Final Sermon on the Book of Ruth: August 31st

Many of you are already familiar with the myths of Ancient Greece. They are powerful, filled with archetype, stories of devotion and love. And lust. And murder. And divine manipulation. Perfect for a new series on Showtime… though even cable television might find some of the stories distasteful. So we come to the founding hero of Athens, one Theseus. And, as always, there is a back story, for despite the biological impossibility of the thing, Theseus has two fathers. One, Aegeus, is a powerful mortal king. He might be the first bigamist, for he goes out of town to take a wife, the daughter of another king. On the night of their wedding, having consummated their marriage, the bride promptly goes down to the beach and gets funky with Poseidon. And so Theseus is conceived as a quarter god. Aegeus buries his sword and sandals under a huge rock, and says the boy can claim them, if he is heroic enough, and so confirm his royal parentage. And then Augeus does what all good bigamists do. He promptly goes home, where he takes up with Medea, fresh from killing her own sons.

The boy grows, is hero enough, and eventually sets off on a series of adventures. There is a pretty standard version of this founder’s myth, and the Theseus tale follows it. The founder must battle a series of enemies and obstacles that represent disorder, chaos, wildness, before they can found the city, representing civility, order, control. And it is to one of the wild obstacles Theseus must face that we turn our attention.

Why or how Aegeus offended King Minos of Crete is disputed, but, as the story goes, every seven years the Greeks were required to send the seven most courageous youth and the seven fairest maidens to Crete, never to be heard from again. And as it turns out, they were being sent into the Labyrinth, the be slain and devoured by the half-bull, half-man monster, the Minotaur. And so, Theseus has his task, which requires not only defeating a powerful monster, but also navigating the maze, designed by Daedalus, and deadly even without the beast.

Are you following so far? Theseus, representing civilization, must navigate difficult choices to conquer chaos and brutality. And he does so with the sword, yes, but ultimately, he is saved by love. For the king’s daughter, Ariadne, loves this foreign hero. She gives Theseus a ball of string and the key to the maze, which she has gotten from its maker. And so Theseus ties off the string, unspooling it as he goes, finds the Minotaur, lops off his head, and follows the string back, the right choices leading to order.

The string is known as Ariadne’s thread. And it lends its name to a practice of logic, a way of problem solving. Using Ariadne’s thread, you systematically try different solutions, carefully cataloging results, until you end up with the correct answer. This might sound pretty basic, something a child might do, but it is really pretty far up on the evolutionary tree.

So in Theseus and the Minotaur, we have the forces of chaos, wildness, disorder, defeated by the power of civility, order and control. The sword may be powerful, but thinking wins the day.

And that is great for humans. It is a great “founder’s” myth. And it is absolutely useless when it comes to understanding our God.

For Yahweh is anything but logical. God’s way of doing things pretty much never makes sense from our perspective. I mean, liberate humans from aimlessness and sin by having Jesus brutally executed, only to be victorious over the forces of death, religious legalism and empire? Did anyone see that coming?

And today’s story is part of that back story, it is woven into that whole Jesus and salvation thing. For Ruth marries Boaz. And the son they have together is the father of Jesse, the father of David, the king. Ruth the Moabite is the great-grandmother of King David, from whom Jesus descends. This story is the back story of the child born in a stable, sleeping in a manger.

Ruth gets woven into the story of Jesus, as do Tamar and Rahab. Who would see that coming?

But God’s ways are not our ways. And they sure as heck are not logical in any human way. You can follow Ariadne’s thread all you want, you’ll still never logically get to Jesus, much less to the foreign woman seducing Boaz on the threshing floor.

It would be tempting at this point to throw our hands up and say “Oh well! I’m never going to understand anyway, so I might as well just walk away.”

But that’s not gonna cut it. Just because God’s creativity. God’s genius, is beyond us, doesn’t mean we should abandon our own role as co-creators, with God, of a realm of love and justice here on earth.

What it does mean is that when we have exhausted Ariadne’s thread, and we are still at a dead-end, still trapped with a bull-headed monster that threatens to do us in, we should not give up hope. For God has proven again and again that a divine path can run through any walls, any rules, that the divine blood of Jesus includes the improbable blood of Ruth.

You are never at a dead-end as long as you have God. Love and life will find a way. Always finds a way. You may not see a path, clouds may blow on the horizon. But there is a way.

Our founder story is one of love and improbability and divine creativity. Our story is one of love. Of improbability. Of divine creativity. May we live it fully. Amen.

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