Ruth 3:1-5; 4:13-17
Bad Ole Moabites and Wrestling with Scripture
James Sledge November
8, 2015
The
Old Testament book of Deuteronomy shows Moses reminding Israel, just prior to
their entering the land of promise, of all the covenantal requirements and
obligations of the Law. Moses will not enter the land with them, and this is
his final act before handing leadership of Israel over to Joshua. Here is part
of what he says. “No Ammonite or Moabite shall be admitted to the assembly of the Lord. Even to the tenth generation, none
of their descendants shall be admitted…”
Now
if you’re worried that I’ve gotten confused about the scripture readings for
today, let me assure you that this has everything to do with Ruth. But to make
that clear, we probably need to go back to the beginning of her and Naomi’s story.
As
the story opens, there is a famine in Israel causing Naomi, her husband, and
two sons to flee their homeland. They become refugees, not so different from Syrian
refugees in our day. They are in danger and at the mercy of those they
encounter. And in the case of Naomi’s family, they end up in the land of those
bad ole Moabites Moses warned them about.
The
story doesn’t share any details of what happen when Naomi’s clan arrives in
Moab. But clearly they are allowed to settle there. They are able to make a
life, and when her husband dies, Naomi’s family is sufficiently a part of the
community that her sons are welcomed to marry two of the local girls, Orpah and
Ruth.
But
then the situation changes dramatically. Naomi’s two sons die. I’m not sure we
modern people can fully appreciate what a dire situation this is. As a widow
without male children, Naomi was in grave jeopardy. She was too old to be
married again, and she had no one to provide for her. As a woman, she could not
inherit or own property. With no husband, no sons, and no grandsons, her
husband’s lineage was at an end, and she was powerless and destitute.
Then
Naomi learns that the famine in Israel has abated. This does not offer much
hope, but it is all she has. She heads back hoping some relatives or friends will
take pity on her. She may still be destitute, but it seems the best chance she
has. And so she starts out for home, her daughters-in-law accompanying her. But
Naomi knows this is not a good idea.
Naomi
has no way to provide for herself, much less for Orpah and Ruth. They are still
relatively young. If they return to their own families, perhaps they will care
for them, even find new husbands for them. Orpah and Ruth protest. They want to
remain with Naomi. But she insists, and finally Orpah relents and leaves,
weeping as she goes.
But
Ruth will not leave. She casts her lot with Naomi, and they return to the land
of Judah and to poverty. Ruth is now the refugee, dependent on the hospitality
of strangers. She tries to help Naomi by gleaning, picking up the grain that gets
dropped during the harvest.
The
story of Ruth is one of several in the Old Testament where God’s name is
mentioned and invoked but God does not seem to be an actor in the story. Which
is not to say that God is not at work. Ruth goes to glean in the fields and by
“chance,” ends up in the field of Boaz, a relative of her long dead
father-in-law.
Boaz
does not recognize this refugee gleaning in his field, and so he asks who she
is. No one seems to know her name. She’s just a refugee, after all. They tell
him, She
is the Moabite who came back with Naomi from the country of Moab. I’m
not sure why they need to say she’s a Moabite from Moab. That’s like saying,
“I’m an American from America.” But it does make perfectly clear that she is
one of those bad ole Moabites.
When Naomi and her family fled to Moab,
their survival depended largely on whether they encountered hostility or
hospitality there. Now Naomi and Ruth’s survival depend largely on whether Ruth
encounters hostility or hospitality from the people of Judah, and especially
from Boaz. God’s providence has steered Ruth to the field belonging to a
relative of Naomi’s husband, but we know nothing of him or what he thinks about
hungry refugees or bad ole Moabites. At least we don’t until he gives his
workers special instructions to look after Ruth, praises her for her care of
Naomi, and gives her food and drink.
As
a Presbyterian pastor, I have a very high view of Scripture and its stories. I
take seriously my ordination vow that asks, “Do you accept the Scriptures of
the Old and New Testaments to be, by the Holy Spirit, the unique and
authoritative witness to Jesus Christ in the Church universal, and God’s Word
to you?” That said, I also see a lot of problems with how the Bible gets used
and understood
On
the one hand there is the notion that Scripture is a literal record of history
and God’s actions, magically deposited onto the pages of the Bible. On the
other hand is the idea of the Bible as a collection of ancient and
unsophisticated writings with little connections to the lives of modern people,
stories that uneducated, premodern people could take seriously, but not us.
The
fundamentalist/literalist view of Scripture causes lots of problems and gives
Christianity a great deal of bad press. But the view of Scripture as ancient,
unsophisticated tales is equally problematic, sometimes making it difficult for
progressive Christians to encounter God as much more than philosophical concept.
But
those ancient compilers of Scripture operated at a level of sophistication and
complexity that evades many of us. They constructed complex theologies in
narrative form. They reworked old myths and folktales to wrestle with question
about God’s reliability and faithfulness. They even set side by side seemingly
incompatible views about what faithful life with God looked like. Alongside a
theology of blessing and curse based on faithfulness to the Law, they placed
the book of Job, where a completely righteous man suffers horribly. And
alongside warnings about purity and the danger of outsiders like bad ole
Moabites who worshiped false gods, they placed this story about a faithful
Moabite woman who becomes the great grandmother of David, Israel’s greatest
king.
In
so doing, those editors of our scriptural heritage, people often much wiser in
the ways of faith and God than we are, invite us to join those who have
encountered God in an ongoing conversation. They invite us to become partners
in a difficult but rewarding wrestling with the Bible and its stories that seeks
to discover just who God is and what it means to live faithfully with this
strange, surprising, and sometimes bewildering God.
Have
you taken your place in this conversation? Have you wrestled with images of God
that upend and threaten your understanding of God and what it means to be
Christian or Church or faithful or spiritual? Have you met the God who is at
work in the commandments and in bad ole Moabites and all manner of other folks
you can’t image God would ever use? Have you met the God in Christ who will not
leave you where you are, but demands that you become something different and
new?
If
so, then maybe, just maybe, you have begun to know the God of Israel, the living
one, the almighty beyond description or imaging, and yet the God most fully
seen in a man named Jesus. Maybe you have begun to encounter the God that
Pulitzer Prize winning author Annie Dillard seems to have met, at least based
on one of my all-time favorite quotes. She writes,
“On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs,
sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what
sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a
word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry
sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear
ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash
helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should
lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or
the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return. ”
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