2024.11.10 | Finding Home
“Finding Home”
Ruth 3:1-5
Preached by
Rev. Dr. Marvin Lance Wiser
Eden United Church of Christ
Hayward, CA
10 November 2024
Well, well. Sounds like we’re overhearing a plot for some subversive action. Before we get to plotting, let’s get to praying shall we?
Señor, que las palabras de mi boca y la meditación de todos nuestros corazones sean agradables a tu vista, oh Señor, nuestra Roca y Redentor. Lord, may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be pleasing in Your sight, O Lord, our Rock and Redeemer. Amen.
Today, I’m going to talk a bit about home. What is home to you? Oftentimes home is defined narrowly as the place where one lives permanently, with a nuclear family perhaps. However, humans like most species have a tendency to migrate, so a wider definition is also often employed relating to the space and place where one lives, relates, and interacts with others most often. Home can be reliable, predictable, and it can also be just the opposite. One can have a long-held perception and experience of their home, and wake up one morning to that perception shattered. War, famine, familial violence, ruling political parties, genocides, like the ongoing one in Gaza, can all cause this.
Hoy voy a hablar del hogar. El hogar puede ser confiable, predecible y también puede ser todo lo contrario. Uno puede tener una percepción y una experiencia de su hogar durante mucho tiempo y despertarse una mañana con esa percepción destrozada. La guerra, la hambruna, la violencia familiar, los partidos políticos, los genocidios, como el que está ocurriendo en Gaza, pueden ser causas de esto. Eso es lo que pasó en el libro de Rut, una hambruna que causó muchas familias a migrar desde Judá a Moab.
The context of our reading this morning has famine disrupting home, and so forces a family from the “House of Bread” or Bethlehem to cross the border into neighboring Moab. There two Judahite men, Machlon and Chilion, intermarry with Moabite women, and as their names suggest, “Spent” and “Impotent” shrivel out of the narrative, dying without producing heirs, particularly sons. With no land, and no husbands, and no sons, Ruth and No’omi are presented as dislocated characters forced into perpetual motion, looking for a home together, despite being from different ethnic groups, one Judahite, No’omi; and the other Moabite, Ruth. The author uses the word √שׁוב, to turn, a dozen times, leaving the reader spinning in the same uncertainty as the characters, not to mention a lot of gender-bending with pronoun usage.
In chapter 3:1, we read what No’omi desires for Ruth. The version that we heard this morning reads, “security.” Other translations of the term מָנוֹחַ, is “rest,” or “home.” This is an interesting term used throughout Ruth, indicating a place of quiet, a resting place. It is used for the final resting place of the ark of the covenant. It carries with it a sense of permanence after a season of impermanence, a landedness after landlessness. This expressed hope for rest and security, a landed home, paints a picture for the reader of the migrant women having been and still being in a state of perpetual motion, constantly moving from place to place for their sustenance, without a place of rest, a place of meaningful relationships to truly call home. And it’s not just hope expressed, what we hear read, is a plan concocted to move beyond their state of landless migrant widows.
Rut con su suegra perdieron a sus esposos y quedaron como viudas migrantes, sin hogar. Regresaron a Belén y tuvieron que buscar hogar por medio de Booz. Pero Rut era Moabita, y pos Booz era Judeo. Según las leyes, no deberían haberse casado. De hecho las autoridades judías en aquellos tiempos quisieron deportar cualquier persona que no era un cierto tipo de judeo que acaba de regresar de babilonia, incluso si esto separaría familias. Pero Rut la Moabita y Booz el judeo resistieron y crearon un hogar donde Rut y su suegra pudieron descansar y estar en paz, no importó su etnia y lo que es más, Belén la aceptó. Y por medio de su unión nació el abuelo del Rey Davíd. Entonces, el libro de Rut nos hace la pregunta, ¿cómo pudieron querer deportar a sus propios antepasados? Hasta los propios abuelos de la gente que crearon las políticas xenófobas eran foreños. Nos hace pensar en el día de hoy, ¿verdad?
If we read one more verse after our reading this morning, we know that Ruth in fact did go down to the threshing floor and did just as her mother-in-law had instructed her. After she had bathed and perfumed, she went to the threshing floor in search of her gōʾēl, “redeemer.” It is important to note that Ruth 3:14 indicates that it was unbecoming for a woman to visit the space at night. So, Ruth is here acting covertly. After Boaz had eaten and had his fill, he drifted off into a slumber at the far end of a grain heap, presumably out of sight. Then Ruth crept up and gently uncovered his genitals. Yes, the plural word for “feet” is a well-known euphemism in the Hebrew Bible for a plural of another sort. But the word that’s even more important here in my opinion, is the word used for “to uncover.”
The word is גלה “Golah.” And just so happens to be the term used for the community of Jewish Exiles to Babylon, as their shame was uncovered in their own deportation, and who would later go on to return to Judah under the Persian empire. The Golah community are represented in the writings of Ezra and Nehemiah, and promulgated Make Judah Great Again campaigns that envisioned one language, one ethnic group, and mass deportations. This vision of making Judah great again of course excluded Moabites, and any “undocumented” who did not have papers. And yes, we actually read them checking family papers in the book of Ezra, and they also wanted to know whose feet were mingling with whose. What’s more, in Ruth 2, Ruth is described as a נֵ ָכר, or a “foreigner,” the same word used by Ezra for the people he wants to deport. That immigrants are bringing “bad genes” to the country is an old and dangerous trope indeed.
So, why are we reading about a Moabite uncovering a Judahite’s uhm. . . feet? Well, this subversive act constitutes a “forbidden” relation, at least in the eyes of the Golah Jewish community, and serves as a reminder that even they themselves are not as “pure blood” as they’d like to think. For at the end of the book of Ruth, it is further uncovered that Ruth and Boaz’s mingling of feet brings forth a mestizo, Obed, whose name means worshiper. Funny, as Ezra and Nehemiah preached that no Moabite would be allowed into the assembly of God to worship. Isaiah on the other hand preached to allow foreigners into the faith community. Oh, and yeah by the way, as the genealogy is told, this mingling of feet also produced none other than King David himself.
And so Boaz and Ruth find one another, and in their interracial and mixed migratory status marriage that is an affront to Golah values, even No’omi finds rest, security, a home. What’s more, the community of Bethlehem, unlike the Golah community, opens its arms to Ruth, and affirm that she is a א ֶשׁת־ ַחיִל or courageous woman. The phrase that’s often erroneously translated as a “worthy wife” in Proverbs 31:10. So then, the obvious question that the author of Ruth elicits from us is, “Why then should we be deporting courageous women, when they are more precious than jewels” as Proverbs tells us? Boaz, like the males at the beginning of narrative, Spent and Impotent, is worthy of his name, “Strength.” That’s some real masculinity for us, not toxic, but partnering in the creation of מָנוֹחַ, security, rest, home, belonging.
On the threshing floor, in a daring act of resistance, Ruth is the one who produces this space of sustenance, rest, and security for both her and her mother-in-law, where multiple ethnic formulations can co-exist. The book of Ruth disrupts ethnicity for those who would have it be linear, homogenous, and strictly demarcated. Simply put, when a group encounters difference, either boundaries shift or people are deported. Let’s be like Ruth and Boaz and co-create מָנוֹחַ out of chaos, spaces of rest, security, home, belonging.
Spaces like the one created right here Friday night. For our bilingual “Be Part Through Art” event where about 65 community members gathered in Oliver Hall, for sharing food, fun, art, music, and other talents. Grief and sadness was palatable, and yet so were smiles, laughter, and joy.
Podemos ser como Rut y Booz y crear espacios de descanso y pertenencia, como el que se creó aquí mismo el viernes por la noche. Para nuestro evento bilingüe “ConecArte” en el que unos 65 miembros de la comunidad se reunieron en Oliver Hall para compartir comida, diversión, arte, música y otros talentos. El dolor y la tristeza por las elecciones eran palpables, pero también lo eran las sonrisas, la risa y la alegría.
It will be these spaces of מָנוֹחַ, that I choose to translate as “belonging,” that will sustain our movements of resistance in the years to come. Interspersing joy and hope along the way, a remedy to both othering and despair. Let us not neglect these spaces that for many will become home. We’ll be having more of them, so be on the lookout.
I’m not going to sugar-coat it, in a short time a criminal, rapist, and fascist will assume the office of the presidency, and we know that these next four years, with less checks and balances, will be worse than his first four years. And yet this is not a first, nor even the worst. We can learn from our collective stories of the past, and drink deeply at the well that is our collective fount of wisdom. The Bible is replete with stories of resistance, of abominations that cause desolation, and you know what’s more? The Bible is bursting at the seams with stories of creating community, building coalitions, working together for common good, in spite of who is the latest to claim the imperial title Divi Filius “Son of God,” which we’ll reject anyway for the true Prince of Peace.
It is time to listen to the voices that have been steeped in oppression. In a heart-wrenching and gut-checking love letter to his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates in Between the World and Me (2015) writes as if to us today, “I did not tell you that it would be okay, because I never believed it would be okay. What I told you is what your grandparents tried to tell me: that this is your country, that this is your world, that this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it.”
And for the spaces of מָנוֹחַ to be truly spaces of belonging, some of us may do well to follow the lead of other leaders. For example, in this time, to not rush lament. As Dr. Yolanda Pierce reminds us in her “Litany for Those not Ready for Healing,” “Let us not rush to the language of healing, before understanding the fullness of the injury and the depth of the wound.” Before finding home, we may have to sit in some . . . ashes. We will grieve together.
And friends, the church was founded in and exists for times like these. We are called for such a time as this! So, may we not fall prey to the divisive mechanisms of othering, and may we not tolerate it either. May we be distinctly Christian and distinctly not Christian nationalists. Escúchanos cuando te decimos que perteneces a este lugar. Te invito a que te dirijas a tu vecino y le digas: “tú perteneces aquí”. Hear us when we tell you that you belong here. I invite you to turn to your neighbor in the pew and say, “you belong here.”
No voy a decir mentiras, en poco tiempo asumirá la presidencia un criminal, violador y fascista, y sabemos que estos próximos cuatro años, con menos controles y contrapesos, serán peores que sus primeros cuatro años. Amigas y amigos y amigues, la iglesia fue fundada y existe para tiempos como estos. ¡Estamos llamados para un tiempo como este! Y que así el amor radical nos guíe a formar un hogar inclusivo, y que la justicia de Dios prevalezca.
I’m not going to lie, Wednesday morning, I felt both saddened and dismayed, angered and ashamed, but not surprised, and then I remembered that this election is neither the end nor the beginning of anything. It is but a part of a journey together, arduous it may be. And in our response, as we continue to create home for one another, these spaces of belonging and collective and at times subversive power, may we remember what Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. cautioned: “Power without love is reckless and abusive, and that love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love.” And so may radical love guide us home, and may God’s justice ultimately prevail. Amen.