"Bitter and Sweet" given Nov. 8

            The Book of Ruth is one of the most beloved tales in the Bible. And some of the language and elements of it have made their way into popular culture—precisely because the story is so timeless and human. It’s a beautiful story—it’s written so that it reads like a novel— but it’s more than that. The Book of Ruth is a narrative of faith, but it’s also a love story.  Not a paperback romance novel sort of love story. Not a “Christian fiction” kind of love story. No it’s truer than either of those could ever be. Just as love expresses itself in more than one form in this world, so the story of Ruth portrays more than one expression of love—on more than one level.

             Once upon a time, a woman of Bethlehem, Naomi, and her husband left their home during a famine to live in the land of Moab. Their sons married Moabite – pagan – women, but tragedy struck the family when the father and both sons died, leaving their three widows bereft without husbands to look after them. Naomi decided to return to Bethlehem, where she had only a tiny field, as part of her dowry.

            At first, the daughters-in-law went with her, but on the road, Naomi urged them to go back home to Moab and find new husbands there. Orpah wept, but turned back. Ruth, however, refuses to part with this foreign woman who has become like a mother to her. She is willing to risk a familiar and comfortable life for the sake of compassion and her love for Naomi. Ruth is remembered for her exquisitely beautiful response to Naomi: "Do not press me to leave you or to turn back from following you! Where you go, I will go, where you lodge, I will lodge, your people shall be my people, and your God my God…."

            Naomi allows Ruth to return with her, but she remains bitter and full of despair. When her old friends, the women of the village come to greet and console her, Naomi (whose name means “pleasant”) tells them from now on to call her "Mara," a name that means “bitter”.

            But even in her deep despair, even if she isn’t aware of it—God is walking beside Naomi offering comfort and care. God is working in Naomi’s life—using Ruth the pagan daughter-in-law whose faithful love won’t be deterred. Ruth loves Naomi despite her bitterness, and looks after her needs. 

            That’s how God works in this world—through people ministering to other people out of love. Our Creator has a marvelous way of taking our pain, and walking with us through our suffering, and forcing it to serve us. When we open our hearts and eyes, we can see God behind the scenes of life, taking our suffering and bending it, redeeming it, using it to bring new growth—new opportunities and relationships into our lives—sanctifying them, and us.

            Now Naomi has an in-law, Boaz, a cousin of her late husband, and a rich landowner..   It was the custom that widows and poor women were allowed to follow the harvesters in order to glean the bits of grain they leave behind. Naomi sends Ruth out with the women into the fields that Boaz owns, hoping he will notice and protect her. And indeed, Boaz notices Ruth working hard, finds out who she is. She has lunch with him, revealing their relationship. And so Boaz makes special arrangements for these women, his shirt-tail relatives, to have extra grain.

            God is using Boaz to feed them. And Boaz finds himself admiring Ruth for her loyalty to Naomi. Things are starting to look up for Naomi and Ruth. But then maybe it's just human nature for us to miss the blessings that are right before our eyes sometimes.

            Naomi is so caught up in her bitterness and depression, she at first misses this tiny spark of hope. We so easily get caught up in so many trials and challenges that we miss God at work in our lives. Like Naomi it might be self-pity, or the struggle for survival or self-pity.  But it could be envy or anger, or grief, or fear of the future, or some other emotion. Or it might be just simple survival—either personal or institutional.

            For many of us in the church, it’s easy to get caught up in  the busyness of life, the business of life, even the busyness and business of church itself. When we let that happen, we can miss what's right before our eyes--the blessing of a loving, courageous, supportive community of faith – a gift from God, to each one of us, and to the world that God loves, the world God calls us to serve.

            Read the story of Ruth and Naomi, and it’s easy to see that old Naomi can't seem to recognize that God has blessed her in a most amazing and unexpected way. Okay, maybe we can't blame her entirely: she's had one misfortune after another – hunger, poverty, dislocation, living as an alien in the land of Israel's mortal enemy, the Moabites. Things got even worse when her husband and both sons died. Now she’s back in her home village with no protection, and no one to work the tiny field that is her only inheritance.

            She is now – officially – a  nobody. How ironic is that: a pagan foreign widow, about as low as it gets in those days. provides Naomi with a glimpse of undeterred, faithful, stubborn love – the dogged, determined love that someone once described as "the kind of fierce, fiery love by which God pursues us." The Bible, you know, is just full of that sort of love from God. 

            So, these two widows are living on the edge of society and the edge of survival. They're not aspiring to luxury or riches; they're struggling just to get through one more day. Ruth goes out every day and works hard in Boaz’s fields to provide for Naomi, and under the warmth of that kind of consistent, persistent love, Naomi's heart slowly begins to open up. She actually starts to think about someone else's welfare – she thinks about Ruth, about Ruth's future.

            We all know you can’t even begin to think about the future unless you have hope that there's going to be one. When you're trapped in despair, you can only think about yourself and "the right now" in front of you, the now that you're sinking in. But it's amazing what love—God’s love brought to us through the care and generosity of others-- can do-- even – especially – in the face of hopelessness and despair.

            Out of love, Naomi finds herself saying what mothers have said to their daughters through the centuries: "We need to find you a man."  How many single young women in college or  grad school or pursuing careers, or simply  more interested in books or other things in life rather than in cooking, have had their mom say something like “So honey, are you seeing anybody?” 

            “Mom I just got my PhD and have been offered a tenure-track professorship at Northwestern.”

            “That’s great honey. I’m proud of you. So are you seeing anyone?” Bless their heart, moms are still concerned about their children’s  future, no matter how old they get.

            Things hadn't changed that much in several thousand years. In Naomi and Ruth's day, the only safety net that society provided for widows was requiring a man to marry the widow of his dead relative in order to inherit her dowry. And  guess what! Boaz is that next-of-kin candidate for Ruth.  Just for dramatic license, it happens that there’s another available male kin who’s actually more closely related, but unwilling to take on a foreign wife and a crosspatch of a mother-in-law, he bows out.

            So, in the midst of this patriarchal system and this situation she finds herself and Ruth in, Naomi is perking up and taking the initiative. She plays match maker and sends Ruth out to snag her cousin-in-law at the after harvest party—I love that this part of the story is included in the reading:

            “Take a bath. Fix your hair. Put on your best dress. Wait until he’s full of food and had a couple of drinks and in a good mood and then go get him girl friend! Catch him in a dark corner. If you don’t know what to do then, honey, trust me, he will.”

            And that’s exactly what does happen. Boaz’s admiration for Ruth blossoms into love and he does indeed buy Naomi’s field,  stepping up to his responsibilities to the two widows.  When we hear that Ruth and Boaz eventually marry and have a child, that alone would be a happy ending, but Wait!  There's still more, a twist that's too wonderful for us to have imagined.

         When Naomi’s well-wishing friends, the women of the village, joyfully place her new born grandson in her lap, the old woman’s life has indeed been transformed and her spirit has been renewed and sanctified. And the twist is that the baby, the son of a pagan foreigner, will be the grandfather of David, the greatest king in all of Israel, and, we Christians say, the ancestor of Jesus himself!

            Little Obed, the grandson of Naomi the-no-longer-bitter, represents God working to bring good out of loss, redemption out of despair, new life out of death-- using human love. Little Obed  represents hope, for the future, not just for this old woman and her daughter-in-law, but for all Israel itself, and for us, today.

            That’s what I call a great love story—on more than one level

            Remember Ruth’s pledge of faithfulness to Naomi?

"Do not press me to leave you or to turn back from following you! Where you go, I will go, where you lodge, I will lodge, your people shall be my people, and your God my God…."

            We hear often hear that passage at weddings.  And that’s appropriate because it’s a pledge of love and faithfulness.. But marriage is not the only way that love is expressed in this life.  Ruth and Naomi, Naomi and the women of the village, Ruth and Boaz, Naomi and little Obed, God and all of them. It's amazing what love can do!      

            If it’s  true that love can do amazing things, and God works behind the scenes of life then in a certain sense, generosity is the way we make that love real-- generosity with our time, our talents, our money, our hearts, our selves, our love.

            Generosity inspired Ruth to follow Naomi, to give her loyalty and love even when Naomi was cranky and mean. Generosity inspired Boaz to make sure the two widows had more than enough grain to live on. Generosity inspired the other village women to rejoice at Naomi's blessing of a daughter-in-law who was more to her than seven sons. The depth of concern and care that Ruth and Naomi and Boaz (and the village around them) had for one another is the kind of concern and care that builds churches, communities, and a better world.

            It’s amazing what God can do through our love and generosity. In every church I’ve served there have been those going through a difficult time in life, and yet they always  knew, despite all the challenges that they were not alone. Their  church family was walking beside them,  loving them every step of the way, helping out in every way they could.

            Even in the midst of grief, or illness, or hard times, or disputes everyone of those saints could say:  this is the place where I'm known, This is the place where I’m accepted. This is the place where I’m loved.

         Those quiet, almost invisible everyday saints who do the most for all of us through their faithful ministry in the church, inevitably will end up discovering their own hearts filled with gratitude for what God was doing for them  there, in their own beloved  community of faith.

            And it is here in the church, where we nurture the vision of a better world, where we work together to bring it to reality, to live out the gospel ideal of the beloved community. The church is where we renew our spirits, and receive love, and hear God's call.  It is the church where the work of God in this world begins. The church is the body of Christ in the world. The church is you.. and me.

            Our God is an awesome God of abundance and generosity, not a God of scarcity and fear. Scarcity happens when we don't trust in God's abundance and generosity, when we think that “we”– not our community, and certainly not God – are the source of our own security.

Scarcity happens when we refuse ton risk, to go into the unknown future—like Orpah.

Scarcity happens when we lose hope and turn inward toward ourselves and forget about the future, when we turn back, and give up, instead of facing the future with steadfast faith in God's generosity.        

            Scarcity happens when we think that we’re in charge and responsible for managing God’s realm on a human basis of profit and loss, income and outgo—rather than trusting God to provide and opening ourselves to the possibility of generosity based on the joy of giving rather than numbers and spreadsheets.  Scarcity happens when we keep on doing the same old things in the same old way—and expect a different result. Scarcity happens when we fail to notice and appreciate the abundance right before our eyes, here in the love and care of this church, like Ruth standing before Naomi, offering persistent, generous, undeterred love.

            I love the story of Ruth because the miracles in this story are "ordinary" ones – the miracles that happen when everyday, ordinary people like you and like me decide to open our hearts and our lives to others, when we firmly resolve to let nothing and nobody deter us from the dream of a better world. When we decide to trust the future to God instead of our own cunning plans and schemes and instead, jump into life, and ministry and love. Stubborn, faithful, undeterred love – it's a miracle, and you can see it every single day.