The Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Love of God, and the Fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.
Ruth 1:1 Now it came about in the days when the judges governed, that there was a famine in the land. And a certain man of Bethlehem in Judah went to sojourn in the land of Moab with his wife and his two sons. 2 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, Ephrathites of Bethlehem in Judah. Now they entered the land of Moab and remained there. 3 Then Elimelech, Naomi’s husband, died; and she was left with her two sons. 4 They took for themselves Moabite women as wives; the name of the one was Orpah and the name of the other Ruth. And they lived there about ten years. 5 Then both Mahlon and Chilion also died, and the woman was bereft of her two children and her husband. 6 Then she arose with her daughters-in-law that she might return from the land of Moab, for she had heard in the land of Moab that the Lord had visited His people in giving them food. 7 So she departed from the place where she was, and her two daughters-in-law with her; and they went on the way to return to the land of Judah. 8 And Naomi said to her two daughters-in-law, “Go, return each of you to her mother’s house. May the Lord deal kindly with you as you have dealt with the dead and with me. 9 May the Lord grant that you may find rest, each in the house of her husband.” Then she kissed them, and they lifted up their voices and wept. 10 And they said to her, “No, but we will surely return with you to your people.” 11 But Naomi said, “Return, my daughters. Why should you go with me? Have I yet sons in my womb, that they may be your husbands? 12 Return, my daughters! Go, for I am too old to have a husband. If I said I have hope, if I should even have a husband tonight and also bear sons, 13 would you therefore wait until they were grown? Would you therefore refrain from marrying? No, my daughters; for it is harder for me than for you, for the hand of the Lord has gone forth against me.” 14 And they lifted up their voices and wept again; and Orpah kissed her mother-in-law, but Ruth clung to her. 15 Then she said, “Behold, your sister-in-law has gone back to her people and her gods; return after your sister-in-law.” 16 But Ruth said, “Do not urge me to leave you or turn back from following you; for where you go, I will go, and where you lodge, I will lodge. Your people shall be my people, and your God, my God. 17 Where you die, I will die, and there I will be buried. Thus may the Lord do to me, and worse, if anything but death parts you and me.” 18 When she saw that she was determined to go with her, she said no more to her. 19 So they both went until they came to Bethlehem. (NASB)
Unlike other ancient religious texts and scriptures, the Old Testament (and the New Testament) records the stories and influences of many women of faith.
The Bible teaches that God created man and woman to be different. They are not interchangeable. They are complementary. God did not create the woman to be inferior to man in respect to her person, her character, her value, or her spiritual state. Eve was created in the image of God too. Genesis 1:27 “So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.”
God not only created the Adam and Eve in His image, in Christ Jesus both the man and the woman are forgiven, redeemed, and made full heirs to the kingdom of heaven. Jesus Christ is the Bridegroom and the Church is His Bride. What sin tore apart God in Christ is putting back together.
Thus we find in the Old and New Testaments wise, brave, and faithful women like Sarah, Abraham’s wife; Deborah, a judge in ancient Israel; Queen Esther: Rachel, Hagar, Rebekah, and more. In the New Testament there’s the Virgin Mary, Elizabeth, Salome, Mary Magdalene, Mary and Martha of Bethany, and Phoebe. This morning we consider Ruth, one of the two women who have an Old Testament book bearing their names. The other is Esther.
Ruth was a native of Moab. The Hebrews and Moabites had a history of hostility. In fact, God had Moses write this about the Moabites. Deuteronomy 23:3–4, “No Ammonite or Moabite may enter the assembly of the Lord. Even to the tenth generation, none of them may enter the assembly of the Lord forever, because they did not meet you with bread and with water on the way, when you came out of Egypt, and because they hired against you Balaam the son of Beor from Pethor of Mesopotamia, to curse you.”
The Lord God had set the Hebrews apart and blessed them with a promise of their own land and more importantly the Messiah. The Moabites on the other hand, did not only not help them in their escape from Egypt, they hired a pagan priest to curse them. So the Lord God made Moabites outcasts in the nation of Israel.
As a Moabite Ruth would have been considered an outcast and would not under normal conditions been welcomed in Judah. Yet, the book of Ruth is the story of how this Moabite woman was not only welcomed into the nation of Israel, but actually became a heroin of the faith and an ancestor to King David. If she is an ancestor of King David, she is also an ancestor of Jesus Christ. Ruth is one of the few women mentioned in the genealogy of Jesus at the beginning of the Gospel of St. Matthew.
The book and story of Ruth is about the Lord God bringing an outcast into His family. That’s the lessons of the Gospel reading as well. The Gospel records the healing of the ten leprous men.
Lepers were outcasts in the ancient world. Leviticus 13:45–46 “The leprous person who has the disease shall wear torn clothes and let the hair of his head hang loose, and he shall cover his upper lip and cry out, ‘Unclean, unclean.’ He shall remain unclean as long as he has the disease. He is unclean. He shall live alone. His dwelling shall be outside the camp.”
Those who suffered from leprosy were isolate from their families, communities, and from participation in the tabernacle/temple. They were barred from the Passover meal and from the various festivals through the year.
The major theme of the Gospel of St. Luke is that Jesus has come into the world to save sinners and to call outcasts to faith in Him and into fellowship with the God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and into fellowship with all the saints, the church.
The book of Ruth began by telling us that “a certain man of Bethlehem in Judah went to sojourn in the land of Moab with his wife and his two sons.” The man was Elimelech, husband to Naomi. A famine had taken hold of Judah and Elimelech and Naomi moved their family to green pastures. Once in Moab, the sons took wives from among the Moabite women (Ruth and Orpah). Tragically Elimelech died. Naomi, her two sons and two daughters-in-law “lived there about ten years [in Moab]. 5 Then both Mahlon and Chilion also died, and the woman was bereft of her two children and her husband. 6 Then she arose with her daughters-in- law that she might return from the land of Moab, for she had heard . . . that the Lord had visited His people in giving them food. So she departed from the place where she was, and her two daughters-in-law with her; and they went on the way to return to the land of Judah.”
Shortly after the journey began Naomi rethought the plan. A husband, sons, and grandchildren were the social security system in the ancient world for women. Losing a husband and sons with no grandchildren in the pipe line was about as bad as it could get for an older woman. It would be better for her daughters to go back home to their villages so they would find husbands and in so doing secure their own futures. Finding husbands and securing their futures in Judah would be a much more difficult proposition because they were Moabites and not Hebrews.
Orpah chose the easier path. She returned to her village. But “Ruth clung to Naomi . . . [and said] “Do not urge me to leave you or turn back from following you; for where you go, I will go, and 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 I will be buried. Thus may the Lord do to me, and worse, if anything but death parts you and me.”
So Naomi brought Ruth to Bethlehem, but the it was the Word and the Holy Spirit that brought Ruth into the Kingdom of God. “Your people [God’s own people] shall be my people, [she said] and your God [the Lord God Yahweh Elohim] my God.”
The woman who had grown up worshiping pagan gods had heard Naomi, Elimelech, and her husband speak the Word of God and came to believe. Thus Ruth offers here her confession of faith in God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and accepts the hardship it will bring.
Ruth’s confession of faith and inclusion in God’s family was brought about as a result of her father and mother-in-law and their sons speaking the Word of God in the normal course of ordinary life. They were Hebrews. They were children of God from Bethlehem. They lived around 1,140 B.C., well after the Exodus and the giving of the Ten Commandments and the books of Moses.
There is no greater evangelism than speaking the Word if God in our respective vocations simply as a normal part of what it means to be parents, spouses, children, and neighbors.
The thankful leper heard the Word, did as instructed, and believed. Thus Jesus said to Him, “Stand up and go; your faith has made you well.”
Ruth no longer worshiped the gods of Moab. She trusted in the true God, the God Who would take on human flesh, be born in the city where Ruth would live out her remain days (Bethlehem), and He would die to take away the sins of the world.
The rest of the book of Ruth reads a bit like a romance novel. Naomi and Ruth arrive in Bethlehem. In order to care for herself and her mother-in-law, Ruth goes into the fields to pick up leftover ears, the scraps off the ground. Since she had no husband or children she was able to worked all day and her hard work and long hours captured the attention of the owner. His name, Boaz. After he got the back story of this hard working woman and knowing that she was a Moabite in an act of kindness and he said to Ruth, “Do not go to another field, and when you are thirsty, you may share the water of my workers.” He told her there was no need for her to go from field to field to get enough food. He would make sure she and her mother-in-law would receive what they needed for their daily bread.
In time Boaz was able to arrange for Ruth to become His wife, an arrangement she also welcomed. In time they had a son. There are no obvious miracles here. This story does not have a great king involved. There are no military battles and victories. Just two ordinary lives. Boaz a farmer and business man tending to business and showing kindness to an outcast. As for Naomi and Ruth, a life of hardship and survival, of love and loyalty, and of faith and devotion.
Though all their lives were terribly ordinary for their time, it is an event of great significance. The city was Bethlehem, the son of Boaz and Ruth – Obed has a son. His name Jesse and the root of Jesse, King David. David of course is the ancestor of “Joseph, the husband of Mary, and Mary was the mother of Jesus who is called the Messiah.” (Matthew 1:16)
The first chapter of the Gospel of St. Matthew consists of a long list of names, the genealogy leading up to the birth of the Christ Child. The overwhelming vast majority of those ancestors lived very ordinary lives. They struggled to feed and protect their families against famine, robbers, wars, sickness, injury, and untimely deaths. Their lives were not marked by obvious miracles or visits from angels. They were not given visions from God and never heard the voice of God. They had the Word spoken and taught to them by mere mortals, their own parents and read to them by rabbis from the scrolls, just as you do.
Ruth heard those words and believed the promises. From birth she was an outcast, a foreigner. She belonged to a people who cursed the children of God and worshiped false gods. As such she fell under the condemnation of Deuteronomy 23 that “none of them may enter the assembly of the Lord forever.”
But by faith Ruth became a child of God, an heir of Abraham and ultimately and heir in Christ. Jesus came into the world to call sinners to repentance. He sought out the outcasts among the Jews first. Then He went to Samaritans and Gentiles, all outcasts.
We learn in the book of Acts that God sent St. Peter and St. Paul specifically to the Gentiles to preach the Gospel and they heard and believed in greater numbers than the Jews. They became full members of the household of faith with all the benefits of the Gospel.
Galatians 3:27-29, “For all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s descendants, heirs according to promise.”
By virtue of sin, our fallen nature and those we commit we were all outcasts. We had a disease much worse than leprosy, but we have been washed clean and wrapped in the righteous robe of Jesus Christ. We have been made children of the heavenly Father and members of His family. 2 Timothy 2:11 “It is a trustworthy statement: For if we died with Him, we will also live with Him.”
AMEN.
May the peace that surpasses all understanding keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.