You may think that kicking off a stewardship campaign with two sermons based on the story of Ruth from the Old Testament is a strange way to begin a discussion about what a good steward is in the Biblical sense. But hopefully after today and next week’s sermon you will have a better understanding of just what God requires of us in terms of our faithful stewardship of our time, talent and treasure.
I do wonder how many of us believe that being a good steward has only to do with what we do for others and nothing to do with how being a good steward affects our own sense of ourselves and, therefore, how we view our own lives? That’s what we’re really going to talk about today: How being a good steward affects all of your life, and not just your decision about giving to the church or charity. Have you ever considered the idea that being a good steward means living the abundant and joy filled life that Jesus promised us we would experience if we would follow him in the way? How many of you feel you are living that abundant, joy filled life right now? How many hope to find that life in your future?
The verb “to steward” means to guide or to direct. How are you directing your life? Each of us is called to establish a pattern in our lives which enables us to direct our living into the fruitful and joyful ways that God wants for us to live. This calling is not a call to a life of drudgery and sacrifice, but rather it is a call to live a life that frees us to enjoy to the fullest extent the abundance of God's good gifts to us. Such a life is not only inclined toward meeting the needs of others but rewards us lavishly as well. Our driving question in today is: What does good stewardship look like in the life of an individual? The story of Ruth will aid us in this quest.
The three women in today’s scripture passage were widows. We know that widows in that society could not own property and did not have jobs that could support them financially. Such women, within a male-dominated society, were destitute once their husbands died unless family or others had mercy on them. And because they were widowed, because Naomi was older, and because Orpah and Ruth had no children, they were not likely to find themselves with any prospective husbands knocking at their doors. After the death of their husbands these women essentially had nothing but the clothing on their backs. Not the usual characters we think of when we try to come up with examples of good stewardship.
The book of Ruth begins with a time of famine, not only of grain but also of spirit. But the book ends with an abundance of both grain and spirit. As we look at our own individual situations and at our church’s situation, we may want to take this into consideration. Are you living in a famine of resources as well as spirit in your own life? Are you facing what seem to be insurmountable circumstances? Have you turned your situation over to God and faithfully began to steward your life and seek God’s will and way like Ruth did? You might find abundance along the way that you could not have expected or anticipated.
So, too should we be looking at our situation as a church! Perhaps we should give up the, “Oh, woe, are we,” responses we are prone to utter when we look at the financial challenges before us and put our time and effort into being and doing what God has called us as a church to be and do. Let’s face it, being a church isn’t only about income and expenses anymore than your own life is only about income and expenses. It’s time that you and I began to move beyond the negatives and toward more positive attitudes for ourselves and our church.
Significantly, Ruth is a transitional book between the time of the Judges and the Kings. The book of Ruth ends with these words, “They named the child she bore Obed; he was the father of Jesse who became the father of David.” Lest you don’t remember, that means Obed was King David’s grandfather. And it was with King David that Israel began one of its most prosperous times of existence.
However, the time of the Judges was not a good time for Israel. In the book of Judges this refrain keeps repeating: There was no king in Israel, and everyone did what was right in their own eyes.”
Having no king, meant there was no order, no good law to remind them of their responsibilities outside of their own selfish desires. The book of Ruth shows us what happens when people act in a different way by stewarding their lives not according to the desires of their hearts, but in response to God’s graciousness toward them.
Ruth is our example of a good steward today. What do we know about Ruth? What would her life have been like?
We know she was from the land of Moab. Throughout the Bible, when she is referenced she is most often called “Ruth, the Moabite,” just so we won’t forget that fact. Why is that so significant?
Moab was a country just west of Judah. The Israelites marched through Moab on their way to the Promised Land even though the Moabite King refused them access, even hired others to harass and do violence against them. Thus Moabites became some of the most despised of foreign nations summarized in this way from Deut: 23:3-4, 6: “No Ammonite or Moabite shall be admitted to the assembly of God…because they did not meet you with food and water on your journey out of Egypt. You shall never promote the welfare of their prosperity as long as you live.”
The Israelites were also forbidden from intermarrying with foreign peoples. The Samaritans were despised because that is how the Samaritans came about, the Israelite men intermarried with foreign wives against the commands of God in the Old Testament. So Ruth became the wife of Mahlon, the eldest of Naomi’s sons, by marrying into his foreign family which meant she would have lost social standing among her own Moabite people. She was twice excluded from proper society. There is a lesson for you and me to hear in her story. Society may exclude us for even so-called Biblical reasons, but God in God’s love and mercy always includes us, no matter who we are, no matter what we’ve done.
Knowing the traditions of the time, it is possible she could have been as young as 12 or 14 when she married Mahlon. Many believe Mary the mother of Jesus was only 13 or 14 when she became pregnant with the Christ child. Apparently Ruth and Mahlon had no children, or the children, too, had died. Ruth would have been about 22 or 24 by the time of today’s story.
From Naomi’s comments we understand that the only real choice Ruth and Orpah had was to return to their own families and beg to live as servants in the home of their parents or brothers. Hoping to be remarried eventually to someone else was probably out of the question because they would have been doubly tainted as eligible brides having married foreigners, and given the fact that neither one had borne a child. Not having children would have been viewed as their just punishment for going against their Moabite God by marrying Naomi’s alien sons.
It is interesting to note that Naomi tells her daughter in laws to return to their mother’s homes. Perhaps their own fathers have died. That would mean they had even less opportunity to regain any social standing or to hope for a future marriage if they returned home. The author of the story is painting a pretty depressing picture for these women.
What can we learn from this foreign widow about stewarding our own lives? If you haven’t noticed, Ruth has no treasure to steward. So this sermon today isn’t about money, just so you understand that preaching about stewardship doesn’t necessarily only mean I going to talk about your giving your money. Stewardship is so much more than just how you use your money.
First of all I notice Ruth’s willingness, perhaps we should call it determination. She is willing and determined to leave her homeland and to follow her mother-in-law. Even after Naomi releases Ruth from all of her obligations toward the older woman, tells her to return to her own mother’s home, Ruth persists. We are told that Orpah, kissed Naomi, but that Ruth clung to Naomi.
It’s the same word used in Genesis 3 where we are told that a man leaves his mother and father and clings to his wife. Ruth is demonstrating a commitment toward Naomi that is not unlike the vows we make to our spouse when we commit ourselves to live our lives with our beloved. I am so glad that we will soon be able to celebrate all committed domestic partnerships in the state of Washington with the approval of Ref. 71, which at last count, looks like it will be a winning effort for all of us who have worked so hard to make it a reality. The Domestic Partnership Law will become the law of our state and we can enjoy the same benefits and responsibilities as do married couples, even without the name of marriage.
Ruth not only commits herself to Naomi, but Ruth makes an oath. When we make our annual pledge of support to the church we are making an oath to God and to each other, just like Ruth made. Ruth’s oath is the most famous oath in the Bible, and the longest:
“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. Where you die, I will die—there will I be buried. May God do thus and so to me, and more as well, if even death parts me from you.” Ruth 1:16-17.
And what a response God makes, completely out of expectations, for God takes and makes this foreign woman, whom other Biblical traditions say should not be tolerated or even allowed to live in the community of Israel because according to the law she was unclean, and makes her the grandmother of Kind David, the one whom God loved and blessed.
Ruth’s oath is the longest loyalty oath in the Old Testament. It is a very powerful speech all by itself even if you don’t know the full story about Ruth and Naomi. Isn’t it funny that so many use this as a marriage vow for heterosexual couples. And with a wicked gleem in his eye the pastor asks, Do you think we should we remind them that it was originally a vow made by a woman to a woman?
Think of what Ruth takes on—lodging, family, burial place and God. Her commitment to the God of Israel is a commitment to a new family and a new community much like the refugee families I worked with in the 1980’s following the end of the Vietnam War. They came to our church community and became a part of our church family, professing faith in God, being baptized, joining the church, becoming a part of the greater community of Madison, Wisconsin. They came with hope that their future would be better than it had been in the failing society of Vietnam. The risks were enormous for them. Some didn’t make it. I buried some who took the exit that suicide provided from the anxieties they felt.
From Ruth we learn today that leading a life of stewardship can mean breaking society’s norms and following God in new and unexplored paths. It can mean committing to an untraditional, non-heterosexual relationship, in this case between a mother and her daughter in law. That’s exactly what you and I will do with our commitment to each other through our faithful ministry through this church. We can break the norms of what it means to be a church and we can follow God into new and unexplored paths of being the church in our community and to each other. We need to stop looking at the churches we have come from and stop looking at the churches that society believes to be successful and ask ourselves exactly what is God calling us to become as a church, and that answer might be a whole lot different than anything we have ever imagined or experienced previously. Are you okay? Am I disturbing you a little bit? Yes? Then I’m doing my job as your pastor. Getting you to think beyond the box, beyond what you have known and experienced, and begin a new journey with God into the future.
Ruth stepped out in faith and followed Naomi and God to a new life of abundance, full of hope and expectancy. Like Abraham of old who was told to leave his homeland and go to a new promised land of plenty without any guidance on where that would take him or where he would end up. Basically God told Abraham to get up and go and that God would tell Abraham when he arrived at the place he was being sent. And without knowing much of anything, Abraham got up and left home and began a faith-filled journey with God.
That’s a lot different from what you and I want today. When God tells us to go, we stop to ask lots of questions. Is this in my best interest, God? As if God would ask us to do anything that God hasn’t considered what would be best for us. Too often we think that if it will be different or force us to change that it can’t be good for us. Change may be exactly what we need to undergo. Different ways of living and being may be exactly what we need to do in order to find the abundant and joyful life God wants to give us. Remember the old saying: Stupidity is doing the same thing over and over again and thinking that this time it will result in a different outcome. It’s time for our church to begin to journey with God, to begin to do things differently.
But we are human, and when God calls us to change and go, we want to know the destination before we leave home. We want the exact directions we are to follow to get there. We want to know everything we can about what might happen before we make the decision to leave where we are and go where God wants us to be. And, for sure, we don’t want any unexpected storms along the way to threaten us. That’s what makes it so difficult to follow God. Because seldom does God answer all of our questions before God tells us to get on the road and go.
Mark and I could share with you a lot about what we went through to make the decision to take the journey to come all the way across the continent to be with you here in Seattle. All we had was a vision of what God wanted us to do and what this church could eventually become. We put everything we had on the line for God and for you. Extraordinarily, though I had gone to new churches previously, Mark, my beloved partner, gave up all he had in terms of family, friends, and jobs, to make this journey with me. And there was an unexpected storm along the way in which I could have lost my beloved in an accident in the middle of a storm. But God worked a miracle and Mark was protected. I like to think of Mark as my Ruth in that he made an amazing commitment to come with me. I just hope he doesn’t meet a good looking local Boaz now that we are here.
Ruth, like the poor widow at the temple that Jesus saw giving her last two cents to God, “has put in all she had to live on.” Ruth gave all of herself to Naomi. Ruth held back nothing. Looked at from this perspective, Ruth’s stewardship of giving was enormous. She gave her life and her future to Naomi and to God.
What will you give to God? Will you give God all that you have, all that you are and let God bless you with an abundant and joyful life? What kind of steward will you be? What kind of stewardship commitment will you make to God through Metropolitan Community Church Seattle? Whether we journey together to that Promised Land of abundance God has waiting for you and me depends upon the decisions each one of us makes. I know where I am going. I know I am going to get there. I’d like to know, by your stewardship commitment to MCC Seattle this year, that you are going to make the journey with me, and that you and I will arrive in the Promised Land that God wants to give us together. Will you make the journey with me?
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