From God's perspective all of us are outsiders. He chooses to love not because of who we are or what we have done. Indeed, what we have done separates us from God - making us outsiders. Ruth is a story that reflects of God's great love for those who are outside.

Transcript

Lord God Almighty, I pray that we would see you as more lovely, having spent time in this genealogy written long ago, but still for us, that we might see Jesus more clearly for who he is. Who are we waiting for in this season after all? Warm our hearts to your holy scriptures and more than anything to your good news in Christ. Amen.  

So, it's Christmas movie season, right? We, for all of you strict church calendar folk, we know that the 12 days of Christmas doesn't start until Christmas Day, right? Amen. I'm getting emails right now saying like, oh, it's the third day of Christmas, like it's counting down the 12 days. I also read an article about just how much money it would cost to actually buy the 12 days of Christmas is crazy amount.  

That is not in my notes and I don't remember the number anyway. We can all agree that it's a great travesty that there are decorations aplenty and Christmas songs being blared from the likes of Costco and whatnot before Halloween is even done, let alone Thanksgiving. Who are these pagans? But it's Christmas movie season now, right? And one of the, there's a lot of great themes in Christmas movies, but one of the great themes of Christmas movies is bringing the outsider in. 

The stranger is close. The enemy even becomes a friend. Sometimes it's the person that you would never think possible. They change and they become part of the community. Think about it. It's not hard.

 

The Grinch, he's way outside, way up on his mountain, bah humbug. Wait, that's not the one that we're going to get to. But because of the love of the likes of Cindy Lou, the community that he once despised and the community that kind of reeled back, coiled back at his presence.Well, by the end, they're singing na, na, na, na, you know, all together. The outsider's brought close. Think of one of my favorites.  

I know this guy can be controversial, Buddy the Elf. Who's named Buddy because that's what brand his diapers were when he was found. He's raised in the North Pole by elves, Santa's elves. And what's pretty clear right away is that he's not an elf. He's pretty large himself. And he, of course, wrestles through where do I belong? And he makes his way, hikes his way from the North Pole all the way down and through the Lincoln Tunnel into Manhattan there in New York City. He finds his dad, who doesn't want a thing to do with him. And it's just a strange man and distance and outsiders and what's going on. And by the end, everybody's there in Central Park singing, hugging.  His dad and he are finally home. Outsiders brought close.

A Christmas Carol. I told you I would get there. Ebenezer Scrooge, who seems to sort of love being on the outside. He's stingy, right? And we know that stinginess is just a manifestation of a very cold heart. But Christmas Eve night, the ghost of one of his old business partner Marley shows up and then subsequently the three ghosts of Christmas past and present and yet to come. And Scrooge is a changed man. And of course, at the end, he's not so much of an outsider. He's brought the turkey and cares for Tiny Tim. And it's just bringing together what was once very distant.

Beautiful stories.  

One of the things that is really clear if we look at these women as we're doing in this genealogy of Jesus, is that they're all outsiders. Not a one of them is part of the people, God, Israel. None of them really, at least bloodline, belong to the family of Abraham, which Matthew begins with, Abraham there in the genealogy of Jesus. Tamar was an Adullamite. Rahab was a Canaanite. She's the beginning of the story of the Canaanite conquest. And yet Tamar becomes part of the family and Rahab becomes part of the family. Foreigners and outsiders, right? But they're fully part of the family. They're fully brought in. And they are mothers of the incarnate Christ. Now we have Ruth. And again, what we see in these women and we see really clearly in Ruth, which is the deep and wide love of God.  

The outsider brought close by the mercy of God. Now, there are some scandalous things about the story of Ruth, but I was encouraged this week to not draw your attention too much to them because we have seen so much scandal already. So I mostly want to instead draw your attention to the mercy here of God. 

Okay. And when I say mercy, actually in this context, I do mean compassion, you know, compassion towards an offender in a way. But mercy, this is something I read this week. I thought it was really lovely. Mercy in the Hebrew is actually the plural of the word womb. And so it's actually like a motherly care, motherly care and compassion.  

Okay. So three ways that we see this in the story of Ruth. The first way is we see mercy through just the places that's going on, the place. Okay. Let me say this too. I'm not, we're going to read all the book of Ruth. There's so much there. It's only four chapters. You can read it. So if you're not terribly familiar with it, go home and, and you know, if you don't have a Bible, grab one of these here, just take it. You don't have to bring it back and read it through. It doesn't take too long, but it's too long to really, really read it all as a sermon.  

But what we see in this passage that we heard read for us is a little bit of this outsider place, kind of, you don't belong here in this location language. Look with me down at verse 10. Then she fell on her face, bowing to the ground and said to why have I found favor in your eyes that you should take notice of me since I'm a foreigner.  

Like that alone in Ruth's mind allows her to say, I should not be cared for this way. I don't really receive this kind of motherly, compassionate mercy care because I'm a foreigner. I belong elsewhere. 

She was a cultural outsider, sort of a racial outsider. Certainly someone that is just not part of the people of God, the people there actually in Bethlehem, they're in Bethlehem there. Now I will say this, there are some, there's some truth to say that, you know, Ruth was far more similar to the Israelites than we are today, culturally and racially.  

The land of Moab, where Ruth was from, was just on the east side of the Dead Sea. So if you can kind of picture, here's the Mediterranean, here's Israel right here at the bottom part of Israel would have been the Dead Sea. So right here going west would have been where Judah was or where eventually the two southern tribes are. And then you cross the Dead Sea and that's the Moabites. That's the land of Moab right there. Okay.  

So there's a proximity of place taking happening here. And in some ways you could even say there's a common story. The Moabites descend from Lot, who is the nephew of Abraham, who we heard of in the genealogy there.That's what it begins with, Abraham. But and this is where I'm not, I'm just going to allude to this. You can read it in Genesis chapter 19.  

The story of how the Moabites come about is really scandalous. So much so that we're not going to read it right now. So when you think, okay, these are people that seem like they're close to each other. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. For an Israelite, the Moabites would not have been somebody that you'd be like, oh, let's go hang out and grab a drink. No.  

And Boaz would have thought to say, he would have known their history and he would have known the distance and he would have said, y'all exist on that side of the Dead Sea. We'll exist on this side. We don't need to meet up.  

That's what you might've thought. And that is what Ruth's thought. She said, why are you treating me this way? I'm a foreigner. Sometimes the Moabites and Israelites actually went to war against one other. Here's what I'm saying. This is an outsider.  

And just by place alone, you know, she doesn't really belong here. What you see in the story of Ruth is outsiders are not just brought in, but welcomed in, cared for in their plight, brought close to the community of God. In some ways, there's a picture of this happening each Monday evening here.  

You have all these people ending up in the United States, from the Sudan and Afghanistan and all over. They're being brought in and welcomed by the ESL that's happening here. And that's partly what's going on.  

Now, there's something that you learn that is very important about Jesus in this. This is one of the things we're asking, right? Why is Matthew mentioning these women? How does it help us prepare ourselves for receiving Jesus? And this is part of the good news. You don't have to be from a certain race, or you don't have to have some sort of perfect background or story in your family line for Jesus to run after you and love you and bring you into the people of God. This is at the very heart of Christian faith, that the good news is not for a certain kind of person that looks a certain kind of way and talks a certain kind of way. No, it's for you, wherever you are, wherever you're from. God loves to bring in all the outsiders.  

I've mentioned this before, but it really bears repeating. In the ancient world, your genealogy in a way was like your CV, your curriculum vitae, or like your resume. It would be like the way of saying, hey, here's what I got going on. Here's why you should listen to me. Here's why you should give me this job or blah, blah, whatever. And what's happening in this story right here at the very beginning of the gospel of Matthew, the very beginning of the New Testament, the genealogy is saying, all you outsiders, come in. 

This God who's going to be born in this particular place, Bethlehem, where actually this story takes place, is not the God for just some specific kind of person. This is the God of all nations. Come, come. It's really important for us to sit in because it's tempting to think, I got to get my stuff together before I go to church. You know, like all those people, they like know how to sing songs and they look at the bullet and they're like, oh, I know that bullet things is what I'm supposed to say. You know, like you think, okay, I have to look a certain way or behave a certain way or understand a certain thing.  

And this is saying, no, come, no matter where you're from, no matter what your crazy family story and its origins, come. You'll notice the second meditation quote. I'm going to read all three of them in the sermon.  

But the second meditation quote that we have is by Leonard Cohen. It says, forget your perfect offering. There's a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in. Oftentimes God's light actually shines most clearly through our crazy backgrounds and the crazy places we've been, crazy things we've done. All right, let's consider the second sort of womb-like mercy in the story of Ruth. 

And this, okay, again, I'm not telling the whole story. I get that. But the second thing I want you to hear of the story of Ruth is God's womb-like mercy in the particulars of the story. Okay. So the places of the story, the particulars. And I mentioned that Ruth is a really short book. It's only four chapters, but it is packed with detail. Let me read to you just verse one of chapter one. Okay.  

It says this, in the days when the judges ruled, there was a famine in the land. And a man of Bethlehem in Judah went to sojourn in the country of Moab, he and his wife and his two sons. Okay. That's a, there's a lot in that one verse. One thing I was saying is this isn't a really good time. It's during the time of the judges. If you know the story of the judges, that was up and down and mostly down kind of time in the story of Israel. It wasn't a great time. It's aggravated, aggravated of course, by the fact that this is a time of famine. 

There's no food. And so someone who was actually given a plot of land to farm around Bethlehem, he actually has to be displaced to another foreign land. He goes around, like I said, around the Dead Sea and he settles there in Moab. So not a good thing going on. He's looking for food for his family. He and his wife, Naomi, she's introduced by name a little bit soon. They have two sons. And as you would read as you go on, these two sons are found two wives in Moab. And it's actually mentioned quite a bit that they're Moabites.  

So they're again foreigners, not an ideal for the people of Israel, but something that God seems to continually work with. One of those young women from Moab is Ruth. And then what we read, and this isn't even five, this is just five verses into the book, is that the father dies and both the sons die.  

So what you're getting in just this little tiny bit is all of these particulars about what a sad, sad, sorrowful situation is taking place there with Naomi and Ruth. What I'm saying is that the particulars are all pointing us to a certain kind of story, which is a tragic and sad, sad story. So okay, if we continue on, what happens is Naomi goes, well, my husband died, my two sons died, I'm going to head back to Bethlehem to be with my people.  

And she tells her two daughters-in-law, Ruth is one of them and Orpah is the other, why don't you go to your mother's house? That's a really instructive thing. And she doesn't say father's house, it's mother's house, because a mother would have been the one that actually helped arrange a marriage most of the time in the ancient world. And so she was saying, go get married and you will be cared for.  

Don't stay with me. I'm a widow. And yet Ruth says this very famous line. It's very lovely. I'll read it to you because I feel like if I give a sermon on Ruth and I don't read this, like five of you are going to email me. “Do not urge me to leave you or to return from following you. For where you go, I will go. And where you lodge, I will lodge. Your people shall be my people and your God, My God. Where you die, I will die. There I will be buried. May the Lord do so to me and more also if anything but death parts me from you.” 

So there's mercy and kindness beginning in the particularities, just the intimacy of that language and the connection there of those two women. So here's what happens. The two women, not Orpah, because she actually does go back to her mother's house. But these two women, Ruth and Naomi, they return to Bethlehem. And the situation is so dire that there's another particular that is drawing our attention to this. And that's that when Naomi gets back to Bethlehem, she tells everybody, don't call me Naomi anymore. Call me Mara, which means bitterness. What I'm telling you is that there's all these little details all throughout, I mean, through this first half of the book that are painting a picture for us of absolute dire, dire, sad, sorrowful situation. But the end of chapter one begins by saying it's the time of the barley harvest.  

So if you look down in verse 11, let's read this again together, verse 11. Actually, I'm going to read 12 too. But Boaz answered her, he's talking to Ruth, after she says, I'm a foreigner. All that you have done for your mother-in-law since the death of your husband has been fully told to me. And how you left your father and mother and your native land and came to a people that you did not know before. The Lord repay you for what you have done and a full reward be given to you by the Lord, the God of Israel under whose wings you have come to take refuge.  

Okay, again, I'm not going to go into all the details of this story, but Naomi and Ruth just happened to come back at the time of the barley harvest. And Ruth just happens to go and glean from the edges of the field, which was a rule to care for those in need in Israel. The edges of the field of this man, Boaz, who just so happens to be a distant relative, who just so happens to have heard all of their story, who just so happens to be actually a deeply kind and caring person, who just so happens to actually know that it is God whose wings Ruth is under and not his own.  

And all of these details, here's what you're supposed to be hearing, all of these details, just as God is totally aware of all of the sorrow in the story, he's totally orchestrating all of the joy. All of the details, all the particularities of this story point us to the mercy, the kind mercy of God, which is to say part of the story of Ruth, which prepares us for Jesus, is that God knows all of your sorrows. There's no part of your life that the Lord is not aware of.  

Psalm 56 tells us that he bottles up our tears. None of them are lost on him. There's nothing that you're going through that he's not aware of.  

Of course, Jesus tells us that hairs don't fall from our heads without it being the Father's will. He's totally aware. He knows you perfectly and intimately.  But this is also telling us that his mercy, his motherly womb-like care is completely for us too. All of the details of our redemption, he's orchestrating it all. He's intimately involved in all of it.  And we see this in the life of Jesus. We see this in some stories of Jesus. Of course, Jesus sits at this well at noonday with this woman and he knows her story better than she does.  

Or, you know, there's of course this beautiful story where this woman touches the garment, the hem of the garment that Jesus is wearing, and he knows exactly what she's going through and exactly how she needs to be redeemed and brought back into society and loved communally. This is who Jesus is. And Jesus continues to be this for you today.  

The God who knows every single one of your sorrows, every particular tear you shed. And he's also intimately weaving together a story of Consider the first quote from our bulletin, Elizabeth Cooler Ross. The most beautiful people are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths.  

These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and deep loving concern. God is so often weaving our deepest sorrows into something very, very lovely. And that's part of the story of Ruth. Mercy in the particulars. Okay, finally, there's mercy in the particulars of a person here. The book is mostly about Ruth, but you notice also Boaz is mentioned by name in the genealogy. 

And the story is significantly about Boaz. Of course, Naomi also, but Boaz significantly. So here's what happens, right? Ruth is gleaning from Boaz's field. Naomi encourages her to do so. And what eventually happens actually is that Ruth lays at his feet at the threshing floor. Keep in mind that this would have been like a big room where probably a lot of people were actually sleeping near their grain. It was a way of protecting it. But sleeping at his feet is sort of a way of saying, hey, would you marry me? Getting down on one knee. So here's this young woman who's proposing to this older man.  

It's only a little scandal there, not much. Not like other stuff that we could get into. And this man, Boaz says, well, first he says, you've been very kind to me, you know, and he's grateful for this kindness.He says, I will redeem you because he is a kinsman redeemer, meaning that he is close in family. He's a kinsman. He's part of the kin. 

But he's also able to buy the land that Naomi would have had rightfully hers that was belonging to somebody else because they left. And in buying that land, he would have been marrying Ruth also. But he's also a very honorable man, and that's part of the story. And so he finds out that there's a younger man who's closer in relationship to Naomi and to Ruth. And so he goes to that man and says, hey, there's some property. Do you want to buy this property? And the man immediately is like, yeah, I'll buy that property. And then he goes, oh, and if you buy that property, you get to marry Ruth the Moabite. And immediately the guy's like, no, I'm not doing that. Okay, so that's part of the story that's going on.  

And then Boaz says, I'll pay that price. I'll live that life. I will care for that outsider, that woman who's been full of sorrow and estranged from her people, finding herself lost in a new land. I will care for her. And then, of course, what happens is they have Obed, who's the great, who's the grandfather of King David. It's a great story.  

Again, you should read it. Excuse me. But what all of this tells us about Jesus is this. Of course, okay, we've already seen Jesus brings the outsider in. Jesus loves and cares for the exact particularities of your story. That's absolutely true. But here we learn that Jesus is the great kinsman redeemer. I mean, that is what happens in the stories of the gospel. Jesus takes on flesh, our flesh.  

God becomes our kin. And he moves from the cradle to the grave that we might be redeemed. I mean, this mentioning Boaz here is saying this is how you have to understand Jesus. God is not someone who's far off, but takes on our flesh. God who knows our plight, and he eagerly and willingly goes to the cross. He might pay for our sins. God is the great kinsman redeemer in Jesus. In his incarnation, he's our kinsman in his crucifixion. He's our redeemer.  

What I'm suggesting to you is that the story of Ruth is everywhere getting us ready for Jesus. I just, the whole story is getting us ready to understand who is Christ. Listen to the final quote in your bulletin. The incarnation took all that property belongs to, all the property that belongs to humanity and delivered it back to us redeemed. Kinsman redeemer. All of our inclinations and appetites and capacities and yearnings and proclivities are purified, gathered up and glorified by Christ.  

He did not come to thin out human life. He's fully part of us. He came to set it free, to redeem it.  

All the dancing and feasting and processing and singing and building and sculpting and baking and merrymaking that belong to us and that were stolen away from us into the service of false gods are returned. They're redeemed for us in the gospel. I mentioned this, the closer kinsman redeemer considered Ruth, but he saw that she was a foreigner.  

There's another detail also actually is that he also saw that her husband had died. He's like, there's too much sorrow in that story for me. There are too many particulars that are too difficult for me to take on. And he says, no, I don't want any of it. In Boaz and in Jesus, what we find is someone that looks, sees, oh, you're an outsider. Just my kind. 

Oh, you're full of sorrow. Just my cup of tea. Come close. 
Let me love you. You redeem you. That is what we see in Jesus.  He takes what frankly the world and so many others would say, no, I don't want anything of it. Not lovely enough for me. And he makes it lovely by loving it.

 

So let me finish with just referring to you to one more great Christmas movie, a Charlie Brown Christmas. It's a beautiful story. Of course, there's the part where the beginning of Luke chapter one is recited. That's lovely. But what's really kind of great about it is the tree, right? Which plays a really important role in that story. Charlie Brown gets this tree and it's not much to look at. In fact, his friends are like, that's not a great tree. Why'd you get that tree, Charlie Brown? But actually as the tree is loved, right? The ornament gets hung on it. And I was like, as the tree is loved, it becomes actually more and more delighted in and lovely.  

I'm telling you, that is the good news of Jesus. It's the same thing that happens in the story of Ruth. The Lord comes when others would be like, oh, yuck, what are you doing with that tree? What are you doing with Ruth? And weaves that story of sorrow and estrangement and distance into the very genealogy of God in the flesh. What a beautiful story. Loved and therefore made lovely. And it's the same thing that's on offer for us. That's what Jesus still does. He still says, oh, you're far off. Let me bring you close.

 Oh, you've got a life of sorrow. Let me hold you dear. Oh, you're the tree that everybody else wants to laugh at. Let me come and make you lovely. He's our great kinsman redeemer. The one who pays the sin for our sin that we might be close to him. 

Let me pray for us. Lord in heaven, what a gift you give us in the mentioning of these women in this genealogy. Certainly stories of scandal, Tamar, Rahab, who's always mentioned as the prostitute, in Hebrews, James, and Ruth, a Moabite, of scandalous origins. A woman who proposes to an older man and a woman who's tossed off by somebody who could have redeemed her.

 

God, we thank you for your love for us. We think that you're showing us your love in these stories. We thank you that you're preparing our hearts to receive you as the God who comes to us in love as the kinsman redeemer, the kinsman who takes on flesh in the end long ago, who makes the way to the cross,  paying for our sin and redeeming us.  

Jesus, thank you for your grace in all of this. Thank you for your kind mercy,  your motherly love, your tender compassion. God, I do pray in all of these stories that we're considering that we might desire more and more life with you. We might cry out all the more as we have sung, "O come, O come, come Messiah, come."  Be present with us today. What's the taste of redemption and your love and your compassionate care today?God, I do pray for those of us who feel so much like we are on the outside or so much that our hearts so much that our lives make no sense. I don't know why we're possibly going through what we're going through. Or those of us who have felt deep and painful rejection.  

God, I pray these words of your kind, compassionate love. would cause us to run to you more and more, to delight in your good news. We're thankful for this word. Teach us through it. Warm our hearts to you, we ask. Amen.