Sermons Preached at Wooster First Presbyterian Church

         You may have noticed the death of British actor Edward Woodward last month at age 79. Among other roles, Woodward starred in the 1980s hit TV series, "The Equalizer." Anybody here willing to admit you watched "The Equalizer"? And liked it? (Guilty pleasure). I admit it. I used to watch the Equalizer and I liked it. Here’s how somebody described the series, Woodward played ". . . a former secret agent, of an unnamed organization, . . .

         Over the Thanksgiving holiday, Beth and I took a quick trip to Virginia to visit with Beth’s side of the family. Beth’s sister-in-law, Ellen, works for the F.B.I. at their headquarters located on the Marine Corps Base at Quantico. So the day after Thanksgiving Ellen took us on a partial tour of the F.B.I. academy, including the gift shop where we loaded up on F.B.I. apparel and trinkets.

                                           THANKS FOR THE REIGN                                                             &nbsp

He always said that he wanted to marry a redhead who was a singer.  He wasn’t sure why he felt this way, but he did.  For several years he waited for his ideal to arrive, and when she didn’t, he continued waiting patiently.  But all of that was before he met HER.  He and she worked together for one summer, and from the beginning of that summer he knew that this was the one.  She wasn’t a redhead and she could barely carry a tune.  But he knew.  And he knew the question he wanted to ask her.

One evening, in the middle of a conversation, he turned to her and asked her to marry him.  She got up and walked away, returning in a moment with her Bible.  She opened the Bible to the book of Ruth and pointed to the words Ruth spoke thousands of years ago to Naomi:

                                                      Where you go, I will go;

                                                         Where you lodge, I will lodge;

                                                      Your people shall be my people,

                                                         and your God my God.

                                                      Where you die, I will die –

                                                         and there will I be buried.

I first heard this story when I was twelve years old when my mother decided it was time for her three children to learn how she and my father decided to marry.  And ever since, I have been fascinated by this little short story that so captivated the ancient Israelites.  So much so, that they included it among the section of their sacred scriptures called the Writings.  To this day, Jews read it aloud every year during the Feast of Weeks or Pentecost.   The Christian church, with an eye to proper chronology, squeezed this little four-chapter work between the big, weighty books of Joshua and Judges and the great historical book of Samuel which was so big they divided it into two parts.  And there the little book of Ruth has sat all these centuries. 

Sometimes it seems as though few people know it’s there.  When confirmands recite the books of the Old Testament, it’s often one of the ones they forget.  And when it comes to preaching, it just doesn’t get much attention.  In fact, during my years of active preaching, it is one of only three books of the Bible that has provided a text for just a single Sunday morning sermon. 

But this year, when I looked at the lectionary and saw the well-known passage from Mark that was just read – a marvelous text that practically preaches itself – and then noted the two passages from Ruth, I immediately thought it was time to dig into this wonderful little story that has survived all the cuttings and trimmings and exclusions, and is still with us today.  So our text for today is the book of Ruth.  The whole book!

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What does the book of Ruth have to say to us today?  What is its message to those of us who live in America at the beginning of the 21^st Century and who belong to the Christian Church?   

We all know, of course, that people in different generations and different countries and different circumstances see different things when they read the scriptures.  We like to think that we are the ones who see the text exactly as it is, with no colored glasses, no prejudices, no preconceptions.  But our own national experience, for one, shows that this isn’t true.  Many of my Southern ancestors could point to chapter and verse, explaining why slavery had always been around and was even blessed by God.  They were not being untruthful or misleading; they were reflecting what they had learned and how they had come to view society and the scriptures themselves.

It’s not difficult to see, then, how the book of Ruth has been seen differently at different times.  For millions of believers, this has always been a story of love and special affection between two women a generation apart.  One was a widow, with no one to care for her or stand up for her or even to offer her food.  The other was a younger woman who gave up her own station in life and left her country out of deep loyalty and love for her mother-in-law. 

But not everyone has seen it this way.  Old Testament scholar Katherine Doob Sakenfeld, one of the College of Wooster’s most illustrious alums, reports on her experience with some Japanese Christian women who found great difficulty in dealing with Ruth’s determination to follow Naomi, even into a foreign land.  This seemed to them to be yet another social support for the strong traditional expectations of younger women toward their mothers-in-law.  They saw themselves in the person of Ruth, pressed to yield to an outdated requirement that limited their freedom and their very personhood.¹

Many readers, over the years, have seen in this story a beautiful example of something more than just the loving bond that can exist between a younger and an older woman, one of deep respect and true affection.  They have seen the story as pointing to the importance of women in providing for the future of the family and the race.  Naomi plans carefully how Boaz can be snared, and Ruth plays her part by dressing up as for a wedding to go and lie down beside Naomi’s unclothed relative.   And in the end, there is marriage and a child who gives purpose and value to their actions and who becomes the grandfather of the great King David.

And many have found in this story a perfect example of the evils of a male-dominated society.  A woman could be a daughter, but only until the very early teen years.  Then she must be a wife.  And she must produce children.  No children: no blessing.  She could at any time be put away, divorced, on the say-so of her husband, and she would be outside the social system, unprotected and no longer a full person.   

Readers have always read into and taken from the book of Ruth what their situations required or, if you will, what their journeys called for.  For everyone who approaches scripture is on a journey.  Everyone is moving in a direction.  Everyone began somewhere and is progressing toward something else.  Everyone is searching for what provides meaning, for what explains life.  Everyone is on a journey!

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Each of these journeys is genuine and each must be seen that way.  The Japanese Christian women were on a journey toward freedom from the strictures of an antique system which denied them their full personhood.  Those who saw the inhuman requirements of a male-dominated society were on a personal journey toward the kind of equality and mutual respect which is fundamental in any modern society.  Those who resonated with the central role of women in providing for future generations were reflecting an understanding of humanity which is central to our gendered race.

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Everyone is on a journey.  Groups are, too.  And congregations.  And we today find much in this wonderful, ancient book that speaks to us, that helps us to see what we need to learn for our journey.

The FIRST is that God is very much in charge.  In fact, in this story, God is the central, hidden character.  God is rarely mentioned in the text.  There is no record of God speaking to anyone, nor is there a suggestion that anyone speaks to God.  On the face of it, God is not around.  But look at the way in which the story unfolds, and see how the characters act out the story of Israel’s life. 

Naomi and her husband and sons were not the first to leave the Promised Land because of a famine.  Remember Jacob and his sons who went to Egypt in search of food, meeting up with Joseph who had been sold into slavery many years ago?  And recall how Joseph interpreted God’s place in the story.  The brothers are terrified, but Joseph responds, “Do not be afraid . . .  Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good”  And so the famine which took Naomi and her family from Bethlehem, which means “House of Bread” and her clan whose name means “Fruitful,” all the way to Moab, and the death of her whole family, and which brought Naomi back again with little hope and much despair, results eventually in new life and ultimately in the greatest of the kings of Israel.     

The story of Ruth is telling us that even the bleakest of moments bears the potential for leading to something better.  Although God does not dictate every event, nor is every evil stopped before it commits to action, God’s imprint in on the movement of human history! 

James Russell Lowell told just this story in the poem he wrote during the years of struggle that led up to the Civil War:

                                                   Though the cause of evil prosper,

                                                      yet ‘tis truth alone is strong;

                                                   though her portion be the scaffold,

                                                      and upon the throne be wrong,

                                                   yet that scaffold sways the future,

                                                      and, behind the dim unknown,

                                                   standeth God within the shadow

                                                      keeping watch above His own.

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This is how the Israelites always understood this story, and it speaks to us today in the same rhythm.  With evil abroad in the world, with irrationality in seats of power, with cruelty in places of authority, and with destructive behavior on the loose in our own country, it sometimes appears that God is on an extended vacation.  So it surely must have appeared to the Jews who had just spent decades as captives in a strange land.  But it was just at this point in history that this little book of Ruth, based on an ancient story, was finally written in its present form, testifying to the belief of this beleaguered little band of survivors, eking out a living in what was once their homeland.  They knew that the story was not finished.  God was still in charge.

The SECOND thing we learn from this simple but profound book is that it is the foreigner – the resident alien – who is the agent of life to Israel.  Here we have the Children of Israel, who made a serious effort in a far-off country to remember their heritage, to sing the Lord’s song in a strange land.  You would think that they would listen to their leaders, to Ezra and Nehemiah, and clean up their bedraggled racial purity.  A little ethnic cleansing here, please.  We don’t need any more foreigners to muck things up.  Jews should marry only Jews; God wants us to be special and not like the other nations.  Moab for the Moabites; Israel for the Israelites.

Yet the book of Ruth opposes this established position in the strongest way.  It is Ruth, the foreign woman, who lays claim to Naomi’s right, who places her petition before Boaz in the most open and obvious way imaginable.  And just to round out the lesson, it is this foreigner who becomes the ancestor of the greatest ruler Israel ever had. 

Remember now that this book was written after the exile, long after the marvelous days of David the king.  This would have been an ideal time to pretty up the picture, to forget the imperfections and the mixed heritage of their great leader.  But no, this story says that Great-grandmother was not a genuine, native-born Israelite.  She came from Moab, the other side of nowhere.

We don’t know how history will see this period in our own nation’s history.  Even history itself will not be sure for many decades.  Nor do we know how the generations to follow in the church will see what we do and how we do it.  But we do know that we are living in strange and possibly – just possibly – transformative times.  Many of the rafters seem to be loose, and not a few of our pilings seem to wiggle a lot.  And year after year of negative statistics suggest that it might be wise to spend our time digging our institutional grave. 

But the fact is that such times have come before.  Often.  Back in the 1820’s, it was clear that the Presbyterian Church was in deep trouble, and that it might not survive.  People were going west, and churches on the frontier were hiring ministers without a Princeton degree (!).  Evangelists were on the loose, and Lord knows what kind of rabble might next invade our church. 

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Well, we did split for a time, and then we got together again.  Just as we had before.  What’s next for us?  Probably important things.  We don’t know.  But we do know that the way to tackle today and prepare for tomorrow is not to hide in yesterday.  Our task is to be faithful to what we know and to seek eagerly for what God has for us to do.  And if our new seat-mate is different from the old one, and the demographics of our denomination seem always to be changing, perhaps this is a part of a grand plan that we cannot yet understand.        

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We are on a journey, my friends.  A wonderful, scary and exciting journey.   Let me make a suggestion. 

Around the same time as the book of Ruth was being written as we now have it, the Greek philosopher Zeno was holding forth, throwing out riddles in the form of what he was the first to call a paradox.  One of his paradoxes involved planning to take a walk.  Before I can walk the whole distance, he said, I have to walk half the distance.  But before I can walk that half, I must walk the first half of it.  And so on, until it is clear that it is impossible to take the walk because I must always first walk half of whatever I am walking. 

For generations, philosophers attempted to solve Zeno’s paradoxes.  But somewhere along the way, some bright soul suggested that the solution to this paradox was to ignore it.  He gave his wise response in Latin, of course: “Solvitur ambulando.”  It is solved by walking!

Well, my friends, so it is.  The journey which has been given to us is for us alone.  And walk it we must.  It was not given to those who came a generation before.  And it won’t be the design of the next generation’s task.

Our journey is uniquely ours.  And it is our challenge.  Take courage from the book of Ruth.  Spend time with it and imbibe its wisdom.  See here what God is telling us right now. 

Embrace the journey and follow it to its destination!

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NOTES

¹          Katherine Doob Sakenfeld, “Feminist Theology and Biblical Interpretation,” Biblical Theology: Problems and Perspectives, ed. Steven J. Kraftchick, Charles D. Meyers, Jr., and Ben C. Ollenburger, Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1995, p. 257.  See also Professor

         Sakenfeld’s Just Women: Stories of Power and Survival in the Old Testament and

         Today, Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003 for further insights into this 

         marvelous story.