Losing Everything Except Love
Naomi Entreating Ruth and Orpah to Return to the Land of Moab, by William Blake,
watercolor, from a series of 12 known as 'The Large Colour Prints', 1795, public domain.
Sermon Series “Through the Bible,” № 18, Ruth 1:1-9, 15-18
“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.” –Ruth 1:16
Today, our journey “Through the Bible” arrives at the Book of Ruth. Its message seemed a good match for Valentine’s Day. I’ll back up to the Book of Judges next week.
Ruth doesn’t get much attention in the Church. It’s a short book. It records no mighty acts of God. It contains no critical information about the political history of the Israel.
What Ruth does record is the 3000-year-old tale of King David’s great-grandmother. Written during the reign of Solomon, Ruth shows us that God works in those who come from outside of Israel. Ruth, who is a Moabite, demonstrates that a person not of Hebrew blood can be faithful in exemplary ways.
There is an interesting theory about how this story was transmitted, a theory that was reinforced for me while participating in the Wednesday Spiritual Growth Group. The Wednesday group engaged in an excellent role play and conversation surrounding the Bathsheba narrative. As they did, I was reminded how Bible scholar Edward Campbell suggests that the storytellers who preserved Ruth were the “wise women” we read about in the Hebrew Testament, for example, the Wise Woman of Tekoah mentioned in 2 Samuel 14.[1] When you see Bible teachers like Mary Anna and Robin so adeptly telling scriptural stories and exploring their nuances, it’s easy to imagine how ancient wise women like them told and preserved the story of Ruth.
Some of you may have read the book of Ruth in Sunday school. You may have heard of Ruth in a study of women in the Bible. But it wouldn’t surprise me if you were unfamiliar with the story.
The text I read for you helps set up the basic plot. After years of homesteading in the hills of Moab, all of the men in an Israeli family die. Naomi, the matriarch, decides to travel west out of the hills, across the Jordan River, and back to the family village of Bethlehem. Her sons’ widows are native to Moab, and Naomi releases them from their responsibility to her. But Ruth stubbornly refuses to let go – once a daughter, always a daughter. Proclaiming her undying love, Ruth leaves familiar surroundings to travel with her mother-in-law to a strange new land.
In that land, Naomi relies upon the generosity of her nearest male relatives to provide food and shelter, for the clan is the social security system of that day. Furthermore, the family law of ancient Israel dictates that the men of the family hold a council to determine what will happen to Ruth. One of them will be obligated to marry her, and raise children on behalf of her dead husband.
Now, raising children who technically belonged to another man is not a profitable business decision. The cost is great, and the financial reward is nothing. A man might not be very anxious to add such a responsibility. So Naomi creates a plan for moving the process along with Boaz, perhaps a brother or cousin of her deceased husband.
Throughout the story, Campbell points out, each main character faces at least one key decision to act in a righteous and godly manner. “At each of these points in the story, a moment of choice is presented . . . . At each of these points the choice is made in favor of what righteous living calls for.”[2]
In the spirit of righteous living, each of the characters contributes important gifts to the health and happiness of the family. And because each of these characters focuses on their responsibilities to God and to one another, for thousands of years, they have been models of what true love looks like. Ruth, especially, teaches that even when you lose everything, perhaps especially when you lose everything, it is then that steadfast love becomes most precious and valuable.
Julia Anderson is a young woman who models a lesson about losing everything except love. I heard her story this past Sunday night while watching an episode of Sixty Minutes.[3] For this particular segment, journalist Sharyn Alfonsi immersed herself in the University of Louisville Medical Center to see how staff are responding to the fifth wave of the pandemic.
Somewhere in the middle, the story got to Julia Anderson, who serves as an ICU nurse. She was just 19 when she began her career in 2020. Anderson had graduated high school early, enrolled in a fast-track training program and was quickly assigned to treat the sickest COVID patients.
Alphonsi opened the conversation with a standard observation that any of us might have about the environment of a hospital floor full of Covid patients, “I imagine there's nothing they can teach you in nursing school to prepare you for this moment.” “No,” said Anderson, “Not at all. I mean, they didn't teach you that you would have to zip up your first body bag …. I still remember the first patient's name. The first room. What happened and everything. And that was hard.”
Julia went on to describe the added stress of angry patients and family members. “Last week, I had a patient put her hands on me after cussing me out for probably ten minutes. Put her hands on me and pushed me as hard as she could. I've been called every name under the book …. It used to bother me really bad …. I've cried before at some of the names I've been called by family members, by patients. But now, I guess I'm immune to it.”
She described the relentless nature of the work. “As soon as you transfer a patient or discharge a patient, it's not five minutes later you're getting another patient. That's a drink and a potty break.” But she keeps at it, still inspired by the call that pulled her into this particular way of serving others.
Just when you think she has shared as much as her emotions can allow, Julia goes just a little deeper, and pulls up one more recent experience. She talks about the patient she was caring for, who, after a difficult time on the precipice of death, finally passed. Then, in the room nearby, another woman calls to say, “You forgot to bring me my water. You told me you would 45 minutes ago.” Julia says she was on the edge of crying. She wanted to let it all out, but knew she couldn’t. So she did what all kind nurses do at a moment like that. She replied, “"Yes, ma'am, I'm so sorry. I'll bring you that water.” And on she went, to the next room, the next, and the next. In each one, she didn’t know what she would find. Like Naomi, and like Ruth, there was the possibility that at each stop on the journey, she would lose everything. But she was committed to the core value that guided her: She might lose a life-and-death battle, then lose another. Though she might lose everything, there was one thing she would keep. And that is the way of steadfast love. May it be so for us.
NOTES
[1] Edward F. Campbell, Jr., “Ruth: A New Translation with Introduction, Notes, and Commentary.” Vol. 7 in “The Anchor Bible,” ed. W.F. Albright and David Noel Freedman. Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1975, p. 22-23.
[2] Campbell, p. 132.
[3] The following is from Sharyn Alfonsi’s, “Staff Shortages, COVID Patients pushing hospitals to breaking point,” transcript of Sixty Minutessegment broadcast on 6 Feb. 2022, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-hospital-staff-shortages-60-minutes-2022-02-06/ accessed 8 Feb. 2022.
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