The Unbusy Pastor, 12 November 09

The book of Ruth is fascinating. It's not quoted by anyone else anywhere in the bible (as Job and even Jonah are), it's not used in any part of the liturgy and you won't find a reading of it on any of the 112 Sundays of the 2-year lectionary cycle. There are no great theological pronouncements. To the best of my knowledge Ruth is never used as a proof text in systematics. God's chosen people Israel are bit players, part of the unnamed chorus. It is an utterly unremarkable book but for one fact:

Ruth is the grandmother of David.

How does that happen? According to the story, Naomi is married to Elimelech. They have two sons and are members of the tribe of Ephram living in Bethlehem. When a famine strikes Israel the family leaves their ancestral home for the Gentile land of Moab. What the story assumes you know is this: it was a big deal for an Israelite to leave the Promised Land for a foreign country. After all, God had JUST brought them through the blood bath that was the entrance into the land God promised them almost a thousand years before. Each tribe was given land as part of the covenant, and that land was fiercely defended by the covenant's terms. No one was allowed to sell their land, trade it or even give it away. This is why the confiscation of land to satisfy debt was such a big justice issue later on; the prophets spoke against it all the time. The point is, it belonged to God not to them. The Land is everything at this point because there is no Temple. The Land is where God dwells, and to leave it is to abandon his favor and blessing. So, leaving Bethlehem, even during a famine, was to run toward disaster and not away from it.

Scene two. Naomi and Elimelech's sons find wives in Moab. Though the story makes no moral pronouncements about this fact, it's a BIG no-no. The Law specifically prohibits Israelite men from taking foreign wives for a number of reasons. Strike two. The narrative never explains why the family violates the Law and breaks with tradition in such a big way, but one might infer that they weren't all that "observant"...not terribly religious, you might say. They were "carnal" Israelites, to use a modern term. Over worldy or something.

Scene Three. Elimelech dies in Moab, leaving Naomi a widow. While tragic, it's not the end of the world because she has sons. When both of her sons die, then Naomi is in real trouble. She can't own land or property. Everything she has must be claimed by a male family member, but the only family she has now are her two daughters-in-law. Add to this injury the insult of the fact that all of this happens in a foreign land, which is precisely what the audience would have been thinking...that's what you get for breaking God's law. Of course they lost everything. They spit in God's face and lived with pagan foreigners. They got what was coming to them.

Scene Four. Naomi announces that she's packing up and leaving for home. She urges her daughters-in-law to go back to their families, which would have been their right. One of them does exactly this. The other is Ruth, and she does something utterly unexpected: she insists on staying with Naomi, and goes so far as binding herself to Naomi using clear covenant language (1:16, 17). To make a long-ish story short-ish, they go back to Bethlehem, Naomi matches Ruth up with Boaz, he "redeems" the family (I hope you're making the gospel connections here) and tragedy is turned to triumph when Ruth gives birth to Obed, the father of Jesse, who is the father of David. From the line of David would come the Messiah, Jesus Christ, about a thousand years later.

So, out of Law-breaking, untrusting, non-covenantal, irreligious behavior comes the story of the redemption of not only Naomi and Ruth, but of all of humanity. A non-Jew, a foreigner from a pagan land who presumably knew nothing of God, a person Israel would have viewed as utterly outside the promises of covenant, land and blessing, becomes the great-grandmother of God's beloved. Naomi knew nothing of Israel's history or their covenant; she knew nothing whatsoever of Egypt, Sinai, 40 years in the desert, the Law or the Tabernacle. She was just one of the masses of the excluded. Yet, here she is, right there in a book of the bible that bears her name, giving birth to the first in the messianic line. Not only was she a part of the story, she's a CRITICAL part of the story. By her persistent love and faithfulness to Naomi, millions upon millions upon millions would be saved.

Who do we not know yet? What critical role will they play? They'll come from places totally foreign to the culture of Christianity. They won't know the lingo or Christian history. They won't be familiar with canon or creed. They won't be able to recite any memory verses. The idea of loving an unseen God will seem mystical and maybe a little fruity. But they'll be critically important. Through them one or two, or dozens or hundreds or thousands will come to know Christ. Because of them families will be "redeemed", and the impact will be felt for generations afterward. They will never forget their lives before...just the opposite. They'll be used to the glory of God; his name will become greater because of them, and they'll be aware of all of it.

I can't wait to meet them.

"We live by faith, not by sight."
- 2 Corinthians 5:7

"But the righteous shall live by his faith."
- Habakkuk 2:4

"These were all commended for their faith, yet none of them received what had been promised."
- Hebrews 11:39

I love the book of Hebrews...it's my favorite book in the bible, actually. The author was writing to what seems to be a primarily Jewish-Christian audience, possibly during or shortly after the horrific purging under Nero in the mid-60's AD, encouraging them not to give up, but to continue in obedience under the new covenant. Hebrews marries faith and obedience in a way that reveals their compatibility rather than highliting their differences. It exposes what I think is the nature of obedience: that it cannot take place until my will conflicts with God's, or my sight conflicts with His. Faith is the critical component to obedience.

After all, we're not really obeying until then are we? When my goals line up with God's, then my willingness to carry out his directions come about as the result of happy coincidence. I mean, it's nice and all, but it's not obedience. The great philosophers of ethics go so far as to say that the fact of obedience is actually undermined by an issuing authority we regard has having honor, or who is issuing an order with a goal that is clearly comprehensible (if not always fully in sight) with an end game we view as valuable. In that case we are really following a personality, or a set of precepts or a code of honor. We are following something that we already believe in. There is no application of the will, no sublimation of who I am and what I want involved in following that person or those commandments. I am in fact in the process of getting exactly what I want in that case.

Obedience involves death. Something about me must die in order to live by another's agenda. I must give up my agenda and believe in another's. This is, in fact precisely the meaning of the Greek phrase used in all of the gospels for "repent and believe in the Good News". One can never unintentionally obey. The opportunity presented to me in obedience is to subsume my rebellious will to God's. After all, I am not in the end a victim of notorious fate...that's not how the bible describes us at all. It's not even a remotely Christian thought. I am rebel entrenched behind fortified walls, and I must be made to come out and lay down my arms. This is obedience.

None of the men and women noted for their faith and obedience ever got what they wanted. They never saw the goal God had in mind. They had no "church", no scriptures, they had no home, they had no people in some cases. They had no way of knowing whether this God-entity was real or not. A reader could quite legitimately replace the word "faith" in Hebrews 11 with the word "obedience" and still have precisely the intended meaning. But obedience is not always loss, is it? It is never loss, really. In obedience we become more like Christ, which is to become more human and not less. To become more like him is to be happy because this is the only happiness He has intended for us.

Kierkegaard addresses the issue of faith and obedience well when he examines the story of Abraham and Isaac, and his conclusion is striking. We place great emphasis on the obedience involved in placing Isaac on the altar, but Abraham's obedience didn't stop there. Kierkegaard places greater importance in the obedience involved in taking Isaac back again.