We Are Witnesses

The Season of Lent

March 17, 2024

Pastor Mike 

Ruth 4

 The morning after Ruth went to Boaz at the threshing floor, surprising him in the night and asking him to marry her, Boaz went to Bethlehem’s city gate to see to the matter of her redemption at once. The drama of the story hinges on a piece of the Torah, the law of Moses, that called the closest male kinsman, usually a brother, to marry the widow of his deceased brother and have a son with her who would, for legal purposes, be the dead man’s son, continuing his name and inheriting his property. Boaz is closely related to Naomi and Ruth, but there is another man even closer. Boaz finds this other man and gathers ten elders of the city, and he sits them down at the gate to force the issue of who will act as the kinsman redeemer. The other man initially agrees to redeem Naomi, thinking it’s just a matter of property. But when Boaz reveals that this duty would include receiving a Moabite woman, Ruth, for a wife, the unnamed man recoils. He relinquishes his right as the closest kin, passing that right to Boaz, who promptly buys back Naomi’s lost property, takes Ruth as a wife, and bears a son with her named Obed.

The story of Ruth began with famine and death and the erosion of all security and stability for her and Naomi; it ends with harvest and birth and a new future opening up before this family, before these two women who clung to one another when they had hit rock bottom.

Ruth became the great-grandmother of King David, and she is in Jesus’ own family tree. Jesus grew up hearing this story told over and over again. It would have shaped his appreciation for his own immediate family – for his young mother Mary, favored by God; for the scandal of her miraculous pregnancy by the Holy Spirit; for his father Joseph’s courage in marrying her anyhow; and for their resilience as the threats of King Herod and of Rome loomed over them.

The story of Ruth is not at all divorced from the events of Holy Week, which we will contemplate and proclaim beginning next Sunday:

As the crowd paraded him into Jerusalem with ‘Hosanna’s and palm branches he would have looked out upon them and seen them as a glorious and unlikely community forged together by their desire and their need to be close to him, a community of the highborn and the lowborn, the rich and the poor, the healthy and the sick, men and women, young and old, foreigners and natives.

In the upper room as he broke bread and gave it to his disciples, he might’ve thought about Ruth’s promise to Naomi – Where you go, I will go; Where you stay, I will stay; Where you die, I will die – and about the power of people on the margins who have nothing to give one another but their loyalty, their very selves.

As he prayed in the garden that the cup of suffering would pass from him, he might’ve though about Naomi, who believed with all her heart that the hand of the Lord had turned against her, that God had emptied her out and made her bitter – and how, thanks be to God, that was just chapter one of what turned out to be a beautiful story of salvation.

When the betrayer, one of his nearest and dearest friends, came to him with a battalion of soldiers, he might’ve thought about the passing of the sandal at the city gate of Bethlehem, about how we can forsake our communion and our duty, and how there was another hand to receive.

When he hung upon the cross, inviting the criminal next to him into Paradise, he might’ve thought about the foreign Moabite widow, about Ruth, whose companionship must’ve seemed absolutely worthless to Naomi and to the rest of Bethlehem when they first returned to town, but who became one of the great mothers of Israel, like Rachel, Leah, and Tamar, who became better to Naomi than seven sons.

And when, after washing his disciples’ feet, he told them to love another as he had loved them, to serve one another as he had served them, because by their love the world would know his love, his presence, his truth, and his kingdom, he might’ve been thinking about that little town of Bethlehem during the days of the judges, swimming against the stream of its times by putting God’s love and mercy into practice. He was teaching them how to be a kind of community that can shelter people as their lives fall apart and get stitched back together again.

That’s been our consistent theme throughout this series on Ruth: the dynamic relationship between personal and communal faithfulness. We saw it in chapter one, when the townswomen were there to witness Naomi’s return to town, to adjust their vision to her new, broken reality. We saw it in chapter two, when Ruth when to glean in the field of Boaz, and was not only permitted to glean, but was singled out for protection and care and blessing. Witnessing, gleaning, blessing – these may seem like small acts, but the truth is that Naomi and Ruth, two widows with no sons, and one of them a foreigner, could have so easily been overlooked or discarded or taken advantage of by their community. Instead, because Torah was being practiced in Bethlehem, the women’s resilience and mutual love was able to gain traction and move them forward into a better future.

The community comes front and center in this final chapter, too. It begins with the elders, the old men. Boaz gathers them together at the gate to witness the legal proceedings between himself and the other potential redeemer. The elders say to Boaz, “we are witnesses,” sealing his right to redeem. They bless him; they bless Ruth. They graft her into the story of Israel, counting her among the great matriarchs. The men see it all, they hold the record of this day in their memories They tell the story. Without the gate, without the elders, without the men there to perform their duty, Ruth would have no ultimate justice.

Then come the women. After Ruth and Boaz have their son, the women gather together, the very women who saw Naomi at her absolute worst. The women who did not shame her, did not try to fix her, did not exert their will upon her, but simply held her in their vision as she went through the necessary stages of bitterness and recovery. These women now come to witness the birth of Ruth’s son, the one who will inherit Naomi and Elimelech’s name and estate. They, too, offer their blessings. They tell Naomi that the Lord has favored her. They tell her that Ruth is better than “seven sons,” which is a sermon all in itself about the undercutting of the patriarchal system and the good news that your ally in the midst of suffering and survival, who chooses you and who you choose, is better than any other obligatory, perfunctory foundation of security. And then in a great culminating surprise, the women actually name the child. Obed, worshipper.

Naomi and Ruth and Boaz are incomplete without the men at the gate and the women in the birthing room. To Naomi’s scheme, to Ruth’s fidelity, to Boaz’s kindness – the community adds its blessing.

And the community of God is still doing that. We are still doing that. We are still called to add our witness and our blessing to the stories of redemption being lived out in our midst. “Love one another as I have loved you,” Jesus tells us. Just as the Bible shows us the worst of ourselves, it also shows us the best. And this is some of the very best.

We should always be open to the new thing that God is doing in our midst, ready to repent from old habits and ways of thinking and to go a different direction, try new things. But very often what God speaks to us is a word of patience: Stay the course, abide in me, practice the essentials. Worship and serve together, take care of the least among you, advocate for the poor and the oppressed. Keep gathering together in God’s name. Keep telling the story of God’s saving involvement with all creation, culminating in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ.

The fact that we are maintaining the time as God’s time, the space as God’s space, the work as God’s work, can do more than we might initially suspect. We might be right where someone else in need needs us to be.

Thanks be to God for Ruth, Naomi, and Boaz, who made God’s love real to another and did not let bitterness have the last word.

Thanks be to God for the men and women of Bethlehem in the days of the judges, who made it possible.

And thanks be to God for God’s own faithfulness, mercy, and love, both now and forever.

Amen.