Spiritual Hiccups - From Unlikely Places

What makes for a hero or heroine in a religious story?  How must folks act in order to be religious heroes?  In my religious formation, faith was primarily about holding certain beliefs, and so it would make sense that any religious champion would have to have his or her religious beliefs correctly organized. 

Perhaps because they have often been a minority, Jews have a tradition of celebrating "righteous Gentiles," but I'm not sure we Christians have anything comparable.  That makes the story of Ruth an intriguing one, I think, for Christians. 

Going to Sunday School as a child, I learned the broad outlines of the story.  The events in book of Ruth's are fairly easy to tell in a "Bible Story" aimed at children.  But I'm not sure I ever picked up on an essential element of her story, the fact that she isn't Jewish.

It doesn't work that way in our world, but in Ruth's day, to say she is Moabite is just another way of saying she is Gentile, that she is not a Jew.  Because of dire circumstances Naomi's sons have been forced to take Moabite women as wives, but this is not the norm, and there are a number of places in the Old Testament where this is expressly forbidden.  Yet Ruth becomes a model of faithfulness, even though her faithfulness is not to a set of religious beliefs, but to her mother-in-law.

Nowhere in Ruth's story do we hear her spout any Jewish theology.  Nowhere does she proclaim that the LORD is the one and only God.  Ruth's only desire seems to be the welfare of her mother-in-law, and all she does is to that end.  It is for this that her husband-to-be will praise her and declare her blessed by Yahweh.  It is by this that she restores her mother-in-law and becomes the great-grandmother to King David.

More often than not, my experience in the Church has seemed to say that faithfulness outside the Christian circle is of little interest or use for me.  To see the actions of a Buddhist or a Muslim as somehow instructive or even helpful for a life of Christian faith sounds like heresy to many.  Yet right here in the book of Ruth, a Moabite woman shows others the shape of loyalty and faithfulness and is called blessed by the LORD.  Perhaps God's grace is at work in other places we think off limits.

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