Sermon 8.12.18
“Reading Ruth: Your People Shall Be My People”
Rev. Laura Arnold preaching
Ruth 1
Introduction to the scripture:
For the next four weeks, we will read through the book of Ruth, one chapter each Sunday. Though one of the shortest books of the Bible, Ruth is story about manythings. It is a powerful narrative of love, survival, grief, compassion, insiders and outsiders, immigration, scandals, and unlikely connections between people. Today we read the first chapter, asking what wisdom does this ancient story still have to inspire and teach us.
It was 22 degrees at Dunning Springs as I got out of my car and unloaded by robe and stole from the back seat where it was draped in an attempt to keep it from wrinkling. The couple wanted an outdoor wedding. They had been wounded by people inside the walls of churches throughout their lives, and didn’t want to stand in a place that represented hurt when they made their sacred promises to one another. Their wedding was a day for celebration, for thanksgivings, and for launching into the new adventures that life together would hold. So perhaps it was fitting that their wedding day began with adventure.
Snow had fallen the night before. The bride had panicked and the groom, too. But the friends that would stand up with them later that morning assembled before breakfast with shovels in hand. At the flat space at the bottom of the waterfall they shoveled out the snow from a space in the shape of a heart. For good measure, they placed candles in jars to illuminate the outline, making the scene look like a photo off of Pinterest or Better Homes and Gardens, with even the finest of details attended to.
When the wedding began, words of welcome were shared, prayer offered, then scripture read–this scripture from the first chapter of Ruth.
Long before the wedding, we had sat together in the warmth of my office to plan. I had pulled a list of possible scriptures to be read. This is the one they wanted at the center of the day. “Ruth’s promises are the promises we are making to one another,” they said, then one looked at the other, “Where you go, I’ll go. Your place will be my place. Your traditions will become, my traditions—even those religious ones you have.” There was a laugh, then a pause, before the other continued, “and the promise that matters the most in all of it will be, ‘Your people will be my people.’”
You see, one of them had biological children and the other, well, they would be making a promise to make those kids people, their people. The couple wanted the kids not only to overhear the vows and promises they were making to one another but to hear explicitly that the vows were about them as well.
So that cold February morning, we read the story of Ruth and Naomi. Never mind that it was 22 degrees and I couldn’t feel my feet or my fingers or my ears…there was going to be some preaching and teaching….and some truth telling (remember I was pretty naive, having moved here from Georgia and having been a pastor for about 6 weeks by this point). We spoke of the context of the story, of the hardships plaguing these two women, and acknowledged that it’d have been easier for Ruth to walk away, but also named that Ruth, had such a profound love for Naomi, that Ruth didn’t walk away. Instead she made a choice that her love for Naomi would trump everything–that she’d move, that’d she change her traditions, that she’d leave the things that once made life feel comfortable, all because she loved this woman so deeply that she couldn’t imagine doing otherwise.
When it was time to exchange their vows, the couple repeated the promises Ruth made to Naomi to one another. Then they slipped rings onto each other’s fingers and they became the outward sign of their inward commitments.
With the same symbolism, the parents turned to look at the kids as they made Ruth-like vows to them as well. I asked the adults, will you choose to be faithful and loving parents to each of the kids? Will you stand by them when they are teenagers and hard to get along with? Will you accompany them into adulthood and keep their best interest at heart? Will you be relentless in your support of them, even if they tell you to go away? Will you love them no matter what?
Will you love them no matter what?
The words of Ruth bring back the memories of that wedding and countless others. They bring back memories of a lesbian couple preparing for their wedding who saw their own story in the story of Ruth and Naomi. They saw it as a story of two women with profound, deep, life changing love for one another and a society that couldn’t or wouldn’t name it for what it was. Modern interpretations of the story and Jewish Midrash have pointed out something similar, suggesting that Ruth and Naomi’s love for one another was romantic not simply platonic and that in a world that required women marry men to preserve their security, Ruth later did, and thereby made sure Naomi was taken care of and that they could continue to be together. “Maybe most straight folks won’t see it in the story,” one of the women said, “But queer folks see themselves in this story. And Ruth’s words are the promises we made to one another long before the government would legally acknowledge our relationship, and these are the promises we want to make once again to each other.” Weeks later, I stood with them at the altar, and heard them recite the vows Ruth once made to a woman she loved, “Where you go, I will go. Your people will be my people. Your God will be my God.”
When the words of Ruth are repeated at weddings, they are powerful, but unless you stand outside with a novice pastor who didn’t think through saying yes to an outdoor wedding and was determined to preach at said wedding, simply rehearsing the vows might miss some of their power. Ruth’s promises, they are a commitment to a family of choice, not a family of origin. They are promises to leave the world she knows and create life in a different way and a different place. They are promises to care for a grieving woman, so grief stricken that her entire identity has changed from “Pleasant” to “victim of God’s supposed wrath.” Ruth makes a promise to care for Naomi and to stick by her, in a way akin to a step-parent uttering a promise to stick by a soon-to-be teenager—knowing its going to be real rough for at least a little while. Ruth promises to keep this woman close—a woman who is from a different clan, who’s skin is a bit different, who’s traditions are different, who’s religion is different.
And maybe more than the promise to follow Naomi to a new land, it’s the fact that Ruth makes the promise to do life together with someone so different, someone Ruth was in fact supposed to mistrust and certainly dislike, that we ought to take away from this story, too. For these vows are not simply made for mother-in-laws and daughter-in-laws. These are vows that speak of way of life that commits to offering relationship across the lines of cultures, countries, religions, accents, skin color, and social classes. These are vows that we might need to consider making ourselves, to one another (I’m not saying move commit to following someone everywhere even if they tell you to go away—let’s not go all literal here, that’d be creepy)…
I think it’s worth considering what if any vows we are willing to make to others. Are we really willing to pick up our lives from our echo-chambers of like minded people and enter spaces and places that are unfamiliar? Are we really willing to see the plight of others, their grief, their hurts, and to stay close, to stay in proximity rather than leaving them because it’d easier for us? Are we really willing to make other people’s beloved ones our beloved ones?
Before you nod in affirmation, know that these kinds of vows may cost you everything. Safety, security, financial stability, your own family of origin, the way of life as you’ve known it. They did for Ruth. To commit to other’s wellbeing is a risky commitment, and it’s sure as heck not comfortable all the time. If it were safe and easy and something humans naturally did, it wouldn’t have occurred to anyone to separate families at the border or to justify it or to standby silently when it happened. It wouldn’t occur to any of us to turn away as though it’s normal that people can’t get the healthcare they need. It wouldn’t have taken an embarrassing number years to realize that kids in our own town used to fear summer because it meant there’d be no school lunch to make sure they had enough food each day and to do something about it.
What changes when we make vows to one another, when we see each other as inextricably linked, commit to stand alongside one another, to work for one another’s wholeness, to care for one another, to see one another as beloved? Everything. Everything changes. What vows are you willing to make to care for others? Who will become “your people”?
On that 22 degree day in the middle of February, with snow on the ground, all of us barely able to keep control of our shivering bodies, the benediction written for the occasion was this: In your willingness to commitment to one another, the loving-kindness God hopes for all people will be made known. Go forth to love another, to be family whatever the odds, and to see one another as beloved, now and always, for it has the power to change the world.”
May these be the words that carry us into the world as well. Amen and amen.