Leaving Moab (Ruth 1.1-18)
Ruth 1.1-18
“Leaving Moab”
Ordinary 27B/November 4, 2018
Eastminster United Presbyterian Church
Tom James
The shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh last weekend was another reminder that anti-Semitism remains a factor in American life. Anti-Semitism has been fueled less by racial disgust than by fear of outsiders. It’s always difficult to understand the motivations of a perpetrator of a mass crime, but reporting suggests that his animus toward Jews was driven at least in part by his belief that they were somehow supporting the so-called “caravan” of migrants making their way up through Central America. The murder was, you might say, timely. In a perverse way, it was even strategic. Killing Jews was seen as a way of stopping the flow of immigration which the shooter saw as a vital threat. “Jews must die!” sounds like almost like a medical indication—as if by killing Jews, he was choking the life out of a contagion. Whatever you think about immigration from Central America, we have a pretty clear picture here of a kind of anti-Semitism that stands in for a paranoid fear of the other.
We have a long history of that. In 2002, in the midst of an uptick in our paranoid fears after September 11th, filmmaker Martin Scorsese directed an epic film about gang warfare in the five points district of New York City during the nineteenth century. The plot of Gangs of New York revolved around two rival gangs battling for control of the district. One of the gangs was Protestant and American-born, led by “Bill the Butcher” Cutting, while the other was Catholic and Irish immigrant. It’s not an edifying film: its scenes are basically one violent confrontation after another. But it is clear that what drives the violence is a nativist fear of losing control of “turf” due to the influx of threatening foreigners. Much like the alt-right demonstrators in Charlottesville, Virginia a few years ago, their angry and violently irrational cry to the outsider is “You will not replace us!”
Ancient Israelites, like Jews in Europe and North America, were also subject to nativist violence, fueled by a paranoid fear of the other. We all know the more recent history, but in some ways that history was prefigured not only by countless pogroms in Europe but even in the Hebrew Scriptures themselves. Conquered by larger, more powerful nations, ancient Israelites often had to be integrated into larger, imperial societies in order to survive. But it was their very status as minorities who persisted in their ancient Jewish identity that made them all the more contemptible to the people around them. And, so, a strategy for survival has, again and again, suggested itself, much as it has to oppressed minorities around the world, and that strategy was nationalism. What we need, some thought, was to re-establish our own territory, where our own language would be spoken and our own cultural traditions would be honored. We could set up rules to keep Jewish men from marrying foreign women, for example, to keep our national identity intact.
Such was the rule imposed during the time of Ezra and Nehemiah, anyway. The Jews had just begun to come back from Babylon after having been in captivity there for many years. They began to trickle back a fragile, beleaguered remnant of a nation, and a renewed nationalism became their strategy for survival. This was not a time to be cosmopolitan. This was not a time to recognize their kinship with surrounding peoples or their common interests with other nations. This was a time for circling the wagons, for doubling down on their own identity as a people, to build themselves up, to strengthen the walls and to consolidate their lands.
But here we have an odd little story. Many scholars believe that the book of Ruth was written during this very period of return from exile, though it tells of a time many centuries before. That earlier time was very mobile and fluid, before there were settled kings in Israel—when Israel was a loose confederacy of tribes banding together to fight for their independence from the city-states of ancient Palestine that were always trying to exploit the countryside and siphon off its wealth.
Borders were not very well-defined, so when famine strikes, it isn’t too strange for Naomi and her husband Elimelech to migrate into the territory of Moab. Now, the Moabites were not the friends of the Israelite tribes. During this period a king had consolidated power in Moab and was oppressing the region by exacting tribute. Moab was an enemy.
The story of Ruth is the story of a Moabite woman—a wife of one of Naomi and Elimelech’s sons. The setting is a catastrophe for the women in the story. In a culture in which women could not own property and were completely dependent upon men, for Naomi to lose both her husband and her two sons in a foreign and hostile land where she had no connections meant that she had nothing to fall back on. And the only hope that Ruth and her sister-in-law Orpah had was to go back to their family’s homes in Moab where sympathetic relations might take them in.
We don’t know why Ruth chose not to do that. The words recorded in our passage are some of the most moving words of faith and loyalty that we find in all of Scripture: “Do not press me to leave you or to turn back from following you. Where you will go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God. Where you die, I will die.” For whatever reason, Ruth chooses in these words to be a helpless migrant, identifying herself with homeless Naomi, without a secure and stable place, clinging to the mother-in-law that she had grown to love and entrusting her self to a foreign people and its fortunes.
And what’s just as interesting here is what this story of brave faith and faithfulness means for Israel. Remember, I said that during the time when this story was written, Israel was in the process of circling its wagons, trying to preserve its identity—even going so far as adopting policies forbidding its men to marry foreign women. And yet we have this story of the Moabite Ruth, choosing to align herself with Israel, showing by her words and deeds that she was more Israelite than those who were native-born.
And who was Ruth? Why does her story matter? As is often the case in the Hebrew Scriptures, we have to turn to a genealogy, and one is provided at the end of the book of Ruth. Ruth, it turns out, is the grandmother of the one who will become King David, the greatest, most beloved ruler of ancient Israel and the true beginning of its monarchy.
To be a true Israelite, the story tells us, has nothing to do with who are parents are or what our national origins might be. To be a true Israelite, all you have to do is to take leave of Moab and be faithful to Israel’s people and Israel’s vision of hope.
It seems to me that we could take two lessons from this story, depending on whether we focus on the issue of migration from the standpoint of those who show her hospitality or from the point of view of the migrant herself. One of the themes of this story is the hospitality that in the region was considered mandatory. There were always things like famines and other catastrophic events that displaced people. Life was precarious, and it was well known that the only way to be assured of some chance for surviving was to embrace an ethic of hospitality. Mi casa es su casa. My place, my space in the world, was not made just for me—it was made for me to share, for some day I may be in need of the same generosity. Our own privatizing and greedy society is no doubt very different from the ancient world, and yet the God who expects compassion and generosity is no different. And, indeed, human need is no different, either. It’s hard to imagine a way of being faithful to the God of Scripture without opening our doors, and our hearts, to those who have been displaced by forces they cannot control, whether they be from other countries or from East Toledo.
But, as I say, there’s another lesson to draw here, one which we can learn as we put ourselves in the shoes of the migrant herself. Ruth and Naomi are both migrants, in a way. But Ruth is the one who chooses to get up and leave her place, not because she has to. We can only assume that it would have been easier for her to stay in Moab. No, Ruth takes leave of Moab for the sake of Naomi, and for the sake of the people she has come to love. And how might we be compelled to take leave of our places of comfort? Do we have that kind of motivation? Are we that faithful? Do we love the future that beckons to us enough that we can take leave of our past? Do we love the future Eastminster United Presbyterian Church enough to let go of the past Eastminster, the Eastminster of 100 years ago, or ten, or yesterday?
I pose these questions because I believe that the testimony of Scripture is that to believe in God is to adopt the attitude of the migrant—or, as we sometimes call her, the pilgrim. To believe in God is believe that we are called to take steps forward rather than digging in our heals and standing pat.
One of my former parishioners, an older woman from Nigeria, used to preach impromptu sermons whenever I would take home communion to her. She was a migrant, too, and she had a deep understanding of God’s providential care that calls us to embrace what is in front of us, even if that means leaving what is behind. One of my favorite lines that she repeated often was, “God never gives us an old day. Every day that God gives is new.”
Wisdom born of many years, and many miles. Where you go, I will go. Where you lodge, I will lodge. Your people will be my people, and your God, my God. So may it be. In the name of God, our creator and redeemer. Amen.
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