Ruth's Beautiful Faith

Ruth 1:6-18

Engaging Image: lost letters of lost souls.

I don’t know if you happened to see the Associated Press news story this week about a grocery bag full of letters that was found washing up on the beach near Atlantic City, New Jersey. It seems that a father and son who were fishing on the beach noticed this plastic bag, opened it, and found around 300 letters addressed to a Jersey City, NJ Baptist minister and marked “altar.”

The minister died several years ago at an advanced age and mysteriously this collection of letters ended up in the ocean over 100 miles away. Most were unopened.

Each writer hoped that his or her letter would be prayed over in a kind of prayer of supplication. Some of them dated back to 1973 and while a few writers asked for divine intervention in some matter like a lottery ticket, most were scribed in anguished ink.

There was a convict claiming innocence who desired liberation and the embrace of his family. Another was from a woman who suspected her boyfriend of abusing her young daughter. One woman prayed that the father of her soon to be born child would fall in love with her so they could marry and form a complete circle of family.

These were truly lost letters of lost souls who put their total confidence in the intervening action of a divinity they could not see or touch.

This story reminded me of the prayer practice of this congregation and many others in which specific concerns are given voice, specific children of God spoken for, specific anguish raised to God in the gathering of a worshipping community. Surely God Almighty already knows of these things, has already peered into all of our hearts, has laid a hand on our foreheads and gathered our thoughts.

A rationalist might interject that vocalizing our concerns is an entirely superstitious and irrelevant act. And yet there is something especially sacred about this practice of naming the pain of those among us in worship.

It is a beautiful practice. It is a confident practice. It is a practice of faith in the power and engagement of a god that we cannot see. As the writer of Hebrews declared, it is faith in what is unseen rather than in what is seen. It is like the faith of Ruth. It’s that beautiful faith of Ruth.

Application of Text: What’s happening inside the text?

Think about Ruth and Naomi trudging out of a land of tragedy into a land of uncertain peril. They live in a time when women have the social standing of property. They live in a society in which paternalistic patronage and the solid relationship to a clan and a tribe meant the difference between life and a destitute, certain death without identity.

With their husbands dead, Naomi, Ruth, and Orpah stand little chance of survival. So Naomi strikes out for Israel where her clan resides. Ruth and Orpah begin to follow her, but Naomi recognizes that going to Israel puts these Moabite women in even greater danger. Their families and clans are in Moab. Custom dictates that they should stay there.

Orpah, whose name translates as “back of the neck,” turns away to find her father’s people. Her name predestines and foretells her action and her adherence to the tangible and familiar social custom. She’s the obedient one.

Ruth, however, clings to Naomi and will not leave despite all urging and reasoning. By loyally staying with Naomi, Ruth puts her faith in what is intangible. She sacrifices the tangible and familiar in her life.

But what is she sacrificing the familiar for? Why would she possibly do it? What is to be gained? Her sacrifice is for the sake of companionship with Naomi. For the sake of something that has little benefit for herself. Ruth’s act is a selfless act of love drawn out of her own moment of despair and desperation.

Listener Context: How is the text beautiful?

You might say that Ruth’s devotion is certainly commendable and perhaps even noble, but how is it beautiful?

On one hand, the literary style of the story is beautiful. The symmetry is beautiful. Naomi has two daughters in law and their decisions are symmetrically opposite: one decides to stay in Moab while the other decides to leave with Naomi.

In the narrative that follows, Naomi and Ruth become an odd pairing on the road. Naomi, a foreigner in Moab traveling home. Ruth, a foreigner in Israel traveling away from home. How strange that in this perilous moment Naomi and Ruth remain symmetrically divergent according to their ethnicity even though they swap ethnic standing in society as their location changes.

This kind of stylistic organization is the beauty that the Greek philosophers described in the order and harmony of physical relationships. It’s the beauty of Greek architecture, its spacing and dimension and proportion. For them, beauty was the harmony of the designed function of every thing in the cosmos and the conformity of every thing to its designed purpose.

For us, it’s the harmonious order and proportion of the created world. It’s God’s organization of the light and the darkness in Genesis, the separation of the waters and the dry land. It’s the rotation of the planets in specific relation to one another. It’s the ebb and flow of the tide, the progression of the seasons, the cycle of life and death in nature. We’re struck by this beauty in our hearts, our feeling senses, our emotions.

But there is another kind of beauty in this story. We find it in Ruth’s speech of self-sacrificing loyalty to Naomi. It’s not the literary style in her prose. It’s not a matter of the eloquence of her vocabulary. Instead it is her benevolence toward Naomi that is expressed in that speech that we find beautiful:

“Where you go, I will go.
Where you lodge, I will lodge.
Your God will be my God.
Where you die, I will die.”

The beauty of what Ruth does is different from the objective beauty of the harmonious functioning of the order of things. It’s more than that. It’s more subjective than objective because it requires a decision.

Ruth knows that returning to her people, like Orpah, is the course that will benefit her the most. But she doesn’t do it and by stepping outside of her own best interests, she beautifully transcends herself. Her choice transcends her own security, her own sense of identity as a Moabite woman, transcends her own fear of going to live in a country where she will be considered an outcast.

This disposition to transcend herself for the benefit of someone else is real beauty because Ruth makes a moral decision that goes beyond the natural order. Goes beyond the designed harmony of natural relationships.

Listener Context: How does this relate to my life?

It’s a beauty we don’t usually see in daily life where people seem to be so caught up in protecting their own best interests. Where people vocally defend their right to a parking place. Where members from one political party demonize members from another political party. Where people judge and distrust each other. Where people do things for others because of a reward or expectation of return benefit.

But Ruth establishes a different relationship. She starts a community built on transcending personal interest. By devoting herself to Naomi’s welfare, Ruth starts a community that promotes the same mutual benefit. Not the individual benefit of two individuals but the mutual benefit of two people who depend on each other and support one another.

And there’s one significant thing further. Ruth accepts Naomi’s God, our God, as her God. She not only transcends her own interests for Naomi’s sake but transcends her own beliefs. She puts her faith in something beyond herself. She puts her life on the altar to be prayed over to Naomi’s God not knowing what will happen. This new community that she builds with Naomi dances around a central understanding that these women are part of something bigger than themselves. That mutuality, that community of common faith is beautiful.

Conclusion: What’s the Point?

So what’s the point? Why is it so important for us to take heed of Ruth’s story?

For one thing, we should pay attention to Ruth’s transcendent act of devotion, her beautiful act of faith because we need beauty in our lives. We need something to counter the base impulses of society. We need something to counter violence and pain and grief and the mundane toil of the day that can suck us in and steal the joyous essence of life itself.

And we need something to remind us of the true nature of the triune God- creator, redeemer, sustainer. In theology, there is a description of the holy trinity as an ideal community. Three equal members in one single godhead. No part of the trinity acts alone, no part has existence outside the others. This description is called perichoresis which comes from the Greek image of people dancing in a circle: creator, redeemer, sustainer joined in sacred dance.

This is a beautiful image that we can look to and model in our lives. It’s an image of what God wants for our lives. What God wants for our communities:

Worshipful communities whose members reveal God to each other in selfless acts of beautiful faith.

A beautiful faith that embraces a holy relationship through which we might live fully, joyfully, and with hope.

AMEN.