A Faith, A Farm And A Family
Sermon
Daring To Hope
Sermons For Pentecost (Last Third)
John Denver wrote a song 20 years ago about wanting to get away from the big city to a place in the country - "somewhere to build me a faith, a farm and a family."7 The story of Ruth reminds me of that song, because it's about simple people living on the land, and about the strength they draw from faith and family.
The story starts by telling us it took place "in the days when the judges ruled." Those were days of dreadful battles between God's people and their enemies, of mighty warriors and great heroes like Samson and Gideon and Deborah. But while mighty giants and epic events were changing the biblical world, people were still going about their regular lives trying to raise their crops and make a living; marrying, raising their children, mourning their dead. And those are the people and events the book of Ruth is about - everyday people leading everyday lives of love and hardship and hope.
We're accustomed to looking for God's work in dramatic events: in miracles like parting the Red Sea or changing water into wine, in sudden conversions, in the resurrection of the dead. But there aren't any apparent miracles in Ruth, no angel choirs, no revelations, no resurrections. Instead, this book reminds us that God also works in steady, unspectacular ways. Ruth is all about the quiet, constant, gentle providence of God - about things like a faith, a farm and a family.
First a farm. The book of Ruth is about farming folks trying to get a living from the land. In the first verse Naomi and her husband and sons leave Bethlehem because of a crop failure, hoping to do better in Moab. When Naomi decides to go back home, it's because God has "considered his people and given them food." Naomi and Ruth, the two widows, arrive back in Bethlehem at the time of the barley harvest, and Naomi sends Ruth out to glean in the fields so the two of them will have food. There in the barley field Ruth catches the eye of Boaz, her future husband. She romances him at the threshing place; he marries her and inherits Naomi's late husband's family farm, which becomes part of the family legacy of King David (and eventually of Jesus).
So farming, in this story, is part of a system of relations and operations that sustains people. It includes raising crops, but it also includes providing work and food for the two widows, finding a new husband and a home for Ruth, and passing a heritage from generation to generation. All those things, the story tells us, are in God's hands.
Farming, in this story, stands for the same things that "daily bread" stands for in the Lord's Prayer. Martin Luther, in his Small Catechism, wrote that when we pray for our daily bread we are asking God for "food and clothing, home and property, work and income, a devoted family, an orderly community, good government, favorable weather, peace and health, a good name and true friends and neighbors."8 There's nothing we need in life that isn't part of God's gift to us through the normal processes of his creation. God is faithful to his people in the things that bring us salvation, but also in the things that bring us joy and comfort, from the food on our tables to our jobs, our spouses and our children.
The most obvious blessing in that array of gifts from God is family, and Ruth is probably best known as a family story. Naomi moves to Moab with her husband and two sons. Her two sons marry Moabite women, after which all three men die. One of her daughters-in-law, Ruth, returns to Bethlehem with Naomi as her loyal companion. Ruth works to support Naomi, while Naomi tries to find Ruth a new husband. A bachelor relative named Boaz falls in love with Ruth, marries her and begins a new family. It's a touching story of love and loyalty, and Ruth's pledge of faithfulness to Naomi, near the end of today's lesson, might be the most popular text in the Bible for weddings.
Naomi and her daughters-in-law were in a desperate situation at the beginning of this story. Women in their world had no status and no economic power except through their husbands and sons. Widows were powerless, and widows with no sons starved. So a household of three widows was the picture of hopelessness. Naomi had no options. She was too old to remarry and resigned herself to a life of poverty and loneliness. Her daughters-in-law, on the other hand, had a way out. They were young, they could expect to remarry, and in the meantime they could move back home with their parents.
Orpah did the prudent thing: kissed Naomi goodbye and went home. But Ruth promised to stay with Naomi forever, to share her house, to worship her God, to love her relatives, to thrive or starve at Naomi's side. That's remarkable enough, for a young widow to throw her lot in with her mother-in-law, but stranger yet is that Ruth was a foreigner to Naomi.
Even though this book in the Bible is called Ruth, it's really the story of how God took care of Naomi. Naomi's bereavement gets mentioned the most often, and at the eventual happy ending of the story, when the neighbors come bringing their best wishes, it's Naomi they congratulate, not Ruth. Sb Ruth's improbable devotion to Naomi turns out to be the way God saves Naomi from her despair.
It's one of God's favorite ways of blessing us - through the love of our family. Our parents, children, spouses and inlaws support us emotionally, physically, financially and spiritually. And many people outside what we might consider our traditional family can offer us that support. "Family," in God's way of doing things, can include our friends and neighbors, or co-workers; it especially includes our church family, our pastors and brothers and sisters in Christ. When we're sick or otherwise in distress we receive the ministry of doctors and nurses, therapists, social workers and counselors. And we, in turn, minister to the needs of other people in our communities through our careers and our involvement in voluntary services. Maybe the significance of Ruth's being a foreigner in this story is that it forces us to enlarge our picture of who our family is, who it is that we support and are supported by.
The third thing we see in the story of Ruth is faith. But it's an unusual faith. There are no hymns of praise in Ruth, no creeds or professions of belief. In fact, God is hardly mentioned in the story except in casual conversation. Still, the characters and the writer assume that God is reliable, and the way the story unfolds shows that they're right.
When Naomi leaves Moab to return to Bethlehem and urges Ruth and Orpah to stay behind, she prays a blessing for them. "May the Lord deal kindly with you, as you have dealt with the dead and with me. The Lord grant that you may find security, each of you in the house of your husband!" Naomi's prayer creates a climate of expectation in which the rest of the story plays out: and the rest of the way through the book we're waiting to see if Naomi's prayer is going to be answered. As Ruth and Naomi meet with good luck in Bethlehem and put together their new lives piece by piece, we know that God is fulfilling Naomi's hope, even though the writer of the story doesn't feel the need to keep telling us so.
That climate of expectation is faith. Faith is an attitude more than a belief or a doctrine: It's an assumption we carry through life, that God is trustworthy. God is faithful in the big things, keeping his promises to his people, guiding history toward its proper conclusion, but God is also faithful in the small things, dealing kindly with widows, blessing the poor and the lonely.
This lovely little story in the Old Testament is about the blessings of faith, farm and family. In 1984 Sally Field won the best actress Oscar for a movie called Places in the Heart, with Danny Glover and John Malkovich. That story is also about faith, farm and family. Sally Field's character, Edna Spalding, is like Naomi, a widow struggling to make a living on the land in Texas in the 1930s. The bank tries to take her farm, the cotton gin operator tries to cheat her, a tornado nearly kills her and her family. Just as Naomi was supported by her widowed Moabite daughter-in-law, Edna Spalding survives with the help of a couple of unlikely fellow-outcasts: a blind boarder and a black field hand. At the end of the movie all the characters who've appeared in the story, including Edna's late husband and his murderer, are shown sharing holy communion in the little church in the center of town. The scene suggests the heavenly banquet to which God invites us all, and shows that the lives of the characters have been directed by God's love toward a final deliverance.
Now, fate might never deal you the kind of blows it dealt Naomi and Ruth and Edna Spalding, but whatever comes your way in life you can depend on God, as Naomi did, to see you through. God takes care of his people: he blesses us with the things we need to live from day to day. This morning's story reminds us of three of the most important blessings God gives us: a way to make a living, family and friends to love us and support us, and faith to keep us going in expectation that God will continue to bless us.
The story starts by telling us it took place "in the days when the judges ruled." Those were days of dreadful battles between God's people and their enemies, of mighty warriors and great heroes like Samson and Gideon and Deborah. But while mighty giants and epic events were changing the biblical world, people were still going about their regular lives trying to raise their crops and make a living; marrying, raising their children, mourning their dead. And those are the people and events the book of Ruth is about - everyday people leading everyday lives of love and hardship and hope.
We're accustomed to looking for God's work in dramatic events: in miracles like parting the Red Sea or changing water into wine, in sudden conversions, in the resurrection of the dead. But there aren't any apparent miracles in Ruth, no angel choirs, no revelations, no resurrections. Instead, this book reminds us that God also works in steady, unspectacular ways. Ruth is all about the quiet, constant, gentle providence of God - about things like a faith, a farm and a family.
First a farm. The book of Ruth is about farming folks trying to get a living from the land. In the first verse Naomi and her husband and sons leave Bethlehem because of a crop failure, hoping to do better in Moab. When Naomi decides to go back home, it's because God has "considered his people and given them food." Naomi and Ruth, the two widows, arrive back in Bethlehem at the time of the barley harvest, and Naomi sends Ruth out to glean in the fields so the two of them will have food. There in the barley field Ruth catches the eye of Boaz, her future husband. She romances him at the threshing place; he marries her and inherits Naomi's late husband's family farm, which becomes part of the family legacy of King David (and eventually of Jesus).
So farming, in this story, is part of a system of relations and operations that sustains people. It includes raising crops, but it also includes providing work and food for the two widows, finding a new husband and a home for Ruth, and passing a heritage from generation to generation. All those things, the story tells us, are in God's hands.
Farming, in this story, stands for the same things that "daily bread" stands for in the Lord's Prayer. Martin Luther, in his Small Catechism, wrote that when we pray for our daily bread we are asking God for "food and clothing, home and property, work and income, a devoted family, an orderly community, good government, favorable weather, peace and health, a good name and true friends and neighbors."8 There's nothing we need in life that isn't part of God's gift to us through the normal processes of his creation. God is faithful to his people in the things that bring us salvation, but also in the things that bring us joy and comfort, from the food on our tables to our jobs, our spouses and our children.
The most obvious blessing in that array of gifts from God is family, and Ruth is probably best known as a family story. Naomi moves to Moab with her husband and two sons. Her two sons marry Moabite women, after which all three men die. One of her daughters-in-law, Ruth, returns to Bethlehem with Naomi as her loyal companion. Ruth works to support Naomi, while Naomi tries to find Ruth a new husband. A bachelor relative named Boaz falls in love with Ruth, marries her and begins a new family. It's a touching story of love and loyalty, and Ruth's pledge of faithfulness to Naomi, near the end of today's lesson, might be the most popular text in the Bible for weddings.
Naomi and her daughters-in-law were in a desperate situation at the beginning of this story. Women in their world had no status and no economic power except through their husbands and sons. Widows were powerless, and widows with no sons starved. So a household of three widows was the picture of hopelessness. Naomi had no options. She was too old to remarry and resigned herself to a life of poverty and loneliness. Her daughters-in-law, on the other hand, had a way out. They were young, they could expect to remarry, and in the meantime they could move back home with their parents.
Orpah did the prudent thing: kissed Naomi goodbye and went home. But Ruth promised to stay with Naomi forever, to share her house, to worship her God, to love her relatives, to thrive or starve at Naomi's side. That's remarkable enough, for a young widow to throw her lot in with her mother-in-law, but stranger yet is that Ruth was a foreigner to Naomi.
Even though this book in the Bible is called Ruth, it's really the story of how God took care of Naomi. Naomi's bereavement gets mentioned the most often, and at the eventual happy ending of the story, when the neighbors come bringing their best wishes, it's Naomi they congratulate, not Ruth. Sb Ruth's improbable devotion to Naomi turns out to be the way God saves Naomi from her despair.
It's one of God's favorite ways of blessing us - through the love of our family. Our parents, children, spouses and inlaws support us emotionally, physically, financially and spiritually. And many people outside what we might consider our traditional family can offer us that support. "Family," in God's way of doing things, can include our friends and neighbors, or co-workers; it especially includes our church family, our pastors and brothers and sisters in Christ. When we're sick or otherwise in distress we receive the ministry of doctors and nurses, therapists, social workers and counselors. And we, in turn, minister to the needs of other people in our communities through our careers and our involvement in voluntary services. Maybe the significance of Ruth's being a foreigner in this story is that it forces us to enlarge our picture of who our family is, who it is that we support and are supported by.
The third thing we see in the story of Ruth is faith. But it's an unusual faith. There are no hymns of praise in Ruth, no creeds or professions of belief. In fact, God is hardly mentioned in the story except in casual conversation. Still, the characters and the writer assume that God is reliable, and the way the story unfolds shows that they're right.
When Naomi leaves Moab to return to Bethlehem and urges Ruth and Orpah to stay behind, she prays a blessing for them. "May the Lord deal kindly with you, as you have dealt with the dead and with me. The Lord grant that you may find security, each of you in the house of your husband!" Naomi's prayer creates a climate of expectation in which the rest of the story plays out: and the rest of the way through the book we're waiting to see if Naomi's prayer is going to be answered. As Ruth and Naomi meet with good luck in Bethlehem and put together their new lives piece by piece, we know that God is fulfilling Naomi's hope, even though the writer of the story doesn't feel the need to keep telling us so.
That climate of expectation is faith. Faith is an attitude more than a belief or a doctrine: It's an assumption we carry through life, that God is trustworthy. God is faithful in the big things, keeping his promises to his people, guiding history toward its proper conclusion, but God is also faithful in the small things, dealing kindly with widows, blessing the poor and the lonely.
This lovely little story in the Old Testament is about the blessings of faith, farm and family. In 1984 Sally Field won the best actress Oscar for a movie called Places in the Heart, with Danny Glover and John Malkovich. That story is also about faith, farm and family. Sally Field's character, Edna Spalding, is like Naomi, a widow struggling to make a living on the land in Texas in the 1930s. The bank tries to take her farm, the cotton gin operator tries to cheat her, a tornado nearly kills her and her family. Just as Naomi was supported by her widowed Moabite daughter-in-law, Edna Spalding survives with the help of a couple of unlikely fellow-outcasts: a blind boarder and a black field hand. At the end of the movie all the characters who've appeared in the story, including Edna's late husband and his murderer, are shown sharing holy communion in the little church in the center of town. The scene suggests the heavenly banquet to which God invites us all, and shows that the lives of the characters have been directed by God's love toward a final deliverance.
Now, fate might never deal you the kind of blows it dealt Naomi and Ruth and Edna Spalding, but whatever comes your way in life you can depend on God, as Naomi did, to see you through. God takes care of his people: he blesses us with the things we need to live from day to day. This morning's story reminds us of three of the most important blessings God gives us: a way to make a living, family and friends to love us and support us, and faith to keep us going in expectation that God will continue to bless us.
