Kin
Ruth 3:6-13
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Look. I just need to be up front with all of you for a minute. This Sunday is a tricky one for me. And you should know that it is a tricky one for a number of pastors that I know. Not all of them, mind you. We’re no more monolithic than any other group of people. But I would say that a fair number of us look at this Sunday on our calendar and wonder what is the right thing to do. I mean clearly this Sunday isn’t like any other Sunday. We’ve got the Albuquerque concert band here, for goodness sake. We cancelled the early service so that folks could come and hear a wonderful and rousing program of music. So clearly, something is different about this Sunday. That’s because it’s the Sunday before Independence Day- our national holiday celebrating the historic signing of the Declaration of Independence; a document that birthed a country, that as President Abraham Lincoln would later say was, “conceived in liberty.” There has been a tradition here, and elsewhere of transforming this Sunday into a service in celebration of America. And that is where things get tricky for me.
Now don’t get me wrong. I love this country and many of the ideals that it stands for. I’m the kind of person who gets choked up when the National Anthem gets played before a ball game. And I love the 4th of July celebrations, with their pageantry, cookouts and fireworks. I love the 4th so much that during my first summer stock gig in college, living out of a roadside motel at the far reaches of Eastern Kentucky, I spent what little money I had on a small charcoal grill and everything necessary to grill up hamburgers in celebration of the holiday. I am particularly proud of the significant influence that Presbyterians had in resisting the tyranny of the British Crown and influencing the principals enshrined in our United States Constitution. As I often say in Elder training, if our form of church government sounds familiar to you, it should, our nation’s constitution is modeled after it. Specifically, the principals of shared and checked power. I love that we make room for, and protect, the freedoms of all our people to speak, write, assemble, and worship without interference from the state.
And it’s the worship part that makes this Sunday so tricky for me. As much as I love this holiday, this country, and the freedoms it represents, my faith prohibits me from worshipping this country. It is the very first thing commanded by God to Moses on Mount Sinai. “I am the Lord your God, you shall have no other gods before me.” Now the interesting thing about that first commandment is what God does not say. God does not say that there are no other gods. To the people who had just fled Egypt that would have sounded absurd. They had left behind all kinds of gods back there: Osiris, Ra, Isis, Horus, just to name a few. No, it isn’t that there are no other gods. Even today there are plenty of other gods to worship. They might not exactly be named as such, but the adulation surrounding them is similar to a religious fervor; professional athletes, entertainers, politicians. But God is clear on this, no one and nothing is to come before the Most High God of all creation when it comes to our ultimate allegiance. Not a team, or a celebrity, not even a nation. As our own confessions express a couple of different ways, “in life and in death, we belong to God.” So it makes me nervous whenever devotion gets expressed in ways that really ought to be reserved for God alone.
That’s one of the reasons why the flags on our chancel were moved to the back of the sanctuary. They are still here in this space. We acknowledge by the presence of our national symbol the gratitude we feel for the freedom that allows us to worship God alone. But when we come into this space at the appointed time on Sunday morning, we come here to direct our heart, mind, soul and strength to the worship of God alone. So the symbols that we place before us in this time- the scripture, the paraments, the cross, and the music – are all symbols that should point us to the object of our worship. We do not come to worship ourselves. And we do not come to worship our nation, however much we may love it.
The danger of conflating the two always puts our faith at risk. We don’t have to look too far back into history to see examples of when the church has been used by state interests in an effort to grant them some kind of legitimacy. In just a minute our affirmation of faith will echo the words penned by the confessing churches of Germany as an act of resistance against a Nationalist movement that sought to justify its own programs of de-humanization. The Establishment Clause within our own US Constitution is not there to protect the state from falling victim to theocracy, but to protect the church from the interference and possible injustice of colluding with the state. And it isn’t just our more recent history that demonstrates the dangers of aligning our trust, belief, and obedience to God with the interests of a nation. Take the book of Ruth, for example.
On its face, Ruth is often presented as the inspiring story of Naomi and her faithful daughter-in-law Ruth, putting their trust in God and one another as they overcome the odds to rebuild their lives after a devastating tragedy. The rough sketch of the story is that this Hebrew woman, Naomi, and her husband are having trouble making ends meet in the land of their people. So the couple emigrates to Moab, where their two sons marry local women and they all begin to make a life together. Then tragedy strikes as all three men, Naomi’s husband and their two sons, all die, leaving the three women widowed with no more children. In a culture where a woman’s livelihood was dependent upon her male family members, this left the three women destitute. Naomi resigns herself to return to land of her people, in the hopes that they will take care of her. She attempts to release her daughters-in-law back to their families. One goes. The other, Ruth, refuses. So they both return together. Ruth does one of only two things that a woman in her position can to remain alive, she joins those who glean others’ fields, hoping to gather enough of what’s leftover from the harvest for the two women to eat. As she does, she becomes acquainted with the owner of one of the fields, Boaz, who it turns out is kin to her through Naomi. Our reading recounts her approach of Boaz at the threshing floor and her appeal to him to, “spread your cloak over your servant, for you are next-of-kin.” It’s essentially a marriage proposal. The two go on to marry and bear a child who will become the father of Jesse, who is the father of King David- one of the most important leaders in the history of the Jewish people. Centuries later, the messianic hope of the people will be for a new David, someone anointed by God to unite all of Israel as a nation.
Sometimes Ruth is lifted up as a story of faith and perseverance in the face of impossible odds. Other times it is presented as a love story, both between Naomi and Ruth and between Ruth and Boaz. But within the canon of Hebrew scripture, Ruth stands as a correction and counter-narrative to the ever-present strain of nationalism that exists throughout the history of ancient Israel. As we heard in our first reading from Deuteronomy, the law of Moses was very clear about the preservation of his people to the exclusion of others, in this particular case Ammonite and Moabite foreigners. That very command is carried out at the end of the book of Nehemiah by the people who return to Jerusalem from exile, as marriages are dissolved and foreign spouses are driven out. But the story of Ruth is meant to remind the people that the one person who is perhaps revered above all others in their history, David, is descended from just such a marriage- and is himself part Moabite.
That’s the danger that such nationalism poses to our faith. It disregards all the ways that we are kin to one another in favor of a much more limited definition of who is one of us, and who is not. Who is in and who is out. Who belongs, and who does not. Categories too often defined not by the cross, but by a flag, or a political party, or an ideology that represent a departure from the good news of Jesus Christ. That good news is about how all the conventional ways we have of sorting and ranking people by religion and politics, ethnicity and nationality are rendered meaningless by a table at which all are equally welcome, and all belong. It is the good news captured by a story about a woman who according to a zero-tolerance reading of Deuteronomy should never have been allowed to cross the border from Moab into Judah, but who in doing so, became the great grandmother of a king. And it is the good news that our truest citizenship is found in a kingdom whose coming we pray to see on earth as it is in heaven, a land whose only borders lie around our hearts, as we open them to receive family and foreigner alike as kin.