I imagine we probably all have a favorite book of the Bible. The gospels should be high on everyone’s list because they tell us the story of Jesus. And when the church’s heart and mind are fixed on Jesus, everything comes together. When we lose sight of Jesus things go wrong. Luke is my favorite gospel, but they are all good. Those who are into theology might especially like Romans or Ephesians. And the Psalms are perennial favorites. When you are struggling to process your feelings about something, you can usually find a psalm that helps you turn those feelings into a prayer and work through it.
Who can tell us a favorite book of the Bible?
Well, this morning I want us to look at a book of the Bible that probably isn’t on anybody’s list of favorites. It’s the book of Ruth. I won’t ask how many have read it even once, but it’s really short, 4 chapters, an easy read. Do you even know where to find it? The Bible starts with the 5 books of the Pentateuch, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. Then you come to a bunch of books we call history books. There’s Joshua, Judges and then Ruth. So, Ruth is the 8th book in the Bible.
It’s a small book, but I’ll show you several reasons for knowing about it.
For one thing, Ruth is just a really nice short story. It’s good literature. There is tragedy. There is redemption. There is romance. And the romance has some exotic twists as Ruth finds love in a culture very different from ours. If you like short stories, Ruth is a good read.
Let me read for you how the story gets started. I’ll start with verses 1-9. While I read listen for where the story begins, the setting.
1 In the days when the judges ruled, there was a famine in the land, and a certain man of Bethlehem in Judah went to live in the country of Moab, he and his wife and two sons. 2 The name of the man was Elimelech and the name of his wife Naomi, and the names of his two sons were Mahlon and Chilion; they were Ephrathites from Bethlehem in Judah. They went into the country of Moab and remained there. 3 But Elimelech, the husband of Naomi, died, and she was left with her two sons. 4 These took Moabite wives; the name of the one was Orpah and the name of the other Ruth. When they had lived there about ten years, 5 both Mahlon and Chilion also died, so that the woman was left without her two sons and her husband. 6 Then she started to return with her daughters-in-law from the country of Moab, for she had heard in the country of Moab that the LORD had considered his people and given them food. 7 So she set out from the place where she had been living, she and her two daughters-in-law, and they went on their way to go back to the land of Judah. 8 But Naomi said to her two daughters-in-law, "Go back each of you to your mother's house. May the LORD deal kindly with you, as you have dealt with the dead and with me. 9 The LORD grant that you may find security, each of you in the house of your husband." Then she kissed them, and they wept aloud."….
Where does the story start? In Bethlehem, where Jesus was born. What a coincidence! Or is it a coincidence? We’ll come back to that in the end.
And you heard the tragedy. There was a famine in Israel. That’s a tragedy all by itself. Elimelech was desperate to feed his family and when he had probably used up all his money and there was nothing for him in Bethlehem, he packed up his wife and 2 sons and moved from his home town of Bethlehem to the land of their ancient enemies, the Moabites. Israelites would not be welcome in Moab. They arrived with nothing but what they could carry. They had no land, no home, not much hope for mercy. They were probably part of a wave of desperate, hungry Israelites. I can imagine the locals complaining, “Oh, no, it’s more of those Israelites. Don’t let them get comfortable here. Look at how tattered their clothes are. How do they expect to support themselves? Why don’t they just go back where they came from?”
So, what do we call people who run into tragedies and just have to pack up and leave home and hope for refuge someplace else? We call them refugees. The Bible has a number of refugee stories. Jacob faced famine in Israel and had to move his family to Egypt. Mary and Joseph faced the violence of Herod’s attempt to kill baby Jesus and they fled to Egypt. But refugees aren’t only in ancient history.
Kathy and I have informally adopted through World Relief a refugee family who came out of the Rwandan genocide. It was a horrible civil war between Hutu and Tutsi tribes. When the father of this family was a young man, he was staying with his grandfather when men came into his grandfather’s hut and bashed in his grandfather’s skull, right in front of him. He ran and hid in the bush until the attackers gave up looking for him, then made his way hundreds of miles to a refugee camp in Mozambique. At least he could be safe there. I asked google maps to tell me how far he must have travelled, from Rwanda to Mozambique, but Google Maps said it didn’t know any route. But I’m sure there are back roads.
As far as he knows his entire family has been wiped out. It could be up to a million who were killed before the fighting ended. In the refugee camp he married a nice woman who also had run for her life. They had a mud hut. The closest water tap was a 20-minute walk away and the water was unsanitary. They used community pit toilets nearby. When they had kids, the schooling that was available for them was of very low quality. That was their life for 2 decades.
What did they do wrong that all this tragedy happened to them? Nothing. And I have been awed at their resilience and hard work to make it as a family. He learned Portuguese and got a job as a laborer on a farm outside the camp in Mozambique. Four years ago, their application for refugee status in America came through and they were some of the very few who could come to the US. Now the husband works one full time job in a factory during the day, then 4 more hours in the evening in his second job. The wife is raising their 4 kids at home, plus when her brother went into crisis they took in her brother’s baby as a foster child. Besides raising 5 kids, the wife is taking GED classes online. And for a while she worked a part time job on top of all that. The kids are doing well in school. They are working to move out of their subsidized apartment and buy a real house of their own. Their resilience and hard work are amazing.
Why do people pack up and leave their homes? Some are running from violence, like Mary and Joseph. Some are running from famine, like Elimelech and Naomi. Some of my ancestors were religious minorities in Great Britain, Quakers and Puritans, who went to jail for their faith and left everything to come to the early colonies where they could be free to worship God in the best way they knew how. So, I am a descendent of refugees many years ago. Some of Kathy’s German ancestors were caught in the middle of the Franco-Prussian War and came to America to escape the bloodshed. In the middle of the 1800s there was a horrible famine in Ireland, the great potato famine as a blight wiped out the potato harvest. About a million Irish died and another million left the country. And they were often very unwelcome here in the US. They didn’t speak English. They drank too much. They were really, really poor. They were Roman Catholic. There was a day when the big Marshall Field’s department store put up signs that no Irish were allowed to work there or even shop there. What happened to all those Irish “invaders”? They just turned into normal Americans. How many here in this room have Irish ancestors? I do. Raise your hands. What do we think? Are they OK? Should we keep them? Of course.
Today we find huge numbers of refugees on our southern border. Why did they pack up and leave home? Many from the countryside were wiped out when hurricanes destroyed their homes and farms. Others were wiped out when drought made it impossible to raise crops. Many from the cities faced drug gangs who gave them a choice of letting their kids join the gangs or getting shot. What would you do if you were in their shoes?
Do you want to guess how many refugees there are in the world today, people who have had to leave everything behind and move to a foreign country? About 20 million. That’s a huge need. That’s the population of Illinois and Indiana combined. They come from Syria, Afghanistan, Myanmar, Libya, Sudan, Rwanda, Nepal and on and on.
Why should we read this little book of Ruth? Let it remind us that real human families face real tragedies. Let it remind us that God sees and God cares.
Well, what happened to Elimelech and Naomi in Moab? They made the best of it. In time their two sons married Moabite girls. But the tragedy continued because Elimelech died. Their two sons died. And so, Naomi, who has suffered the loss of her home town lost her husband, one son and then the other son. The story continues with 3 widows, Naomi, and her two widowed daughters in law, Orpah and Ruth, now with no husbands to provide for them, which was necessary in that time.
Those two Moabite girls are famous now. One was named Orpah and she is famous because about 65 years ago a desperately poor, single teenage mother in rural Mississippi decided to name her daughter after Orpah. Only it got misspelled and her daughter became famous, Oprah Winfrey.
But more important than Oprah Winfrey is Naomi’s other Moabite daughter-in-law, Ruth. When Naomi decided she had to go home to Bethlehem, she told her daughters-in-law, to stay in Moab and hope to find husbands who would care for them. And the story continues at verse 16.
16 But Ruth said, "Do not press me to leave you or to turn back from following you! Where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God. 17 Where you die, I will die-- there will I be buried. May the LORD do thus and so to me, and more as well, if even death parts me from you!"
In her own personal tragedy of losing her husband, this young Moabite woman was loyal to her mother-in-law and travelled to Bethlehem, a place she had never seen. And she went out every day during the harvest time to glean so they could eat. Gleaning means that she would go behind the reapers and collect any few grains that had been missed. It took a very long day’s work for gleaners to gather very much grain. A young woman out alone in the fields with the workers, a foreigner, could be very vulnerable. But Ruth was determined.
Let me broaden our focus for a moment from just refugees to all immigrants and let’s think about the hard work that so many of them do. As I was writing this in my home there was a Mexican man cutting the grass of one neighbor in front of our house and there was another Mexican painting the house behind us. Immigrants pick our fruits and our vegetables and slaughter and package our meats. I had knee replacement surgery at Swedish American Hospital in Rockford about 10 years ago and had nurses from Bosnia and Morocco. When you see an immigrant working a hard and a difficult job, think of Ruth in the Bible.
But there’s still one more person in Ruth’s story that we need to meet. His name was Boaz. Boaz was a farmer in Bethlehem. He was doing pretty well because he had hired hands working for him. And he noticed this foreign woman who was working so hard to support her mother-in-law. Actually, he was some sort of relative to Naomi, so he should have been helping her in the first place. But it wasn’t long before he told his workers to make a point of leaving some grain to make it easier for Ruth. And the more he watched Ruth, the more impressed he was by her. One day he just took some of the grain his workers had harvested and gave it to her.
I know that the problem of refugees in the world is huge and complicated for people smarter than I am. But this world needs a whole lot of people like Boaz who will see refugees, really see them, and do what they can to help. You can follow the news and pray. You can keep refugees in mind when you make your decisions about voting. You can support agencies like UMCOR and World Relief who are there, on the ground in refugee camps. Kathy and I have found several ways to be directly involved with refugees near where we live in the Chicago suburbs. Before Covid I sometimes got to drive the van to meet refugee families when they first arrive at O’Hare airport. I’d drive them to an apartment prepared by good church people organized by World Relief, stocked with basic furniture and dishes and such. I’d explain about the gas burner on the stove, how to lock the door and what not to put down the toilet. Before Covid, on Saturday mornings, we would join a group that offered tutoring for immigrants who were preparing for US citizenship. I wish you could see how much they appreciated being here and wanted to become good citizens. And there may well be opportunities here. Ask Pastor Jonathan when he gets back.
I told you that Ruth is a great story and a great story has to have a happy ending. Boaz was so impressed with Ruth’s character and loyalty and hard work that he married her. They had a son named Obed. Years went by and Obed had a son named Jesse. Jesse had several sons, one of Jesse’s sons became the greatest king of Israel, King David. The great King David was the great grandson of a Moabite refugee.
But that’s not the end of it. Many more generations went by and centuries later another couple had a baby in Bethlehem and they laid him in a manger and they named him Jesus for he would save his people from their sins. Jesus was a descendent of this Moabite refugee named Ruth.
How many descendants of refugees and immigrants are making great contributions to our country? Is there anybody in this room who is not a descendent from someone who immigrated to the US?
Now, like I said, the problems of refugees and immigration are too big and too complicated for me to give you easy practical solutions. We can’t just open our borders and let everyone in all at once. But that doesn’t mean that we can do nothing. Things are not going to get any better until we learn to see immigrants and refugees as real, flesh and blood human beings. Just that is a start.
Sure, they come from other countries. They crossed our border. But when the Lord looks down from heaven, does he even see those artificial national borders that we make such a big deal about? I don’t think they mean anything to him.
Sure, many of them have darker skin than most of us have. But when the Lord looks at the heart, does someone’s skin color mean anything at all? Nothing.
You have probably heard the story of a little boy walking along an ocean beach one morning. There was quite a storm the night before and thousands of star fish had been thrown up on the sand, out of the water, and would die when the sun got hot. The little boy was picking them up and throwing them back into the water. A man watched him for a few minutes and then he said to the boy, “Kid, you’re wasting your time. told the boy that he was wasting his time. There are so many of them that you can’t make a difference.” But the little boy simply kept going. He threw the next starfish back into the water, and he said to the man, “It made a difference to that one.” That’s the wisdom of a child.
Are you and I going to solve the worldwide problem of displaced persons? No. But we just might find a way to make a difference for just one.
When I look at the mother of our Rwandan family, I often have asked myself what I would want someone to do for my daughter if she was thousands of miles from home in a strange land and very limited resources. And sometimes I think I hear the Lord saying, “She’s my daughter.” Then my heart knows what to do.
And, in closing, I’d like us to remember back to our childhoods and that wonderful song many of us sang in Sunday School.
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.
Jesus cares for all the children
all the children of the world
Black and yellow, red and white
They're all precious in his sight
Jesus cares for all the children of the world.
Jesus came to save the children
all the children of the world.
Red and yellow, black and white
They are precious in his sight.
Jesus came to save the children of the world.
