September 4, 2005 Des Moines

Labor Day Sunday

TEXT: Ruth 1:15-18

Clinging to the Faith

We are familiar with “odd couples.” Some of us will remember Felix Unger and Oscar Madison – the first to officially wear the label, but by no means the first odd couple, nor certainly the last. Most of us, at one time or another, have probably lived next door to one. Among humanitarians we watched former Presidents George Bush and Bill Clinton join forces last winter to raise money for tsunami relief – an odd but effective partnership they will reprise in the coming weeks on behalf of hurricane victims along the Gulf coast.

Biblically, one of the oddest in a veritable pantheon of odd couples is the companionship between Ruth and her mother-in-law Naomi. In reality, this couple isn’t as odd as it first may seem – the caricatured and storied tug-of-war between mothers and daughters-in-law being largely overdrawn. But even given that caveat, the relationship between these two is impressive for more reasons than one.

“Once upon a time,” the story begins, “back in the days when judges led Israel, there was a famine in the land. A man from Bethlehem left home to live in the country of Moab, he and his wife and two sons.” In other words, the story begins in pain, disaster and displacement. Refugees – not at all unlike those we have seen on television this week crowding freeways, boarding buses and staring plaintively, helplessly into cameras – desperate and in search of basic survival. In this biblical example, the family leaves their home and their city, and ultimately their country, seeking food and any kind of livelihood.

They settled, according to the story, in the land of Moab – a land and people from whom the Israelites were estranged, and against whom held strong prejudice. Given the ethnic and religious bad blood that ran between these peoples, I don’t know why Elimelech and Naomi opted to settle in Moab. Perhaps it was simply as far as they could manage to go – running out of gas figuratively and literally. Perhaps they wearied of the journey and reluctantly chose to take their chances. Perhaps they were met by surprising charity and gracious hospitality – welcoming strangers who opened their home, who held their hand and willingly shared their pain.

One thing, however, is clear. Whatever settled them there in the land of Moab, grief also followed and ultimately found them there. Not too long after settling there, Elimelech, the husband and father, died. The only other piece of background we know is that the sons married local women.

That, too, is a bit of a surprise, given the dim view taken among Israelites of marrying outside one’s own kind. Who knows how the widow Naomi reacted to her sons’ choices – whether she was grateful for the female company, or disapprovingly bit her tongue? It wasn’t soon to matter, because tragedy had still more winds to blow. If famine and the death of their patriarch weren’t enough, the two remaining men of the family were shortly to follow their father to the grave.

So there it is: scarcely two paragraphs into the story, this once vibrant family is numbingly, tornadically reduced to three grieving widows, one of them bereft in a foreign land, all three of them without any real means of support; without any palpable sign of hope.

In light of their desperate circumstances, Naomi makes a difficult, but understandable decision: she’s going home. She encourages her daughters-in-law to do the same, whatever that might mean. She has nothing more to offer them – no more husbands for them will be emerging from her womb. Best, she tells them, just to shake hands and go their separate ways. “Me to my own people, and you to yours, and perhaps there to find some means by which to live.”

Of the two Moabite women, one takes her Jewish mother-in-law’s advice and leaves to rejoin her own people. But Ruth refuses to turn around – her “own people” suddenly located in a new direction. In words that have lost none of their power, none of their emotional nobility over the years, Ruth clung to this woman of a different country, a different generation, a different family, and a different religious tradition, saying,

“Do not press me to leave you

or to turn back from following you!

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--

there will I be buried.

May the LORD do thus and so to me,

and more as well,

if even death parts me from you!”

In fact, the sense of her words is even stronger than that. While our English translation suggests an emerging commitment, in the original language there are no verbs signaling future intent. There are simply the juxtapositions of pronoun and noun: “your God, my God; your people, my people.” As such, the sense is just as likely – if not likelier – present reality than future intention. Naomi has become Ruth’s family. Her blood may not flow through Ruth’s veins, but her spirit flows through her soul, and Ruth can no longer imagine life apart from it. “I’m going with you,” Ruth announces to her mother-in-law. And that, as they say, was that.

Her insistence is met with curious ambiguity. According to the story, when “When Naomi saw that Ruth was determined to go with her, she said no more to her.” Does it mean that Naomi accepted Ruth’s decision and stopped urging her to go back, or does it mean that Naomi stopped speaking to Ruth altogether? It could well have been, after all, that Naomi didn’t want Ruth to accompany her. Ruth, to tell the truth, would have been a burden in some ways. She was a responsibility of sorts; another mouth to feed. And back in Bethlehem there was prejudice against Moabites. Who knows but what Naomi could have shared some measure of that historic bigotry against her daughter-in-law. All of that, and Ruth would have represented a reminder of all that Naomi had lost along the way in this miserable and foreign sojourn.

Any of those scenarios is possible, I suppose; but I’m not buying them. This story doesn’t beat with the agitation of a masochistic tag-a-long and her passive-aggressive mother-in-law, but pulses with the appreciation for a life that has become wholly if surprisingly new.

From whence do such waters flow? Certainly we can understand a bond forged of shared grief and travail. And desperation has often cemented bizarre alliances. But my sense is that none of those offer adequate explanation. I simply believe that Ruth, in a manner of speaking, had fallen in love, and had, in some transforming way, been reborn. I believe that because I have known Naomies – those blessed and holy mothers who, through the power and depth of relationship, through the compelling witness of character and faith delivered oftentimes unawares, have been silent evangelists introducing those around them to the one true God, intimate and near.

I have known Naomies whose transparent discipleship has been a window opening onto heaven, and at whose turning I, myself, would follow anywhere, knowing that whatever their road, it would lead me home. I won’t name any names, but one doesn’t have to look very far in these pews to see her; indeed, to see many of them.

In truth, for the acquaintance of one such as these I would happily trade all the religious tracks, all the sermons, all the crusades and organized campaigns, brochures and advertisements. For these Naomies are the only evangelists who ultimately and effectively matter.

But I have also met countless Ruths whose loyalty and devotion demand a sacrifice willingly and gratefully paid. We have heard countless stories this week of Ruths who would not suffer separation – the elderly wife who stayed in New Orleans with her diabetic husband, through the hurricane and on the bridge to which they were later relocated, until he died of his illness beside her. We have watched the efforts of service workers, troopers and police who stayed behind to help as they could, rather than seize their own safety and advantage. And a growing resolve is emerging about how the coastline from east to west and for hundreds of miles north is awash with Naomies with whom Ruths the likes of us will find a way to stand and take as our own – for indeed, they are nothing else.

Ruth clung to Naomi, but both, it seems, clung to the tenacious faith that theirs was not an empty travail. They clung, as well, to the faith that the God whom Naomi worshipped and the God to whom Ruth had been introduced had neither forsaken nor abandoned them, but moved with them and ahead of them in grace and healing and ultimately redemptive purpose.

The book of Ruth ends by tracing the line of descent that birthed from her – a line that would ultimately be traced through David, Israel’s beloved King, and Jesus, humanity’s highest hope.

Who knows what holiness and animating purpose might birth from we Ruths and Naomi’s, from our witness and our convictions, from our labors and our loves, and from the faith to which we cling?