Unitarian Universalist Meeting of South Berkshire

 

 

May 11, 2003

 

 

“Ruth and Naomi”

 

 

Rev. Kathy Duhon

 

 

            Happy Mother’s Day!  The readings have ideas for three different gifts you could have given your mother – art work for the fridge (seems to work at any age), flowers from the garden (although sweet peas are not recommended), and the sheer devotion and faithfulness of journeying with your mother in her world.  This last gift is hard to do, for a mother’s world is quite foreign sometimes, beginning when you are a small child.  Let’s say you have always been the center of your Mom and Dad’s existence, and then they tell you that a new baby is on the way, and it’s like Mom is speaking a foreign language.  One Mom said that she didn’t expect her three year old, the oldest, to react so badly to the news of the third baby coming:  “I don’t want a new baby” Brian cried.  Mom asked why, as mothers do, and Brian answered with teary eyes, “Because I want to keep Damian.”  Brian was already journeying with his mother in the world of family faithfulness and devotion.

            We heard the beginning of the book of Ruth from the Hebrew scriptures, a story of great family fidelity and devotion.  This is a short story and a good read – I encourage you to find it, and indulge – it’s usually located a few books into the Bible, between Judges and 1 Samuel.  The story has intrigue, tantalizing details, and a good ending.  No one is behaving badly, not even God.  There are no enemies, only inspiration. 

            M.O.A.B. – the name of a particularly aggressive bomb used recently by the United States – is also the name – Moab – of an ancient country deemed aggressive by the early Israelites, located East of the Dead Sea.  The story of Ruth and Naomi begins when the father, Elimelech, decides to move his family to Moab from Bethlehem during a famine.  It was a desperate act to move into a country whose people they feared, but not so unusual for those who are hungry.  People who face great poverty, unemployment, and famine, move their families in order to survive – from the farm to the city, across oceans, and even into countries that seem to be aggressive to their people.

            Elimelech moved with his wife Naomi and their two sons, Mahlon and Chilion.  The sons married Moabite women, Ruth and Orpah.  Tragedy strikes this family, with first the father dying, then ten years later, the two sons die.  Another sadness for the family in that society is that both daughters-in-law seem to be barren.  Naomi is a widow, left with two widowed daughters-in-law, and no grandchildren.

            Naomi sounds like she is being considerate of her daughters-in-law in sending them back to their families, and she probably is trying to give them back their lives.  Her life has been so devastated.  Anyone who has one loss in their immediate family would grieve deeply, but she has three losses, including the loss of children – hard, hard for a mother.  Naomi is emotionally lost in a foreign land, away from her people and the comfort of her religion, and she is empty, empty and bitter, as she says later in the story.  “Call me not Naomi (which means pleasant), call me Mara (which means bitter)”.  Naomi is not just letting her daughters-in-law return to their homes and lands and people and religion, she is sending them away.  Like many who have grieved deeply, she wants to be alone, she may want to die, she does not want their pity or their feelings of responsibility toward her – she wants to go sulk off by herself and not have to sweetly receive their solicitations. 

            If Ruth had left the powerless Naomi, an old woman, a foreign woman, a poor woman, without the protection of men, to try to journey all the way from aggressive Moab to Bethlehem, days, if not weeks away, Naomi would have surely fulfilled any bereaved desire she had to die.  Ruth does not have a social duty to her mother-in-law, is herself vulnerable and grieving, and knows that to go away with her is to turn away from her own land, people and religion.  She does so anyway.  It is the ultimate act of fidelity, responsibility, and caring.  It may be love, as is indicated later in the book of Ruth, but it’s probably done more from a sense of the desperateness that she is the only one standing between Naomi and death, depression, danger, so she feels called to help.  Ruth offers her support with humility and Naomi receives it with humility.

Responsibility isn’t always the easy sidekick of love – it is the desperate ‘I can do no other’ call to action, which may draw the judgment of others.  Should Ruth have made such a huge sacrifice?  Ruth is responsible, faithful, and so she becomes a model, like George Bailey in “It’s a Wonderful Life”, making the kind of sacrifices everyone hopes they won’t have to make.  Her story made it into the Bible because it says something about how one ought to live.  Ruth takes care of her mother-in-law, ‘mothers’ Naomi, taking her home, and being the one to glean for food for them. 

This is a story of desperation, but the endings are good.  In desperation, each of the main characters makes a hard and good decision, (instead of the more common variety of desperate bad decisions), and the good life is found.  Ruth, Boaz her new husband, and Naomi all decide to sacrifice for the other and all are sacrificed for by the other.  All lives are transformed, but the most amazing is Naomi, who was bitter, angry, and depressed, and comes alive again, a mother again, to her daughter-in-law, whom she starts calling daughter, and to her new grandchild.  In child dedication services, I say to the parents, “You may be called upon to sacrifice ambitions, deny yourselves pleasure, or set aside your own dreams so that your child may journey more surely the path of life.  But you accept this service to another life, knowing that your own lives will be fuller and richer in consequence.”

            Ruth becomes the great-grandmother of David, the King David who is beloved and so important in both Judaism and Christianity.  Ruth’s name also appears in the genealogy of Jesus, one of only 5 women there.  All those women had some strike against them according to their society – they were foreign or they had engaged in scandalous behavior or they were strong and feisty.  I think that’s the point of naming them, as it is the point of being sure to proclaim that the great King David had a Moabite great-grandmother.  It could have easily been hidden – you didn’t usually name the mothers.  But occasionally we get it – we understand that diversity of culture and religion is good and to be celebrated, that vulnerabilities like widowhood and poverty make us strong, and that strength of character sometimes seems scandalous, but really is a reason why we can make it in this world.  For all of us feel like foreigners sometimes, strangers in a strange land, who have made enough bad decisions that our lives may look scandalous, but who nevertheless can be redeemed by faithfulness. 

            The story is centered in those words of Ruth that we read:  “Where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God.”  Ruth clings to her mother-in-law Naomi, not to security, not to a man, not to the past, not to the rules, but to the present desperateness which she is called to answer with faithfulness and love.  Ruth is our religious mother.  Her story gives birth to a strength of fidelity that redeems, and a universalism that flowers in our religious heritage.  Blessed be motherhood, religious and everyday.  Amen.