Spread Your Wings Over Me
The Season of Lent
March 10, 2024
Pastor Mike
Ruth 3
The Book of Ruth began with Naomi and her family leaving their home in Bethlehem during a famine to go and try to make ends meet in a foreign land, the country of Moab. They lived there ten years, enough time for that strange place to almost feel normal, and Naomi and Elimelech’s sons, needing to move forward with their lives, went ahead and married Moabite wives, Orpah and Ruth. Over time, all three men of the family, the father and his two sons, died. In her grief and supreme sense of displacement, Naomi set off to return to her own people in Bethlehem. One of her daughters-in-law, Orpah, opted to stay behind in Moab; the other, Ruth, vowed to go with Naomi, live in Israel, and take care of her mother-in-law until death. As a husbandless, sonless, bitter version of her former self, Naomi walked back through the gate of Bethlehem. The townsfolk were stunned and could only ask, “Is this Naomi?” Naomi, the local without her old place, and Ruth, the foreigner determined to carve out a place for herself, settled into life during the busyness of harvest time. And that’s chapter one.
While gleaning grain to provide for her mother-in-law, Ruth the Moabite meets Boaz, a man of Bethlehem and the owner of the field. Boaz acts kindly toward Ruth, promising to protect her while she gleans, feeding her at his own table, and sending her home to Naomi with an abundance of grain. When Ruth returns in the evening and tells Naomi about her run-in with Boaz, the women realize how lucky – or, we might say, providential – that encounter was. “He’s closely related to us!” Naomi shouts – meaning Boaz is eligible, through marriage, to redeem them, to continue Elimelech’s family line and protect the family’s assets. “Keep going to his field,” Naomi tells Ruth. “Keep getting to know him. See what happens.” And that’s chapter two.
Where we are today is chapter three, and here the action peaks. Wanting a future of security rather than insecurity, Naomi and Ruth decide to shoot their shot. Naomi gives instructions: “Tonight, at the threshing floor, Boaz will be all alone. He’ll work, eat, drink, and be merry. Ruth, wash and anoint yourself, dress yourself, and go meet him there. Uncover his feet and lie down as he sleeps.” Naomi is asking Ruth to take on a great personal risk: a foreign widow, reduced to gleaning in a field, going to present herself and request redemption of the propertied, respected, above-reproach older man. To do it in under the cover of darkness, secretly and stealthily. The sexual subtext and tension are obvious. They are, actually, important. Risk and desire are at work, swirling around the threshing floor like the chaff.
As we zero in on this midnight encounter between Ruth and Boaz, we should remember that all this was Naomi’s idea. She is scheming.
If you’re scheming you’ve moved beyond bitterness, beyond despair. Sometimes we might scheme out of anxiety or fear or a need to get or keep control; but sometimes scheming is a form of hope, a way of clawing beyond bitterness and despair. This is especially true if you’re scheming from the very bottom of the social ladder, like Naomi; if you’ve got nothing left but a wily idea, and if that wily idea is born of love, it might just be a form of hope. Hope doesn’t always need to be serene; hope can be scrappy. .
As the chapter unfolds, three times some form of the statement “I will do whatever you tell me” is spoken. First, Naomi to Ruth: “He” – referring to Boaz – “He will tell you what you should do.” Then, Ruth to Naomi: “Whatever you to me, I will do.” And finally, Boaz to Ruth: “Whatever you say I will do for you.” Ruth promises to follow Naomi’s words; Naomi says Boaz will take charge; Boaz gives the reigns to Ruth.
These three characters are putting themselves in one another’s power, in one another’s trust throughout the chapter. They are giving everything while also consenting to everything. Three persons, each acting out of their own center, each reaching, risking, and receiving; three persons, fully themselves, yet working in one mysterious accord, with desire and a reversal of power at the heart of it.
In this way, Ruth, Naomi, and Boaz are realizing the life and love of the Trinity, of our three-in-one God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Any time we talk about the Trinity we come to the fundamentals, the essentials. And we talk not only about who God is but about who we are, for we are made in this God’s image and likeness. The Trinity is essentially a mystery; all attempts to describe it rationally fall short. Which is fine, because it’s not a doctrine to be memorized but a reality to be entered into and lived through prayer.
Humans are made in the image of a communal God. I am made for you, and you are made for me. We belong to one another, and to all of creation, at the most basic level of our being. Which brings us to a very important distinction, the distinction between being an individual and being a person. And here I want to let Thomas Merton, the Kentucky-based Trappist monk who died in 1968, speak about this. Merton’s words come from a conference that he gave in Alaska of all places, where he was searching out a possible location for secluded living as a hermit. (I guess Kentucky had gotten too crowded-feeling for him, so he went poking around Alaksa. God bless.)
Merton says this about personhood and the Trinity:
“We misunderstand personality completely if we think, ‘My personality is nothing but my little exclusive portion of human nature.’ Because it isn’t. That is my individuality; when I die that individuality has…got to disappear immediately… Personality is not individuality. Individuality is exclusive; personality is not. Each of us has an individuality which is exclusive, but that is not the whole story, and that is not the person that you are trying to fulfill. If you try to fulfill an exclusive individuality as if it were a person, you end up in a complete self-contradiction, because what the person really is is an existence for others, and the pattern for that is the Trinity.
“The divine persons don’t have three pieces of the divine nature. They have one divine nature and each one exists unto the others, for the others. Perhaps you begin to see something of the sense of the refusal to assert one’s own exclusive individuality in the presence of the other, of being completely open to the other. On the other hand, you cannot at the same time be completely absorbed in the other. There has to be a certain distance. How do you reconcile the fact that the person is not just an exclusive little fence around a section of nature and yet is different and unique? You have to combine uniqueness and complete openness and non-exclusiveness, and the only answer to that is the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the one who confers on the human person this particular character of being completely open and yet being nonetheless unique.”[1]
Let’s apply that. I exist for you and with you, in relationship to you and God and all of creation. And you exist for me and with me, in relationship to me and God and all of creation. I don’t get to define myself over here in this corner in distinction from everything else and then come and say, “This is me – and you have no right to say anything about it!” And you don’t get to define yourself in your little corner and come and say, “This is me – and you have no place in determining who I am!” We are created to be fully ourselves, pouring ourselves out freely through our own loving choice; and we are created to be fully open, receiving and responding to the free gifts of others without fear. When this way of life is practiced and relished and celebrated, we have the Church.
We spend much of our lives, certainly the first twenty or thirty years, working on the project of our individuality, our self-creation. With God’s help, somewhere along the way we are convicted of sin and seduced by grace, and we spend the rest of our lives sloughing off the crust of that individuality to embrace the power of personhood, of knowing and being known, giving and being given to. We receive who we are.
Naomi is looking out for Ruth’s welfare. Ruth is looking out for Naomi’s welfare. Boaz, once he recovers from his shock, receives Ruth and, by doing so, looks out for both her and Naomi’s welfare. It’s beautiful. It’s powerful. It’s erotic in the most wholesome sense, because each of them desires this life of mutual consideration and choice.
And here’s what can happen when we embrace the Trinitarian shape of our life together: we are set free from the identities and stories that hold undue power over us in the world. This chapter, chapter three, with its threshing floor and darkness, is the only chapter of Ruth where Ruth is not referred to as a Moabite. In the darkness, in the moment of risk and reversal, of give and take, Ruth is no longer a Moabite, no longer a foreigner, no longer a widow. She is no longer defined by where she came from or what she’s lost. Instead, she’s defined by her essence.
“You are a worthy woman,” Boaz says.
Embracing a self that is born of communion always feels like we are entering a dark mystery. And that holy darkness is where we actually give and receive the truth of who we are.
So, one way to test whether or not we are pressing into the life that God wants for us as a people is to notice whether or not we are hung up on secondary things, secondary identities: race and class, male or female, local or transplant, Methodist or seeker, young or old, straight or queer, Republican or Democrat. We might also ask ourselves: Do I feel invisible here at Church? If so, that’s not good. Or: Am I thrusting myself to the center of things to try and prove my value? If so, that’s not good either. Somewhere the dynamic of giving and receiving, the dance of uniqueness and openness is getting lost. What we want is for those secondary identities to get lost in the darkness of communion. What we want is for everyone to be so fluidly involved in mutual concern and responsibility that you can never quite tell who’s at the center and who’s at the periphery at any given moment.
After Boaz wakes up and finds Ruth by his uncovered feet – that’s the PG version – after he asks her to tell him what she wants him to do for her, Ruth says, “Spread the corner of your garment over me, since you are a guardian-redeemer of our family” (NIV). Cover me with your blanket, in other words. This is basically a marriage proposal. But here’s something wonderful. The word for “corner of your garment” in Hebrew is kaw-nawf. And kaw-nawf has a wide range of meanings. It can be translated as wing, edge, extremity, border, cover, or shirt. In the majority of its uses in the Old Testament, it actually means “wing.” Many translations translate it that way here. For example, the English Standard Version has it like this: Ruth says, “Spread your wings over your servant, for you are a redeemer” (ESV).
We’ve already had this word once in Ruth, back in chapter two, in perhaps the most significant verse, where Boaz blesses Ruth in the field. Remember? He said to her, “May the Lord repay you for what you have done. May you be richly rewarded by the Lord, the God of Israel, under whose wings you have come to take refuge.”
So, in the field, Boaz said, “You’ve taken refuge under God’s wings.”
And at the threshing floor, Ruth now says, “Spread yours wings over me.”
In other words: Hey, Boaz, you’ve said that God will do it, so you do it!
I love that. God’s grace and kindness must be incarnated. They must be made flesh. They must not be abstractions or sentiments but concrete realities. We are responsible, as persons made in God’s image, for showing God to one another.
Oh, how the world would be transformed if we treated our wings like God’s wings.
May we, God’s people, consider the necessity of our communion together in the Spirit.
May we neither lose ourselves in that communion nor hold ourselves back from it.
May we give all and receive all.
And may God help us to do it, for our sake and for the sake of all those yet to receive this indescribable gift, those still waiting to be gathered under the shadow, the holy darkness of God’s wings.
Amen.
[1] Thomas Merton, Thomas Merton in Alaska: The Alaskan Conferences, Journals, and Letters (New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1989), 86-87.