Leadership in the Book of Ruth
Today is Thanksgiving Sunday, a Sunday where we give thanks to God for the many blessings in life, where we celebrate the harvest and bounty of the earth, and where we reflect on the gift of family and friends and good food. That is our perfect offering for today, right? The problem is, our world and our lives are not so perfect and rosy, and Thanksgiving inevitably highlights the inequalities, struggles, chaos and complexity of our world. Yes, we can point to blessings and good things in our lives, but we are also so aware of the challenges of our lives and our world. Last Sunday we had a service of Lament and gathering our tears as we marked the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation in Canada and heard from Kandace about her experience on the Trail of Death, and as we named so many of the other Laments in our world right now – Gaza and Israel, the invasion of Lebanon and the expansion of tension in the Middle East, Ukraine and Russia. We could also name so many other places of violence in our world – Myanmar, Sudan, Somalia, Syria, Mali, Afghanistan, violence in our own country and the list goes on. I had an email from Laura Carr-Pries who named the struggles right now in Zambia, where she is working with MCC. We could also name the effects of climate change and the devastation it wreaks on crops and livelihoods – there are not always wonderful harvests or we look at the natural disasters caused – North Carolina and now the devastation this week in Florida with Hurricane MIlton. When we look closer to home, we see the inequalities of our society, the growing problem of affordability and homelessness, tent encampments in our cities, addictions and drug overdose deaths, even as consumption sites are being closed. Thanksgiving is a family time, and that can be good. Yet, if we are honest, we know that every family has its issues, its conflicts, its funny or strange or damaging family dynamics and disfunctions. Our families are not perfect. Many people carry trauma of various kinds, or unspoken or unresolved issues. Marriages can struggle, siblings can argue, and one can feel lonely or unheard even in the midst of family. We are also aware of loss at this time. For me it is my Father’s death in March. My whole Harder family has been gathering this Thanksgiving weekend at Hidden Acres Camp, even as this was originally booked as the time to celebrate my parent’s 60th wedding anniversary that would have been in August. We hold all these things on this day of Thanksgiving. Knowing how to celebrate and mark Thanksgiving is not such an easy straightforward thing to do.
The other week, Rachel and I attended a folk music concert by the Newfoundland trio called ‘The Once.’ They were great – lots of close harmonies. They mostly sing original pieces, but they did sing a couple of cover songs from the late Leonard Cohen, one of them being the 1992 song ‘Anthem’ from his album ‘The Future.’ The chorus literally struck a chord with me and has rattled around my brain and imagination even since. The song begins with all this imagery, so typical of Cohen, a mix of sacred and profane:
The birds they sang. At the break of day. Start again I heard them say. Don’t’ dwell on what has passed away or what is yet to be. Ah, the wars they will be fought again. The holy dove, she will be caught again. Bought and sold, and bought again. The dove is never free…. And then we get the repeated chorus:
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.
What a powerful statement. Forget your perfect offering, your perfect life, your perfect world, your perfect systems. There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in. It took Leonard Cohen 10 years to write this song, and his historical context and reference points for him were World War II, Hiroshima, the Tiananmen Square massacre, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall. Maybe this gives a little insight for us as we think about how to approach Thanksgiving in the midst of our troubled world right now. In one of his rare interviews, he stated:
“The future is no excuse for an abdication of your own personal responsibilities towards yourself and your job and your love. “Ring the bells that still can ring”: they’re few and far between but you can find them. This situation does not admit of solution of perfection. This is not the place where you make things perfect, neither in your marriage, nor in your work, nor anything, nor your love of God, nor your love of family or country. The thing is imperfect. And worse, there is a crack in everything that you can put together: Physical objects, mental objects, constructions of any kind. But that’s where the light gets in, and that’s where the resurrection is and that’s where the return, that’s where the repentance is. It is with the confrontation, with the brokenness of things.” (End of Quote)
I also watched a YouTube recording of Cohen singing this song in London in 2009, which he introduces with the words ‘We’re so privileged to gather in moments like this, when so much of the world is plunged in darkness and chaos. So…. Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8-BT6y_wYg)
It is these images, this framework, that I brought to the story of Ruth that we heard our Junior Youth and Youth share so wonderfully. At first glance, Ruth sounds like an easy Thanksgiving text. It is agricultural – there is a harvest There are these wonderful words of loyalty and love given by Ruth to Naomi, there is a return to a homeland and a marriage resulting in a child and hope for the future. The quick sweep has a Thanksgiving shine to it. But when you dig into this story it is much more complicated and nuanced and profound that that.
A few of us from SJMC have joined a full Great Hall of folks at Conrad Grebel during the 4 Thursdays in October to participate in a communal Bible study with Professor Derek Suderman, called ‘Catching the Spark.’ It is an interactive form of Bible study where we sit in small groups, with the occasional guiding questions or comments from Derek to help us pay attention. He likens it to a hike, where you can be curious and explore and experience all sorts of different landscapes and beautiful vistas, if you pay attention to the details, if you don’t walk too fast, and if you take time to look around. The Bible study on Ruth is only half done, but it has sparked my imagination into the story, and made me pay attention to the details – of which there are way too many to include in a sermon. But let me share a few observations, a few places where I saw cracks in the story, in the people, in the systems, and where it is through those very cracks that you see the light getting in.
The first thing that struck me in this story is the depth of trauma. You can almost miss it, or dismiss it, because it is told in such matter-of-fact ways. In the first 5 verses you already have a famine, an unwanted dislocation to a foreign land in search of food, and then the death of first a husband and then both adult sons. I cannot begin to imagine what this experience was like for Naomi and the depth of her pain, loss and trauma. All she can think about is to go back to her homeland, even knowing that she would be destitute and without status there. She wants to go alone. She refuses to be called Naomi anymore, meaning pleasant, but rather call her Mara, meaning bitter, because the Lord has dealt harshly with me and brought calamity upon me. This is more an act of desperation and futility than a homecoming. The crack that opens here is that one of the two daughters-in-law refuses to let her leave alone. Ruth literally clings to Naomi. She declares her loyalty and even her allegiance to Ruth’s God and Ruth’s people. She is determined and persistent. Naomi does not even say anything. She is silent. Might it even be the silent treatment? Is Naomi relieved or angry that Ruth goes with her? Whatever the case, this is the small little crack within this history of trauma that let’s just enough light in to start to shift things, to give the potential for good things, to start healing trauma. I am reminded of verse 2 in a favourite hymn – God of the Bible (VT 420): ‘God in our struggles, God in our hunger, suffering with us, taking our part, still you empower us, mothering Spirit, feeding, sustaining, from your own heart.’
I am struck too by the question of identity that winds its way throughout the story. What is your identity within the family as mother, as widow, as daughter in law, as foreigner, as poor and landless, as childless. Ruth is continually named as Ruth the Moabite, the stranger, the foreigner, the one who really should not belong. Yes, the culture of that time and its assumption are so different, and yet there is a familiarity to this question of identity. We struggle all the time in our world with identity, questions of family and gender and status, with insiders and outsiders, with who belongs, with how do I find my place within the world, my identity, our identity. What is so delightful and subversive in this story, is that the question of identity is not stagnant, or set. Characters cross lines of expected identities and in subtle ways challenge the roles set for them. The foreign daughter-in-law shifts the identity politics and claims status. The light gets into these cracks. Verse 3: ‘Those without status, those who are nothing, you have made royal, gifted with rights, chosen as partners, midwives of justice, birthing new systems, lighting the way.’
Not unrelated, but this is also a story about power, and who has power, loses power, exerts power, dissolves power, and uses power for good. There are the given systems of power and how they are allotted and what is expected, but then cracks too in those power systems as different characters discover and use their own personal power, sometimes in unexpected ways. As we heard from Ryan in the children’s story, Ruth has persistence, determination, initiative, creativity… she claims a power that is not at all expected. She first clings to Naomi and accompanies her back to Jerusalem. But then she is willing to glean as a foreigner in the fields, on her feet from early morning until now, without resting even for a moment. She turns up in the fields over and over again. She continues this interaction, this persistence with Boaz, finally lying at his feet – a Hebrew euphemism. But there is also how power plays out with Boaz, who has been given power in his society and family. He uses his power with compassion and intention and with a willingness to give up some of his power and status for the sake of good. He acts as the next of kin, and pushes the systems with the person who should have been first in line. There are all sorts of strange marriage customs, and land rights, and cultural expectations that we do not fully understand, and how this whole family redeemer role works with the closest male family members responsible for the family of a widow. The system is patriarchal, but then we too have our share of patriarchy expressed in its many ways today. This past Thursday night we talked about the whole system of gleaning and how it disrupts the economic systems. Might it give us imagination and vision for an alternate way of viewing economics, where the land is ultimately seen as God’s and not ours to possess, own and control, and where the powerless are invited to be a part. Talk about disrupting power. Derek wondered out loud why churches never use the story of Ruth and Naomi on a Thanksgiving Sunday. Hmm… The wonder in this story is how the cracks in these systems – family, economic, political, social – are opened up then, and open up now in our time. Power has a way of being upended, and shifted, the light getting in.
Veres 4: Not by your finger, not be your anger, will our world order change in a day, but by your people, fearless and faithful, small paper lanterns, lighting the way.’
There is a kind of resolution in this story of Naomi and Ruth and Boaz. With all these questions of trauma and identity and power swirling around the story, in the end there are blessings, there is a new stability of family and future found. Derek Suderman pointed out for us at Grebel, that already in the first chapter, the Hebrew word ‘Shuv’ is used 12 times – the word for return, to turn around, or go back – the same word used for repent, to literally turn around and go in a different direction. There is this turning around in the story, this longing for home and a new life, this returning to something and somewhere where it all started, but where it is all about the journey, and you are no longer the same. There have been all sorts of cracks along the way, and but also the light that gets in. Like we heard from the Cohen interview:
‘But that’s where the light gets in, and that’s where the resurrection is and that’s where the return, that’s where the repentance is. It is with the confrontation, with the brokenness of things.’
In a few minutes we are going to share and celebrate communion together. Communion goes right to the heart of the story of Jesus, a story of trauma and hope, of identity and promise, of repentance and return, of loss of control and the very power of God. The central symbols of communion speak to the cracks in life and how the light gets in – the bread and the cup – This is my body, broken for you, cracked open for you. This is the new relationship with God, the light, made possible because of my death. This is a gift to us on this Thanksgiving, a way to approach this day, with joy and hope, even with all it carries. Thanks be to God.
Verse 5: Hope we must carry, shining and certain, through all our turmoil, terror and loss, bonding us gladly, one to the other, till our world changes, facing the cross… Fresh as the morning, sure as the sunshine, God always faithful, you do not change. Amen.