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From The First Baptist Church in America pulpit

September 23, 2007
"Without A Map" (Ruth 4:13-17)
Dr. Dan Ivins, preaching

The story of Ruth is about how life gets harder and harder, but sometimes better and better. Like many biblical stories it's realistic because it’s full of brokenness: broken dreams, broken hearts, broken lives. A famine in the land causes a family to migrate to greener pastures in search of a better life. Not unlike how people down in New Orleans attempted to get away from Hurricane Katrina’s devastation. So a Jewish family leaves behind their familiar homeland and moved to a foreign land. Making a move is always a roll of the dice risking the unknown. It’s a mixed-bag, because you stand to gain as well as lose.

In this situation, it backfired, going from bad to worse, as the tragedies began to multiply. Soon after they arrive in Moab the father dies, leaving a widow to raise her sons by herself. Then to add insult to injury, both sons married outside the faith, which is often taken as rejection.

Just when Naomi’s plate looked full, both of her sons died too, leaving her all alone. The bleakness in her family seemed to match the barrenness in the land they’d left behind. The story of Ruth hits the bottom before it goes up. Desolation, isolation, empty arms are not determined by place. And you’re only kidding yourself if you think you can avoid them by moving. All that was left were three widows.

Sometimes life ambushes us with force like that. Three funerals in five verses, and still no cradle to rock! Feel the despair and suffering? Because that's right where the author wants us: in our moments of deepest pain, is where we meet God best.

I know you've seen these places. I've been with you in them. When we lose, or feel insecure, when our hearts break. Sometimes our greatest source of pain comes from where we care the most: within our own homes or on the job. Sometimes in church. Wherever people suffer, these are the places the church is called to be. If we have the courage to show up at them, we'll be in good company.

A Hebrew family moved to Moab to escape the suffering of famine and its “out of the frying pan, into the fire!” With an even darker future ahead in a strange place, there’s not much left, but to move back to Israel. It may be desolate, but at least it was home.

We pick it up as Naomi is joined by Ruth, and they’re walking heavy‑footed up the road to Bethlehem. On the way Naomi voices her anger at God, which is natural for someone in her circumstances. She's like a female Job, lamenting the indignation in her life. She really lets God have it! And God can take it. But bitterness is never God’s last word.

Ah if we could tell the future! But Naomi couldn’t, so she sent back to Bethlehem poorer than when she left. Minus two sons and a husband, at harvest time. This year there was a hint of fullness. But she had picked up a companion over in Moab, so she wasn't completely alone. With her every step of the way was loyal daughter-in-law, Ruth. Now she became a stranger in a strange land. But she was also a woman of promise. Hope is always God's last word.

When I was a kid, I remember the pictures they used to hang on our wall in Sunday School, depicting Ruth out in the fields with sickle in hand, gleaning the leftovers, which was Israel's welfare system. I always wondered how Ruth could hear things others couldn't hear, and follow where others dare not go. Because of some tug in her heart, she left her home in Moab to live in Bethlehem, a gentile among Jews.

The first Chapter begins in tragedy but ends with promise. Chapter two reminds us in 23 verses that Ruth was not Jewish. Over and over the author impresses upon us that Ruth is not-one-of-us, a foreigner, a Moabitess, in case you didn't get it in Chapter one. Maybe it’s intended to heighten her decision to declare her faith, "Your God shall be my God" (1:16). But in claiming allegiance to a alien God, she cut her ties to home, friends, and faith to prove it.

We've seen it before with Noah, Abraham, Moses, those guys. Their declarations were aided by a flood or a miracle child or a burning bush. But Ruth the Moabitess, had nothing to go on. There was no call from God, no promise from God, no child of promise, no inward or outward miraculous signs; just a lot of heartbreak. Yet she chose God on her own.

But even this wasn't the biggest surprise in the story. There’s one greater. Before Ruth chose the God of Israel, God chose Ruth the Moabitess; an outsider, to play a key role in his plan of redemption. The writer won’t let us forget that Ruth was a Gentile. Nevertheless, in spite of her lack of proper credentials, she became the great-grandmother of David the King, who was the 4x great-grandfather of Jesus the Christ! Who was born, (where else?) in “the little town of Bethlehem!” This woman was an outright pagan, not part of the family of faith. But God needed her just the same. Don't you love the grace of that?

And can't you hear the gossip about it? "Who does this Ruth think she is? Naomi claims she wants to worship God. Well, we don't share our God with her kind. She has her ways; her own people. Why doesn't she just go back where she came from?" Ah the plight of immigrants! People don't take kindly to strangers, but God does.

Yeah in a way, Ruth was asking for it. But this gal had something God wanted passed down to her progeny: staying power. How important is that in this kind of world? It could be what God liked about her. She was also faithful, just kept showing up and working hard every day in the fields. And that caught somebody else's eye, named Boaz.

Though she couldn't see it at the time, and her life looked pretty dismal, God's plans are larger than ours. Ruth is a story about gleaning. It’s an agrarian term we may not be familiar with in these techie-days. Here’s how it works: During the harvest, any leftovers could be gleaned, or picked up, kinda like scooping up crumbs from beneath the table.

So day after day, Ruth is bent over in the fields, picking up spare wheat to survive. Gleaning. Something for the poor. It runs counter to the way God's people are hell-bent to kick somebody out! The Book of Ruth is in the Bible because somebody realized it’s a grand story about God providing a way to gather people in. Even those who are different. Like “We reserve the right to accept everybody.”

God chose Ruth. That’s the surprise. And it’s only a matter of time before wise ol’ Naomi sensed it and devised a midnight meeting. Pulling strings behind the scenes, fixing beautiful Ruth up on a blind date with handsome Boaz. You know the rest of the story as nature takes its course.

What’s outstanding about it is how God's purposes are served through the unlikeliest people. Who would’ve thought anything good could come from a grief‑stricken widow who’d given up any hope of a future? So unlikely. Foreigners. Unmarried women. They had no chance. Or how anything religiously redemptive could come from a decent man generous with his barley fields; and Gentile Ruth with lots of initiative but the wrong bloodlines? We turn to the gospel and hear ol’ Nathaniel, one in whom “there is no guile,” but plenty of bigotry: “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”

None of that apparently bothered God. How often what matters to us is of no concern to God, who’s always focused upon what really matters. “Harder and harder; better and better.” The Book of Ruth has a happy ending. In between there is life as we know it, tragedy and hope, bouncing back and forth and how our faith comes to play on it all.

I would characterize the Book of Ruth as a journey without a map. There's a lot of transition, traveling and movement in it. The nub of the story is about two vulnerable women on a scary journey, not knowing what would happen or where it would take them. Yet they ventured forth; eyes on the future not the past.
Two of them together, then there were three, when Boaz joined them on the journey, and then finally four when little Obed was born, the father of Jesse, the father of David. With all the cards stacked against them, how could they have even imagined such a positive outcome? Or that their painful journey would lead to royalty; or that Israel's greatest, if not the most ethical, King would claim them as ancestors? A happy ending! Naomi's emptiness is filled with a grandchild. The widow Ruth became a wife again. The family name was not only restored but elevated.

Are not these our kind of people? Ordinary people living extraordinary lives, with nothing unusual from God to strengthen their faith. No magic, special advantages, no miraculous props to guide them and assure them of truth. Unlike most biblical heroes, none of God's ways were made known through earthquakes or pillars of fire. Just simple acts of kindness, unexpected courage, radical faithfulness, and love. The same things we have at our disposal to do battle with our own woundedness in our day at our place.

The one thing they didn't have was a map. And neither do we. Our own church is on a journey, like Naomi and Ruth, without a map because there are none. They don’t make maps for what we’re facing. What we do have is faith in God and love for one another.

No doubt, we too will pass through famine times and full times, as we live among the broken hearts and birthing rooms. Many are here today who know what it's like to live in a different culture. But at The Meeting House we have something in common that overrides all differences, and destinations, and situations, namely, our oneness in Jesus Christ. Together we share the journey trying to keep track of our holy Guide...without a map.

God’s been good to us. That, I take it, is why we’re here. We come and the stream of life moves us on without a map ... but not without friends. The church sees to that. I hope we will all allow the story of Ruth and Naomi to speak to us on our own journeys ‑‑ of courage and kindness, of the God of the gleaning harvest, gathering people in‑arms full, even to those who are forgotten and left behind. Of such is the kingdom of God. Amen.

Pastoral Prayer (9/23/07)

It is good to gather in worship O God, to remember Thy mercies every morning and Thy loving-kindness each night. We are children of our world, of our time, measuring our success by all the wrong things: property owned, cash amassed, securities held, people impressed. And we end up coming way short of how blessed we really are with the things that matter most: life’s surprising intangibles, the lift of a loving voice, the strength that comes from accepted sorrow, the excitement of shared purpose.

Lord we bless Thee for faith that lights our way when the path is dark. Encourage our life together in this church. May this worship enable us to clarify our convictions, subordinate our whims and fears to the larger calling of Christ.

Teach us what it means to follow Thee, to rest in Thee, hope in Thee. Fill the homes with your Spirit where death has come; let your wisdom fall like gentle rain on the parched souls of those struggling with life’s complexities; let Thy warming light bring healing to the injured; those who are sick or afflicted from the unfairness of life; let Thy joy overcome the gloom of those who’ve forgotten how to laugh. Shape thy amazing grace around our inmost needs, through Christ our Lord. Amen.