This Sunday we begin our four week series on the Book of Ruth, wedged into the Hebrew Scriptures between the chaos of Judges and the slowly evolving order and drama of the Books of Samuel. The Book of Ruth is beloved, some verses frequently used in wedding service. Yet, despite its popularity, few notice the many ways in which it is subversive. In fact, we could as easily consider this little story as the start of a series called “Why Jesus is like jazz…†acknowledging that uniquely American form with its mash-up of African and European musical traditions. Or maybe we could call the series “Bubble and Squeak,†with a nod to our English friends… But I’m way ahead of myself…
To get Ruth, we must once again situate ourselves in the broad context of Ancient Near Eastern history. The Hebrew people emerged in the land of Canaan, modern Palestine. The region was dominated by the cultures of two river valleys, with the Hebrews located approximately midway on a northeast to southwest axis running from the Tigris-Euphrates and the Nile. Canaan was difficult land, defensible because of the hills, but prone to drought. In fact, drought plays a major role in the biblical story.
The Hebrews would, in the texts that follow Ruth, form a centralized government, and briefly establish a kingdom. They would face minor pressure from a maritime tribe that would settle on the coast, the Philistines, but the real threats would come from those two great river valleys. The kingdom would split, collapse, the Hebrews would be subject to ethnic cleansing, mass deportation. And so they did what oppressed groups have always done. They drew inward, emphasizing the ways in which they were different from their oppressors, constructing themselves as the other. They would do a good job of it, for this sense of “otherness†has survived for more than 25 centuries. They would create racial purity laws, would create propaganda in which they claimed to have always been pure, always descended from those great progenitors, Abraham and Sarah. They would claim to have carried out their own ethnic cleansing when they claimed the land, sometime after fleeing slavery in Egypt, a story that like this one, hinges on a drought. Those returning from the Babylonian Exile would condemn intermarriage, creating stories to show that such behavior brought false religions into the people and so, God’s wrath. The the Hasmonean rebellion in the centuries just before Jesus, they would claim that they could resist the influences of other cultures, especially the Hellenism that spread throughout the eastern Mediterranean.
And it was all, every bit of it, a lie.
We know it is a lie not just from archeology, though we know it from that. We know it is a lie not just from the histories of the surrounding cultures, though we know it from those. It is a lie because they didn’t even manage to purge their own texts from stories of intermarriage and assimilation, of economically driven immigrants. And the Book of Ruth is exactly a tale of immigration and intermarriage.
Elimelech and Naomi, along with their two sons, desperate and hungry, have crossed the border into another country. Where, apparently, they were treated well enough, for the two sons would eventually marry local girls. While they are from the tribe of Benjamin, their wives were Moabites. But then all three men died, a stunning blow in that time for this left the women vulnerable. And Naomi decided to return to her own people in Bethlehem, for there was a developing tradition in the Hebrew culture requiring care of the vulnerable. And she must have been the best mother-in-law ever, because these Moabite daughters-in-law, Orpah and Naomi, insist on going with her. And as we see in today’s text, while Orpah is eventually persuaded to turn back, Naomi is exceptionally hard-headed, and find herself the Moabite widow of a Benjamite, a foreigner, living in Bethlehem with a sad old woman.
Though this is not, of course, where the story will end.
And during the coming weeks we will ear how human kindness meets the flow of the divine, how we are here because Ruth was there, how the kindness of a man who welcomed the immigrant made the difference, became a pivotal moment in God’s working out our salvation.
And none of it could have happened today. Elimelech and Naomi may have felt against the wall when they fled the famine and found themselves in a foreign land. Naomi may have again felt against the wall when she traveled back to Bethlehem, having suffered the worst of fates, husband and children dead. But today, they would find themselves literally against the wall.
For there is a wall running through the West Bank. There is a wall that hems in Gaza, a tiny Palestinian ghetto, brutal, under the threat of constant violence. We can easily compare what Palestinians endure to what Jews endured in the Warsaw ghetto. The whole situation is complicated. By the time you factor in our collective guilt over the Holocaust, the history of Islamic oppression of religious minorities, the continued armed resistance by Palestinians to the ongoing expropriation of their land, the reality that Israel is an apartheid state. I do not have solutions. It seems no one does. But like a growing number of international civil and religious thinkers, I have come to believe that a two-state solution will never work. I have come to believe that God is against the wall, is against walls, both literal walls and the insane walls of ethnicity and racial division. So echoing the words of the last Cold War president, Mr. Netanyahu, tear down that wall!
Not that we have much room to judge. We have been great at constructing our own walls, creating myths of racial purity. Just as intermarriage was the norm until it wasn’t and new myths were created, so intermarriage or at least pro-creating were a norm in the colonies and the early United States until they weren’t and new myths were created, including the infamous “one drop rule,†that said if you had one drop of black blood, you were black, as if it were contagious.
Never mind that race is a human construction having no basis at all in biology.
And today, like the Soviets, like the Israeli’s, we are people behind a wall, terrified that we might be contaminated. And who are these invaders, threatening our way of life? They are children, terrified of the violence in their home countries. And Americans wave the flag, sing God Bless America, as if God could ever bless a nation that would behave so despicably. Jesus has particularly harsh words for those who would turn away a child.
And so, I am against the wall. Against the wall that has fallen. Against the walls that are being constructed. Against the wall in Bethlehem and the wall in so many hearts that defines the other, that walls out love and creativity and the mash-up and jazz that is what we are, that is this amazing, diverse dynamic people that are called to serve a living God. The Jews that returned from Babylon were not racially pure, Jesus was not racially pure, we cross into Moab and come home again. To be alive, we must be against walls. We must be prepared to smash them. In our hearts. And in our world. Amen.