View pdf of bulletin

December 29, 2002 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Setting Out

Joanna M. Adams
Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Matthew 1:1–6
Ruth 1 (selected verses)

“So she set out from the place where she had been living,
she and her two daughters-in-law, and they went on their way.”

Ruth 1:7 (NRSV)

---

As we gather ourselves in the stillness of this moment of worship, O God, we ask that you would silence in us any voice other than your own. As we listen to your word, we pray that it may become for us a lamp unto our feet and a light unto our way into a new year, for the sake of Christ. Amen.

Tucked away in a remote section of the Old Testament, between the book of Judges and 1 Samuel, is what the NRSV Commentary describes as “one of the most beautiful pieces of literature in the Bible.” It is called the book of Ruth, named for one of only four women who are mentioned in Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus. The book of Ruth is a powerful narrative about a family that lived in Bethlehem of Judea 900 years before Jesus was born.

Let me offer a word of background for today’s reading: Famine had forced a man named Elimelech, his wife Naomi, and their two grown sons to leave Judea and seek survival in the land of Moab, a region east of the Jordan River. Once settled there, the sons took wives from among the Moabites. For a time, life was blessedly without loss and hardship until, after ten years had passed, both sons and their father died. Naomi and her daughters-in-law, Ruth and Orpah, were left alone. Eventually news reached Naomi that the famine in her homeland had ended. Here is where we pick up the story, at the seventh verse of the first chapter of the book of Ruth.

So she set out from the place where she had been living, she and her two daughters-in-law, and they went on their way to go back to the land of Judah. But Naomi said to her two daughters-in-law, “Go back each of you to your mother’s house. May the Lord deal kindly with you, as you have dealt with the dead and with me. The Lord grant that you may find security, each of you in the house of your husband.” Then she kissed them, and they wept aloud. 0They said to her, “No, we will return with you to your people.” But Naomi said, “Turn back, my daughters, why will you go with me?” . . . Then they wept aloud again. Orpah kissed her mother-in-law, but Ruth clung to her.

So she said, “See, your sister-in-law has gone back to her people and to her gods; return after your sister-in-law.” But Ruth said,

“Entreat me not to leave thee,
or return from following after thee;
for wither thou goest I will go
and where thou lodgest I will lodge.
Thy people will be my people,
and thy God will be my God.
Where thou diest I shall die
and there I will be buried. . . . .”

When Naomi saw that she was determined to go with her, she said no more to her. So the two of them went on until they came to Bethlehem.

I wonder how many of you have actually ever read the book of Ruth. I am relatively sure that some of you have at least heard an excerpt: “Entreat me not to leave thee. . . . Whither thou goest I will go, where thou lodgest, I will lodge.” Those words were sung at my wedding more than thirty years ago, and it is always a surprise when people learn that they were written not to describe the faithfulness and steadfastness of a husband and wife but to describe the beautiful relationship of love and constancy that existed between a mother-in-law and a daughter-in-law. Ruth is speaking to her mother-in-law Naomi. Scholars suggest that the book of Ruth is included in the Bible to make the point that Ruth, an outsider, a Moabite, someone who would have been considered an alien to those who believed themselves to be God’s chosen people, was not only included in the gracious promises of God, but in fact had an indispensable role to play in God’s plan of salvation. It is Ruth who meets a man named Boaz, and after they meet they marry they have a son, and when that son grows up, he has son, who is David, the King of Israel. It is from this family tree that the Messiah, the Savior, will be born. The outsider becomes an indispensable member of the family tree. (Would that the great religions of the world today would pay fresh heed to the message of the story of Ruth.)

Another important reason this story is told in the Bible is that it reminds us as beautifully as any other story in all of scripture that all of human life is, at its essence, not a matter of putting on your slippers and sitting by the fire and settling down. Human life, and certainly the life of faith, is a matter of setting out, of going forward, of receiving the adventure that is your life, of trusting God not only with today, but trusting God also with tomorrow. This is perhaps the paradigm story of our faith tradition. Think of Abraham and Sarah, letting go of what had been in order to receive the promise of what was yet to be. Think of the Hebrew people leaving Egypt, moving on toward the land of Canaan. Think of the fishermen of old, beside the Sea of Galilee, leaving their nets in answer to Jesus’ call to the adventure of discipleship. Think of Ruth and Naomi on their way to Judah: two women in a patriarchal society who have lost their husbands and yet who are full of hope and of the courage to put hope into action.

Orpah, the other daughter-in-law, directs her steps back to the place from whence she came, but Ruth would not do it. This is Ruth’s story today, Ruth’s sermon, but let us give Orpah at least a glimpse. Do you see her disappearing back across the horizon, into the purple hills of Moab? How close she had come to being a part of the new thing God was about to do, to playing her role in the covenant of God’s grace. “How sad it is for anyone to miss life, but how doubly tragic it is to get so close to the meaning of life, to its richness, to its fullness, to its glory and grandeur and then to turn away and to go back to where you came from” (Gardner Taylor, “Three Women and God,” Women: To Preach or Not to Preach, ed. Ella Pearson Mitchell: Judson Press, 1991, p. 85).

My favorite moment this Christmas was the Christmas Eve service in the Fourth Presbyterian Church sanctuary. How moving it was to look at all your faces that holy night, as together we held candles in our hands, sang “Silent Night,” and listened to the story of God’s becoming flesh in a baby born in Bethlehem. While there were all other kinds of stories running concurrently in our minds—worries about North Korea and nuclear threat, war with Iraq, all those stories—here, together, we all believed in the possibility of a better world. We believed that the darkness of today does not necessarily determine that which is yet to be. We had hope for our world. I am sure of it. I am just as sure that for a moment you were able to imagine that good things are still possible for you in your own life. Here on this Sunday, at the cusp of a new year, none of us can predict what will happen, but this much we know for sure: the future is in the hands of God, and God wishes us well.

What happens to Ruth and Naomi, after they strike out for an unknown tomorrow, is this: they arrive in Bethlehem, and there Ruth meets a prominent citizen named Boaz, a kinsmen of her deceased father-in-law. The account of their courtship is that stuff great romantic legends are made of. If there is anyone here today whose life partner comes from a different faith background or ethnic background, then let me tell you, the story of Ruth and Boaz is the story for you! They have a dramatic courtship, these two, featuring a famous encounter at the threshing house, which involved the winnowing of barley and a midnight nap on a heap of grain, but I am not going to go into that from the pulpit. Just let me say the Bible is not boring in this matter. Eventually they marry and have a child. That child becomes the grandfather of David, and on it goes until the time comes that Jesus is born, and Matthew makes sure the world knows that Ruth is his great-great-great . . . grandmother.

One year ago this past week, my mother-in-law, Claudia Adams, passed away. She was famous in her circles for saying to just about everybody she ever met within the first five minutes of meeting them, “Tell me who your people are.” That is such a wonderful Southern custom, but it also reflects the deep human need to know who our people are. To whom do we belong? To whose story do we belong?

This is our story: Ruth, Naomi—they are your grandmothers; Obed, Jesse, David—they are your grandfathers. I am talking about our family tree. We all are a part of the story of God’s unwavering faithfulness. It is to this story that they belonged. We, too, through grace. In spite of the estrangements that mark the human family, in spite of “the dubious and sinful actions of men and women throughout the human history,” the story still stands (Edward Schweizer, The Good News According to Matthew: John Knox Press, 1975, p. 26)

I subscribe to an email magazine published by the Martin Marty Center called Sightings. Just last week, there was a letter from Bethlehem, written by a visiting professor at the University of Tel Aviv (Ithamar Gruenwald) who is a regular teacher at a divinity school here in Chicago. He writes of the scene this Christmas at the Church of the Nativity, the place where tradition says Christ was born. He reminds us of the terrible year it has been in Bethlehem: first, an occupation of the church by Arab-Palestinians and then, thirty-nine days later, the Israeli troops and armor forcing them out. He describes how at the altar in the center of the Church of the Nativity, “midnight mass is conducted with guns protecting the Holy Host.” What an irony, since Christ came to earth to tear down the walls of hostility that separate us, one from another (Ephesians 2:14). We can only pray this new year that the people of the world will move to a higher, broader, vision of God and of neighbor.

In 1994, I visited the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. It was not a particularly religious experience. The place was crawling with tourists snapping pictures with their cameras and with people trying to sell trinkets to the tourists. My most vivid memory of the experience is that when one wants to enter the grotto, the place where tradition says Christ was born, one has to go down a deep, narrow staircase. You almost have to let your forehead touch your knees. What a message for the world this Christmas. More humility, less self-righteousness. This is what is needed in a world experiencing a famine of hope, a famine of justice, a famine of peace. To be humble as God was humble in Christ, humbling himself, taking the form of a servant: this is the way of salvation.

I was proud to be a citizen of Chicago this Christmas, as faith leaders all across the city issued a statement urging our president to make war among the last options our nation might elect and to work with other nations to ensure long-term stability in the Middle East and around the world.

Hope for the world this Christmas, and hope for ourselves. With all the uncertainties ahead, I challenge you not to be tempted to retreat into the purple hills of the familiar, but to be brave in your own life, to move forward with courage and hope, trusting that the God who led Ruth to Bethlehem will guide your steps toward your new tomorrow, trusting that all the seemingly inconsequential decisions you make in your life will be woven into the great tapestry of God’s covenant of grace.

I think of people I know who are possessed by the spirit of Ruth. I think of people who have lost someone they loved deeply and then after a time are able to find within themselves the courage to love again, to cross that frightening frontier of intimacy, where the danger of loss always lurks.

I think of a young man in this congregation who is spending this year as a volunteer in mission in Ghana. I think of another young person in this congregation who recently left a successful career in the practice of law in order to go to seminary to prepare for ordained ministry.

I think of people who are sick and in pain but who wake up in the morning, saying to themselves, “I am going to hope, not mope!”

I think of all the moments in the history of Fourth Presbyterian Church, when it would have been so logical to have retreated into the safety and security of a congregation that focused on taking care of its own members but instead realized that when there was a knock on the door, it just might be Jesus who was knocking, and how the door was opened and everybody became welcome here.

I do not know how it is in your life, but I often live on the border between wanting to settle back and be secure but then feeling as if there are great adventures ahead and I need to let go of what has been, in order for God to do a new thing in the world through me, as God did through Ruth.

Human life is certainly a matter of risk and narrow escapes, but human life is also the locus of the activity of God, who not only gives us Bethlehem, but gives us the longing and the courage to get there.

I close with a prayer for the new year by theologian Reinhold Niebuhr:

O God, who has made us the creatures of time, so that every tomorrow is an unknown country, and every decision a venture of faith, grant us, frail children of the day, who are blind to the future, to move toward it with a sure confidence in your love, from which neither life nor death can separate us. Amen.

And a blessing from Scotland:

Deep peace of the running wave to you,
Deep peace of the flowing air to you,
Deep peace of the quiet earth to you,
Deep peace of the shining stars to you,
Deep peace of the Son of Peace to you, now and always. Amen.

Sermon © Fourth Presbyterian Church