fields,
or on the threshing floor of Boaz’s farm.
It’s a compelling, challenging, and controversial book,
and it raises profound themes of ethnicity, belonging,
sexuality, gender, and family values.
A twenty-minute sermon can’t do justice to this story,
which repays deeper study,
but I hope I can raise some interesting issues for us to consider
as we spend today with Ruth, Naomi,
and some of the other characters in this ancient text.
I think, in many ways this story is as contemporary as it is ancient,
as relevant as it is archaic.
It speaks to us from a world far, far removed from our own world;
but it speaks to the human condition, which is unchanging,
and it does so in ways that resonate down the millennia
to the culture wars, and actual wars, of our own time.
Let’s recap for a moment. [1]
In our reading for today, Ruth the Moabite
makes a profound series of promises of belonging
to Naomi, her Judahite mother-in-law;
even vowing unspoken curses on herself
if she fails to keep her promises.
The thing is, Moabites and Judahites were not natural friends:
there is deep ethnic tension here in this story.
Clearly Naomi’s son had transgressed some serious social boundaries
when he married Ruth and took her into his family,
and Ruth continues this pattern of making commitments across boundaries
when she binds herself to her mother-in-law
after the death of her husband.
The extraordinariness of Ruth’s actions is highlighted
by her sister-in-law Orpah’s response,
who also finds herself widowed,
because although Orpah is obviously very fond of Naomi,
and her instinctive reaction is, like Ruth, to remain with her,
in the end the overriding boundaries of geography and ethnicity
lead her to return to her family of origin.
This is a world of famine, sickness, bereavement, and division;
but it is also a world of love, hope, and faith.
In other words, it is our world as well.
It’s worth paying attention here to the geography of the story,
because it begins in Ruth’s homeland Moab,
which was across the Jordan from what was to become Israel.
These days we would describe Moab
as the southern area of the country of Jordan,
bordering the eastern shore of the Dead Sea.
And Ruth’s story is deeply rooted in movement
across geographical, ethnic and ideological boundaries.
Last week in our sermon we stood with Moses
as he gave the sermons of Deuteronomy in the land of Moab,
delivering his reiteration of the ten commandments
to the gathered Israelites on the shores of the river Jordan,
at the end of their wilderness wanderings.
We saw how, as they prepared to invade ancient Palestinian,
to occupy the land that they believed God had promised to them,
the ten commandments called them to the twin pillars of faithful living:
to love of God, and to love of neighbour.
Famously, of course, Moses himself never made it
over the Jordan into the promised land,
he died and was buried there in Moab,
the land of Ruth’s family,
leaving the occupation to his successor Joshua
(Deuteronomy 1:5, 29:1, 32:49, 34:1-5, 34:6-8).
And it’s in this context of a region bearing the legacy and scars
of violence and occupation,
with famine forcing people to make choices
about where they will turn for survival,
that Ruth, after the death of her husband,
makes her vows of belonging to her mother-in-law.
Unlike Orpah, Ruth decides to throw in her lot
with a woman from a different culture and country.
This well-known tale, often featured in children’s Bibles,
is a story about how a non-Israelite woman
became a model of faith, loyalty, and preserving life,
for all receivers of Scripture.
And I think we need to hear the message of Ruth very clearly in our world today.
But more on that in a few minutes.
First, let’s think for a moment about when this story is set,
and when the book telling the story was actually written.
The Jewish scriptures, what we call the Old Testament,
have a different order to the one we’re familiar with.
In our Old Testament, we use an ordering which arranges the texts
in such a way as to build up to the revelation of God in the life of Jesus;
but the Jews still follow their ancient ordering,
of putting the books of the Law first,
followed by the books of the Prophets,
and finally the books known as the ‘Writings’.
The book of Ruth is part of this third division of the Hebrew Bible,
part of the Writings,
and like most of the books of the Writings,
it was produced in the Second Temple period,
the time of Ezra and Nehemiah,
the time when many Jews who had been exiled to Babylon
were allowed to return to their ancient homeland.
So whilst he book of Ruth is set
many, many centuries before the Babylonian exile,
before even the time of King David,
who is described as a descendent of Ruth,
it is in fact a story that was written quite late in the day,
and which reflects the concerns of the time it was written.
So the concerns of the book of Ruth
are the concerns of the post-exilic community of Jews
returning to the land of Israel,
and trying to work out how they should relate to their distance cousins
who had remained in the land
whilst the exiles were spending their decades in Babylonian exile.
The book of Ruth is set during the period of the Judges,
which is why our ordering of the Old Testament puts it
after the book telling the story of this time.
This setting is significant, but so is the fact that it was likely produced
during the time of Ezra and Nehemiah
to address a specific social issue for the returned exiles:
the question of intermarriage.
The question was whether those returning from exile
could intermarry with those who had remained in the land,
or whether the exiles should only marry other exiles?
This was a question of both racial and religious purity:
were those who had not been exiled, those who had remained,
still ‘Jewish’ enough in their ethnicity and faith?
Or were they now to be considered as gentiles?
In this context, the book of Ruth challenges the previously-exiled Jews
to remember their obligation to the stranger, to the outsider;
and to not forget the universality
of the covenant God made with Abraham (Genesis 12:1-3).
The time of writing for the book of Ruth
was the time when the Prophet Ezra went full xenophobe,
and attempted to expel the indigenous wives of returned exiles,
calling them “strange,” or “foreign.”
These wives he’s referring would most likely have been the descendants
of those Jews who were left behind to tend the land,
or those from unions of such Jews and others,
because the Babylonians had imported people from neighbouring nations
into the land of Judah during the decades of the Jewish exile to Babylon
(Ezra 10:1-17).
Ezra concludes by listing officials who had married women of the land,
a kind of early naming-and-shaming,
but the book in the end stops short of ordering their expulsion.
The book of Ruth counters this trend toward exclusivism
by reminding the post-exilic community
of the faithful outsider-women in Israel’s story.
The book of Ruth explicitly recalls not only the Moabite Ruth
but also Tamar, who became a matriarch of the royal tribe of Judah,
to which Naomi’s family belonged.
Let’s see how this unfolds.
At the beginning of the story, we learn that Naomi was a widow,
and more than a widow—she had also lost her sons,
and so was utterly bereft of males to support her.
In a patriarchal world, this was a catastrophe for a woman.
Then and now, widows symbolize bereavement, poverty, and dependence,
and are often without adequate means to live,
especially if, like Naomi and Ruth, they had no sons.
Naomi and Ruth, two widows:
one an older woman, and the younger a Moabite!
Naomi felt utterly deprived, but she was not,
for she had Ruth, a Moabite daughter-in-law who loved her.
Within Judaism, Ruth became a model for later converts,
following her mother-in-law back to Judah out of loyalty and love,
refusing to let Naomi travel back to Bethlehem alone.
These were dangerous times, with the book of Judges saying
that “all the people did what was right in their own eyes”.
This was a time of chaos, violence, and degeneration.
For Ruth to have left Naomi to travel alone could have been disastrous.
But staying with Naomi was not in her best interest, of course,
as is made clear by Naomi’s rationale for urging her to turn back to Moab.
But the story tells us that Ruth clung to Naomi like glue (1:14).
She promised six things to Naomi:
they will journey together, live together, share a common people,
share a common God, die in the same place,
and be buried in the same location, perhaps in the same family tomb.
These promises echo the marriage vows
that Ruth would have made to her husband,
and fact that she speaks them to her mother-in-law is profound.
She is transgressing not only ethnic and geographical boundaries
by binding herself to Naomi, but also gender boundaries.
It’s no surprise that in our context,
these promises often feature in the marriage vows made at same sex marriages.
These two women join their families and their lives,
to the extent that when, later in the story, Ruth has a child to Boaz,
she gives it to Naomi to hold, and all the women of the neighbourhood
say together that ‘a son has been born to Naomi’ (4.17).
I think the lesson here is that families are complex,
and they can transcend boundaries
of geography, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality.
We may not realize how much of an outsider Ruth was
to the early audiences of this drama.
Israel’s origin story for the country of Moab is pretty brutal:
Genesis 19 claims that the nations of Moab and Ammon
were the descendants of Lot
through his incestuous relationship with his daughters.
Throughout much of their history (but not all),
Moab was Israel’s enemy.
The legal ruling against these nations in Deuteronomy
forbids any “Ammonite or Moabite
[to] be admitted to the assembly of the Lord.
Even to the tenth generation … ” (Deuteronomy 23:3).
When Ruth the Moabite ultimately marries Boaz, later on in the story,
a Jewish kinsman of Naomi’s dead husband,
all the people at the gate said:
“We are witnesses.
May the Lord make the woman who is coming into your house
like Rachel and Leah …
and, through the children that the Lord will give you by this young woman,
may your house be like the house of Perez,
whom Tamar bore to Judah” (Ruth 4:11–12).
This is significant, because it points to another outsider woman,
the Canaanite, Tamar,
who pretended to be a prostitute in order to bear children.
And after Ruth gave birth to Obed,
the women affirmed that Naomi was no longer child-less:
“Obed shall be to you a restorer of life and a nourisher of your old age;
for your daughter-in-law who loves you,
who is more to you than seven sons, has borne him!” (Ruth 4:14-15).
Did you notice that – Ruth is worth more to Naomi than seven sons!
Throughout Scripture the perfect family
has seven sons and three daughters (Job 42:12-15)
and yet this Moabite foreigner woman
is worth more to Naomi than seven Jewish sons!
As I said at the beginning, this is a controversial book,
because it intentionally questions
the boundaries and expectations that people construct:
boundaries of ethnicity and religion,
expectations of gender and family.
This story is as contemporary as it is ancient,
and it speaks to our world of complex families,
and geopolitical tension.
It was a story that reminded the Jews of the second temple period,
those returning from Exile,
that their great king, David,
and all the kings of Judah since,
were descended from a Moabite woman;
and that therefore women who joined the people of God
should be emulated, not expelled, whatever their background.
Like many other Old and New Testament passages
(Exodus 4, Joshua 2, 2 Samuel 11, Acts 10:34-5, Romans 2:14-5),
it shows us that loyalty and faithfulness
are the markers of God’s people,
not biology, genetics, culture, or history.
This is a story that speaks to the culture wars
of our society and our faith communities.
As we tear each other apart over LGBTQ issues, what marriage means,
and what boundaries are necessary for belonging,
we need to hear the challenge of Ruth
that such boundaries are ultimately meaningless in God’s eyes.
And in a world of war, and particularly these last weeks of renewed war
in the land of Israel and Palestine,
we need to pray for a world where the boundaries
of geography, ethnicity, and religion
are challenged by an overarching faith
in a God who values those on both sides of the line.
I was reading an article this week by Naomi Klein,
the author and left wing activist who comes from a Jewish family. [2]
She reflects on the current conflict between Hamas and Israel,
and I’d like to end with her words,
which I think reflect the spirit of the Book of Ruth. [3]
For Zionist believers (I’m not one of them),
Jew-hatred is the central rationale
for why Israel must exist as a nuclear-armed fortress.
Within this worldview, antisemitism is cast as a primordial force
that cannot be weakened or confronted.
The world will always turn away from us in our hour of need, Zionism tells us,
just as it did during the Holocaust,
which is why force alone is presented
as the only conceivable response to any and all threats.
The Israeli state’s current murderous leveling of Gaza
is the latest, unspeakably horrific manifestation of this ideology,
and there will be more in the coming days.
The responsibility for these crimes of collective punishment
rests solely with their perpetrators
and their financial and military backers abroad.
But we all have to figure out how to make it stop.
So how do we confront this violent ideology?
For one thing, we can recognize that when Israeli Jews are killed in their homes
and it is celebrated by people who claim to be anti-racists and anti-fascists,
that is experienced as antisemitism by a great many Jews.
And antisemitism (besides being hateful)
is the rocket fuel of militant Zionism.
What could lessen its power, drain it of some of that fuel?
True solidarity.
Humanism that unites people across ethnic and religious lines.
Fierce opposition to all forms of identity-based hatred, including antisemitism.
An international left rooted in values that side with the child over the gun
every single time, no matter whose gun and no matter whose child.
A left that is unshakably morally consistent,
and does not mistake that consistency with moral equivalency
between occupier and occupied.
Love.
It’s certainly worth a try. In these difficult times, I’d like to be part of … that.
[1] This sermon is based on the notes by Karen Strand Winslow at https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/narrative-lectionary/ruth-3/commentary-on-ruth-11-17-3
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naomi_Klein
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/11/why-are-some-of-the-left-celebrating-the-killings-of-israeli-jews
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