How We Tell the Story Matters

February 18, 2024

Judges 2:6-23; 21:25

Pastor Mike

This Lent, I’ll be preaching through the book of Ruth. Ruth is a short, four-chapter book in the Hebrew scriptures, those books of the Bible that we often call the Old Testament. In Christian Bibles, Ruth is placed right between the books of Judges and 1 Samuel. Judges follows on the heels of the Book of Joshua, and Joshua on the heels of the Five Books of Moses ending in Deuteronomy. It’s good to remember that for our Jewish brothers and sisters, the ordering of the scriptures is different. In Hebrew Bibles, Ruth is placed towards the end of the whole thing, among what’re called “The Writings for reasons having to do with public worship. Jewish folks read Ruth in its entirety on Shavuot, a holiday coinciding with the Israelite wheat harvest and celebrating God’s giving of the law to Moses on Mt. Sinai. These themes of bread and law, of God’s provision and human faithfulness, are central to the story of Ruth.

Despite its brevity, Jews and Christians have praised Ruth for millennia for its dense, rich narrative put down in masterfully crafted yet accessible language. It’s one of the easiest and quickest books of the Bible to read, yet the power and depth of its message rewards repeated readings. Many Christians I’ve met who struggle to connect with the Bible still love Ruth.

Ruth tells the story of an Israelite woman named Naomi who experiences displacement, the death of her spouse and children, and then a reversal of fortunes through the love and boldness of her daughter-in-law, a foreigner named Ruth. Ruth becomes King David’s great-grandmother, which means she was an ancestor of Jesus. Jesus’ genealogy is recorded by both Matthew and Luke, and in each of their long lists of fathers begetting sons, Ruth is one of the few women to receive an honorable shoutout.

Sounds great, Mike. Soooo, did you make a mistake? Why all this doom and gloom from the book of Judges this morning? Why did we sit here and listen to all this dysfunctional stuff about idolatry and oppression and battle and God’s anger?

The reason is because the very first words of the Book of Ruth, chapter one verse one, are these: “In the days when the judges judged…” (Ruth 1:1).

In the days when the judges judged. This is very different than saying, “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.” Ruth is timestamped. Ruth’s story unfolds within a very specific moment of history. We need to know something about that moment, about those days when the judges judged, in order to understand what Ruth can teach us.

The days of the Judges were bad days. Leaderless days. Days of division. Of insecurity. Of divided hearts and loyalties. Moses had been the strong, wonder-working leader for the whole people of Israel. Through Moses, God had begun forging a holy people out of the freed Israelite slaves. Through Joshua, God had let that people into a land to inhabit, a land promised to their ancestors Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. But after Joshua died, there was no leader of his caliber to replace him, and the people settled into their newly conquered lands according to tribal affiliation. Tribal identity became more important than a unified identity as God’s covenant people, and the new generations no longer knew the Lord or remembered God’s works or were faithful to God’s law and covenant.

Because of this, their life in this land was marked by turmoil rather than peace, by political, economic, and religious instability. The people were under military threat from all sides, as well as from within their own newly drawn borders. The people fell into worshipping the regional gods and idols. God made God’s anger known, actively foiling their military efforts, permitting their oppression by other nations.

But when God’s anger turned to pity, God raised up, localized military chieftains called Judges to deliver the people from their enemies. The people were grateful for these leaders, but their gratitude lasted only as long as each judge’s tenure. No matter how many times God sent them a judge to secure their freedom, the people fell further and further into sin.1

Let us listen again to a few verses from Judges chapter two: “When Joshua dismissed the people, the Israelites all went to their own inheritances to take possession of the land. The people served the Lord all the days of Joshua and all the days of the elders who outlived Joshua, who had seen all the great work that the Lord had done for Israel. ….Moreover, that whole generation was gathered to their ancestors, and another generation grew up after them who did not know the Lord or the work that he had done for Israel” (2:6-7, 10).

        There are few things worth pulling out of that.

The Israelites went to their own inheritances, which, again, sounds to me sounds like they became concerned with what materiality belonged to each of the tribes, rather than to their common inheritance of God’s law and covenant. As Christians and as Americans we know how bad things feel when everything gets tribal, and common affections are forgotten.

Also, the generational rift is mentioned several times. Once the generations that had been with Moses in the desert, and then with Joshua through the conquest, passed away, the younger generations no longer knew God or the stories of God’s work on their behalf. The scripture seems to blame the younger generations for this, but weren’t the older generations supposed to teach their children and grandchildren about God?

One of the most important parts of the law says this:

“Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. …You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates” (Deut. 6:4-9).

It makes you wonder if the elders had tried to do what God had asked them to do. How else does a whole generation fall away from the stories, the memories?

        Judges is one of those books of the Bible that ends worse than it starts. The very last verse, after we get all the stories of all the different deliverers – Samson and Deborah, Jephthah and Ehud – says this: “In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes” (Judges 21:25, NKJV). Sit with that for a moment: Everyone did what was right in his own eyes. A totally fragmented people, autonomous, self-determining and self-defining, far from God and from one another. A time such as ours? Read the headlines, scroll the feed and it seems so.

But, but, but – turn the page and: Ruth!

“In the days when the judges judged” – this! This happened! The characters of Ruth and their loving actions are pure examples of the kind of love and devotion that God wanted everyone to have for one another, for the commandments, for God.

Judges’ conclusion isn’t the whole picture. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes. Yes, I’m sure it seemed that way, but there, in that little town called Bethlehem, something good and holy and against the grain of the culture was happening.

The law was being lived out and honored. People were sticking by one another and working toward one another’s healing. Courage was manifesting rather than fear, hope rather than despair, community rather than individual autonomy. A person who so easily could have ended up as a complete cast-off, a childless widow named Naomi, is brought back to life by a person who so easily could’ve been mistreated by or outright excluded from the community, a foreign childless widow named Ruth. But the law calls for widows to be cared for, and, in Ruth, they are cared for, first by one another, then by others. The law calls for the harvest to come in and for the poor to be permitted to glean in the fields behind the harvesters, and the harvest comes in and the poor are permitted to glean. The law calls for the elders to sit at the city gate, and there they sit, ready to witness Naomi and Ruth’s redemption by Boaz. Over and over again, in this out-of-the-way place, in the lives of these ordinary people who know both sorrow and joy, everything that Judges tells us isn’t happening is happening.

Which brings me around to the why. Why preach Ruth right now? And why start Ruth with the days of the Judges? 

Because Ruth is a local story of human goodness and obedience to God’s ways in a divided, unsafe, unpredictable time and place. Judges gives us the doom and gloom perspective that you get when pull the camera back. But the book or Ruth zooms us in to see that hope comes from the daily actions and risks and commitments of people like you and me. Ruth offers a different point of reference, a different way of seeing. Things are really bad in the land, but things are different here in Bethlehem, among these people. Ruth is in some ways is the answer to Judges. Judges may offer an accurate aggregate assessment, but it is not the final word of the story. Through Ruth, Boaz, and Namoi, the people will receive their good King David, and, at long last, through Ruth, the King of Kings of will come, the one called Christ.

Ruth can help us commit to the way of the local church, the life of the community, the daily efforts to be God’s people. It is no small thing to look out for our neighbors, to provide for the poor among us, to walk the journey of grief together, to attend to the rhythms and rituals that bring us stability and joy, to keep a promise, to take a risk for love. These things do more than defy the headline, they send the story in a different direction. The kingdom of God is like a mustard seed. You can barely see it, until you can’t help but see it. It is like yeast, an invisible power bringing richness and life to the whole.  

How might our own story begin? In the days of warming temperatures and vanishing species, in the days of purchased politics and brutal economies, in the days of artificial intelligence and virtual realities, of wars and rumors of wars, in these days of – you fill in the black – there was you, and me, and a congregation gathering and going out from this plot of ground on the corner of 15th and Clark.

What will our story be?

Will it be a confirmation of or an antidote to the general diagnosis?

Thanks be to God that God “chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to abolish things that are” (1 Cor. 1:28), to bring about new beginnings.

        Amen.