The Other Side of the Story

Ruth 3: 1-5; 4:13-17

November 25, 2012

 

A few weeks ago, the Germantown Mennonite kids from our Kid’s Club headed over to the Johnson House for a tour.  Most of the kids had never been inside that historic building, and only knew it as that place we go for the Easter egg hunt every year.  And because these are kids who have a passion for justice, it felt important that we go and learn these stories of justice from this neighborhood.

This is the kindof trip that could have gone either way.  The kids could be bored by the stories and whine and complain about the event.  Or they could get really into it.  But, lucky for us, the event was a great success.  Many of the kids went home and told the stories they heard back to their adults—word for word.

If you ask one of the 15 kids that attended the tour of the Johnson house, you might hear about Harriet Tubman—a free black woman who worked tirelessly for the freedom of slaves.  If you ask the kids, they’ll tell you about the time when Harriet was a slave, her master threw a metal doorstop at her brother, but missed.  It instead hit Harriet in the head, leaving a large dent that remained there for her entire long life.

You may also hear about William Stills, the son of free parents that escaped slavery in the South.  Stills made a lot of money in the coal industry in his lifetime in Philadelphia, and used his wealth to help many slaves find freedom.  What drove him to be involved in the underground railroad was the hope that he might someday meet his older brothers, who were left down south when his parents escaped slavery.  And—by the grace of God—he did have the opportunity to help one of his brothers to freedom.

Those stories certainly made an impression of the kids of this congregation.  And, I was so glad we were able to hear them.  I was especially glad that these stories were not as much about the white Quaker family—the Johnsons—reaching out to the oppressed slaves as it was about the slaves making freedom for themselves.  Don’t get me wrong—those are important stories, and the stories of the Johnson family need to be told.  The Johnson were indeed courageous.  But what incited the passion of the children who heard these stories, were those of William Stills and Harriet Tubman, who understood freedom, because they went from slave to free status, and they desired for others to have that same freedom.

The story of Ruth, Naomi and Boaz is a bit like the Harriet Tubman story or the William Stills story.  It is not the official story of the people of Israel, just as William Still and Harriet Tubman are not the dominant stories of our nation.  Let me be clear—abolition of slavery happened through the network of white and black, free and enslaved people in this country.  But in many textbooks, or at least the textbooks of our youth—before African American history was brought to the light–we heard far less about the Stills and the Tubmans than we did about the “courageous Johnsons” or others like them.

The story of Ruth, Naomi and Boaz is not the official story of the people of Israel—in fact, it almost feels like it is shoved in the Hebrew Scriptures between the book of Judges and I Samuel.

Why on earth would this story even be here?  It’s not the official approved story of how the people of Israel came to be.  The story of the making of the people of Israel is reserved for I and II Samuel and I and II Kings.  They are the official propaganda of the making of Israel.

The book of Ruth is the story behind the story, or the story before the story.  It’s told from the women’s perspective, with the women’s relationship at the center.  The men who are involved in this story are passive, and secondary to what is happening between Ruth and Naomi.

This is not the story you’ll hear in the book of Judges, the book that comes right before Ruth.  In fact, at the end of the book of Judges, there is a story about a woman, but told from the point of view of a man.  She is an unnamed woman—she is beaten, raped repeatedly, and cut into pieces, with each body part being sent to each of the tribes of Israel.  The story of the unnamed woman at Gibeah takes place just before we turn to the book of Ruth, a book which focuses on the care and love shared between two named women, two women who do most of the talking, and all of the plotting.  We move from a story about a woman whose life felt inconsequential to these men from the tribes of Israel and Judah—so inconsequential that she wasn’t even bothered with a name.  Then we move to Ruth and Naomi–whose negotiating and social maneuvering was pivotal in making David the king of Israel, and consequently, making Jesus the one we call Messiah.

 

Last week, I talked about the new family systems that these women were forging.  Naomi and Ruth were each other’s redemption and salvation.  This week, we see in the text the lengths these women will go to save each other.

I don’t know if you realize this but this story of Ruth and Naomi is pretty risqué.  A reading of it in its original Hebrew is bound to make a few of us blush.  In the second half of this book, Naomi finds a man for Ruth—a man that would give Ruth the opportunity to act as a redeemer for Naomi, a man that would carry on the line of Naomi’s husband.  His name was Boaz—he was a somewhat distant relative of Naomi’s, and a kind man.  He had been helping out Ruth and Naomi, making sure that they were able to claim some of the leftover wheat after his workers were done in the field.

So, Naomi hatched a plan—a plan to get Ruth and Boaz together, join their wealth, and get herself a grandchild.  She instructed Ruth to go to the threshing floor, where the field workers were gathering, threshing and sorting the crops.  When Boaz fell asleep late at night, Naomi instructed Ruth to uncover Boaz’s feet and lay next to his feet.

This is where it gets a little risqué.  The word “feet” in Hebrew is actually a polite euphemism for anything below the waist.  This was no timid attempt to wake Boaz up with cold feet, this was a bold gesture—a direct statement of Ruth’s desires and intentions with Boaz.

Naomi also told Ruth to uncover Boaz’s “feet”, and he would tell Ruth what to do next.  But that didn’t happen.  Ruth took matters into her own hands.  When Boaz woke up and was trying to figure out what was going on, Ruth instructed him—“cover me with your blanket, because you are the redeemer of our family.”  This was a marriage proposal.

Boaz seemed a little surprised by this overture, a little embarrassed to be uncovered, and instructed.  Yet, he complied with Ruth and Naomi’s wishes.  He married Ruth, and they had a son, Obed, who was the grandfather of the future King David.

But, this child was not for Boaz. When that baby was born, Boaz was silent—he was not even in the final frames of the story.  Boaz seemed to be the means to an end.  He was a redeemer of Ruth and Naomi, but more than that, Ruth and Naomi were the redeemers of the people of Israel.  Their relationship, their love for each other, was key in ensuring that the people of Israel lived on, that the story continued.

 

Unfortunately, it was not so for the unnamed woman at Gibeah.  She had no voice, and she could not save herself.  The powerful disregarded their role of redeemer, of caretaker, and destroyed her.  But, Ruth and Naomi, claimed their roles as redeemers, and informed Boaz that he too would be part of that.  They made a way for themselves, and in doing that, saved themselves and the people of Israel.

This is what Ruth and Naomi have in common with the Williams Still’s and Harriet Tubman’s of the world.  They claimed their own freedom, they created their own redemption.  They knew who they were—they knew they were free—and yet they also knew they couldn’t rely on the powerful for their own freedom.  They had to make it happen for themselves, and help others to find it.  Their lives depended on it.  And future generations depended on it.

 

If you ask church historians, they’ll tell you that something is happening in the Church universal.  A shift is taking place.  Many are calling it the great emergence.  This is a shift that takes place in the church every 500 years or so.  The last great shift was the reformation, where our church tradition and Anabaptist understanding was born.  In this great emergence we expect to see the end of denominationalism, and new ways of being church forming.

We’ve seen the Mennonite denomination in chaos, struggling to hold together this increasingly theologically diverse group of people, and choosing who’s in and out in the process.

We don’t need church historians to tell us that there is a shift in the church.  We live it.  We know we cannot rely on denominational structures.  We never should have.  That is not the heart of the gospel. What stands at the center of the gospel is the redeeming work of Christ, who called us to follow in his way, who calls us to some frightening places, and who calls us—like Naomi and Ruth, like Harriet Tubman and William Stills—to bold acts of justice and redemption for the sake of all people.  It’s difficult to do that from the center of a denomination.  It’s much easier to do that from the margins, from the edge of the fields, from the shadows of the threshing floor, from the underground railroad, and from the very edges of faith.

We are here not to preserve a tradition or to hold tight to something.  We are not here to tell the story of the dominant culture.  We are here—as a people of faith—to save each other, to lift up each other, to name each other, and to welcome each other.  We are here to claim our voices and our freedom, and to help others do the same.

Thanks be to God for Ruth and Naomi, for William Stills and Harriet Tubman, who act as models for how we are to live—one hand lifted in praise to God, the other extended, an offering of freedom and hope to all who wish to have it.  AMEN.