O Little Town of Bethlehem Ruth 1

O Little Town of Bethlehem
Ruth 1.15-19a, 4.9-17
Dr. D. William McIvor
December 7, 2003 — 2nd Sunday of Advent
Presbyterian Church in Sudbury

On this Second Sunday of Advent we lit the Bethlehem Candle to remember where Jesus was born. What we may not remember is that Bethlehem was important for more than a millennium before Jesus because it was also the birthplace of David, Israel’s greatest king. To better appreciate this we need to remember the delightful story of Ruth, set somewhere about 1,100 years before the birth of Jesus.

In that time there was famine and to escape it a man from Bethlehem named Elimelech along with his wife Naomi went to live in a foreign country called Moab. Their two sons, Chilion and Mahlon, went with them. The sons married two Moabite women — foreigners. One was named Orpah and other Ruth. Then tragedy struck. Elimelech died, widowing Naomi and then both her sons died leaving her childless as well. This also meant that her daughters-in-law were both widowed and childless. That put the three women in desperate straits.

For in that time, in that patriarchal society, any woman not attached to a male was at the mercy of economic and social forces that could easily engulf her. For that reason the Israelites had a law called levirate marriage (see Deuteronomy 25.5-10). The law specified that a widow should be claimed by the nearest male relative of her deceased husband. In this manner the widow and her children would be provided with a name, a home, and a defense against danger. But Naomi, Orpah, and Ruth now had no such defense.

So Naomi decided to return to Bethlehem and she urged her foreign daughters-in-law to return to their people in Moab. Naomi said that she was too old to remarry and have more sons and the two younger women would be much better off if they stayed and married among their own people. So with great sadness Orpah agreed and said goodbye to Naomi. But Ruth did not agree and she clung to her mother-in-law.

Ruth’s response is the most frequently quoted passage in the book (although often taken sadly out of context — at weddings, for example). But Ruth’s statement is actually an oath, sworn before God that she intends to embrace Naomi’s future for good or bad. That’s where we’ll pick up the story in chapter one.

So [Naomi] said, “See, your sister-in-law has gone back to her people and to her gods; return after your sister-in-law.” But Ruth said,

Now go home this afternoon and read the whole book of Ruth — it’s only four pages— and you’ll see that so far the story seems to be about the courage and faith of two women in extremely vulnerable circumstances. But once back in Bethlehem, the story becomes more of a love story. For Ruth soon catches the eye of a man named Boaz, a relative of Naomi’s dead husband and Boaz clearly wants to marry Ruth. We may wonder if Boaz and Ruth will be able to marry and live happily ever after like the prince and Cinderella.

But like all good love stories there is an obstacle to a happy ending. Another man has a prior right to marry Ruth unless he gives up that right. So Boaz sits down to talk with him. In that time, an agreement was sealed when a man took off his sandal and gave it to the other party. After lengthy discussions the man said, “I cannot marry Ruth” and he gave his sandal to Boaz. That meant Boaz inherited Naomi’s ancestral lands and also now had the right to marry Ruth. That’s where we’ll pick up the story in chapter four.

Then Boaz said to the elders and all the people, “Today you are witnesses that I have acquired from the hand of Naomi all that belonged to Elimelech and all that belonged to Chilion and Mahlon. I have also acquired Ruth the Moabite, the wife of Mahlon, to be my wife, to maintain the dead man’s name on his inheritance, in order that the name of the dead may not be cut off from his kindred and from the gate of his native place; today you are witnesses.” Then all the people who were at the gate, along with the elders, said, “We are witnesses. May the Lord make the woman who is coming into your house like Rachel and Leah, who together built up the house of Israel. May you produce children in Ephrathah and bestow a name in Bethlehem; and, through the children that the Lord will give you by this young woman, may your house be like the house of Perez, whom Tamar bore to Judah.”

So Boaz took Ruth and she became his wife. When they came together, the Lord made her conceive, and she bore a son. Then the women said to Naomi, “Blessed be the Lord, who has not left you this day without next-of-kin; and may his name be renowned in Israel! He shall be to you a restorer of life and a nourisher of your old age; for your daughter-in-law who loves you, who is more to you than seven sons, has borne him.” Then Naomi took the child and laid him in her bosom, and became his nurse. The women of the neighborhood gave him a name, saying, “A son has been born to Naomi.” They named him Obed; he became the father of Jesse, the father of David.

So only at the very end do we learn that this isn’t a fairy tell about living happily ever after. Nor is it just a love story. It’s the story of God preparing for the birth in Bethlehem of Israel’s great king David — Ruth is David’s great grandmother — and God preparing a thousand years later for the birth in Bethlehem of a son of David, a son of Ruth, indeed the greatest king of all, Jesus the Messiah. What a grand story it is.

Ruth’s story is a story about courage and faith. But we live in such a mobile society it is hard for us to appreciate how much courage and faith it took for her to move from Moab to Bethlehem. Her journey was perhaps no more than a hundred miles and yet it meant giving up everything she knew. Her journey to Bethlehem meant giving up her people, her culture, and her religion. Ancients believed that a god was only a god for a certain region. Even the Israelites believed that at times and wondered when they went into exile if the Lord would be with them in a strange land. Ruth faced that fear and she gave up everything for the love of her mother-in-law.

Yet without a journey to Bethlehem Ruth would not have found the true God. Without a journey to Bethlehem she would not have become part of God’s plan in the world. If Ruth had not been loyal to Naomi, she would have gone the way of Orpah. We would never hear of her again and the larger purposes of God would have been frustrated.

It is really the same for our journey to Bethlehem. God always calls us to journey in courage and faith, often to where we’ve not been before. Our journey to Bethlehem means embracing the God who always calls us to the future. God never calls us backward. We are not called back to 1,100 years before Christ. That’s not why we remember Ruth. We are not called back even to the birth of Christ. That’s not why we remember Mary and Joseph. We are not called back to sweet Christmases of our past for God is not a god of nostalgia. We remember Ruth and Mary and Joseph and Christmases past only to remind ourselves that God calls us to the future, to new Bethlehems.

Last Sunday you heard me say how I don’t like Christmas carols before Christmas Eve. You will find that I am an Advent curmudgeon and I tend to rant about this every year. But my point is not the carols or when we listen to them. You can listen to Christmas carols in July if you like. We’ll even sing them sometimes in Advent. But I fuss about the carols because I want us to not settle for the sappy sentiment or commercial value that so many attach to the carols. Too many people who don’t give a hoot about what the birth of Jesus really means get all teary about “Silent Night” or “O Little Town of Bethlehem.”

But if we really understand them, the power of the carols is not sentiment but a call to new Bethlehems. Think for a minute about that famous carol. “O Little Town of Bethlehem” was written by Phillips Brooks, a giant among American preachers. In the summer of 1865 he took a year’s leave of absence from his church in Philadelphia and began a world tour.[1] On Christmas Eve he rode on horseback from Jerusalem to Bethlehem, pausing in the field where the angels’ appearance to the shepherds is said to have taken place. Later that evening he attended a service at the Church of the Nativity on the supposed site of Jesus’ birth. Brooks was deeply moved by that and back home in Philadelphia, he drew on those memories to write a hymn for the members of his Sunday school to sing at Christmas. “O little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie!”

Sweet? Yes, but not sappy sentiment. For the carol goes on even in the first verse to talk about:

What hopes and fears are met in Bethlehem? Well, we hope for lots of things at Christmas. We hope that we can all be together. That we can be healthy. That our families might be happy together even when more stress lands on already strained relationships. If we are very young we hope for exciting things from Santa’s well-equipped warehouses. But I don’t think any of those hopes are what Brooks was writing about.

I think our real hopes are for something much grander. We hope for something of which we can barely speak, so extravagant is our hoping. We hope for peace. We hope for peace, though we scarcely know how to conceive it. The peace we have known are momentary intervals between conflicts. That is not the peace we hope for. We hope for something more even though we do not know how to name it or even pray for it. We hope for peace.

We hope for food and enough to eat. We have enough, to be sure. In fact, we have too much, as our scales likely tell us. But we know that many don’t have too much; they don’t have enough. As people of faith, we try to do something about that. But we hope for something more potent and more permanent than our own good will provides. We hope for enough for everyone.

We hope for an end to sickness, to cancer, to AIDS. We hope for an end to racism and prejudice and everything that divides the human community into angry camps. We hope for an end to our homesickness for God. We hope for the healing of the creation. That is what we hope for. “The hopes and fears of all the years.”

It’s so easy to give up on hope. It’s so easy to make fun of hope. It’s easy to poke fun at worshipers like us, vulnerable people who put ourselves out on a limb of faith to pray to God for hope, asking for such extravagant Christmas gifts as peace, food for the hungry, better treatments for cancer and AIDS, and even greater things. We hope, really, for God but it is so much easier and safer to hope reasonable hopes, smaller hopes, manageable hopes.

But then we are no longer journeying to new Bethlehems where God seeks to be born again in us and in our world. It took courage and faith for Ruth to go to Bethlehem. And it still takes courage and faith for us to journey to Bethlehem and live as people of hope.

The late Joseph Sittler, for many years a professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School, once commented about how he still plants trees. After he retired, Sittler often went around with a shovel looking for a good place to plant seedlings. He said that Christian hope is in God, not in human history. He wrote, “I do not think we are in a very good situation historically. Our record indicates that we can walk with our eyes wide open straight into sheer destruction if there is a profit on the way.… I have no great expectations that human cussedness will somehow be quickly modified and turned into generosity or that humanity’s care of the earth will improve much. But I still go around campus planting trees.”[2]

Dr. Sittler was man of hope. Even so, we must be people of hope, planting trees as we journey always to Bethlehem where Christ will be born again. Not trees all tinseled up with sentiment but true trees of Christmas, trees of hope.

[1] Ian Bradley, ed., The Penguin Book of Carols (London: Penguin Books, 1999) 224-227.

[2] Joseph Sittler, Grace Notes and Other Fragments (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1981) 97.