Remembering the Past...
        Planning the Future

    Park Christian Church
                                                                    (Disciples of Christ)

November 1, 2009

Scripture:         Ruth 1:1-18

Sermon:           “Family Ties”

            Turning our hearts and minds now to the word of God, let us read together the scripture lesson for the day.  Turn with me to the book of Ruth where we will read the first 18 verses of the opening chapter.  You can find that easily on page   of the Old Testament or Hebrew Scriptures in the pew Bible.

            Ruth is an amazing story of folks making their way through hard times.  You’ve got a family here that migrates from one country to another because of a famine.  They’re refugees.  They’re immigrants.  They’re foreigners.  They’ve gone to a land where there is work and food and more opportunity than where they’ve come from.

            That family of refugees gets a little bigger when the two sons marry women from their new country.  Ruth is one of those women.  But, the family never grew beyond that.  Over time all of the men died.  There were just three women left—a mother and two daughters-in-law.  And that was quite a fix to be in.  Widows were vulnerable.  It was hard to make a living as a woman on her own.  Husbands and sons meant security.

            Now, just so you know, I’m not promoting this.  I’m only trying to give you a sense of what is going on here in this story.

            What happens in the following chapters is a great tale of perseverance, creativity, and courage.  It’s all set in the midst of some of the more trying circumstances that people can find themselves in.  So, it’s a great read.

            And at the end of the story we discover the identity of the story’s heroine.  Ruth is not just a woman from Moab that found herself incorporated into a family of Israelites.  It turns out that she is the great-grandmother of King David.  You and I, of course, know that means she is one of the ancestors of Jesus.  Ruth is one of only four women mentioned in the list of Jesus’ ancestors at the opening of Matthew’s gospel.  Read the entire story sometime.  You’ll see why.

            This is the beginning of all of those things.  Let us listen to the word of the Lord…

            In the days when the judges ruled, there was a famine in the land, and a certain man of Bethlehem in Judah went to live in the country of Moab, he and his wife and two sons.  The name of the man was Elimelech and the name of his wife Naomi, and the names of his two sons were Mahlon and Chilion; they were Ephrathites from Bethlehem in Judah.  They went into the country of Moab and remained there.  But Elimelech, the husband of Naomi, died, and she was left with her two sons.  These took Moabit wives; the name of the one was Orpah and the name of the other Ruth. When they had lived there about ten years, both Mahlon and Chilion also died, so that the woman was left without her two sons and her husband.

            Then she started to return with her daughters-in-law from the country of Moab, for she had heard in the country of Moab that the Lord had considered his people and given them food.  So she set out from the place where she had been living, she and her two daughters-in-law, and they went on their way to go back to the land of Judah.  But Naomi said to her two daughters-in-law, “Go back each of you to your mother’s house.  May the Lord deal kindly with you, as you have dealt with the dead and with me.  The Lord grant that you may find security, each of you in the house of your husband.”  Then she kissed them, and they wept aloud.  They said to her, “No, we will return with you to your people.”  But Naomi said, “Turn back, my daughters, why will you go with me?  Do I still have sons in my womb that they may become your husbands?  Turn back, my daughters, go your way, for I am too old to have a husband.  Even if I thought there was hope for me, even if I should have a husband tonight and bear sons, would you then wait until they were grown?  Would you then refrain from marrying?  No, my daughters, it has been far more bitter for me than for you, because the hand of the Lord has turned against me.” Then they wept aloud again.  Orpah kissed her mother-in-law, but Ruth clung to her.

            So she said, “See, your sister-in-law has gone back to her people and to her gods; return after your sister-in-law.”  But Ruth said, “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!”  When Naomi saw that she was determined to go with her, she said no more to her.

            Where you go, I will go.  Wherever you stay, that’s where I’ll stay.  Your people shall be my people.  And your God shall be my God.

            These are the words that Ruth spoke to her mother-in-law.  Two women, who were not related by blood, had no obligations to one another, and didn’t even come from the same country decided that they were going to be family together.  Come thick or thin, Ruth and Naomi committed to do whatever it took in order to take care of each other.

            Isn’t that something?  It’s just a family cobbled together out of desperation and trust.

            They had wound up together, you know, when Naomi’s family fled from Israel in the midst of a famine.  Call it a recession if you like.  There weren’t any jobs.  There weren’t any prospects.  And these people had just kind of been blown by the winds into a place where they began to depend on one another for survival.

            When the situation back in Israel changed, and all of the men had died, leaving them as vulnerable widows in a world dangerous for single women, Naomi decided it was time to go back to where she had come from in the first place.  It makes me think of the countless numbers of people in the world that cross borders in search for the better life.  Some of them are here in this congregation!  Refugees.  Immigrants.  Sometimes we use the word “aliens”.

            Naomi and Ruth didn’t have a great deal in common, coming from different sides of that border.  And when Naomi decided to go back home, she told her daughters-in-law something like this:  It would be better for the two of you to stay here where you were born.  Find husbands.  Have families.  Be safe.  You’re still young enough to make it happen.  I’m going home where I might still be able to make a life for myself.

            And that’s when Ruth, a Moabite still living where she grew up, said, “No!  I’m coming with you.  You’re my family now.  And I’ll hitch my wagon to this team and follow it wherever it goes.”

            I imagine that this story has survived its way into our sacred scriptures for more than one reason.  Of course, its Ruth’s story.  And Ruth became the great-grandmother of the great King David.  And she is part of the winding and twisting story of the family of Jesus Christ.  So, it’s worth telling for those reasons alone.

            But, I imagine this story is worth telling and remembering and keeping as part of our sacred story, too, because it speaks of an enduring and deep human need for community, for family.  We all long to be a part of a people that is our own.  We all long to know and to be known.  We long to connect deeply with others with whom we share a destiny.

            It doesn’t always look so pretty, you know.  Not all of us have the perfect, happy story of home and growing up.  Some of us come from broken homes.  Some of us are driven by circumstance to leave the place we’re from in search for new life.  Some of us lose the families we’ve had when loved ones die before us.  It leaves us, like Ruth and Naomi, longing for a new community, a new family of sorts, no matter how we have to put it together.

            Ruth said, “You’re my family now.  And wherever you go, I’ll go.  Your people will be my people.  Your God my God.”

            On the overpass near the house where I first lived there are all kinds of writings on the concrete.  Graffiti.  It’s down in South Atlanta, a neighborhood that has deteriorated with crime and drugs.  Most of it, you know, are symbols of different gangs in the area.  Groups of young men that band together for some sort of survival.

            Now, you consider that many of these young men who join gangs come from single-parent homes in a place where unemployment is astronomical and the schools are notoriously bad, and you start to get the picture of just why gangs offer some kind of appeal.  It’s that deep human longing to connect with a community of people that are like, well, family.  The kind of loyalty in gangs sounds vaguely like what Ruth promised to Naomi.  It’s powerful.  But, when those kids say that their god will be the god of the gang, that god is violence, crime, drugs.

            I imagine that is why the story of Ruth has struck a chord with folks throughout time.  It’s who we are to be with other people.

            Gangs may illustrate the darker side of that.  I’ve seen how it works in places like the Gaza Strip, too.  Young people without much hope in life hitch their wagons to groups that promise to take care of them no matter what.  And so HAMAS and Hezbollah become families with ties so deep as to make the unthinkable to us seem reasonable.

            Maybe all of that seems like a long way away.  If you want something more tangible, consider the young people you know who merely go to high school here in New Albany.  What kinds of community will they find among their peers?  A sports team?  The marching band?  4 H?  Or will it be the only kids that treat them with respect—only it happens that they depend on chemicals to alter their brains in order to cope with whatever life has dealt them?  Our longing for family and community is powerful stuff.  And it can cause us to adopt the gods of the people we follow.

            That’s Ruth’s story.

            Now, let me rephrase this just a little bit.  Naomi and Ruth were hardly bad influences on each other.  In fact, they were remarkable people making the best of a very dire situation.  Our longing for family, for connection, for community—it all has the power also to bring us into right relationship with the world.

            What did God do in order to redeem the world?  The story goes from the beginning that God didn’t just find a person here and find a person there and redeem them as individuals.  No, God created a community, a nation, where redemption could be found for all of them together.  It’s the story of Israel.  In that people, in that community, in that family, there would be right relationship with one another and with the earth.  God used that powerful longing within us to draw us in.

            Keeping all that in mind, listen to these words as if they were the first time you ever heard them.  In Matthew’s gospel stories of Jesus, his mother and his brothers were standing outside of a house where he was speaking.  They wanted to see him.  So, someone whispered in Jesus’ ear, “Look, your mother and your brothers are standing outside, wanting to speak with you.”  Jesus turned and said, “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?”  He pointed around the room at his disciples and said, “Here are my mother and my brothers!  For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.”

            What did he say?  It sounded something like Ruth, didn’t it?  “This is who I choose to be my family.  Their God will be my God.”

            Now, you read through the New Testament sometime and take note of how many times the church is referred to as brothers and sisters.  What God is doing with this thing in the church, well, it’s the same as Ruth and Naomi.  We’re adopted into this family where God sees to our needs through one another.  Do you see that?

            May we be for each other, and for anyone longing to connect to community, a new family of faith where God redeems us to earth and heaven!

Rev. David James Brown

Park Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)