Next of Kin
Ruth 3:1-5; 4:13-17
A Meditation by the Reverend Odette Lockwood-Stewart
Epworth United Methodist Church
November 8, 2009

(sung) Whither thou goest I will go. Where you dwell there will my dwelling be.  Your people shall be my people, my darling. And your God I’ll gladly come to know.

Jim Strathdee set these beautiful words of love from the Book of Ruth to music. Ruth, widowed Moabite daughter-in-law, speaks these words to her widowed Israelite mother-in-law Naomi.

Years earlier, Naomi and her husband Elimilech had left Judah, the land of their family and faith, to escape famine.  They came to the more prosperous but inhospitable land of Moab as refugees, and they had two sons. Then Naomi’s husband died and both her sons married Moabite women.  Ten years later both of her sons died.  Naomi was left a foreign widow with no children, the most destitute among the destitute.  So she decided to risk the journey back to Judah, where the famine had subsided.

Both of her Moabite daughters-in-law, Orpah and Ruth, began the journey with her.  But Naomi realized that her land would be as foreign and hostile to them as theirs was to her.  So she told them to go back to their own mothers’ houses, to their futures in Moab.  She kissed them goodbye. Orpah turned back.  

But Ruth “clung to her.”  She refused to leave Naomi saying, “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.”  This vow, made to a mother-in-law from a different land, a different culture and religion, expresses the depth of human love and commitment.

Ruth and Naomi arrive in Bethlehem of Judea, and there Ruth works hard to support them both by gleaning in the barley fields of a man named Boaz, who is a kinsman of Naomi.

As Naomi knew, their only real hope for a future was to find another husband for Ruth.  According to ancient Jewish marriage laws, if a man died, his nearest kinsman had an obligation to marry and to have a child with the man’s widow. This was the way to a future life and lineage for the family.  

Here is where the story gets... complicated.  

For the law said, “No Ammonite or Moabite may enter into the community of God, none of their descendents, even in the tenth generation shall ever enter the community of God.” (Deuteronomy 23: 3)

Ruth is a vulnerable outsider who desires to be included, but law rejects her.  Family is security, and Ruth risks that security to choose Naomi as family, but even the nearest kin will reject her because she is a Moabite. So, Ruth – vulnerable, rejected, outsider, not protected by the law, becomes an agent of change by choosing kinship and keeping her vow despite the law.

Naomi devises a plan.  She tells Ruth to dress up and go in to Boaz in the night ... and lie with him as next-of-kin.  Naomi’s plan worked.  Boaz married Ruth.  And their son, Obed ... became the grandfather of King David.

This link to King David is the end and some would say the point of the story.  But it is the story itself that is interesting and complicated because kinship is chosen again and again against the grain. The power of choosing kinship reveals the power of the kinship of God.

Ruth and Naomi and Boaz make choices ... to care for others in hard times ... to risk love and loyalty across cultural boundaries... to protect the vulnerable... to strategize survival with wily wisdom... to honor lovingkindness in others.

The Hebrew word for such lovingkindness and loyalty is Hesed. And that is how God’s power is at work in the Book of Ruth... through Hesed. The love, loyalty and survival strategies of two women living on the edge changed the course of a people’s history.  In desperate times, Naomi and Ruth worked the social system of patriarchal power in the ways available to them to honor and subvert that system with love.  For those who do Hesed there is power.

The story also reminds us (as though we really needed it), that every choice is more complicated than we may think:  Ambiguities, complications, mixed motives, multiplicity of contexts, unintended consequences. Every choice for kinship in lovingkindness creates a future.

There was no goodness in the famine.  There was no goodness in the untimely deaths of a father and two sons.  There was no goodness in the destitution of widows. But somewhere in every circumstance God was at work for good.

The Book of Ruth makes it plain that God works through it all.

Through an extraordinary interplay of choices and events the ancestral House of David is formed, leading in the Gospels to the lineage of Jesus. It wasn’t blood or nationality or culture but loving kindness, loyalty and risky strategies that subverted traditional kinship patterns and formed the Holy Family.

When we pray the prayer Jesus taught, I pray the words, “Thy Kindom come, thy will be done.”  Kindom of God describes God’s sovereignty but also affirms that God is relentlessly relational.”

In the Kindom of God, who is our next of kin?  Love and loyalty in ... adoption ... partnership ... commitment in communities of life and faith transform the present and the future.

Love is choice, not biology.  Love is kindom commitment not national, or cultural identity.  Choosing love, transforms relationships in strange lands today, tomorrow and for generations to come. “Blessed be God who has not left you today without next of kin.”

Hear this good news for all who find themselves without kin – for any reason – for those who choose family and are vulnerable to exclusion by law or prejudice.  I invite you to close your eyes and listen as I sing this promise and prayer:

We’ll be together on that day when the Lord shall come again and say, Follow me to the feast, my darlings, and we’ll go to heaven on the way. Whither you go there will I go. Where you dwell there will my dwelling be.  Your people will be my people, beloved, and our God we’ll gladly come to know. Yes, our God we’ll gladly come to see.