Ruth 3:1-5; 4:13-17
Six centuries ago, if you attended a church service in Europe, the rites were in a language you did not understand. Much of it occurred with the officiant’s back to you. And there were no pews, which explains the short sermons.
Don’t get any ideas.
If you knew the Bible at all, it was from a sort of street religion of mystery plays and festivals.
Then, everything changed. First came Johannes Gutenberg and the printing press. Not that the average serf was out there buying a Bible, but the texts were more widely available and no longer strictly under church control.
Then came Erasmus. If Martin Luther and Huldrych Zwingli were the parents of the Reformation, Erasmus was the grandparent, a Catholic priest and Dutch humanist who, among other things, encouraged better translations of scripture. Working from the oldest manuscripts in the original languages, he laid the foundation for what is today called the “textus receptus,” the received text, though even that foundational work notes the constant disagreement between the oldest biblical manuscripts. There is no such thing as “the Bible,” just Bibles, plural.
Spin this out a bit, and it did spin out quite a bit, and you end up with a paradox at the heart of the Protestant faith. On the one hand, we want and claim direct access to scripture, not scripture mediated through popes and priests.
The most extreme expression of this is the idea that any person should be able to open the Bible as translated into their own language and interpret it properly.
At the other pole of the paradox, you have the idea that scripture is worthy of our study, and that it does require study. And though some lay people buy commentaries and study the text on their own, it often falls on what my alma mater calls “learned clergy” to place scripture in context.
Today’s reading from the Book of Ruth offers a little at both edges of this paradox. On the most basic level, the Book of Ruth is the story of widows, often vulnerable in the ancient Near East, and of a fidelity shown across traditional tribal lines. On the other hand, there is a bit of “if you know, you know” going on, because the ancients often used coded language in exactly the same way we do today, so when Ruth uncovers the feet of Boaz… well let’s just say, that’s not a foot.
Though before you panic, when Jesus washes the feet of the disciples, they really are feet.
The Book of Ruth takes place in an ancient, mostly mythic, age, but it is a mythic part of the Jesus story that makes me love the Book of Ruth.
Today, you are considered ethnically a Jew if your mother is a Jew. If you accept essentialized categories of race and ethnicity, this totally makes sense. After all, you always know who the mother is.
On the religious side of Jewish identity, you have the claim that the Jews are God’s chosen people, a claim that carries over into the Christian tradition.
This is a pre-modern belief, a story people told themselves to make sense of their world. It actually became a theological problem for the Jews as first the northern Jewish state and then the southern Jewish state were crushed by invaders. They had to reconstruct their theology when the story didn’t cohere with their reality.
Let me say that again in a way that still applies. When your theology and your reality do not match, you either change your reality or you change your theology.
The idea that Jews are God’s chosen people plays into a dangerous form of Christian nationalism that is itself deeply antisemitic.
I say this was a pre-modern idea because the notion of a chosen people depends on understanding God as essentially a giant human in the sky, and understanding that essentially human God as choosing only one family out of all the human families in the world for special blessing.
That God would not be worthy of my worship. And given the historic persecution of the Jews, some Jews might wish to be a little less chosen.
In reality, national and ethnic identity and race are all human constructs with no basis in biology. In fact, the construction of Jewish identity probably goes something like this: A group of slaves in Egypt escapes. There is no way of knowing if they originally came from Canaan or not, but the actual escape seems historically probable. The group was relatively small, not the two million or so recorded in the Book of Exodus.
The scholar Richard Elliott Friedman suggests this was the group that would come to identify themselves as the Levites.
Scripture tells us that the two million escapees replaced existing inhabitants in Canaan through a campaign of ethnic cleansing and divinely sanctioned genocide, much like what is happening today in the same place. Archeology tells us this did not actually happen. There is no widespread layer of destruction in the right time frame.
Instead, Friedman argues that the Exodus people brought new ideas to Canaan, and eventually created a monotheistic overlay to the existing Canaanite religion and identity. They essentially constructed a people from the ingredients at hand.
You can see this religion building in scripture when Yahweh presides over a council of the gods, when God is given Canaanite names like El, which then works its way into Hebrew naming conventions we have inherited, for every Michael and Rachel and Samuel is named for a particular relationship with God under the name “El.”
The claim that this is a singular people who move from Ur in modern Iraq to Canaan, today’s Palestine, to Egypt, where they end up enslaved, then back to Canaan, where they wipe out the locals is a lie of racial purity. The text undermines it in a few places, but it still dominates Judeo-Christian belief to this day.
The ancients even construct claims that exclude the Samaritans, Yahweh worshippers from the destroyed northern kingdom, then excludes the poor who were left in the land during the Babylonian Captivity, when the southern kingdom was destroyed.
The authors of the two mostly different Nativity Narratives for Jesus want to confirm the claim that Jesus is born from this line that goes back through Abraham, and more importantly, that Jesus is from the House of David, for the national religion included a Davidic king on the throne.
The genealogies in Matthew and Luke vary slightly. Matthew includes the prostitute Rahab of Jericho, not a Jew. Both Matthew and Luke include Boaz and Ruth. And Ruth is not a Jew.
So much for matrilineal descent.
If we accept the text at face value, Jesus is not an ethnically pure product of God’s chosen people. His ancestors include a foreign prostitute and a foreign widow. And oh, by the way, these two women pre-date King David. In fact, according to the Gospel Attributed to Matthew and the Book of Ruth, Ruth is David’s great-grandmother. Probably myth, but that’s not the point. Even David, the prototype for the Jewish king, is not of purely Abrahamic stock. Never mind all the raping and murdering.
We can choose to read the Book of Ruth as a stand alone text, though no text in scripture ever truly stands alone, and the folks who don’t at least use a Study Bible won’t realize that that is not a foot. But when we read the whole text, Ruth in conversation with Matthew, we see an unfolding, evolving understanding of the human encounter with mystery and all that is holy.
And if we have a book that chronicles a thousand years of changing belief, what makes us think it has not changed in the last two thousand? Some folks seem to worship a vampire god, evil, draining, and most certainly dead.
The God who subverts all of our stories, that won’t be contained in an ancient text, that doesn’t favor one family out of all the homo sapiens families, in fact doesn’t favor homo sapiens out of all the amazing species on this planet, animals that think and have feelings, that God who is bigger than our smallness, that is a God worth worshiping.
This morning, I echo the words of Joshua. If you are unwilling to serve a living God, a changing God, for love always means change, if you are unwilling to serve a God who is bigger than a book and bigger than a religion, then choose what god you will serve, whether it is the god of a Constitution designed to perpetuate racism or it is the god of an economic system designed to exploit people and the planet and anchored in fear and greed, or it is the god of sameness who is going to replace this amazing and diverse creation with some human-centered heavenly kingdom that sounds more like hell to me. You choose.
But for me and my house, which I guess means me and the dog, we will serve God, the God of Jacob and of jazz and jackalopes and Jack Black, of Siddhartha and Mother Jones and Maya Angelou and Milkbone, because there has to be something in there for Oscar. Me and my house, we will serve the Lord.
May you choose life, for life has chosen you. Amen.