"Women Who Shook The World: Part Two" 
Ruth: Jesus' pagan ancestor.
Sermon Preached by
The Reverend Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, December 12, 2004
Text: Ruth 4:13-22
It was the week before Christmas in 1969, and my father and I were walking through the lobby of one of the most famous hotels in Bermuda: the Hamilton Princess. We were on our way to my school's Christmas concert. As we were going through the lobby, a great big man in a big suit came out of the auditorium. My father said, “I can't believe it! Look! “ I looked at him and had no idea why my father was getting so excited, but he was.
Now, you're all assuming, of course, that it was Santa Claus, but it wasn't. It was a tall man with the most immense shoulders that I have ever seen. In fact he looked, from a distance, as if he might not fit through the entranceway of the auditorium. His suit was white and luminescent, he had a black silk shirt on and he had a stately appearance. My father immediately grabbed hold of me and said, “Now then, I want you to go over to that man and get his autograph. Here,” and he handed me a piece of paper and a pen.
Well, I had no idea who this man was, but seeing as my father was so excited I ran over to him. I looked up at him, and he was immense. I said, “Excuse me, sir, my father would like your autograph.”
The man looked at me and smiled and said, “Your father wants my autograph, does he?”
“Yes, sir, really.”
“All right, young man” he said, and rubbed the top of my head and patted me on my chubby cheek. He took the piece of paper and pen, signed his autograph and handed it to me. My father waited in the corner, looking absolutely delighted and ecstatic. I tried to read the name on the paper, and couldn't decipher the handwriting, but I knew that this must be someone important. Seeing my puzzlement, this tall, muscular young man, leaned down towards me and said, “By the way, my name is Muhammad Ali and I want to give a message to your father.”
I said, “Yes, by all means.”
He said, “Tell him I'm still the greatest, okay?”
I ran back to my father with no idea who Muhammad Ali was at all and said, “Father, Muhammad has got a very nice message for you: He's still the greatest.”
My father told me, “This is the most famous boxer in the whole world.” In 1969, he was one of the biggest names on the whole of the globe. For the next six months I told everybody I met. “By the way, I talked to Muhammad Ali. Muhammad and I had a conversation. My good friend Muhammad Ali and I.” I was insufferable for months, until finally one of my friends took me to one side and told me how annoying I was becoming.
For me, meeting the great Muhammad Ali was one of the highlights of my life up to that point. And isn't it interesting that whenever we meet superstars or great figures of the world and they deign to talk to us, it really does make us feel important. One of the reasons that we like to name drop or be around stars is that somehow, vicariously, we become more important. It gives us a great boost.
And just to show that the shine of that moment has not worn off, I showed my colleagues Jean, Bill and Rick his autograph this morning, just so they could corroborate my story. Powerful and important people are significant, and sometimes these vicarious connections that we make with them can have great meaning in our lives and can change the way that we look at the world. John Guare's play, Six Degrees of Separation, was based on the philosophy of a sociologist named Stanley Millgram, who observed that every human being in this world is linked to every other one by a chain of acquaintances no more than six names long. In other words, if we trace our acquaintances, we in fact have some connection with everybody on the planet. Now, I don't know whether this is true and manifests itself in the same way for everyone. But even if there is a modicum of truth to this, then we are only six degrees separated from the Aga Khan, for example, and likewise from a poor, homeless person in the city of Baltimore. We are connected with one another and with the world.
Connections are important. When you look at the Scriptures, you can see a whole new realm of connectivity introduced. Not just by knowing a superstar, not by being separated by six degrees from anyone else on earth, but through the tracing of genealogies, seeing where people have come from, what their roots are and how connected we are to the past.
Now, this series that I'm doing on women who shook the world arises from the genealogy that we find at the beginning of the Book of Matthew, the book of genealogy of Jesus. Those introductory phrases might seem to be there for some sort of pedantic reason, but they're not. The women mentioned in the genealogy of Jesus are vitally important for what they reveal in his background, not only a continuity through to the line of David and back to Abraham, but also a great diversity.
I look, for example, at my own genealogy. A few years ago my uncle decided to trace our family tree back as far as he could. The problem was it became a very depressing exercise, for the further back he went the more of our ancestors were found to have expired in ditches in Scotland after having consumed too much alcohol! For example, there was the famous great, great, great, great grandfather George, who outside of Kirkaldy passed away in a very wet and cold manner. I'm, pleased to say, however, that this was mitigated by the fact that one of his descendents eventually became the moderator of the Church of Scotland. So, there is hope in every genealogy, no matter how far back you might go. Great-uncle Neville was, thank God, a good man.
When we trace our genealogies we find that there is a mixture of both blessing and curse, of good and of bad. From Matthew's list of Jesus' genealogy, we looked at Rahab last week, and this week, we have another amazing woman: Ruth. She was a Gentile and, in the lineage of Jesus, she stood out as a deviation from the norm. But she was there for a reason. Ruth was a woman who shook the world.
What is it about Ruth? Why is she named in the genealogy of Jesus? What does she mean for you and I as we gather here for Christmas? The first thing we notice about Ruth is that she was transformed from a pagan into a believer. The story of Ruth, and I do commend it to you, begins with a man named Elimelech, who marries a woman named Naomi and has two sons. A famine comes upon the land of Israel and they move to Moab, a neighbouring country. In Moab, unfortunately, Elimelech dies and Naomi's two sons marry two Moabite women, but a few years later the two sons die. Naomi, the widow of Elimelech is left with her two daughters-in-law. Then they hear that good harvests have returned to Israel, and a big decision has to be made, Naomi wants to go back to her homeland, but she looks at these two Moabite women who have never left home and she gives them the option to return with her to her native land. And in one of the most courageous decisions in the whole of the Bible, one daughter-in-law Ruth, decides, to leave her homeland of Moab and go with Naomi to Bethlehem.
Once they get there, the story goes that Ruth meets a man named Boaz, who was related to her late husband and to Elimelech. Boaz takes Ruth in and eventually marries her and together they have a child, whose grandson, as we shall see, goes on to do great things. What makes this story so profound is that Ruth is a Moabite, a member of a heinous, pagan ethnic group. In fact, they were descended, according to biblical tradition, from the illegitimate child, born of incest, of Lot. They created their own God, called Kemosh, to which they sacrificed children. They practised sexual immorality and impurity. They turned their backs on the laws of God. And so, the Moabites, as we see numerous times in the Bible (particularly in the Book of Ezekiel), were condemned almost to damnation for their paganism.
Ruth, this Moabite, is now living in Israel, in Bethlehem with Boaz and her mother-in-law Naomi. What hope is there for her? What right does she have, then, to live in the land of the people of the covenant? What status should this woman have? We are told in the Book of Ruth that it was Ruth's faith and love that transformed her from a pagan Moabite into a believer.
In one of the most beautiful parts in the whole of Scripture, Naomi urges Ruth to stay in Moab, and, born out of love and compassion, this is what Ruth says:
Don't urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the Lord deal with me, be it ever so severely, if anything but death separates you and me.
What a statement! What an act of love! A foreigner who is willing to emigrate to the land of no less than her mother-in-law! But to declare, “Your God will be my God!” Ruth was a person who by virtue of her faith turned her back on her pagan roots and followed Naomi to the land of Yahweh, the land of God.
But there is something even deeper in this story, something that carries with it an even greater meaning, and that is that this woman was not only faithful, she also became foundational for the life and the working of God's saving acts in history.
There's a lovely moment in the Disney movie Mulan where the Emperor praises Mulan to Captain Shang: “For the flower that blooms in adversity is the most rare and beautiful of all” Ruth experienced adversity. She experienced the death of her father-in-law. She experienced the death of her husband. She experienced this pull to leave her homeland and go to a new land. She was a flower that bloomed in adversity. Here was a woman who took the difficult things in her life as a challenge to be obedient to God. All of this was born out of love for her mother-in law.
Now, I know that mothers-in-law get a very bad rap, and I don't know why. I think of all the jokes I've heard about mothers-in-law. For example, one man says, “I got a bottle of brandy for my mother-in-law.”
And the other guy says, “That's a good trade.”
Or, what is apprehension, but when you see your mother-in-law driving over a cliff in your brand-new Ferrari. Somehow, mothers-in-law are the butt of so many jokes. How unfair it is, especially when you look at Naomi. She was a mother-in-law who, in the midst of sorrow and famine and death, must have been a great example to Ruth. I think Ruth became a believer because of Naomi's influence. Naomi must have been a person of great faith, courage and strength, and that is why Ruth said, “Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay… May the Lord deal with me, be it ever so severely, if anything but death separates you and me. Your God will be my God.”
In Naomi, Ruth must have seen a profound sense of the spirit of the God of Israel, and it was that winsome, wonderful love that must have won Ruth over. But Ruth responded not only by following Naomi to Israel, but also by marrying Boaz. And here is where the story gets really intriguing, for Boaz and Ruth had a son named Obed. Obed then had a son, and his name was Jesse. And Jesse fathered eight sons, one of which was David - King David. Ruth, a Moabite from a pagan background, had been the means, the instrument, for the line of Abraham to continue to David.
Christians look back on this lineage and see the connection from David to Jesus. Is it any wonder, then, that Matthew would put Ruth in the genealogy, in the lineage of Jesus, when you look at what Jesus was trying to do? Jesus, as you can tell from his ministry, was trying to extend the covenant to the Gentile world.
You see this in the story of the good Samaritan. You see it in the arguments he had in the temple. Jesus was trying to extend the love and the grace of the covenant of God to the whole world. You see this picked up by the apostle Paul, who on four different occasions said that in this Christ there is neither Jew nor Gentile, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female.
In other words, the New Testament is the extension of the covenant of God to the whole world - to you and to me. And Ruth's name stands in the genealogy of Jesus as a symbol of what God's redemptive history and purpose does. It brings all of humanity into the fold.
Now, my friends, we are living in a time when this very sense of the grace and the love that we find in the story of Ruth is so easily forgotten and dismissed. We are living in a time of our emerging paganism that, like the Moabites, turns its back on the commandments of God and says, “We will march to our own drum. We will make our own gods. We will do our own thing and we will treat God and His commandments with ennui or sometimes even with disdain.”
When we turn our backs on the will and the Word of God, we lose the very vision that those who included Ruth in the Scripture held dear: that the covenant is an open covenant for the world - a covenant that embraces the world - a covenant that is born out of obedience and love to God in Jesus Christ.
There's a true story about a man who owned a department store in New York City. Just before Christmas, he decided to order some Baby Jesus dolls. He put them in a crib and surrounded them with straw and some nice fuzzy stuff. The ads said, “Come and buy the baby Jesus. You can squeeze him and hug him and he won't leak, crack or break. You can have your own baby Jesus for yourself.”
The problem was that nobody bought these little cuddly Jesus dolls. And so, the week before Christmas, the store owner was left with hundreds of squeezable, huggable, non-leaking baby Jesus dolls. So, he put a sign up in the store that simply read, “Jesus Christ, 50 per cent off. Come and get him while you can.”
Sometimes we trivialize in a deeper way. We trivialize our faith by treating it as just an addendum to everything else that we do. As secondary. As reasonably unimportant. We placate it with our words, but we do not adhere to it with our lives.
The story of Ruth is the story of a woman who saw in the witness of Naomi a love for God, a love for family and a love for the world, and from that love said:
Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the Lord deal with me, be it ever so severely, if anything but death separates you and me.
Ruth was a woman who shook the world. Ruth is a woman who still shakes the world because Jesus came from Ruth. May he come to you this Christmas and may the love and the grace that Ruth had be born in us through Christ. Amen.
This is a verbatim transcription of the original sermon.