Sermon: Ride or Die

Sunday, October 15, 2023
Spirit of Hope Lutheran Church, Lincoln, NE
Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost
(narrative lectionary)
watch this service online (readings start around 21:35; sermon starts around 26:45)

Reading: Ruth 1:1-17; 4:13-17

(No kids in the first service, so no children’s sermon in the online recording of worship today)

I think it was in sixth grade that I first realized that kindness is a superpower. That’s the year that my friend Kacy moved to town. The town I grew up in was really, really tiny – only around 500 people. There was only one school in town, and it was K-12 – sort of the 20th/21st century version of the one-room schoolhouse, except it was one building instead of just one room, haha. This meant that I was with the same group of 14-16 other kids from the time we started kindergarten all the way through to our high school graduation. So you can imagine that when anyone new moved to town, it was a pretty big deal. And Kacy was instantly popular – she was tall and cool and super pretty, and all the popular kids immediately wanted to be her friends. 

It might shock you to learn this, but I was decidedly not one of the popular kids – not even close. My social position at school was more along the lines of dangling-at-the-bottom-of-the-food-chain – and for the most part, the popular crowd either bullied me or just plain ignored me; so when Kacy joined our class, she and I didn’t really have a whole lot to do with each other at first.

But partway through the school year, right around the time when Kacy’s shiny newness was starting to wear off, she started having some medical issues. She ended up having to get spinal surgery for scoliosis, and it left her with this very distinctive, stiff kind of way of moving around, as well as some massive scars. Suddenly, Kacy was different, and it was just enough to make her social status plummet practically overnight. 

From where I was sitting, at the bottom of the social food chain, it was a massive shift in the social order. Kacy’s newfound unpopularity gave me some unexpected breathing room – because suddenly, everyone was making fun of someone else, instead of me! Suddenly, I wasn’t the one at the very bottom of the pile. (Or, at least, not the only one!)

And I distinctly remember having this moment of clarity in which I realized that I had a choice. I knew that could choose to take advantage of this disruption in the social order – I could leverage Kacy’s fall from grace to lift myself a couple of links up the food chain. But I also knew all too well how lonely it was at the bottom, and I knew that sooner or later, Kacy would be really grateful to have a friend. I realized that I had great power to change someone else’s life, simply by choosing whether or not to be kind. 

In our reading for today, Ruth is faced with a similar choice – a choice about whether to put her own self-interest first or to choose instead to be kind. She faces a choice that has been forever immortalized in the sage lyrics of The Clash: “Should I stay or should I go?” 

Ruth was a Moabite woman. She belonged to a people who lived in an area across the Jordan River from Israel. But Ruth’s mother-in-law, Naomi, was an Israelite – and, of course, the choice Ruth has to make centers around her.

Naomi had moved to Moab about a decade earlier with her husband Elimelech and their two sons. It was an unusual move for an Israelite family to make. The ancient Israelites were famously not big fans of the Moabites – I’ll let you look up for yourself some of the nasty things written about them in the bible. Suffice it to say, they were traditionally considered to be descendants of Lot. But Naomi and her family didn’t really have a lot of options. The area they lived in, around Bethlehem, had been stricken by famine, so they left in search of food in order to survive. 

They end up settling across the river in Moab. Not long after the move, Naomi’s husband Elimelech suddenly dies. Her two sons marry a couple of local women – Ruth and another woman named Orpah – but then her sons die as well, leaving no children of their own behind them. Naomi is left with no sons, no grandchildren, no husband, and no hope. 

So she decides to go home, back to her own people and her own country. But Naomi knows that, even there, she will be a poor widow; her only option for survival will be to depend on the charity of others. So, as Ruth and Orpah pack up their bags prepare to go with her, Naomi turns to them and tells them to go home – to go back to their own families. She has nothing left to offer them; there is no future for them with Naomi, because Naomi herself has no future. Ruth and Orpah are still young enough to remarry and have husbands and children and families of their own. Naomi thanks them for their kindness and for the faithfulness that they have shown toward her and her sons, but she makes it clear that she expects nothing more from them. 

Ruth and Orpah both protest that, of course, they will go with Naomi wherever she goes – but Naomi continues to insist that they go home. Orpah finally relents and turns back. But Ruth stubbornly refuses to leave Naomi’s side. She eventually tells Naomi, “Look, stop telling me to leave you, because it’s not gonna happen. Where you go, I go. Your people? My people. Your God? My God. Where you live, I will live, and where you die, so will I.” 

It’s an incredible act of kindness. Choosing to leave behind her homeland and her people to go and live with Naomi in Bethlehem totally goes against Ruth’s own self-interest. But Ruth chooses to act out of her love for Naomi. And in the end, we see that it does turn out well for her. With Naomi’s guidance she’s able to take advantage of next-of-kin laws and ends up marrying a very nice relative of Naomi’s named Boaz, and eventually she gives birth to a son.

For Naomi, Ruth’s choice is life-changing. Instead of being left destitute and alone, she has Ruth to keep her company and to care for her. Ruth provides for Naomi – she doesn’t exactly bring home the bacon (I mean, they are Jewish, after all), but she goes out into the fields to pick grain and brings it home to Naomi. Ruth makes this connection with Boaz and then marries into Naomi’s family all over again, cementing this bond that she has with her. And when Ruth gives birth to her firstborn son, Naomi herself gets to become a caregiver for the child. Through Ruth’s actions, Naomi is transformed from a childless widow into a loving grandmother.

Naomi lamented because she couldn’t give Ruth any kind of a future. Instead, Ruth has given Naomi a future that she had given up hope of ever having. And she does so simply by choosing to be kind. 

Now it’s not so surprising to us, but one thing that would have probably surprised the original hearers of this story is that the one person in it who most clearly reflects the love of God also happens to be a Moabite woman. Ruth’s story – as it says in the beginning of the book – is set in the era of the judges. This was a period of time that came just after the end of the Babylonian exile. Israelites who had been deported to Babylon were finally allowed to return to their homeland. But it had been seventy years – much had changed. 

One of the major changes was that, since the people of Israel had been so scattered by the Babylonians, it had become increasingly common for them to marry outside of their own people. This became a concern as they came back to their homeland and tried to re-establish some sort of cohesive national identity. Prophets even went so far as to denounce the marrying of foreigners and actively tried to kick them out of their community in the name of nationalism.

It’s a division that’s poignant to think about in light of the conflict happening now in the territory of Israel and Palestine – or even in light of the conflict happening now on Capitol Hill. The love of God reflected in the story of Ruth’s kindness pushes back against this human instinct we have to draw boundaries between Us and Them. God’s love contradicts our human instinct to put our own self-interest first, our instinct to push someone else down in hopes of clawing our way a few more links up the food chain. 

And I realize it sounds almost silly – in the face of complex, deep-seated global conflict – to talk about something as simple as being kind. But we see in Ruth’s story that kindness truly is a superpower. Her one choice to be kind ends up transforming the lives of multiple people, including her own. Even in my story with Kacy, she and I both ended up with a friend when we needed one most – and some 27 years later, we’re still friends. In fact, I literally wrote a good chunk of this sermon yesterday at her wedding reception! Almost thirty years of friendship is not at all a bad return on investment for that one choice to be kind when I could have chosen to be a jerk.

Kindness is powerful. And it’s powerful because kindness is one of the clearest, purest reflections of the power of God – which is love. God chooses to love us, to be kind to us. God chooses to commit to us with even more stubbornness than Ruth with Naomi – even though there’s probably even less in it for God than there was for Ruth with Naomi. But for us, God’s choice to love us and to commit to us is everything. God’s love not only transforms us and gives us life; it also gives us this superpower of kindness. It gives us this power to go and do likewise. It gives us power to join in God’s work of transforming the world – one mother-in-law at a time.