Strange Face in the Album

Ruth is a strange book to have in the canon. It’s not overtly theological. It hardly mentions the name of God. It’s the story of an Israelite widow named Naomi, who has two sons, both of whom marry foreign wives and promptly die. One of Naomi’s daughters-in-law returns to her native region of Moab, but the other, whose name is Ruth, stays with her.

Ruth’s words to Naomi promising that she will stick with her mother-in-law through thick and thin used to be a popular text for singing at weddings. These words are a kind of love song, I suppose, but not the romantic kind. In fact, they describe precisely the kind of love a lasting marriage needs:

Ruth accompanies Naomi to her ancestral town of Bethlehem. It’s the barley harvest time, and they go into the fields to glean what they can. The law of Israel, you may remember, required landowners to leave portions of their fields unharvested, so that poor people could come along and glean food for themselves. You could call this provision the social safety net of ancient Israel.

Naomi gives Ruth some tips about how to get noticed by Boaz, a distant kinsman of Naomi. One thing leads to another, and Ruth ends up marrying Boaz. Not only are the two women saved from a life of poverty, Ruth also becomes the great-grandmother of a rather famous child of Bethlehem: David, King of Israel. For Ruth bore Obed, and Obed became the father of Jesse, and Jesse became the father of David.

Generations later, when Matthew sat down to write his Gospel, he took pains to mention that Ruth the Moabite was the ancestor of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

I particularly love this story because of a picture in my own family album. It’s a photo of my Great Grandmother, Naomi Shive. The high cheekbones and the jet black hair still give her away. Its seems my family didn’t like to talk about it, but the mother of my Great Grandmother Naomi was an American Indian, of the Comanche tribe.

The story of Ruth and Naomi reminds us that God’s people are not, and never have been, a bunch of blue-bloods, and the faith that relies on the Bible is not a tribal religion. King David’s great-grandmother was a resident alien, a Moabite, the patron saint of racial diversity. The God of the Bible, revealed most clearly in Jesus of Nazareth, is the God who welcomes all people into the Covenant of Grace.

Some Presbyterians make a big deal about their kinship to Scots and other northern Europeans. I am often called upon to loan my kilt to a fellow minister who wears it to conduct "Kirkin’ o’ the Tartans" services. He also wears it to give the invocation at highland games. (He’s welcome to my clergy tartan kilt. For some reason, my kilt doesn’t fit me as well as it did when I was in my mid twenties and a graduate student in Scotland.)

Hanging in my study is a reproduction of an 1891 painting by J. H. Lorimer entitled "Ordination of Elders in a Scottish Kirk." I like to look at that painting. It reminds me of distant, but important, links to the past.

But the fact is, the center of world Christianity has now shifted from northern Europe to the southern hemisphere. Representative Presbyterians don’t look at all like the folks in that 19^th century painting. The archetypal Presbyterian today is a 27 year-old female who lives in Africa. Theologically, Christians have always been descendants of Ruth. Now we are beginning to look the part.

The church is built of "living stones," says the writer of I Peter (2:5). That image used to call up in my mind a giant cathedral, uniform and gleaming, built from stones all cut from the same quarry. It turns out that’s not what God had in mind at all. Right from the start, God intended the church to look more like a crazy patchwork quilt, composed of every shape and color under the sun. That’s not so different from the picture my Sunday School teachers conveyed when they taught us to sing:

           Jesus loves the little children,
                    all the children of the world.
                    Red and yellow, black and white --
                    they are precious in his sight.
                    Jesus loves the little children of the world.

The local church of my own childhood bore almost no resemblance to the church we were taught to sing about. Now, at long last, there are at least some signs that we might embody our true heritage. The children of our own Preschool, for instance, look a whole lot more like that collection of children Jesus loves than my childhood Sunday School class.

And consider this: Our ancestor Ruth was not only an immigrant of a different race; she was also a homeless person. If it hadn’t been for the welfare laws of ancient Israel, Ruth and Naomi might have starved to death.

Look carefully at their photos in our Christian family album. Who are the Ruth’s and Naomi’s of our day? Are they not the 30,000 or so of our neighbors who, following last Tuesday’s vote, still have no health insurance? Isn’t Ruth a woman who has breast cancer, but doesn’t know it, because she can’t afford a mammogram? Isn’t Naomi a diabetic who can’t afford both groceries and insulin?

There are some who think that the church should have learned a lesson from the defeat of the Health Care Plan, and that lesson is this: Stay out of politics. But we can’t do that without ignoring our kinfolk Ruth and Naomi.

We have learned a lesson – many lessons, in fact. We’ve learned that getting people to vote themselves a tax increase is no easy thing. We’ve learned that many good-hearted neighbors, neighbors who do care about the poor, also don’t trust the government to be good stewards of public money.

And we’ve learned that dining with politicians, like dining with the devil, requires a long spoon. A few – not all, a very few – elected officials will welcome people of faith to the table so long as they keep stroking their egos. If, however, you should dare to suggest that their critics should have a place at the table, too – your own chair can be pulled right out from under you.

The lesson is not that the church should stay out of politics. Quiescence is itself a political choice. For the church to say or do nothing about public policies that affect the poor (and, for that matter, the rich) is to ignore God’s call to do justice and love mercy. To disengage is to renounce kinship with the prophets of Biblical days and the Ruth’s and Naomi’s of our day.

No, the most important lesson to be learned from last Tuesday’s vote on Health Care is one of humility. Political reality has a way of cutting us all down to size and reminding us that we are all sinners in the sight of God who never see the whole picture – that apart from God’s grace, we are nothing and can do nothing.

It’s good to flip back through the family album from time to time and look at Great, Great, Great Grandmother Ruth. If it weren’t for her, we might mistake our nation, our tribe, our class, for the family of God, and we might fail to recognize just how diverse God’s family really is.

Take a close look at Ruth. She doesn’t look as though she belongs, does she? Now look at Jesus. See the resemblance? In a uniquely Biblical way, it’s Ruth’s very strangeness that proves she belongs. If Ruth doesn’t belong, neither do you and I.

Now, look at yourself in the mirror. Look very closely. Can’t you see how much you look like Ruth? God sees the resemblance. If God didn’t, we wouldn’t be the church.