Wisdom Sermon Series 1, Ruth, "The Strange Woman Challenges the Story"

 

B Wisdom (Ruth) Pilg 2021

Ruth 1:16-17, 3:1-5, 7-11, 4:13-17

September 8, 2021

 

In the book of Deuteronomy, chapter 23, verse 3, Scripture reads:  “No Ammonite or Moabite shall be admitted to the assembly of the Holy God.  Even to the 10^th generation none of their descendants shall be admitted to the assembly of the Holy One.”  As subtle as a sledgehammer, throughout the book of Ruth, the main character is always named as “Ruth the Moabite.”[1] It is a way of saying, “Here is someone we would normally consider the antithesis of being a faithful Jew, a part of our community.”  Yet, throughout the story, Ruth is the one who exhibits one of the primary values of God, the Hebrew word, chesed, or steadfast love, a love that is loyal and true and endures.  Ruth models chesed.

In that way, the book of Ruth is a parable.  Parables offer familiar figures that make you believe you know how the story will end.  Then the script gets flipped.  John Dominic Crossan refers to the mind-bending suspension offered by parables “the dark interval.” 

With all that we know about Moabites from the Bible, Ruth is objectified as a foreigner, outsider, an immigrant, a border-crosser, one who does not belong.  In fact, the story plays with the understanding that Moabite women were thought to be sex-crazed people.  In the Jewish Midrash, it is even said that everyone who saw Ruth orgasmed.[2]

Everyone orgasmed?  The hyperbole lets us know that judgments and pre-conceived notions are being tested here as we see Ruth in command of her sexuality when she offers it to Boaz.  Ruth uncovers the feet of Boaz—a euphemism for male genitalia and sex that is not so distant from present day euphemisms.   Ruth does this so that he will take her in marriage, redeem Naomi’s family, and provide protection for both of them. 

As good parables do, the story of Ruth upends a familiar Jewish script and asks us to see what it means to be an immigrant, a border crosser, a Moabite, with new eyes.  “There is need for a simple story to trouble the simple stories we sometimes tell about borders.”[3]

The script in the Jewish Scriptures comes from Wisdom Literature which talks about Woman Wisdom or the excellent woman.  In the Jewish Scriptures, the book of Wisdom Literature, Proverbs, ends with a description of this Woman Wisdom or excellent woman, a father telling his son the characteristics of a woman who would be good to marry.  In the last chapter of Proverbs, Proverbs 31, this excellent woman “[O]pens her mouth with wisdom and the teaching of kindness is on her tongue.   She looks well to the ways of her household and does not eat the bread of idleness.”[4]  This is a father, speaking to his son, wanting him to find a nice Jewish girl with Jewish values for his bride.  Thus ends the book of Proverbs.

Throughout Wisdom Literature, is that same counsel, from father to son, to listen for and find the wise and excellent woman and eschew the strange, foolish, and foreign woman.  This was an ancient part of Jewish teaching as the Jewish people came into contact with other peoples and other religious practices and faiths. Other religious practices and faiths encouraged men to go to the Temple prostitutes and have sex with them as a way of demonstrating fertility to the gods so that the gods, in like manner, might bring fertility to the earth and bring forth food. Thus, the strange or foreign woman became strongly connected with idol worship and forbidden or mysterious sexuality. To an ancient Jew, sin is largely defined by this idol worship, and idol worship is closely identified with the cultic practices of other peoples involving Temple prostitutes.

Wisdom Literature defines a life of justice, righteousness, equity, and steadfast love by heeding the call of Wisdom or Sophia as she calls from the city gates for people to come in and dine with her. In contrast to the Jewish Wisdom Woman, there is a Strange or Foreign Woman who seduces young men with a meal of her own, laced with a strange, forbidden, and foreign sexuality. At times, these teachings became strongly ethnocentric as the Jewish people sought to maintain their social, political, and religious identity over and against other people and their faith practices.

In Jewish Scripture, directly following the description of the wise and excellent woman in Proverbs 31, is the book of Ruth.  The book of Ruth is a parable because it clearly knows the Jewish script and chooses to flip that script, to critique the well known story.

The book begins with the patriarch, the one who should be the hero of our story in a patriarchal culture, Elimelech, leaving with his wife Naomi and their two sons because of a famine, a hunger, a time of climate disruption, in the land of Judah.  Hunger in the Hebrew Bible is often narrated as a time of displacement and death.  God is sometimes seen as holding back crops so that the people reflect on their “mistakes, wrongdoings, or betrayals.”[5]

Jewish midrash, or commentary, suggests that Elimelech is a leader in Judah who abandons his community for his own personal benefit.[6]  Elimelech goes with his family to Moab, the geographical area whose founder was conceived in an incestuous relationship after Lot's flight from the destruction of Sodom. In Jewish mythology and story, Sodom is the place of social oppression and inhospitality with dubious sexuality. Elimelech makes a choice for his personal benefit and against his community by going to the place of oppression and inhospitality.

 

In contrast to the usual hero of our story, the Jewish patriarch, Ruth is the one who practices Wisdom’s social virtues to save and redeem Naomi and her family’s name.  Could the story draw the contrast any more starkly?[7]

Ruth even calls herself the strange and foreign woman before the feet of Boaz.  The book of Ruth flips the script, is a Jewish critique of Jewish ethnocentrism and contemplates a God who is far wider and broader in steadfast love than religious bigotry can imagine.

          The book of Ruth is like the father who tells his son, over and over again, “Watch out for those women who wear tattoos and have piercings. They tend to be a little too wild, will lead you down the wrong path, and get you into all kinds of trouble.” And then, Junior introduces Dad to his new fiancé who has sleeves tattooed down her arm, a nose ring, and a pierced tongue. Wouldn't you know, she just happens to be the kindest, most well-read, and most respectful young woman Dad has ever met?  She ends up being the best mother a grandparent could every hope for.  Our prejudices about who is a saint and who is a sinner get foiled by the actual content of someone's character. Who knows? Some family member from one side of the river may actually marry someone from the other side of the river find out that the people on the opposite side are really not so bad after all. I'm not saying for a certainty that that will be your experience. But it could happen?

         Naomi tells Ruth and Orpah to go find some nice Moabite boys while they are still young. Literally, in the Hebrew, Naomi tells Ruth and Orpah to go find rest and peace[8], the passive form of Sabbath practice.  Go find rest and peace, a life free of obligation with me.  Orpah leaves to find a nice Moabite boy.  Ruth remains with Naomi, without power in a patriarchal society.  Namely, they are both without a man.  Ruth is the protagonist for the active forms of Sabbath practice found in the Jubilee traditions: hospitality, gleaning, and redeeming are central to the health and welfare of Ruth and Naomi.[9]   In contrast to what our wider culture teaches, that you judge a community and nation’s sustainability and resiliency by its middle-class and rich, Jewish teaching believed that a community and nation’s sustainability and resiliency was to be judged by how things were going for its poor or its most vulnerable.  Hospitality, gleaning, and redeeming helped to make communities and vulnerable people within their communities sustainable and resilient against such things like famine, natural disaster, and war.

Rabbi Binah Wing, from Temple Beth-El in Rockford, once shared with me this week that Ruth is preached in synagogue as the first convert to Judaism. For, rather than leading her husband away from his faith as a Moabite or foreigner, or going back to her people after her Jewish husband has died, Ruth proclaims her loyalty and allegiance to her mother-in-law in a profound and beautiful poem or love song. “Where you go, I will go. Where you live, I will live. Your people shall be my people. Your God shall be my God. Where you die, I will die and may God do the very worst to me if anything but death parts me from you.” Throughout the story, Ruth practices the Jewish faith in a way that is righteous, resolute, and steadfast. Again and again, she demonstrates a way of living out the Jewish Sabbath, ways of economic and ecological practice, that are intended to preserve the most vulnerable and save the community.

Ruth saves her mother-in-law, Naomi, and herself by being . . . the righteous Jew.  She is a woman of welcome, hospitality, and loyalty.  Three times in the book, Ruth acts with chesed, a Hebrew word we translate as steadfast love, loving kindness, and loyalty. Chesed is most often used to describe the actions of God.[10]  Without proposal or prodding from Naomi, Ruth goes out into the fields to glean grain for the both of them, reminder of the Jubilee code, within Sabbath mythology, found in Leviticus.  Boaz, the owner of the field, notices Ruth, and from the double entendres that go back and forth, Ruth notices Boaz as well.[11]   (double eyebrow raise)  Ruth throws herself at the feet of Boaz, calling herself the strange woman, the foreigner, the interloper, so that if you had any doubts before, you know now that the conventional Wisdom story is being turned upside down.  The conventional Jewish script is being flipped.

And the story plays and has fun with the mysterious, seductive, and forbidden sexuality of the foreign or strange woman.  Ruth eats the “seed” of Boaz and is “filled.”  Boaz gives Ruth “his seed” so that Ruth and Naomi may be sustained in the midst of famine.  I don't make these things up.

Remember the rest and peace Naomi offered Ruth and Orpah at the beginning of the story?  Ruth proves that sometimes the moral challenge of life requires precisely the opposite of rest and peace.   In contrast to the patriarch Elimelech, Ruth chooses meaningful actions and experiences that permit and demand growth from all those around her.[12]  

When Naomi sends Ruth back to Boaz to offer herself sexually, Ruth willingly agrees in an attempt to redeem “family” for Naomi. In the Jubilee redemption process, the closest male relative is to marry a woman whose husbands die so that the women have “protection” in a patriarchal culture.  Ruth challenges Boaz to do the right thing, the moral thing.  Though Boaz is the one who will be referred to as the redeemer in this story, it is Ruth who is making all this happen, creating a new family for everyone. Ruth cuts across the patriarchy, ethnocentrism, and xenophobia of her time to deliver a message that is at the core of Jewish social values, thought, and theology. In the end, because Boaz does do the right thing, the child born from the mixed marriage of Boaz and Ruth goes on to be the ancestor of the famed King David.

Now the easy moral to this beautiful parable is don’t judge a book by its cover.  But we do a disservice to a parable that sought to upend a national narrative, a narrative used to keep and uphold their identity as a people when the Jewish people feared they might fracture or lose their way.  Who would Ruth have to be to scare us, to be a strange and foreign woman to us?  Maybe Muslim?  A Haitian immigrant?  Maybe, because her sexuality scares us, a lesbian?   What if we have the national narrative so locked in our skulls that there is no way God has a chance to expand our minds and enlarge our hearts?

Deep within the Jewish script is this negative stereotype against Moabite women.  Even deeper still is the understanding that foreign women will lead you away from your Jewish identity.  So it is that the prophet Ezra who preaches against the sins of intermarriage.  As a result, an assembly is called in Ezra’s time.  All the men are to gather in the town square or face impoverishment.  Under torrential rain, the men gather. There they are commanded to separate from their foreign wives.[13]  The book of Ezra ends with a permanent listing of all the men who had married such foreign women, a permanent blemish on their family name.[14]

It is into this world that the story of Ruth is told.  It is a challenge to upend a familiar script.

Remember that Ruth challenges Naomi to receive her kindness and devotion, and if Naomi flat out refuses, the story ends and Naomi dies.  Remember that Ruth challenges Boaz to do the right and moral thing, but that if he refuses, Naomi and Ruth may live on the edge till they die and that the story ends right there with no ancestor to King David.  God forever offers steadfast love through people like Ruth, but what if, what if we refuse?  What if we refuse?

The challenge is forever before us.  Strange and foreign, yes, but mind expanding and heart enlarging.  Do not let the story end.  Accept Ruth’s challenge.  Tell this simple story to upend the simple stories we often tell to label women, immigrants, and borders.  Amen.

---

[1] Ruth 1:22; Ruth 2:2; Ruth 2:21; Ruth 4:5; Ruth 4:10.

[2] Pádraig Ó Tuama and Glenn Jordan, Borders & Belonging:  The Book of Ruth:  A Story for Our Times (Norwich, England:  Canterbury Press, 2021), p. 19, referencing Rabbi Yochanan, Ruth Rabbah, chapter 4.

[3] Ibid, p. 18.

[4] Proverbs 31:26-27

[5] Borders and Belonging, p. 15

[6] Mira Morgenstern, “Ruth and the Sense of Self: Midrash and Difference,” Judaism, Spring 1999.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] http://www.theotherside.org/resources/jubilee/index.html.

[10] Amy Jill-Levine, “Ruth,” The Women's Bible Commentary, ed. by Carol A Newsom and Sharon H. Ringe (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992), p. 78.

[11] See Amy Jill-Levine’s article for an extensive discussion of this. 

[12] Mira Morgenstern, “Ruth and the Sense.”

[13] Ezra 10:9-11

[14] Borders and Belonging, p. 51.

Sermon for the Thirty-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time, November 8, 2015

B Proper 27 BFC 2015

Ruth; Jeremiah 29:1, 4-11 (Pledge Sunday Theme)

November 8, 2015

We have two Biblical stories before us today.  Both, I would argue, with the same lesson.  In one of the more moving stories of the Bible, before the Scripture Alicia read for us from the book of Jeremiah, the prophet Jeremiah has been begging and imploring the leaders of Jerusalem to return to the covenant God established with Moses and the Children of Israel.  As the Babylonian Empire sacks Jerusalem, Jeremiah invokes one senseless, grace-filled, covenantal practice.  Using the right of redemption, he buys ancestral land as a way to keep it in his family—a practice that was intended to remember that the land and its resources were given as a gift to sustain the people.  Without land in one’s family, a landless family would be vulnerable and might very well fall into debt slavery.  Allowing for the right of redemption made sure that people with more economic power would not have the ability to leverage debt and join estate after estate to one another without a family member’s ability to intercede and buy the land on behalf of a relative who was down on their luck. 

 Jeremiah buys this land to remember God’s will to protect the poor and most vulnerable in the community as the Babylonian Empire begins the wholesale destruction of Jerusalem and begins one of the most horrific times in Jewish history—the Babylonian Exile.  The Scripture before us from Jeremiah is after the Babylonian Exile has led to the great hopelessness of the Jewish people.  After incredible devastation, violence, warfare, and death, living now in oppression, utter hopelessness, Jeremiah enjoins the people to continue the small, graceful practices that will build the Babylonian cities in which they now reside.  We can imagine the Jewish people asking what they are now to do when their religious life is not the one that carries the culture, dominates the spiritual landscape.  Live life.  Grow vineyards.  Raise your kids.  Pray for the city.  It is these small practices, Jeremiah believed, that would reveal God’s plan, how God was working to sustain them, build resilience, to infuse their everyday lives with grace.

In the same way, Naomi, Ruth, and Orpah live in a seemingly graceless age.  Famine and hunger make Naomi and her husband Elimilech migrants and refugees who see themselves necessarily moving to Moab.  Famine and hunger kill Elimilech and the two sons of Naomi and Elimilech.  The two sons are also the husbands of what was, back in that time, two adolescent girls, Ruth and Orpah.  In a patriarchal culture, adolescent girls are probably the most dangerous of all creatures.  Their sexuality begins to show and men, seemingly, have no control over that sexuality.

In reality, Naomi, Ruth, and Orpah are three women without any public power.  So Naomi tells Ruth and Orpah to go find some nice Moabite boys while they are still young. Literally, in the Hebrew, Naomi tells Ruth and Orpah to go find rest and peace[1], the passive form of Sabbath practice.  Go find rest and peace, a life free of obligation to Naomi.  Orpah does leave to find a nice Moabite boy.  Ruth remains with Naomi, without power in a patriarchal society.  Namely, they are both without a man. 

From this point forward in the story, Ruth, one of those adolescent girls, is the protagonist in the story.  She builds family and community through practices of honor, hospitality, gleaning and redemption—all practices rooted in the covenant with Moses and the Children of Israel, in short form, what we know as the Ten Commandments, many of them an extend form of what Sabbath practice meant to Jewish faith and life.  They are practices central to the health and welfare of Ruth and Naomi and are practices which provide grace for the most vulnerable in economic systems.[2]  

In contrast to what our wider culture teaches, that you judge a community and nation’s sustainability and resiliency by its middle-class and rich, Jewish teaching believed that a community and nation’s sustainability and resiliency was to be judged by how things were going for its poor or its most vulnerable.  Practices of honor, hospitality, gleaning, and redemption helped to make communities and vulnerable people within their communities sustainable and resilient, practices of the covenant with Moses and the Children of Israel that infuse grace into economic systems against such things like famine, natural disaster, and war.

Rabbi Binah Wing was one of my best colleagues when I served near Rockford, Illinois.  Rabbi Wing once shared with me that Ruth is preached in synagogue as the first convert to Judaism. For, rather than leading her husband away from his faith as a Moabite or foreigner, or going back to her people after her Jewish husband has died, Ruth proclaims her loyalty and allegiance to her mother-in-law in a profound and beautiful poem or love song we read last week. “Where you go, I will go. Where you live, I will live. Your people shall be my people. Your God shall be my God. Where you die, I will die and may God do the very worst to me if anything but death parts me from you.” Throughout the story, Ruth practices the Jewish faith in a way that is righteous, resolute, and steadfast. Again and again, she demonstrates a way of living out the Jewish Sabbath, ways of economic and ecological practice, that are intended to preserve the most vulnerable and save the community.  Ruth saves her mother-in-law, Naomi, and herself by being . . . the righteous Jew.  She is a woman of honor, hospitality, accompaniment, welcome, hospitality, and loyalty.  Three times in the book, Ruth acts with hesed, a Hebrew word we translate as steadfast love, loving kindness, and loyalty. Hesed is most often used to describe the actions of God.[3] 

Remember the rest and peace Naomi offered Ruth and Orpah at the beginning of the story?  “Drop your obligation to me,” Naomi says, “so that you may live lives of rest and peace.”  Ruth proves that sometimes the moral challenge of life requires precisely the opposite of rest and peace.   In contrast to the patriarch Elimelech, Ruth chooses meaningful actions and experiences that permit and demand growth from all those around her.[4]  

Remember that the land of Moab was historically associated with the land of inhospitality—Sodom.  In contrast to the mythic legacy, how we traditionally reference Sodom, the Moabites provide hospitality for Naomi’s family in the midst of famine.  In contrast to the prohibition against relationship with foreign women, Naomi welcomes the Moabite women, Orpah and Ruth, under her tent as daughters.  Boaz then welcomes and provides hospitality to Naomi and Ruth. 

In the true spirit of the covenant with Moses and the Children of Israel, Ruth names Naomi as her mother and honors her by refusing to leave her side.  This is the true meaning of the commandment to honor our father and mother.  It recognizes a time when our elders might be vulnerable in the land, and, rather than leave them without protection and cover, honoring our parents is to not leave them unaccompanied. 

Without proposal or prodding from Naomi, Ruth goes out into the fields to glean grain for the both of them, reminder of the Jubilee code, within Sabbath mythology, found in Leviticus.  Gleaning was an economic practice of rest and grace for the land, the workers, and for those in the community who were most vulnerable.  Gleaning assumed God’s abundance such that some heads of grain would be left to those who might be needy.  Ruth was so bold as to walk and glean at a time reserved for the men.  But what are you to tell an adolescent girl who confidently walks in a field knowing that she must provide for her mother?

When Naomi sends Ruth back to Boaz to offer herself sexually, Ruth willingly agrees in an attempt to redeem “family” for Naomi. In the Jubilee redemption process, the closest male relative is to marry a woman whose husband or husbands die so that the women have “protection” in a patriarchal culture—not unlike the way the redemption of land functioned for Jeremiah.   Ruth challenges Boaz to do the right thing, the moral thing.  Though Boaz is the one who will be referred to as the redeemer in this story, it is Ruth who is making all this happen, creating a new family for everyone. Ruth cuts across the patriarchy, ethnocentrism, and xenophobia of her time to deliver a message that is at the core of Jewish social values, thought, and theology. In the end, because Boaz does do the right thing, the child born from the mixed marriage of Boaz and Ruth goes on to be the ancestor of the famed King David and, finally, Ruth is one of three women who is included in the Gospel of Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus. 

We, too, live in a largely graceless age.   Fear of people who are not like us leads to inhospitality, violence, and death in our political and economic systems.  Fear leads to odd and strange law enforcement decisions and mass incarceration and torture of people long known to be innocent.  Forgiveness of debt, an important Sabbath provision, is ignored in favor of economic systems driven, fueled by austerity and debt.  What the popular culture tells us is that we will be saved by some superhero who comes to removes us from all danger and peril.  What Jeremiah and Ruth teach us, however, is that danger and peril are part of human existence and that we are saved by God’s plan revealed through spiritual practices that reveal God’s grace and accompaniment and kindness and welcome and hospitality.  We move through an age that is “ruthless” to communities that are full of Ruth. 

To finish today, I want to end with the stewardship letter that was sent out to the whole congregation this past week, because I hope you all heard in it my prayer that we never care so much for the survival of this church that we lose sight of God’s steadfast love for this earth. 

We are a great congregation.  I have remarked to several people over the last month that when I step into the pulpit some Sundays, I look out and see incredible spiritual power.  I see historic leaders from our congregation and conference.  I see people who have been prophetic in the wider Billings community.  And I see people who span generations living out a public and quiet courage. 

You have heard the budget report for our congregation.  It sounds pretty dire.  Not unlike many mainline congregations, we will have to row against the tide to continue our faithful ministry in downtown Billings.  Biblical faith was lived in such a context.  True spiritual power was seen as people of faith acted not from the center or the seat of influence but from the marginal and forgotten places.

The stewardship theme comes out of one of those places.  The prophet Jeremiah tells a people who have been decimated by imperial power that God yet has plans for them.  Jeremiah encourages the people to continue with spiritual practices, however small, that reveal the character of God as one of steadfast love, righteousness, community building, and justice.  In doing so, Jeremiah believes that the plan of God will be revealed to the Jewish people.

So I know this sounds crazy but I want us not to try and “save” our church thinking that we can overcome our budget deficit with some miracle giving.  We do not need heroes.  Jeremiah did not expect that small spiritual practices would turn back the Babylonian Exile.  Jeremiah encouraged small spiritual practices that revealed the character of God.  So begin the small spiritual practices in your giving.

If you have never pledged to the church before, start very small but begin a practice of gracious giving.  Do it as a reflection of being part of a community that is rooted in steadfast love, righteousness, community building, and justice.  If you already pledge to the church or have turned in your pledge, talk to others about what you give and why.  

Giving has so long been built on guilt and shame that we have lost the joy of it.  If you need to give less because of other priorities or a tightening budget, share that with others so we all can celebrate what you do give.  It is not about giving more.  It is about building generosity in all of us, sharing in our joys and struggles, so that we can reveal what God has planned for us. For that to happen, we need to talk about why we are even committed to giving one dollar to the church.  I believe those conversations will build a hope against hope.

We are a spiritually powerful congregation.  I trust that God has a plan for us.  In a ruthless age, let us reveal that plan by building a community full of the spiritual practices of Ruth to reveal the plan that God has for us.  Adolescent girls can be darn threatening to men who want to have it all under their control, but, what I’m finding, if you listen to adolescent girls close enough, they challenge you in all the right ways to be more kind, and graceful, and open to family and community and the plan God seeks to reveal to all of us.    Amen. 

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[1] Mira Morgenstern, “Ruth and the Sense of Self: Midrash and Difference,” Judaism, Spring 1999.

[2] http://www.theotherside.org/resources/jubilee/index.html.

[3] Amy Jill-Levine, “Ruth,” The Women's Bible Commentary, ed. by Carol A Newsom and Sharon H. Ringe (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992), p. 78.

[4] Mira Morgenstern, “Ruth and the Sense.”

Sermon for The Thirty-First Sunday in Ordinary Time, November 1, 2015

B Proper 26 BFC 2015

Ruth 1:1-18

November 1, 2015

The book of Ruth is a parable.  It flips the script.  It’s like a good knock-knock joke that uses word play to introduce language or even the form itself to turn the tables. 

For example, I have a good knock-knock joke.  Let me share it with you.  You start.  Go ahead.  (Hopefully the congregation says, “Knock, knock.” and I say, “Who’s there?” and they realize I have played them).  See?  We all know how the format goes so it’s familiar.  I flipped the script on you. 

The script in the Jewish Scriptures comes from the book of Proverbs which talks about Woman Wisdom or the excellent woman.  In the Jewish Scriptures, the book of Proverbs, ends with a description of this Woman Wisdom or excellent woman, a father telling his son the characteristics of a woman who would be good to marry.  In the last chapter of Proverbs, Proverbs 31, this excellent woman “[O]pens her mouth with wisdom and the teaching of kindness is on her tongue.   She looks well to the ways of her household and does not eat the bread of idleness.”[1]  This is a father, speaking to his son, wanting him to find a nice Jewish girl with Jewish values for his bride.  Thus ends the book of Proverbs.

Throughout Hebrew Scripture is that same counsel, from father to son, to listen for and find the wise and excellent woman and eschew the strange, foolish, and foreign woman.  This was an ancient part of Jewish teaching as the Jewish people came into contact with other peoples and other religious practices and faiths. Other religious practices and faiths encouraged men to go to the Temple prostitutes and have sex with them as a way of demonstrating fertility to the gods so that the gods, in like manner, might bring fertility to the earth and bring forth food. Thus, the strange or foreign woman became strongly connected with idol worship and forbidden or mysterious sexuality. To an ancient Jew, sin is largely defined by this idol worship, and idol worship is closely identified with the cultic practices of other peoples involving Temple prostitutes.

In other places in Proverbs, a life of justice, righteousness, and steadfast love is defined by heeding the call of Wisdom or Sophia as she calls from the city gates for people to come in and dine with her. In contrast to the Jewish Wisdom Woman, however, there is a Strange or Foreign Woman who seduces young men with a meal of her own, laced with a strange, forbidden, and foreign sexuality. At times, these teachings became strongly ethnocentric as the Jewish people sought to maintain their social, political, and religious identity over and against other people and their faith practices.

In Hebrew Scripture, the book of Ruth follows directly after Proverbs, particularly Proverbs 31, with its advice about finding the good Jewish wife.  The book of Ruth is a parable because it clearly knows this Jewish script and chooses to flip that script, to critique the well-known story.

The book begins with the patriarch, the one who should be the hero of our story in a patriarchal culture, Elimelech, leaving with his wife Naomi and their two sons because of a famine in the land of Judah. Jewish midrash, or commentary, suggests that Elimelech is a leader in Judah who abandons his community for his own personal benefit.[2]  Elimelech goes with his family to Moab, the geographical area whose founder was conceived in an incestuous relationship after Lot's flight from the destruction of Sodom. In Jewish mythology and story, Sodom is the place of social oppression and inhospitality with dubious sexuality. Elimelech makes a choice for his personal benefit and against his community by going to the place of oppression and inhospitality.  

In contrast to the usual hero of our story, the Jewish patriarch, Ruth is the one who practices Wisdom’s social virtues to save and redeem Naomi and her family’s name.  Could the story draw the contrast any more starkly?[3]

Ruth even calls herself the strange and foreign woman before the feet of Boaz. The book of Ruth flips the script, is a Jewish critique of Jewish ethnocentrism and contemplates a God who is far wider and broader in steadfast love than religious bigotry can imagine.

The book of Ruth is like the father who tells his son, over and over again, “Watch out for those women who wear tattoos and have piercings. They tend to be a little too wild, will lead you down the wrong path, and get you into all kinds of trouble.” And then, Junior introduces Dad to his new fiancé who has sleeves tattooed down her arm, a nose ring, and a pierced tongue. Wouldn't you know, she just happens to be the kindest, most well-read, and most respectful young woman Dad has ever met?  She ends up being the best mother a grandparent could every hope for.  Our prejudices about who is a saint and who is a sinner get foiled by the actual content of someone's character.  

Shallow religion is always telling us to be afraid or fearful of the stranger and their exotic sexuality. Deep religious faith reminds us that sexuality is a gift, that we are responsible for our own sexuality, and that the stranger may very well be bearing gifts that lead to salvation for our community.  

Rabbi Binah Wing, from Temple Beth-El in Rockford, Illinois, once shared with me that Ruth is preached in synagogue as the first convert to Judaism. For, rather than leading her husband away from his faith as a Moabite or foreigner, or going back to her people after her Jewish husband has died, Ruth proclaims her loyalty and allegiance to her mother-in-law in a profound and beautiful poem or love song. “Where you go, I will go. Where you live, I will live. Your people shall be my people. Your God shall be my God. Where you die, I will die and may God do the very worst to me if anything but death parts me from you.” Throughout the story, Ruth practices the Jewish faith in a way that is righteous, resolute, and steadfast.

Ruth saves her mother-in-law, Naomi, and herself by being . . . the righteous Jew.  She is a woman of welcome, hospitality, and loyalty.  Three times in the book, Ruth acts with hesed, a Hebrew word we translate as steadfast love, loving kindness, and loyalty. Hesed is most often used to describe the actions of God.[4]  Without proposal or prodding from Naomi, Ruth goes out into the fields to glean grain for the both of them, reminder of the Jubilee code, within Sabbath mythology, found in Leviticus.  Boaz, the owner of the field, notices Ruth, and from the double entendres that go back and forth, Ruth notices Boaz as well.[5]   (double eyebrow raise)  Ruth throws herself at the feet of Boaz, calling herself the strange woman, the foreigner, the interloper, so that if you had any doubts before, you know now that the conventional Proverbs story is being turned upside down.  The conventional Jewish script is being flipped.

And the story plays and has fun with the mysterious, seductive, and forbidden sexuality of the foreign or strange woman.  Ruth eats the “seed” of Boaz and is “filled.”  Boaz gives Ruth “his seed” so that Ruth and Naomi may be sustained in the midst of famine.  I don't make these things up.

Remember the rest and peace Naomi offered Ruth and Orpah at the beginning of the story?  Ruth proves that sometimes the moral challenge of life requires precisely the opposite of rest and peace.   In contrast to the patriarch Elimelech, Ruth chooses meaningful actions and experiences that permit and demand growth from all those around her.[6]  

Though Boaz is the one who will be referred to as the redeemer in this story, it is Ruth who is making all this happen, creating a new family for everyone. Ruth cuts across the patriarchy, ethnocentrism, and xenophobia of her time to deliver a message that is at the core of Jewish social values, thought, and theology. In the end, because Boaz does do the right thing, the child born from the mixed marriage of Boaz and Ruth goes on to be the ancestor of the famed King David.

Now the easy moral to this beautiful parable is don’t judge a book by its cover.  But we do a disservice to a parable that sought to upend a national narrative, a narrative used to keep and uphold their identity as a people when the Jewish people feared they might fracture or lose their way.  Who would Ruth have to be to scare us, to be a strange and foreign woman to us?  Maybe Muslim?  Maybe, because her sexuality scares us, a person of androgynous sexuality?  For some of us, maybe she’s a tea-partying Republican?   What if we have the national narrative so locked in our skulls that there is no way God has a chance to expand our minds and enlarge our hearts?

Remember that Ruth challenges Naomi to receive her kindness and devotion, and if Naomi flat out refuses, the story ends and Naomi dies.  Remember that Ruth challenges Boaz to do the right and moral thing, but that if he refuses, Naomi and Ruth may live on the edge till they die and that the story ends right there with no ancestor to King David.  God forever offers steadfast love through people like Ruth, but what if, what if we refuse?  What if we refuse? 

I am being forever told by different members of this congregation of the plan to get back all the saints of this church who left at one time or another.  They would like me, I’m told.  I appreciate the compliment intended.  But what if the saints we are being given for the future of this church are the new people arriving every Sunday that we never ask to be a part of a board or a committee, never ask to join the Chancel Choir, never have knowledge of the Sunday School program or the nursery or Melody Choir ready for their children, or never ask them to join us in mission and ministry?  On this All Saints Sunday, what if we refuse to see the saints God has appointed to this congregation because we have a rather narrow view of what a saint is?  Is our religious tradition of saint somewhat shallow and we require something deeper for us to see saints who bear God’s salvation for our community?

The challenge is forever before us.  Strange and foreign, yes, but mind expanding and heart enlarging.  Do not let the story end.  Accept Ruth’s challenge.  Amen.

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[1] Proverbs 31:26-27

[2] Mira Morgenstern, “Ruth and the Sense of Self: Midrash and Difference,” Judaism, Spring 1999.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Amy Jill-Levine, “Ruth,” The Women's Bible Commentary, ed. by Carol A Newsom and Sharon H. Ringe (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992), p. 78.

[5] See Amy Jill-Levine’s article for an extensive discussion of this. 

[6] Mira Morgenstern, “Ruth and the Sense.”