Ruth 1:16-18 - But Ruth replied, “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 even death
separates you and me.” When Naomi
realized that Ruth was determined to go with her, she stopped urging her.
The book of Ruth is always been peculiar to me. It is, relatively speaking, an ordinary
story. No miraculous military conquest,
no red-sea-like drama, or dramatic revelation from God. There is hardly a
mention of God. Ruth is important in
Hebrew history because she is David’s great-grandmother. But her story, although not overly dramatic,
is heroic nonetheless.
Ruth loses her husband and Naomi, her mother-in-law, also
loses her husband. Instead of returning
to her homeland, Ruth decides to stay with Naomi and remains devoted to her the
rest of her life. It is a touching and
inspiring decision that eventually leads to her and Naomi’s redemption. Ruth is celebrated in the festival of Shavuot
as a model of loyalty and devotion. That
would be enough to celebrate but there are at least a few other significant
things we can take from the story of Ruth:
God is concerned about all people regardless of race,
nationality, or status. Ruth was not a
Jew. She was a Moabite. Even though many discriminated against her, the fact
that a Moabite is celebrated as part of the David’s (and thus Jesus’s) ancestry
is a powerful statement that all have a role to play in God’s plan. In addition, Men and women are both equally
important to God. In the midst of a patriarchal biblical narrative, the book of
Ruth holds up the value of women in God’s story. There is no such thing as an
unimportant person in God’s eyes, regardless of sex, ethnicity, or history.
At a surface level, few saw Ruth as an important person. She
was from Moab, which was a nation that originated from an incestuous encounter
between Lot and one of his daughters She was a poor widow. She was living in a
foreign land away from her birth family.
God’s plan includes people who are considered to be unimportant or
unimpressive from a human perspective.
Prayer: God help me
to see people the way you do. Help me to
see myself as you do. Amen.
Prayer Focus: Pray
for race relations in this country and across the world.
Song: Aiton Birnbaum
– Song of Ruth
No comments:
Post a Comment