November 11, 2024

Ruth 3:1-5; 4:13-17

Naomi had lost her husband and her two sons. We do not know how they died, but their names are suggestive. The sons’ names were Mahlon and Chilion. In Hebrew, “Mahlon” means “sickness” and “Chilion” means “wasting.” Not go-to names for most purposes, but for this story, the names explain what happened to these two men.

The point of concern was that Naomi no longer had any male heir to care for her in her old age, which is one of the worst things that could happen to an Israelite woman. But then her daughter-in-law Ruth marries Boaz, one of Naomi’s kinsmen. This meant that Boaz had agreed to care for Naomi through his son, named Obed.

Blessed be the LORD, who has not left you this day without next-of-kin, and may his name be renowned in Israel!

He 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.

Last Sunday, I said that there are very few happy endings in the Bible. The Book of Ruth is one notable exception. It has a happy ending. More so than that, the Book of Ruth is a story about good people. There are no bad guys in this story, though a few people are less good in comparison to others. For example, Naomi had a second daughter-in-law, Orpah, who was going to stay with her mother-in-law, but she was convinced to return home to her people from the land of Moab, as would have been customary.

By the way the name “Orpah” can mean either “fawn” like a young deer, or “back of the neck” meaning to turn away from someone. Her name implied what was going to happen. What does “Ruth” mean? It means “friend.”

And Ruth the friend refused to do what was customary and return to her father’s house. From the King James Version, famously Ruth said, “for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God…”

The names in the Book of Ruth all tie into the flow of the story. Naomi means “beauty” or “pleasantness” but she renames herself for a time as “Mara” which means “bitter.” This renaming also suggests that we are to pay attention to these names as they are important to the meaning of the story.

And it is a story in my estimation. A story, meaning it did not happen. It was and is a way of presenting a message. And that message is a direct criticism of other parts of the Bible.

In other books, such as the Book of Nehemiah, marriages to non-Israelite women, to non-Jewish women, are forbidden. During the exile in Babylon, some men had married woman from other religious groups. Those men were suddenly being asked to cast aside these wives and to take on Jewish ones. This was happening as the Jewish people in exile were being allowed to return to Israel and, one assumes, it was an effort to reinforce traditional Jewish values and relationships.

The Book of Ruth is set during a much earlier period. Naomi’s new grandson Obed would have a son named Jesse who in turn would have a son named David. That David, yes, King David.

But there are numerous clues in the Book of Ruth suggesting that it was written long after the time of David, around the time of the Book of Nehemiah, when those exiles were returning home. For example, there are turns of phrase that came about centuries after the founding of the Kingdom of Israel. So, it is seen as a then contemporary criticism of the Book of Nehemiah about religious purity.

Ruth was not from Israel. She was from Moab. Moab is one of the historic enemies of Israel. And this story states that King David’s great grandmother was from Moab. And, one imagines, this detail about a beloved king places the expectation of religious purity in the Book of Nehemiah at odds with the pluralism in the Book of Ruth.

The Bible is not a consistent book. It is not consistent because it is not a book but a collection of books. Books that have been gathered over the centuries into one compendium that were not intended to be in close agreement. Why? Because life is not simple. It has never been simple. And the stories of the Bible reflect a wide range of stories and ideas across the centuries that cannot be completely harmonized. As such, the Bible can offer conflicting answers to the same question.

Should I marry this person? Yes and no, at least when comparing the answers from Ruth and Nehemiah.

Should I kill or not kill? Yes and no.

That simple question about the most basic of moral concepts is not black and white when you consider the many passages in the Bible in which killing is allowed, when killing is even honored. The prophet Elijah kills hundreds of non-Jewish priests. Admittedly this was in reprisal for the killing of Jewish prophets. But killing was allowed and we do not expect the rule to be thou shalt kill.

Here is another question: should we have a king? Should the people of Israel have a king to rule over them? Yes and no, at least according to the Book of Samuel, which eventually does not even agree with itself.

The prophet Samuel was a judge. Unlike our modern judges, an Israelite judge was a tribal leader who had power much like a king, specifically in times of war. The various tribes otherwise ruled themselves. However, Samuel was asked to find a king to rule over the people because his own sons, his would-be judicial successors, were considered corrupt in the eyes of the people.

Samuel thought having a king was a bad idea and prayed to God for guidance. And God explained that the people were not rejecting Samuel but rejection God, who was somehow seen by the people as inadequate to the task of caring for Israel. Aagain, a judge was like a war-time prophet acting on behalf of God. The people’s lack of faith in Samuel’s sons was a lack of faith that God would provide for them, particularly with these imperfect candidates.

So, God told Samuel to explain the consequences of having a king to the people. Samuel said, “These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen, and to run before his chariots …and some to plough his ground and to reap his harvest, and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his courtiers. He will take one-tenth of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and his courtiers….”

That description of the greed of kings goes on for quite a while and ends with this warning. “And in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves; but the Lord will not answer you in that day.”

You made your bed, now you must lie in it.

You might have recognized a similar sentiment in our psalm this morning: “Do not put your trust in princes, in mortals, in whom there is no help.”

Please remember one thing, however, about these bits of wisdom from the Book of Psalms. The psalms are in the Bible. They are passages of scripture, meaning religious texts. But the psalms do not come from God or, that we know of, from any prophet of God. The psalms are prayers often attributed to King David, which is a tradition that has no basis. The psalms were written over many centuries. There are also more psalms that did not make the editorial cut, lying in museums cabinets being studied as history rather than as scripture.

And recall that those moral and ethical questions I posed have at least two different answers depending upon which Biblical passage you quote. Can you marry outside your religion? Shall you kill or not kill? Should you place your trust in a king?

Later on, after the time of Samuel, the people of Israel place their trust in a long line of kings. This reliance ebbs and flows over the centuries and finally ends with the destruction of the Kingdom of Judah, the last remnant of larger Israel, in the sixth century BCE. The land of Israel is then ruled by a series of empires until the year 1948 and the founding of the Nation of Israel – 2,500 years later.

Which leads to a modern question: is it now safe to place trust in princes, in mortals?

Or should we only place our faith in God and those sent from God, whoever they might be?

I do not have a good or simple answer for you this morning. I wish I did, honestly. I wish I had a handy passage from the Bible to tell you what the best way is to move forward. But as a handbook, as a how-to manual, the Bible is not so particularly straightforward, at least when you try to reconcile its many divergent messages.

If the people had listened to Samuel, they would have had Samuel’s two corrupt sons leading them. The logic would have been that they had been sent from God and God would not let the people fall victim to corrupt leaders. However, the people asked for a king like those who ruled in the nations around them. And that Biblically bad decision becomes the norm in Western cultures.

Over the centuries, there even developed the notion of the divine right of kings, that kings were actual representatives of God and therefore could be trusted. That notion is explicitly contrary to the warnings of the prophet Samuel, but it became the guiding principle throughout European history.

Eventually, we decided to get rid of kings, or at least kings that wielded any actual political power. Instead, we would choose our leaders, we would elect them. We would not call them kings even if they wielded the power of kings. But the warnings of Samuel are still there, placing governments of mortal beings at odds with reliance upon faith in God.

But again, the Bible is not consistent. Paul in his letter to the Romans effectively rejects the prophet Samuel’s warnings. He wrote, “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities; for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore whoever resists authority resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgement.” And yet, I do not offer this passage from Paul as advice. I do not suggest it to you as a good or simple answer for you this morning. I truly wish I had one.

And that wish is not because I want you to listen the Samuel or Paul. That wish, that desire, is not because I do not have my own views and ideas about what it means to be a faithful person trying to live a moral life in complicated times. That desire stems from the challenge of walking through the wilderness of complicated times. That desire stems from my frustrations trying to imagine a path forward.

I have for many years preached about the centrality of the message of Jesus. I cite to other texts in the Bible, but I invariably I will take us back into the teachings of Jesus. It is the way I look ahead, even if it takes work to do so. What does Jesus tell us?

Blessed are the peacemakers for they will be called children of God. But being a peacemaker does not mean there is nothing worth fighting for.

Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. But our sense of righteousness must be tempered with humility because sometimes blind faith leads us in troubling directions.

Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you on my account. But even then, even when we are being reviled, Jesus asked us to love. Jesus asked us to love our enemies. It sounded crazy then and it sounds cray now, but that is what he said.

And over the centuries and across many generations, people have tried to sand off the sharp edges of Jesus’ teachings to make them more friendly to whatever is normal in whatever fleeting cultural moment we find ourselves in. Such moral flexibility allowed slavery to persist for many centuries. It allowed American colonists to take land from those already in possession of that land. It allows some people to get very rich at the expense of many others.

That lesson about the dangers of wealth appears dozens of times, across the many books of the Bible. And yet somehow being rich always turns into a sign that God has chosen some people to be more blessed than others. Not that some people got lucky. Not that some people were simply more ruthless than others.

It is not the correct etymology of the word “ruthless,” but I occasionally wander into thinking that ruthless means being without ruth, without a friend as the name Ruth suggests. Without a spirit of care and concern in our hearts. And that when we treasure wealth and success more than love and compassion, we turn toward graven images and golden idols rather than to the teachings of Jesus.

Again and again and again.

If I could only teach one enduring thing after all my years up in this pulpit, it would be that we must follow Jesus. We must embrace his idea that we must love one another.

And that if any other any other teaching or tradition, any other theology or philosophy, any other passage from the Holy Bible itself contradicts that simple message of love, it must be rejected. It must be placed aside. It must be renounced.

“[F]or whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God…”

And so, my friends, once again I ask you to follow Jesus.

I will end this morning with a story. It is a true story. It does not have much to do with the readings or the sermon. But here it is.

This past Tuesday, I managed to injure myself. I had already voted and so I was at the gym, just starting my morning workout.

They had swapped in new weights, you see. New weights which are both shiny and for some reason slippery. I was taking a 45-pound plate off a machine and dropped that weight perfectly onto my big toe.

And it hurt. It hurt as much as you might imagine it would hurt. It hurt so much I was sick to my stomach. That pain flared up over the day. And the pain is still there, waiting for me to move the wrong way to bring it back full throttle.

I can walk, but it is not fun. I can drive, which weirdly hurts more than walking because it was my right foot. I am not doing much else. It is too soon.

It is too soon to do anything else.

I did not scream in pain in public, in that crowded gym, though I would have been justified in doing so. I would not have blamed someone who had. I simply did not.

I had the worst bruise I have experienced since playing rugby in college. Purplish black, a color that I imagined fading through the bruise spectrum of browns and yellows. Fading, hopefully away entirely, sooner rather than later.

That change will take time, of course, but I have been through this before.

Like the bruise, the pain will fade. It will inevitably fade because I am merely banged up, I am not quite broken. I do not look forward to it, to the pain and all that. But here I am.

And I have been through this before.

Walking with a limp, but still walking. Amen.