November 11, 2012 | 4:00 p.m.

A Sermon Series on Ruth: Part 1

Adam H. Fronczek
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 146
Ruth 1:1–18

A woman named Naomi and a man named Elimelech are married. They live in Israel, and shortly after their two boys are born, there is a food shortage and they move to Moab. In our time, this is the story of any African family that moves in order to escape famine; it’s the story of any Latino family that has moved to the U.S. because there are no jobs in their own country. Or it’s the story of the decline of a small town in America from where young people move toward bigger cities in search of work. Maybe it’s the story of someone who lost a job in the recession and had to move in order to pay the rent. Any of these people might be Naomi and Elimelech. This is a couple who moves not because of a promotion or a wedding or because someone is going back to school; they are leaving home because they have to, because they have no other choice.

For this couple, the chance they take works out. The family survives, and even thrives, in Moab. Their two sons grow up, build lives for themselves, and there in Moab, they get married to two of the Moabite women, one named Orpah and the other named Ruth. You can hear between the lines the conversations that might have taken place between Naomi and Elimelech. “Is it okay that our sons are marrying foreigners? They don’t look like us. They aren’t Jewish girls. Aren’t we going to move back to Israel eventually?” they ask. But things seem to work out for awhile. The family is intact; life stabilizes again. And then one day, tragedy strikes; life falls apart for Naomi. Elimelech gets sick and he dies, and as if that isn’t enough, so do both of Naomi’s sons. You can imagine that the emotional toll would have been quite enough, but in their patriarchal society, the situation was even worse: family and clan was everything, so being a either a widow or an immigrant was nothing, and Naomi is now both. Naomi is an immigrant woman in a foreign country, and her husband and her sons, all of her breadwinners, have died and left her alone. So you can see that anyone who is deeply concerned with the plight of immigrants or the unemployed or who has been a migrant or without work can relate to the social implications of this story; it happens in American ghettos and foreign refugee camps more often than most of us care to think about. Fortunately that has not been the story for most of us, but anyone who has lost a spouse or a child or a job and felt at risk or alone in the world knows something of what Naomi might be feeling.

This is Naomi: She is vulnerable and alone in the world. No doubt she feels trapped, stuck, and helpless. What is she going to do? How will she survive? She must do something, and she concludes that her best hope is to pack up and go home. By this time the famine in Israel has come to an end. If she goes home, maybe she will luck out and find that some member of her father’s family, which she left years ago, is not only still alive but has enough to spare to take her in and take care of her. It’s dangerous for a woman to travel alone, but if she makes it back home safely, she may have a modest chance at survival.

Orpah and Ruth, the two daughters, are in a better position than Naomi. They are not immigrants; they are at home in Moab. They married well, and they have now lost their husbands, but they are still quite young, and they can return home to their fathers and can be hopeful that they might remarry and have a second chance at happiness.

This difference between the somewhat-hopeful outlook for Orpah and Ruth and the truly devastating situation Naomi faces is what makes Ruth so interesting. You see, Orpah returns to the security of her father’s house, but Ruth, who could have taken the same option, decides to go with Naomi, and in so doing, she offers to take on Naomi’s problems; she volunteers to make herself as vulnerable as her mother-in-law. Ruth is voluntarily choosing to become part of Naomi’s devastating situation. She will pick up and go with her mother-in-law to Israel, a foreign country, and there she will be the immigrant. She will not speak the language; she will not know the culture or the religion; she will be the person who people whisper is “not from around here” and “doesn’t look like us”; and she will have no husband, no place to live, and nothing much that would recommend her to anyone who might want to take her in. She is another mouth to feed, just like Naomi, but now there will be two of them returning to Israel, not just one. It is a risky proposition, but Ruth loves Naomi, and she will not let her make the journey alone, so she makes this sacrifice. This is the woman who says, “Where you go, I will go.”

I hope you are seeing what I find so compelling about this story. If you have ever been an immigrant or moved away from home for a job or had the course of your life changed by the death of a spouse, if you have found yourself in a situation where you feel like the life you have is not the life you want and you must make a choice in order to change things, Ruth and Naomi are people you can relate to.

Now check this out: of all the things that happen in this story that are highly relevant, there is one more thing that I find even more relevant to people like you and me, and it’s something that is not in the story—namely, God. Where is God? Isn’t it funny that here, in this Bible story, God has not made an appearance? The book of Ruth stands apart from many other books of the Bible because of the conspicuous absence of anything supernatural. Ruth and Naomi have fallen on hard times, but unlike Job, there has been no reference to whether or not God played a role in that. In other places in the Bible, people strike out on their own and move to a faraway place because God instructs them to do so; Ruth and Naomi apparently come up with this solution on their own. Not only are there no clear instructions from God, there is no miraculous occurrence that reveals God’s presence; there is no sign through fire or severe weather, food falling from the sky or a disease cured—nothing happens to guarantee that God is with Ruth and Naomi. So if you want to know where God is in this story, you have to think about it for yourself. I like this story so much—this is a Bible story I can sink my teeth into—because I believe very much that there is a God and that God is active in my life, but in the midst of my own major life transitions and decisions, I have had no burning bush, I have heard no clear voice of God, and I have had no healing miracle to guide me. God’s presence has often been obscure in my life, and so when I read about Ruth and Naomi, I see people who might be like me.

I’m going to tell you a story about someone else who is a little like Ruth. In the last few years I’ve helped to lead mission trips to Guatemala through a group called Faith in Practice. They provide medical care through volunteer physicians and nurses who come from all over the United States. Through Faith and Practice, I met my friend Linda, who used to live here in Chicago. She was a lawyer, and a member of this church, and about a dozen years ago she started volunteering with Faith and Practice. At the same time, she began taking adult education classes here at the church, which eventually led her to take more classes through the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. Today Linda is an ordained Presbyterian minister and is the executive director of Faith and Practice, and I’m sure if you had told her twenty years ago that’s what she would be doing, she would have called you crazy.

I remember several years ago sitting down with Linda to talk when she was agonizing over accepting the job offer to go run Faith and Practice. It was a huge decision. It meant closing her law practice, moving away from her friends and family to Houston, where she knew almost no one, selling her home, taking a pay cut. It was the first-world, modern-day version of Ruth’s decision. It caused the same kind of anxiety and fear I imagine Ruth must have faced. I’m sure most of us face that kind of anxiety and fear when we think about changes in our job, our home, or our lifestyle, and we resist making those changes because we feel trapped by the life we already have and the systems of security we have set up for ourselves. It seems almost weekly that I sit down with someone who says to me, “Adam, I have this opportunity. I want to make some changes in my life, but I’m stuck in the situation I’m in. I need the health care package my job provides; I have a mortgage that is strangling me; my kids are in private school; my family expects me to make this kind of money so we can keep living this way.” How can I tell these people what to do, because in those situations, we typically have no miracle healing, no voice of God, and no burning bush. Like Ruth and Naomi, if we want to know what God wants us to do, we have to pray about it, we have to talk to our friends (or our minister), we have to go through this unpredictable process called “discernment,” we have to struggle with the possibility that we might make the wrong choice.

Going to Houston turned out to be a very good choice for Linda, but it was definitely not an easy one. I believe that she has been upheld throughout this new chapter of her life not by the clear voice of God but by small things that have indicated God’s presence: Linda has been helped by friends and family who have encouraged her along the way, changes in the lives of the Guatemalans who are helped by the work of Faith and Practice, and changes in the lives of the volunteers who work with her.

I was with one of those volunteers this week, one of the surgeons I have traveled with several times. We met up after work to hang out, as we often do. In the course of our conversation, he told me a story he has probably told me twenty-five times. Six years ago, the first time he got off the bus at a Guatemalan hospital, he saw hundreds of Guatemalans waiting, patiently and thankfully, for the team to arrive. These people had not had any medical care for months. Most of them had traveled several hours by some combination of walking and riding on crowded buses full of heat and dust and exhaust. It could hardly have been more different from the waiting room at Northwestern, and the patience and understanding of the people could hardly have been more different from the demanding and entitled behavior of most American patients. My friend was blown away. He wound up on that trip out of curiosity and almost by accident, but when he stepped off that bus, his life was changed permanently. It wasn’t a dramatic change, nor did it happen all at once, and I don’t think it’s finished. But every year, he volunteers a little more of his time and a little more of his money, and every year the transformative effect of the time he spends in Guatemala reshapes a little bit more of the life he lives the rest of the year here in Chicago. And although he would not say he is a “church person” any more than Ruth would have called herself a Jew, my friend speaks quite openly about the undeniable fact that God was present on that first day he stepped off that bus and is present in his life still, and that is always the most emphatic part of the way he tells the story.

Two friends: one in the ministry, the other not a churchgoer. Two lives changed: one by a major intentional decision, the other almost by accident, and neither one through a clear declaration from God or a supernatural miracle, but both, in their own way, miraculous.

God’s presence is available to us in all kinds of ways, big and small, obvious and hidden, creating dramatic life changes and gradual transitions that we often see only in hindsight. Often the greatest factor in whether or not we see God’s presence has less to do with what God is doing and more to do with whether or not we are willing to notice. Today we strike out on this new journey with Ruth, and next week we will see how it ends. And this week, in between, I invite you, without any rules or restrictions about what God’s presence is about, to take a particularly close look in your own life and ask where you might be finding, or missing, the presence of God. Are you feeling nudged towards something new or different in your life or toward a greater commitment to something that is already a part of your life? Is there a major change or a gradual transition going on for you? Is there something you’ve recently been through where you’ve had lots of questions or doubts but haven’t really stopped to think about how God might have been involved? Maybe you’ve thought about it but haven’t chosen to talk with anyone about it. Are you feeling stuck or trapped by something about the life you have right now? Any of these things might be opportunities to explore how God is at work in your life. Ruth makes an incredible statement to her mother-in-law: “Where you go, I will go.” With those words, Ruth has made her commitment, but make no mistake about it, she has no idea how it will turn out. She will have to go and see. Just like us, she has an uncertain future in front of her, and she must be on the lookout in order to find where God is leading her. Let us go with her on this journey of faith . . .

Amen.