It is good to be with you again.
You have done some great things in Ely
these past few years.
I find that really encouraging.
I have been encouraged by your determination
to have a children’s
Sunday School.
You are now organizing the community
to provide food and
support
to low income kids in the
public schools.
Your ministries are an inspiration to the whole diocese.
We are grateful for you.
I am grateful for you.
There are several good ways to read the Bible.
Sometimes I like to read it an old fashioned way.
It works like this: we study the social situation
– what was going on
at the time the story was written –
and look at the history leading up to that
situation.
That way we can figure out the point
the
author was trying to make.
There are other ways to read the Bible,
and
we will still get a point out of it,
just
not necessarily what the author meant.
In the case of Ruth, the author was making
a point
that
speaks to the United States today,
and
it’s a point churches might learn from.
King David was the centerpiece of Jewish
history.
David was the ultimate Jew.
He was their George Washington, Abe Lincoln,
and
FDR all rolled into one.
David was everything a Jew ought to be.
Our story happened before David,
but
it didn’t get written until after David.
After David, the Jewish Empire fell apart.
Finally, Babylon conquered Judah
and
carried the upper class away into exile,
leaving
only the blue-collar workers behind.
For 40 years, the upper class exiles in
Babylon
kept
tight with each other and practiced their religion
scrupulously
dotting ever I and crossing every T.
Back home in Judah, the blue-collar folks
had
not been so precise.
They were more easy going with their
rituals.
To make matters worse, there was a tide of
immigration.
Foreigners from neighboring Moab moved into
Judah
and
mixed in with the blue collar Jews.
Jews and Moabites even married and had
children.
Then the exile ended.
The upper class Jews came home
and
were not pleased to see what had happened.
They began whipping the place into shape
religiously
and cleaning it up
ethnically.
They began a massive deportation effort
to get rid of all those unclean Moabites.
Most particularly they wanted to get rid
of the Moabite wives of
Jewish men,
and their little
half-breed children.
When our author saw families being torn apart
by this deportation policy,
it
reminded him of Ruth.
A few hundred years earlier, two Jews,
Elimilech and Naomi, lived in Judah,
until there was a famine.
When they couldn’t make a living in Judah,
they packed up and moved
where they could.
There was precedent for it.
During an earlier famine, their ancestors had moved to Egypt.
But Elimilech and Naomi didn’t go that far.
They moved to the country next door.
They moved to Moab.
Elimilech got a job and worked in Moab.
Their sons both married Moabite women.
Eventually Elimilech and his sons died.
By now the economy had picked back up in Judah,
so Naomi decided to go
home.
But her daughter-in-law Ruth wanted
to keep what was left of the family
together.
So Ruth the Moabite woman moved to Judah with Naomi.
There Ruth worked in the fields;
but her story doesn’t end
like that.
It’s frankly a pretty racy story.
She sort of slept her way to the top.
The author doesn’t criticize her for it.
He’s too focused on admiring her family loyalty.
The prurient details of the romance between Ruth
and the Jewish gentleman farmer Boaz
just keep us reading the story to its
conclusion.
The conclusion goes like this:
Boaz the Jew marries Ruth the Moabite.
They have a son Obed, whose son is Jesse,
whose
son is - - - - David!
David, the ultimate Jew,
had
Moabite blood in his veins.
Under the deportation policy at the time
this was written,
David
would have been deported.
His grandma Ruth would never have been let
in the country.
If she had snuck in,
the Judean
Immigration Control & Enforcement
would have pulled
up in their black SUV’s
to Boaz’s house one
night,
told Ruth to kiss
Boaz good-bye,
and the Jews
would never have won their freedom
from the
Philistines because David
would
never have been born.
The author of Ruth could have made his point
just by quoting God’s law. Deuteronomy 24:
17-22.
It commands Jews
to welcome and care for aliens in their
land
because they were once aliens in Egypt.
But the author preferred to tell us this story
that makes a subtle reference to the law.
Boaz met Ruth while she was gathering
the gleanings from his field.
Those gleanings were left for her as an alien
because God specifically commanded it
at Deuteronomy 24: 17-22.
So what was the moral of the story for Judah
in those days after the
exile ended
when the upper class
leaders
were deporting
the Moabites?
What might the moral be for us?
That’s something we all have to pray our way through.
But I’ll make one small point about church life.
There’s something that goes on in virtually all churches.
It is always completely unconscious,
and that’s what makes it
so powerful.
Some churches are just cold and aloof.
But most churches are pretty welcoming
to newcomers who are like
the folks
who are already
there.
We are pleased as punch to see
more of our own kind in the pews.
But unless they are very deliberate about it,
most churches are not so
inviting
to people who are
different.
The cruelest behavior I have ever seen
has
been church folks excluding people
who
“aren’t our sort.”
It isn’t unusual for young adults to ask me to suggest a church.
But, we have congregations where I will not refer a young adult
because I know how they
will be treated.
No one intends to do this.
It’s unconscious – but it isn’t invisible.
Different churches have different unconscious standards
for who they will include
and who they won’t.
If we want to get serious about evangelism in Nevada,
a good starting place
would be for each congregation
to figure out “Who is a
Moabite to us? Who is alien to us?”
then prayerfully reflect on God’s word at Leviticus 19:34:
“The alien must be treated
as one of the native born.
Love him as yourself;
For you were aliens in
Egypt.
I am the Lord your God.”
