Sermon: The Journey is Home

The Journey is Home

Judges 21: 25

Ruth 1: 1-18

A Sermon by the Reverend Odette Lockwood-Stewart

Epworth United Methodist Church, Berkeley

January 22, 2012

I want to thank Steed, Benny, Boyung, and Linda, – Biblical, theological and cultural scholars of this community – who so generously agreed to lead the five-week Bible series that begins today: Reading the Bible from the Margins:  Finding a Home for Ruth. I am eager to hear Dr. Steed Davidson’s presentation at 11:30 today.   At the planning meeting Steed suggested that I preach on the Book of Ruth on the very day they begin this five-week series. My only regret is I am preaching before rather than after the series!

I have chosen to preach on a particular place, a space in Scripture that has always fascinated me: the space between the last verse in the Book of Judges and the first verse of the Book of Ruth.

Let us pray…

The Book of Judges was a time of division and disintegration of identity and covenant among God’s people between the 13^th and 10^th centuries BCE. The time of Judges is between the time of Moses, the Exodus, the time of Joshua, the conquest of Canaan, and – the time of the Kings (beginning with Saul and ending with David).

The Judges were warrior rulers.  The first judges (Othniel, Ehud, Deborah, and Barak) were faithful deliverers and leaders, but later judges (Jephthah and Samson) confused their need for power or revenge with God’s will. Reckless vows, machinations and manipulations, and idolatry cause the people to lose their bearings.

The time of the Judges became a time of chaos and civil warfare and retribution. (The Steig Larson books have nothing on the Book of Judges for violence, rape, and atrocity.)

Chapters 19-20 include one of most disturbing texts in the Bible.  A woman from Bethlehem was the concubine, or secondary wife, of a Levite of Ephraim.  This woman ran away from her priest husband, returning to her father’s house.  Months later the Levite came to get her, staying as the guest of his father-in-law for several days.  This woman became trapped as the story unfolds, property in the battles of men over power and pride. She was gang raped and then killed. The Levite dismembered her body and sent her body parts to each tribe of Israel inciting them to attack the tribe of those who had violated her and affronted him, the Benjaminites.  In the name of avenging this nameless silenced woman tens of thousands died, cities were attacked, vows made and battles waged. Hundreds of young women were taken as the spoils of battle and hundreds more kidnapped.

You would need charts, maps and a huge moral compass to figure out the actions, reactions, alliances of power, and meanings of this morass – let alone where God was in the midst of it all!

Miriam Therese Winter wrote a prayer reflecting on this story,

…

Weep with us

As we mourn the death of our daughters

From AIDS

And drugs

And suicide,

From rape

And violence at another’s hand,

And from religious gendercide

By those who would destroy us

For reasons we do not understand.

We turn to You,

For protection and compassion.

May our cultic acts

Never distract

From You or Your intentions,

Never divert our energies

from the need to work for justice

for women

and for everyone. Amen.

The Book of Judges describes the unintended disaster and unholy mess of judgment without mercy, of denial and projection of sin, of fighting hate with hate, violence with violence, of unchecked power.

Hear again the last verse (as translated by Eugene Peterson):

IN THOSE DAYS THERE WAS NO KING IN ISRAEL;

PEOPLE DID WHATEVER THEY FELT LIKE DOING.

Following a complex and conflicted context where self-interest is the center… comes the Book of Ruth.  In a brief 85 verses, God is revealed…

in the margins.

The Book of Ruth begins, In the days when the judges ruled… 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…

To escape famine, Elimilech and his wife, Naomi, had left their home in Bethlehem, left the land of their people and their faith.  They became refugees, immigrants, in the more prosperous, yet alien and hostile land of Moab.  Their two sons married Moabite women.

Naomi’s husband died. Then both of her sons died.  She became a foreign widow with no children, the most destitute among the destitute of the land.  Desperate, she decided to go back to Bethlehem, where the famine had subsided, to risk the journey to find new life among her own people.

As Naomi started on the journey, both her daughters-in-law, Orpah and Ruth, came with her.  But Naomi, realizing that her land would be foreign and hostile to them, stopped them.  She told them to leave her, to return to their mothers’ houses, to their own people, their own faith, their futures.  She kissed them goodbye. Orpah turned back.

But Ruth “clung to her.”  She refused to leave Naomi. Ruth spoke words that have inspired people of faith for centuries, “Where you go, I will go.  Where you live, I will live.  Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die, there I will die also.”  These words – from a daughter-in-law to a mother-in-law of different lands and religions endure as an expression of love and loyalty, commitment and solidarity.

Love as choice, not biology.  Love as kindred commitment not national, or cultural identity.  Love transforming lives in strange lands.  Love risking solidarity, adoption, clinging to the “other” and revealing the power of God.

Ruth’s decision changed generations, for she became the great grandmother of King David, from whose house came Joseph of Bethlehem, adoptive father of Jesus.

Today we harvest from a history and current reality of people doing whatever they felt like doing.  By people, of course, I include corporations.  Although I heard Bill Moyers say that he will not accept corporations as people until Texas executes one.

The story of Ruth is often understood as ethical teaching for individuals, with Ruth as example.  But I believe that Ruth is revelation more than lesson.  Ruth reveals the very nature of God!  We are more like Naomi … empty, full, empty, full, empty, bitter, fearful, resistant, silent – Naomi is the model for us – for as she allows Ruth to cling, to stay close, she participates in God’s future.  It is Naomi who invites us to let those who are “other” – the powerless, the immigrants, the outsiders – journey with us and stay near.  And the journey is home.

In a time when marriage and sons were security…. the solidarity of two poor single women in rural Palestine, shifts the focus of the people of God from wars and nations and rulers, to love and abundance in the midst of scarcity, to right relationship.

Whatever the horrors of militarism, and materialism, and individualism … whatever the frightening specter of social disintegration, of greed, and of violence,  God clings to us, refuses to leave us, redefines family and faith, and refashions yet again a future of hope.  Thanks be to God!