Sunday, November 8, 2015

Sermon: Bad Ole Moabites and Wrestling with Scripture

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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