Blogging Towards Sunday
November 18, 2007
Heroes of the Bible:
Ruth & "Chesed" Loyalty

IF YOU DRIVE A CADILLAC DO YOU STILL GET A TURKEY?

Sunday at our church community we're reflecting upon the story of Ruth, one of the Heroes of the Bible picked by a member of our community of faith. It's a challenge to preach and facilitate a dialogue about an entire book, so I chose a section (used by the Lectionary) to summarize and respresent the entire story. We're using Ruth 1:1-19 as the foundation for our worship gathering. If you can read the whole book. I remember learning that the book of Ruth is one of the best literary examples of a short story in class in college.

Ruth is a challenging story. An Israelite family leaves Israel during a famine and settles in Moab. While there the father and two sons die, leaving the mother and her childless daughter-in-laws to fend for themselves. The daughter in laws are moabites, foreigners for the Israelite mother now stuck in a foreign country in a time when Israelites were encouraged to only marry within their ethnic group. Naomi, the mother-in-law decides to return to her people, her land, her home in her loss. For her widowhood, lack of progeny, and continued poverty seem to mark her as cursed by God, a possible visible sign of her invisible unfaithfulness. One daughter-in-law accepts her liberation from marriage bonds and stays, the other - Ruth - refuses to leave her mother-in-law returning with her to Bethlehem. Once there to stays faithful, and while in their poverty, forced to eat from their gatherings of the gleanings, or unharvested edges of the farm fields meets Boaz a good man. They fall in love, marry and have a child, who turns out to become the grandfather of the mighty king David.

So what's the big deal?

*The story is written with much more depth, invisible to our eyes as we come from a different culture and time.
*Moab is a bad place for the Israelites. It's associated with gluttony, sexual perversity and generally has the connotation of a place of the ennemies of God's people throughout the First Testament.
*The Israelite family that is faithful forsakes their homeland, marries into foreign families, and sets up shop in the worst of all possible lands - all no-nos!
*The story was most likely written down in a time when the Israelites were forbidden to marry women outside of the Israelite ethnicity, and if they had were automatically granted divorces to right that wrong.
*The personal who exemplifies faithfulness (chesed in Hebrew) in the story is actually - horrror of horrors - a woman, a foreign born woman, a foreign born woman who never really talks about the God of the Isarelites, and on top of it all she's childless after her first marriage.


So the story is actually subversive. The one that seems to be the most unfaithful is the absolute paragon of faithfulness and has become the icon of chesed living in the testimonies of the Bible. Ruth challenges us, the way that we put God in a box, the ways in which we put each other in a box with our expectations, racial/ethnic/gender stereotypes, the ways in which we restrict what God could be doing in our world, and when and who God might be doing them through.

It's Thanksgiving. Our community gives out Thanksgiving Baskets to those who are hungry and come for them. It's great. We feel good. Folks are served. We do it in the name of God's love in Jesus the Christ. Yet there's always a Ruth-ish challenge. Someone always comes who drives this beautiful Cadillac. Do they deserve a turkey and basket of food if they drive such an expensive car? Why are they coming for free food when their car cost as much as some people pay in rent for a year? A wise woman of our community says, "I don't care what they drive, or how they come. If they come and ask for food we're going to give it to them. If they're hungry and they ask then they'll be fed, doesn't matter if they come in a Cadillac, on the bus or walk. That's all that Jesus says to do. Feed the hungry. Clothe the poor. Open the door when someone knocks."

Maybe that's the challenge of the story of Ruth, in particular for us in this week of Thanksgiving. God works in mysterious ways, most often from the margins, in avenues that we don't expect, understand, or even always like. The question isn't "Why is God doing this?" but "How is God showing up? How is God inviting us to respond to the needs around us in the love of Jesus?"

What do you think? If you drive a Cadillac do you still get a turkey?