Sermon Text: Ruth 1:1-19a
Date: July 13, 2025
Event: Proper 10, Year C
Ruth 1:1-19a (EHV)
During the days of the judges, a famine occurred in the land. So a man left Bethlehem in Judah to stay awhile in the territory of Moab—he, his wife, and his two sons. 2The man’s name was Elimelek, his wife’s name was Naomi, and the names of his two sons were Mahlon and Kilion. They were from the clan of Ephrath from Bethlehem in Judah. They entered the territory of Moab and remained there.
3But Elimelek, Naomi’s husband, died, so she was left with her two sons. 4They then married Moabite wives. The name of the first was Orpah, and the name of the second was Ruth. They lived there for about ten years. 5But Naomi’s sons, Mahlon and Kilion, also died. So the woman was left without her two children and without her husband.
6Then Naomi set out with her daughters-in-law to return from the territory of Moab, because while she was in the territory of Moab, she had heard that the Lord had graciously visited his people by providing them with food. 7So she left the place where she had been, and her two daughters-in-law left with her. They set out on the road to return to the land of Judah.
8But Naomi said to her two daughters-in-law, “Go back. Both of you return to your mother’s house. May the Lord show you kindness as you have shown kindness to the dead and to me. 9May the Lord grant that each of you finds security in the house of a husband.” Then she kissed them, and they wept loudly.
10But they said to her, “No, we will return with you to your people.”
11Then Naomi said, “Turn back, my daughters. Why should you go with me? Am I going to give birth to any more sons who could become your husbands? 12Turn back, my daughters. Go! For I am too old to be married to another husband. Suppose I say, ‘I have hope, and I will be married to another husband tonight, and I will even give birth to sons.’ 13Would you wait for them until they grow up? On the basis of that hope would you give up the chance to marry another husband? No, my daughters. It is much more bitter for me than for you, because the hand of the Lord has reached out against me.”
14They once again wept loudly. Then Orpah kissed her mother-in-law, but Ruth would not let her go.
15Naomi said, “Look, your sister-in-law has returned to her people and to her gods. Go back! Follow your sister-in-law.”
16But Ruth said, “Do not urge me to abandon you or to turn back from following you. Because wherever you go, I will go, and wherever you make your home, I will make my home. Your people will be my people, and your God will be my God. 17Wherever you die, I will die, and there I will be buried. May the Lord punish me severely and double it if anything but death separates me from you.”
18When Naomi saw that Ruth was determined to go with her, she stopped urging her.
19Then the two of them traveled until they arrived at Bethlehem.
Find a Neighbor to Love
We like to find limits, or even loopholes, in the rules. “I know I set a budget for myself, but this sale is too good to pass up.” “Sure, the speed limit says 65, but I know they don’t enforce that until you’re more than 10 over, so it’s no problem if I drive 74.” “Mom only said to go to my room, so setting two feet inside the door and then turning around and coming back out shouldn’t be a problem.” Those “loopholes” won’t do much good for your bank account or your interactions with the police officer. And I don’t think I’ve ever met a parent who likes to discuss the technicalities of outlined discipline with their child.
Unfortunately, this loophole-seeking attitude also often shows up in our approach to God's commands and directions. We might think of Peter asking Jesus how many times he had to forgive his brother who sinned against him, perhaps seeking justification to refuse forgiveness on some immature, but theological, technicality.
We’re going to focus our meditation this morning on our First Reading from the book of Ruth. Ruth lived during the time period referred to as the “days of the judges.” These were the years in the Promised Land between Israel’s initial entry into the land after wandering in the wilderness and the beginning of the monarchy with King Saul. This stretch of roughly 300 years was a particularly tumultuous time in Israel’s history. There’s a refrain that echoes throughout the book of Judges, “In those days there was no king in Israel, and every man did whatever was right in his own eyes” (Judges 17:6). There is wholesale dismissal of God as the leader of the nation and the leader of the individual people. People were looking for loopholes, or more flagrantly, just outright ignoring what God had said. If you read through Judges, you see many examples of a cycle that loops back on itself over and over again: Israel is unfaithul; God sends chastisement, usually in the form of an enemy foreign power; the people recognize their mistakes and pead to God for help; God gives his people relief, usually through some ad hoc leaders referred to as judges… until they are unfaithful again, and the cycle starts anew.
However, despite this negative cycle, the faith life in Israel during these years was not all bleak. There are snapshots, snippets of faithfulness among God’s people preserved for us in Scripture. Sometimes, the faithfulness even stands out as extraordinary. Clearly, God was continuing to preserve his faithful, his remnant, even if the nation at large was often struggling to be faithful to him.
In our First Reading this morning, we have one of those highlights from this time period: the account of Ruth. We pick up with Ruth right at the very beginning of the book, and so we hear the quick outline of her life. She was not an Israelite; she was a Gentile, a Moabite. She met her husband and his family when they moved from Israel during a time of famine. Ruth was eventually brought into this believing Old Testament family, and she joined them in their faith by the working of the Holy Spirit.
Her faith produced a dedication not only to her family but to God as well. As the years went on, tragedy struck this extended family. Mahlon and Kilion, Naomi and Elimilek’s children, both died. That left Naomi as a widow for some amount of time already, and Orpah and Ruth, her sons’ wives, as widows in the prime of their lives. Having lost all of the men in her family, Naomi decided to return home to Israel. She wanted to release her daughters-in-law from any obligation they might feel toward her, to take care of or provide for her, because she was returning home. “Go back. Both of you return to your mother’s house. May the Lord show you kindness as you have shown kindness to the dead and to me. May the Lord grant that each of you finds security in the house of a husband.” After some hesitation, Orpah followed Naomi’s direction. However, the weeping embraces make it clear that this was not an easy decision for her.
But Ruth didn’t follow Orpah’s lead. Ruth dedicated herself, latching onto her mother-in-law with a protective dedication and love. Now she didn’t have to do this; she was under no obligation to do this. In fact, a lot of people might say this decision was unwise. Why connect yourself at the hip to your mother-in-law, whom you were not officially joined to by marriage anymore? Why leave and go to a foreign nation with her and abandon your people, customs, broader family, and comfort zone? Even beyond that, Ruth was possibly dedicating herself to a long life of widowhood. Would she find another Israelite man willing to bend God’s directions and also marry her, a Gentile?
Ruth was not driven by what was best for herself; her love for Naomi drove her. This is clearly shown in Ruth’s imploring: “Do not urge me to abandon you or to turn back from following you. Because wherever you go, I will go, and wherever you make your home, I will make my home. Your people will be my people, and your God will be my God. Wherever you die, I will die, and there I will be buried. May the Lord punish me severely and double it if anything but death separates me from you.”
In all aspects of life, only doing the bare minimum can be a tempting loophole to try to find. A child might try to figure out what is the least that needs to be done to keep the teacher satisfied and the parents off his or her back. A spouse might try to do just enough to keep a semblance of peace in the home, but nothing more. It is tempting to see work responsibilities as a minimum bar that we have to reach. And yet, when we think of our responsibility to our neighbor, to love our neighbor as ourselves, this bare-minimum approach gets expressed in the same question that the man asked Jesus in our Gospel, “Who is my neighbor?” (Luke 10:29).
How many people do I have to love? How many people do I have to feel responsible for in order to meet God’s definition of loving my neighbor as myself? In Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan, while obviously a stunning example of going above and beyond in showing love, Jesus's real point is answering the man’s question. Who is your neighbor? Your neighbor is everyone, not just those who are close to you by emotion, relationships, language, faith, or location.
It is not by accident that Jesus made the Samaritan the one who went out of his way to help the Jewish man beset by robbers. The Samaritans and the Jewish people did not get along at all. That he would go out of his way to show love to an enemy speaks volumes. You could imagine many people advising this Samaritan that he shouldn’t waste his time or resources on this man. After all, weren’t there people closer to him who should be helping him? Something like, “Let the Jewish people help the Jewish people and the Samaritans help the Samaritans!”
How often don’t we consider our love for others in the same way? “Well, that person needs more help than I can offer, so I’m not going to do anything.” Or, “This person is not really my responsibility. They have family or friends who should really be taking the lead here.” Or, “This person got themselves into this mess; I’m not going to help them get out of it. That’s their responsibility.” And in those moments, we’re not even asking Jesus who our neighbor is. We’re saying to him very directly, “No, this person is not my neighbor. And God, you are wrong if you think differently.”
Outside of the situation, we can hear clearly that that’s not what we want to say to God. But that notion of trying to do the bare minimum, finding a loophole in God’s commands, applies here far too often. The reality is that, as far as God is concerned, there is no minimum; there’s only perfection. There is only love for everyone. Do everything for everyone that you possibly can. Love like the Samaritan loved the man who fell into the hands of robbers. Love like Ruth loved Naomi. Love in a way that doesn’t seem to make sense. Love in a way that might make you vulnerable, might set you up to be hurt, might set you up to be taken advantage of.
We can see this kind of love most clearly in our Savior.
If anyone could be said not to owe anything to anyone, it would be Jesus. His entire mission of mercy, his entire mission to save mankind from their sin, was something that, objectively, he didn’t have to do. There’s no reason why God should have felt compelled to do this other than baffling, one-sided love for us. Because the sin that he’s rescuing us from is our sin against him. He is the one who has been harmed; he is the one who has been taken advantage of; he is the one who has a nearly unending stream of enemies in the sinful human race. And yet still, he goes looking for someone to love; he goes digging to find people who need his forgiveness but certainly do not deserve it; he seeks out you and me.
That means we have experienced the kind of love God asks us to share with others, which goes way above and beyond what people would naturally think is reasonable. We’ve experienced love that forgives when hurt, love that seeks the good of others even at the expense of self, and love that is perhaps illogical.
Which brings us back to Ruth. She follows through on her promise. These are not empty words. She subjects herself to living in poverty with her mother-in-law when they return to Israel, to Bethlehem. Their need is significant enough that they don’t even have food; Ruth goes out into the fields, gleaning from the leftovers at the harvest. But in Ruth’s account, we see another extraordinary measure of love because she gleaned in the fields of a man named Boaz, a relative to Naomi, if a bit distantly so. Yet Boaz is a man who showed both Naomi and Ruth love and mercy that went above and beyond.
In the end, Ruth and Boaz marry. Ruth, this Gentile, this Moabite woman, is brought into a believing family through marriage yet again. God showers extraordinary mercy and blessings on them both because Ruth and Boaz will be ancestors of King David. As a result, Ruth and Boaz will also be part of the human ancestry of our Savior Jesus. God not only loves them and forgives them, but he brings them into the line of the Savior, the plan of salvation, through whom he will rescue all mankind from their sins.
The love of God for you means that your sin is forgiven. Cling to your Savior and let your Savior’s love guide and dictate the love you have for others. Let us not look for the loophole, the bare minimum, that would argue for the smallest circle of acquaintances that we could possibly show love to so that we satisfy requirements that God might have for us. Instead, in love, in thanksgiving to God for his free forgiveness, let us love in extraordinary, baffling ways, in ways that others might say are too much, but that we know are but a pale reflection of the love God has shown us. In our love for other people, whether members of our family, friends, neighbors, or complete strangers, may we be living witnesses and examples of the love that Jesus has had for us and all people.
May our love, motivated by thanksgiving for God’s forgiveness, instill in us the desire to share not only the physical and emotional needs of this life but also the true spiritual and eternal needs all people have. We do not only look to help with food, clothing, shelter, physical care, and emotional needs, but we also share the good news of our Savior Jesus with our neighbors and with the world.
Find a neighbor, many neighbors among the people of the world. Love them, just as Jesus found and loved you. Amen.
