Proper 26B. 31 October 2021. The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz
Ruth 1:1-18. Do not beg me to leave you anymore, woman.
Hebrews 9:11-14. Purify our conscience from dead observances for worship of the living God.
Mark 12:28-34. You are not far from the Realm of God.
O God of our redemption, grant us the strength, the wisdom and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.
Many of you know that the formal name of our educational and artistic collaboration program with Central Reform Temple is Emmanuel Center. You’ll see our statement of purpose in the back of your bulletins. Essentially it says that faithfully rooted in our distinct religious traditions and shared spiritual heritage, we model compassionate encounters between Judaism and Christianity that affirm the difficult challenges of history and aspire to new levels of understanding. The Emmanuel Center Board comprises leaders from the parish and the synagogue to plan activities that explore spiritual and ethical perspectives on our shared human experience. When the board met this past Tuesday, we spent considerable time talking about the history being made right now with regard to the tens of thousands of refugees of rapacious militarism coming into the US from Afghanistan to be resettled here. Afghani people are living in refugee camps on five military bases in this country; the pictures of Fort Bliss (a highly ironic name) in New Mexico show about 100 huge tents holding 6,000 people. Our conversation on the board had to do with our moral obligation to respond with welcome and assistance, and the process of figuring out how. Where to begin?
Then on Wednesday, faith leaders from congregations and other faith-based organizations in and around Boston met to talk about our moral obligation to respond to a different refugee camp, the one in the South Bay neighborhood of Boston. I’ve been agitating for this conversation for the past month since I went back to the prison to resume the art-and-spirituality program after a 20-month hiatus due to the Covid pandemic. I have never moved through a such a dystopian cityscape. The level of human misery, squalor, disease, overcrowding, danger, and despair was staggering. The hundreds of people who were “cleared” from the intersection known as Mass and Cass, have been living in tents on Atkinson Street and the surrounding blocks. They are refugees of the strategic flood of opiates and the intentional famine of adequate and dignified healthcare, housing, and other kinds of basic needs. Both the flood and the famine are in service to rapacious accumulation of wealth. Now they are being preyed upon by a different class of drug sellers and pimps.
Into these complex and overwhelming humanitarian crises, come readings from the Book of Ruth, the Letter to the Hebrews, and the Gospel of Mark. What wisdom might they share with us? The Book of Ruth is one of only two books in the Bible named for a woman, so you know it is exceptional. (The other is Esther, by the way.) Once upon a time, the Book of Ruth tells us, there was a famine in Israel. A man from Bethlehem (which ironically means House of Bread), whose name was God-is-my-king (that’s Elimelech), sought refuge in another country, an enemy country, with his wife, whose name was Pleasant (that’s Naomi). They had two sons, named Disease and Death (we could call them Pox and Mort), who took women (the word is actually abducted) from the enemy territory, from a different religion, different ethnicity, a people in long simmering conflict with Israel. [1] The listeners know these guys aren’t going to make it, even before the story tells them.
The first abducted woman was named Back-of-the-neck (Orpah). I don’t know what that idiom means, but it sounds a little bit like seat of the pants to me. The other abducted woman was named, Friend-and-vision-of-beauty (that’s Ruth, and her name is a pun on full-to-overflowing). I want you to get a sense of how many-layered and heavy-handed this tale is. When the men had died, the woman named Pleasant (Naomi) decided to return to her homeland, so she urged her daughters-in-law to go back to their own mothers. They were impoverished and vulnerable, without protection. Orpah did what was expected, but Ruth did the unexpected. There’s no judgment about Orpah’s obedience, but it does seem noteworthy that we never hear about her again. Obedient women rarely stay in the news, if they even make the news.
Ruth, the friend and vision of beauty, offers the most beautiful vow in all of scripture to Naomi in response to her saying that she’s going to return alone to Bethlehem. Ruth’s vow underscores her kindness, loyalty, and fidelity, far beyond what would be sensible or logical. Listen to theologian and Episcopal priest, Wil Gafney’s translation, which emphasizes the point that this is a conversation of women. [2]
Do not beg me to leave you anymore, woman,
or to turn back from following you, woman.
For where you go, woman, I will go;
where you rest, woman, I will rest.
Your people, woman, will be my people;
and your God, woman, will be my God.
Where you die, woman, I will die
and there I will be buried.
May YHWH [the Holy One] do this to me and more
if anything but death separates me from you, woman.
And our portion today ends with Naomi saying no more to Ruth about it; but what happens next, is that the woman called Pleasant doesn’t want to be called that anymore. Naomi tells the women of Bethlehem to call her Mara because she is bitter, resentful, alienated, and disillusioned by calamity. This is the story of Naomi’s redemption and, by extension, the redemption of the people of God. Indeed, the word redeem or redemption is used 23 times in a story that is only 85 verses long.[3] The enemy-outsider Ruth, the unlikeliest agent of the grace of God, demonstrates that Naomi (the insider and, by extension, her people) are worthy, valuable, redeemable, indeed lovable, no matter what calamity and bitterness has followed. The redemption, furthermore, is going to come through the last person you would expect to be a blessing of the Holy One. It will come from a foreigner married into an Israelite family (by the way, intermarriage was prohibited for the people of Israel according to Ezra and Nehemiah).
Redemption comes in the barley harvest, in Ruth’s marriage to Boaz, in the birth of a grandson for Naomi; redemption comes when that grandson becomes the grandfather of King David; and for Christians, redemption comes in the birth of Jesus, a direct descendent of Ruth and Naomi. The character of Ruth plays a similar role for Jews and Christians, as the matriarchal ancestor from a despised foreign nation, who served as a vessel of grace, of reparation and restoration, a foremother of a mighty savior. The Book of Ruth reminds us that we often fail to recognize the despised others, who are agents of God’s redemptive activity in the world. In addition to asking, “How can we help,” the Book of Ruth encourages us to imagine that our salvation is bound up with outsiders and enemies.
How are reparation and restoration delivered? With love and by love, in relationship. The scribe in our Gospel passage knows, and Jesus knows, that listen is the first commandment: when you will listen deeply, you will love God, and you will love your neighbor as yourself. “The one who loves another has fulfilled the law….Love is the fulfilling of the law,” to quote Paul [4]. The verse from the Letter to the Hebrews, which moved me so much this week, was the description of Jesus as a greater and more perfect tent, a tent not made by hand, in which the priesthood of Jesus will purify our conscience from dead observances or rituals, so that we worship the living God. Remember, worship means ascribing worth to, and God means Love (capital L).
It’s hard. It’s overwhelming, thinking about how to respond to so many refugees living in imperfect tents without adequate and dignified resources. We struggle to know what to do; it’s painful, and that’s actually good. The words of Frederick Douglass come to mind. [5]
If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are [people] who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or I may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will.
So how do we make our spirits, our souls, ready? (Now I’m quoting our cantata; I often think of our cantata as our fourth reading). Perhaps you read Vanessa Holroyd’s lovely reflection in Emmanuel Music’s weekly e-news this week? She wrote about today’s cantata:
So much of the text for BWV 115 centers on keeping to the righteous path, lest death and final judgement come for you unexpectedly. We must “be vigilant, plead, and pray” states the opening chorus in its oddly happy, bubbly way. However, my take is more carpe diem than fear of being caught mid-sin, of taking nothing for granted, especially as we emerge slowly but surely into a post-pandemic world. In the soprano aria… the voice is urging the listener to ask for mercy and forgiveness from sin, but for me, it’s about release; it’s about letting go of past mistakes, sadness, and focusing on the present and is some of the most beautiful, soul-nurturing music I have ever encountered.
I love serving a congregation of people who can preach! I want to encourage us all to not turn away from the struggle, because in it, in the blight of refugee camps, in loving our refugee neighbors, we will find the opportunity to be not far from the Realm of God. I want to encourage us to ask God for mercy and forgiveness for the fact of our tent cities, and to use the freedom we are given to do our part to respond, repair, and rebuild a world where there are no more refugees, only welcome arrivals.
[1] Wilda Gafney, “Ruth”, The People’s Companion to the Bible (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010), p. 127.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Kathleen Robertson Farmer, “The Book of Ruth,” The New Interpreter’s Bible (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1998), v. 2, p. 892.
[4] Romans 13:8,10.
[5] Epigraph from My Bondage and My Freedom in Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s Racism without Racists, 5th ed. (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018) p. 238.