Readings (click here for full text of the readings):
   Ruth 1:1-19a; Psalm 113; 2 Timothy 2:3-15; Luke 17:11-19

Today is a special day in the church year, because today – the 19^th Sunday after Pentecost in Year C of the church calendar, for those who are keeping track – is the only time you’ll ever hear the book of Ruth in the Episcopal Church.  In our three year Sunday cycle with all the special occasions and saints days on top of that – we never hear from Ruth, except today. 

The story of Ruth is pretty simple: a woman named Naomi has to leave Bethlehem, along with her husband and two sons, because of a famine.  They go to Moab, which is a pagan land with its own set of gods, and there her two sons get married.  Eventually all the men die, leaving just Naomi and her daughters-in-law, Orpah and Ruth. So Naomi decides to return to the land of Judah where she was raised, and she tells Orpah and Ruth to stay put, because in Moab at least they have a shot at remarrying, but no Jew back in Bethlehem is going to marry them.  Orpah agrees, but Ruth doesn’t.  Ruth won’t leave Naomi for anything, and the two of them return to Judah.

Once they get there, they survive by gleaning – picking up the wheat that the harvesters have left behind.  And one night Ruth comes across Boaz, the rich owner of the plantation, and they fall in love, and their great-great-great-grandson turns out to be none other than King David.

If that sounds a little like a fairy tale – like Cinderella, perhaps – that’s because it is.  None of the characters except for Boaz is mentioned anywhere else in the Old Testament, and all of them have names that reflect their actions: Naomi’s sons’ names mean “sickness” and “spent;” Orpah, who leaves Naomi behind, means “back of the neck;” and Ruth means “friend,” or “companion.”    The important thing about the book of Ruth isn’t so much the exact events described, but rather its deeper meaning.

First of all, the book has to do withpower.  In the ancient world – which was even more male-centered than our world today – to be a widow was to be as powerless as you could be.  A woman was only as important as her husband and her sons, and here you have Naomi whose husband and sons are dead, and Ruth whose husband is gone and who has no children.  It’s pretty remarkable that anyone cared enough about them to write a book about them, let alone include it in the Bible.  Yet from powerless, vulnerable Ruth ultimately came King David and later Jesus Himself – not from a noble family or good stock, but from poor beggars who clung faithfully to each other when the world didn’t care a whit about them.

The book also has to do with identity.  In a patriarchal society, women’s identities are often taken up in being wives and mothers. More than depending on their husbands and sons, they’re defined by them.  But when Naomi and Ruth are left without any men to define them, they respond in different ways.  Naomi decides to return home, and figuratively she’s returning to who she was before she married, before the famine took her away from her homeland.  She hasn’t allowed herself to be just a wife, just a mother.  She is a person with a history and opinions and feelings all her own, and when everything goes against her, she’s strong enough to stand up to it, and to be selfless. The selfish thing to do would have been to keep Orpah and Ruth with her.  To lean on them, because they were young and she wasn’t anymore.  But instead she looks out for her daughters-in-law, putting their happiness above her own, and is willing to return to Judah as a childless widow, vulnerable, and alone.

Ruth’s sense of identity is a bit different.  Just like Naomi, Ruth is alone, but unlike Naomi there’s hope. Ruth is still young, and she could remarry and have children and live happily ever after.  But instead of choosing that – like Orpah did – Ruth refuses to leave Naomi’s side.  She says to Naomi some of the most powerful and loving words in the entire Bible: “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.” 

Ruth is willing to give up everything that the world says is important in order to stay with Naomi.  In that way, Ruth is the embodiment of faithfulness.  She doesn’t think of herself and her own well-being.  She doesn’t think of her status in society.  She doesn’t listen to common sense.  She lives out the word “love” in ways that most of us can only dream of, because love in today’s world usually means partnership and give-and-take and mutual benefit.  Not so with Ruth – she doesn’t ask Naomi to compromise, to walk a middle road, to see Ruth’s needs as well as her own.  No, Ruth says: “Where you go, I will go; your people shall be my people, and your God my God.”  Ruth basically says that as long as she’s with Naomi – as long as she’s with the person she loves most in the world – then everything will be okay.

And, finally, the book of Ruth is about justice.  Because the reason that Ruth and Naomi were able to survive back in Judah was because the Biblical rules required that harvesters not go back and pick up the grains of wheat that they missed or that had fallen out of their baskets.  Those left-overs – the gleanings – were left for the poor, who had the right to pick them up, and survive.  The poor weren’t given a handout.  There were no so-called “welfare queens” in the ancient world. The poor had to work in order to survive, and they were given a chance to work. 

The poor were also accorded respect, for when Boaz sees Ruth – a foreigner – gleaning in his fields, he orders his laborers not to harass her or call her names or mistreat her.  When Ruth asks Boaz why he is so kind, he replies, “All that you have done for your mother-in-law since the death of your husband has been fully told me, and how you left your mother and father and your native land and came to a people that you did not know before.  May the Lord reward you for your deeds, and may you have a full reward from the Lord, the God of Israel, under whose wings you have come for refuge!”

And the poor were also allowed to rest.  More than that, they were ordered to rest.  Because the people lived according to the law of Moses, which said that “the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God: you shall not do any work – you, or your son or your daughter, or your male or female slave, or your ox or your donkey, or any of your livestock, or the resident alien in your towns, so that your male and female slave may rest as well as you.”[1]  From that list it’s clear that the resident alien is worth less than the donkeys and livestock; but the foreigner still matters, and has rights, and deserves respect.

So it’s pretty clear that Ruth is a marvelous book.  It has a lot to teach us about power, and identity, and faithfulness, and justice.  But that was a long time ago, right?  What would the book of Ruth look like in today’s world? 

In today’s world we worship productivity and efficiency.  If we go to the grocery store, and while we’re checking out the cashier drops some change on the floor and doesn’t even bother to pick it up, we’d think he was lazy or careless, and he’d probably be fired before the day was out.  We probably wouldn’t say to ourselves, “Now there’s somebody who follows God’s law.”

When we’re approaching a deadline at work and need to put in some extra hours to make sure things are done by Monday, and one of our co-workers says, “I can’t work on Saturday, because that’s my day of rest,” we’d probably grumble and complain.  We probably wouldn’t say to ourselves, “Now there’s somebody who follows God’s law.”

And if you translated the book of Ruth into modern terms, who would Ruth be? Moab doesn’t mean anything to us nowadays, and while most of the time being a woman works against you, in some cases it’s harder to be a man.  I think a modern version of Ruth would have an American woman with two daughters travel to the Middle East.  While there, the daughters marry Arab men who are Muslim. Over time the woman’s husband and daughters die, and she decides to return to the U.S.  She tells her sons-in-law to stay behind, because they can make a new life for themselves in their own country.  One decides to stay, the other won’t leave his mother-in-law’s side.  He says to her, “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 so he comes with his mother-in-law to this country, or at least tries to.  Would he have been allowed on board the plane in the first place, given his ethnicity? Would he have made it through immigration checks?  Would he have been able to find a job, with dark skin, a Muslim name, and no green card? And if he had found a job and earned the legally established minimum wage, and worked forty hours a week, every single week of the year without a day off, he would have earned about $10,000 and he and his mother-in-law would still fall below the poverty line for a family of two.  And would the boss have ordered the other workers to treat him with dignity and respect, noting his commitment to his mother-in-law, or in this post-9/11 world would he have been harassed and insulted and maybe even worse?

In the end, the book of Ruth isn’t just a pleasant little fairy tale with a few nice sentiments thrown in.  It’s a challenging, revolutionary, turn-our-view-of-the-world-and-of-ourselves-on-its-ear kind of story that shows us just how far we’ve strayed from the Biblical ideal.  We work and work and work, and think we’re doing God’s will.  We pay somebody $5.15 an hour, and we think we’re doing right by them.  We read the book of Ruth every three years on the nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost, and we think of a meek, unthreatening, attractive young woman who was faithful to her mother-in-law.  But when we translate Ruth into our world, and she becomes a muscular, swarthy Muslim man from the Middle East, everything changes. We feel threatened and uncertain and not so sure that the moral of the story is a very good one after all, and the Bible has done its job.  It’s challenged us and moved us and threatened us.

And, perhaps most of all, reminded us.  It’s reminded us of where we came from, and not just where we ourselves were a few years ago, or what our parents had to fight for, but where our spiritual ancestors came from.  For we are all descended from the people of Israel, an outcast people who had to depend on the hospitality and generosity of strangers in order to survive.  And that dependence is the reason God calls us to rest, to not delude ourselves into believing that we are who we are because we earned it or deserved it.  In Deuteronomy, right after God commands that everyone rest one day a week, He tells us why we should do so: “Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm; therefore the Lord your God commanded you to keep the Sabbath day.”

In America, if you work hard and do the right thing and look out for number one, you’re supposed to get ahead.  That’s capitalism, not God.  God says that we shouldn’t work all the time.  God says that we should give the poor a chance to earn a living wage, even if that means that we don’t keep everything we’re entitled to.  And the reason we should do all those things is that we were once poor ourselves, and the only reason we’re here today – in this land of riches, if not milk and honey – is because somebody once gave us a chance that we didn’t really deserve.  The theological word for that is “grace,” and now we’re expected to show that same grace to the Ruths of the world, whoever they might be.

[1] Deuteronomy 5:14.

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