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Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
Pleasantness was married to my God, the king. But then sickness and death came into her family, and now she has lost, not just her smile, she's lost her very name. We spent the first six weeks of the fall in a series called learning to listen. And in the journal about that series, we wrote, there is a kind of exhaustion unique to our moment. Not just physical tiredness, more like fatigue of constant noise.
Jeremy Duncan:Headlines, notifications, podcasts at double speed, opinions arriving faster than we can possibly process them. We are endlessly connected and yet somehow profoundly disconnected from each other. And maybe that's because one of the deepest spiritual cries of our age is not just disbelief, it is distraction. We're losing our ability to listen. And look, we in this province just came through a referendum this week largely because we're struggling to listen to each other these days.
Jeremy Duncan:In fact, we responded to questions that will impact people whose voices were explicitly not heard in that process. The thing is, I would offer that the way of Jesus offers us an alternative. A path that very intentionally opens space for us to both learn from and to listen to each other. And so for the past six weeks, we have talked about that listening. We started by talking about how we listen to our own hearts, how doubt and fear and sometimes even indecisiveness are not voices to silence, but instead conversation partners that can help us to be honest with ourselves.
Jeremy Duncan:We talked about listening to our neighbor and how really it's about welcoming someone to become a neighbor. The idea that the answer to the question, who is my neighbor, is always downstream from our decision of whether we will listen to someone. We talked about listening to the stranger, how sometimes putting the conversation we think we want to have on hold so that we can create room for someone new at the table, how sometimes that's actually what gets us into the conversation we really want to have. We talked about the divine voice in nature and the idea that sometimes slowing down, observing, listening, not for more ideas and explanations and theories and concepts, but for the voice of stillness and presence. How that can speak in ways we sometimes forget.
Jeremy Duncan:We talked about spiritual ancestors, how our story is built upon those who came before us, and then last week, it was all about scripture. A conversation about listening to the words on the page in ways that point us to the word of God that is alive in Jesus. And all of those conversations with our hearts and with our neighbors, with strangers, and with nature, with those who've come before and with the text that offers those stories to us to read. I think if we can learn to listen there, then perhaps we can learn to listen in our neighborhoods and in our politics and in the choices that we make to contribute to the kingdom of God slowly taking shape all around us all the time. I think that was a good way to start the new season, and I think as someone who talks a lot, someone who gets paid to talk a lot, those conversations were probably more important for me to hear than to preach, so I'll try to hang on to that for the rest of the year as well.
Jeremy Duncan:Today though, we're gonna shift to a new conversation. It's Ruth and the story of chosen family. First though, let's pray. God of grace and love, as we open the scriptures again today, help us to continue to listen. Not just to the voices we already know, of the stories that sound like our own, but also to those we might otherwise overlook.
Jeremy Duncan:To people whose experiences challenge our assumptions or whose lives invite us to see the world a little differently than we have before. As we begin this journey through this story of Ruth, remind us that sometimes the most important tales are found in unexpected places. In the lives of ordinary people and surprising friendships and the quiet courage of those who choose to care for one another anyway? Then, would you teach us to recognize your presence there? So that these ancient words might do more than just inform us, but slowly shape us into people who listen more carefully and who love more generously, who work to make room for one another in ways that we can scarcely even see just yet.
Jeremy Duncan:In the strong name of the risen Christ we pray. Amen. Okay. Today, we start a new series on Ruth and we are gonna work our way through this book together. But today, we will cover the star of the show, Story as Polemic, proper names, and losing our self.
Jeremy Duncan:Ruth is a short little book that is tucked into a nice little seam in the historical books of the Hebrew scriptures. And we're gonna see that right away in verse one. We'll talk about that when we get there, but first, a little bit of background here. This week, I came into the room as my daughter was watching something on the TV, and immediately, I knew what it was. I would recognize those accents anywhere.
Jeremy Duncan:And so, I said, we're watching a little Peppa Pig. And she turned back to me and said, dad, now this one is about George. Now, if you know anything about Peppa Pig, you will know that George is her brother. He only ever talks about dinosaurs. He's usually a bit of a bit character on the side, but apparently for this particular episode, it would seem he was the star of the show, and my daughter was not going to let me steal his shine.
Jeremy Duncan:A little pedantic, but whatever. She's six years old. I let it go. However, I was thinking about that interaction this week as I read through Ruth again and realized that she is not really the central character here either. Now, Ruth is the main character.
Jeremy Duncan:And what I mean by that is that she's the one that grabs the audience's attention. Like, she's the one that we most readily identify ourselves with when we're reading. She's not, however, the central character in the narrative. Because that, of course, is actually her mother-in-law, Naomi. In fact, I would argue the whole narrative arc of the book is the movement from Naomi's emptiness in chapter one to her fullness in chapter four.
Jeremy Duncan:Now granted, that movement only happens because of Ruth, her extraordinary loyalty. So I'm not downplaying her part in the story. I'm just saying that like George, perhaps Naomi deserves her flowers too. Because this is a remarkable little text. It's a story about two women where everyone else, including the love interest by the way, are really supporting characters.
Jeremy Duncan:It's a story where the central character arc belongs to an older woman who doesn't remarry. It's also a story from thousands of years ago that actually passes the Bechdel test. Now, if you don't know that term, it comes from the writer Alison Bechdel, who in 1985 created a little test for films. All you have to do to pass this test is have one scene where two women have a conversation together about something that's not a man. Sounds pretty easy.
Jeremy Duncan:You're probably not surprised about how many films passed this test though. By the way, Alison Bechdel often calls the test the Bechdel Wallace test, and she wants to give credit to her friend Liz Wallace who helped her come up with the idea, which means that the Bechdel Wallace test actually passes the Bechdel test, which is nice. Anyway, for all these reasons, there has always been a lot of scholarly speculation about who wrote this text. It's about a woman. It's named after woman.
Jeremy Duncan:Was it written by a woman? Truth is, we don't know. There have been arguments made to suggest that Samuel wrote it. A Jewish text called the Talmud suggests that. Some traditions have pointed to the prophet Nathan as the author, perhaps at least in part because of the rather vigorous defense of Bathsheba he gives when she's abused by King David.
Jeremy Duncan:That said, there's nothing really available to us in the text to mount a strong argument for any author in particular. Which leaves us though with the only clear fact we do know about the text. It's a uniquely woman centered story about women from the point of view of women named after a woman. I think on balance, I'd argue, it's at least more likely that it was originally written by a woman. Still, could ask, well, when and for what purpose was it written by a woman?
Jeremy Duncan:And those end up being really interesting questions as well. When we get to the actual text, which we will do today, we'll see that it is placed historically in the transition from the judges to the kings of Israel. So the story is in that liminal space between eras. Generally though, we tend to think that the text was written later during the monarchy or probably even after the monarchy during exile. And there's a couple reasons for that.
Jeremy Duncan:First, because the text explicitly ties Ruth's son who's born at the end of the story to the Davidic lineage. So Ruth, a Moabite woman who's faithful to her mother-in-law Naomi and comes to worship the God of Israel becomes an ancestor to the most famous king of Israel. Clearly, that story is written when people know about who David is. So it's adding to the lore that surrounds him. There there is a rather interesting wrinkle though.
Jeremy Duncan:Because after David and after exile, around the time of Ezra and Nehemiah, when the people are returning to their homelands, there emerges this really strict prohibition against non Israelite marriages, marriages with Moabites in particular. And you can understand that historically. The people have been in exile for generations. They have been conquered. And now, they're getting a little bit of autonomy and freedom again.
Jeremy Duncan:So, they want to preserve their national identity as much as possible. But in fact, if you turn to Nehemiah 13, you'll find Nehemiah, leader in Israel coming back from a trip to visit the authorities in Persia who still really in charge. But he's finding the people not really following the reforms that he put in place back in Judea. As he kinda cracks down, that's what's going on in Nehemiah 13. But in verse one it reads, that on that day, the book of Moses was brought out and read aloud in the hearing of the people, and there it was found written that no Ammonite or Moabite should ever be admitted into the assembly of God because they had not met the Israelites with food and water.
Jeremy Duncan:And when the people heard this, they excluded from Israel all who were of foreign descent. Now, context there is that they're opening Torah for the first time in a long time, and they find this story in Deuteronomy where the Moabites aren't very welcoming, and they don't help the Israelites. And so... And then they said, okay. They're all excluded.
Jeremy Duncan:They're all out. Thing is in Ruth, the story is an Israelite family who travels to Moab to find bread. A Moabite woman who makes sure that an Israelite widow has bread. Ruth almost reads like a response to this moment. Are you sure the Moabites are the villains?
Jeremy Duncan:Are you sure that excluding the other is the way forward for us? After all, if a Moabite woman like Ruth could end up being part of the Davidic lineage, then that spoke not only to the welcome of the foreigner, but also to their contributions to the nation. By the way, that perspective is not an outlier in the bible. Isaiah writes in chapter 56, let no foreigner say the Lord will ever exclude me. All of this is why one of the major views in scholarship today surrounding the book of Ruth is that it was likely written or at least came to prominence during this period as part of a polemic against a more fearful distrusting time in Israel's history.
Jeremy Duncan:All that means is that this text is not just written by a woman. This is probably a text written in defense of women, in particular women who were being pushed to the margins of the communities and the families that they had been helping to build. And notice that argument as important as it is is made not with a political treatise, but with a story that helps us to listen to experiences that fall outside of our own lives. Which in the end might just be the biggest gift that Ruth and Naomi offered to us today. But with all of that in mind as background, let's go to the text and we're gonna look at the first five verses of Ruth today.
Jeremy Duncan:In the days when the judges ruled, there was a famine in the land. So a man from Bethlehem in Judah together with his wife and two sons went to live for a while in the country of Moab. The man's name was Elimelech, and his wife's name was Naomi. And the names of his two sons were Maelon and Kilion. They were Ephrathites from Bethlehem, Judah, and they went to Moab and lived there.
Jeremy Duncan:Now, Elimelech, Naomi's husband died and she was left with her two sons. They married Moabite women, one named Orpah, the other Ruth. But after they had lived there about ten years, both Maelon and Kilian also died. And Naomi was left without her two sons or her husband. So that's the start to our story.
Jeremy Duncan:Few things here. Verse one starts off, in the days when the judges ruled. As I mentioned earlier, that's a reference to the historical setting in the development of Israel. We are post patriarchs like Abraham. We are pre kings like David.
Jeremy Duncan:And in that in between period of the nation, which is really not really a nation at all, it's more like a loose confederation of tribes right now. They are being governed by a judge that would rise up in a time of crisis to lead them. A few years ago, we did a series called the last of them, and it was all about the last judge in Israel, a guy named Samuel. In that series though, we covered a lot of the more famous judges in the story, and if you go back and look at that series, what you'll see is that this is a very chaotic time. And it's all characterized by this sort of yo yo effect where the people abandon God and things go badly for them.
Jeremy Duncan:And then a judge rises up to fight on their behalf, lead them back to repentance and things go well for them. Then the judge dies and the people abandon God and things go badly for them once more. Repeat that ad infinitum. That's the whole book. Well, we already talked about how part of the intent of this story is to weave foreign mothers into the royal lineage.
Jeremy Duncan:That story is going to need to be set before the kings emerge. But it's also set in one of the most chaotic, least supportive, most you are absolutely on your own eras of Israelite history. There is no consistent national identity. There is no real national leader. There is no social safety net to lean on here, which means that this first line of the story is not just setting the story in historical context for us, it's placing it in a social context as well.
Jeremy Duncan:Right from the start, first verse, we know these women are going to be in trouble. Naomi is an Israelite widow living on foreign land. She has no husband and now no sons, therefore no legal standing to the land she's standing on. And she's living in a time when lawlessness was more normative than not. Add to that, she has two equally vulnerable, now also widowed daughter in laws to care for.
Jeremy Duncan:This is why the scriptures talk over and over again about caring for the widow and the foreigner. Example, Exodus 22 says, do not mistreat or oppress a foreigner. Do not take advantage of the widow or the fatherless. Why? For you were once foreigners in Egypt.
Jeremy Duncan:This story starts with the central character being a widow and the foreigner all over again. In some sense, this is the central story of the Hebrew people, the Exodus, being told again at the scale of a single human person. What's fascinating though is the way that this is also subtly embedded in the storytelling, but then unfortunately, kind of hidden in our translation of it. In these first few verses, we get a lot of proper names. We're introduced to a lot of characters.
Jeremy Duncan:Elimelech, Naomi, Maelon, Kilion, their wives, Ruth and Orpah. Now, Elimelech is a name that means my God is king. A very good and stately name for a gentleman of this era. And his wife Naomi carries a name that means beauty or pleasant. Some has even gone as far as to suggest that the specific formulation of the name here should be read as my pleasantness.
Jeremy Duncan:In other words, this story starts off pretty well. But then we're introduced to Melon and Kilion. Now Melon comes from a Hebrew root which means to be sick. Although, is an argument that maybe it comes from an Arabic root, means to be sterile. And, Qilion comes from a word that meant to be finished or even to be annihilated.
Jeremy Duncan:There's some evidence of a similar name being applied in Ugaritic texts around the time that way. Point being, unless mom and dad are just really bad at choosing names, those names are part of the storytelling. Right? Like that's likely not was written on the birth certificates. We are being told right from the start how to read the story.
Jeremy Duncan:It's a tale. Gunkel, a very famous Old Testament scholar calls it a novella. A parable, you could even call it in some sense. But you are being tipped off right from the beginning. This is not an objective recounting of history.
Jeremy Duncan:You are meant to be looking for the lesson as you read, and that theme only continues in the names of the daughters in law. Ruth is a name that means friend or companion, which is exactly what she turns out to be. And Orpa, not Oprah, that one's a little more confusing. It could mean either perfume or the back of the neck, depending on which language you want to root the name in. Now remember, she's not an Israelite, so likely not a Hebrew word here.
Jeremy Duncan:But considering that all of the names are gonna tell us something about their characters, most scholars tend to think back of the neck is what Orpah means. Because ultimately, she will decide to turn and walk away from Naomi. Again, point here. In a culture that you're not gonna read this story, you're gonna hear it told. In fact, you're probably more likely to see this acted out in front of you than ever see it written down on paper.
Jeremy Duncan:These names in the first few verses are cluing you in to how to listen. They're setting the stage for what's coming. They're drawing you in with a little bit of intrigue about how the story will unfold. And yet, we're still missing the big reveal in the opening because we've buried it in English. In verse two, we read that the man's name was Elimelech and his wife's name was Naomi.
Jeremy Duncan:In verse four, we read that Elimelech, Naomi's husband died. But then in verse five, after all the tragedy has hit, in English we read that Naomi was left without her two sons or her husband. In Hebrew, what it says is that the woman was left alone. Imagine listening as somebody is telling this story. Pleasantness was married to my God the king, but then sickness and death came into her family, and now she has lost not just her smile, she's lost her very name.
Jeremy Duncan:We'll even see next week. She doesn't want to be called pleasantness anymore. She wants to be known as bitterness. Have you ever found yourself grieving something so deeply that it actually started to feel like you had lost not just that thing, but something of yourself? That somehow your sense of identity itself was slipping away from you?
Jeremy Duncan:Or that despite all the people that maybe came to visit you, to see you, to comfort you, you had somehow become invisible to them in some way. There was some part of you they couldn't see, like they didn't really know you anymore. Maybe for you, it was being a mother or a father or a husband or a wife, maybe a job that you had really come to love. It was more than a job now. It really felt like a calling and somehow that was taken away from you.
Jeremy Duncan:Maybe health issues? A sport you used to play? An activity where you felt really alive and now that's gone? It it can be a really profound thing when age and health inevitably begin to show themselves in our lives. I'm on the edge of 50 now.
Jeremy Duncan:My beard is starting to show a little more gray than I think it should. There's a lot of changes on the horizon. Maybe it's something less tangible, the way that people in your life used to look to you. Maybe the fact that your kids don't need you for help as much as they used to. That's changing for me now.
Jeremy Duncan:It's wonderful, but there are times it still stings a bit. My daughter's six years old. She's at the stage where just when we're ready to go and everything is packed up and we might actually make it somewhere on time, she will make sure, insist that she is the one to get herself into the car and buckle her own seat for herself. And look, yes, most of the time I'm just annoyed because I wanna get going, but sometimes honestly, I'm a little sad because I want her to still need my help. But all of a sudden, we lose these things and we start to wonder if we're not that anymore, who are we at all?
Jeremy Duncan:That's the internal monologue that these opening voices verses are starting to lay out for us here. Naomi has lost so much already that she's starting to lose her name With the added complication that in the ancient world, without a husband and without her sons, Naomi's identity crisis is a lot more than just an identity crisis. This is a very real matter of social and economic standing too. In other words, she really is in trouble here. And the text, the storytelling is inviting us to feel that as much as we understand it.
Jeremy Duncan:And we'll explore all of that as we move through this story. It's really the foundation of Naomi's journey and Ruth's courage to stick with her. But I think here in these opening verses, at least for today, the question for us to face is not how we bypass grief in our lives, but to wonder about how we hold on to ourselves in the midst of it. These verses name something that is very real in our world today. Often, our sense of identity, who we are, is very wrapped up in status markers.
Jeremy Duncan:And that might be the things we see in the story, being a mother or a father, a husband or a wife, but often it's really career or contribution, sense of status or success that defines us for us. Now I get that. I feel that. Sometimes I am not entirely sure who I would be without my job. But one of the images that I come back to consistently when I face that weight and I find myself coming up against that pressure, who am I?
Jeremy Duncan:It's the image of Jesus' baptism in the Jordan River. It's recorded in three of the gospels mentioned in the fourth, but as I was watching baptisms here in this room right there last week, I couldn't help myself to think back to that moment at the start of the story nine verses into the gospel of Mark. Before Jesus has performed a miracle or called the disciple, before he has offered a prayer in public or even a single word of wisdom, Jesus walks down to the Jordan River, and the first divine words recorded in that gospel are not from Jesus. They are these words that come down from heaven. You are my son whom I love.
Jeremy Duncan:With you I am well pleased. Which means that the first time we meet Jesus, it is not as teacher or rabbi or prophet or savior. It's not with any title that's connected to anything that he will do or has done yet. It is simply this as beloved son. That's what I want for myself when I lose sight of it.
Jeremy Duncan:That's what I want for Naomi. That's where the story will take her over the next five weeks. That's what I want for all of us at some point in our journey. Not that we wouldn't grieve, or not that we wouldn't find ourselves sad when that's appropriate, but in the midst of our laments. That we would somehow never lose sight of the fact that our inherent worth does not come from what we produce or from the titles that we acquire or from how we live up to the expectations of those around us and what they think we should be doing.
Jeremy Duncan:Because the truth is all of that can get taken away from us. And if it does, it will hurt. But it still will not change your identity as the beloved child of an infinite God. That's what Naomi is struggling to hold on to in this moment. That's what Ruth will help bring her back to over the course of the story as they begin to care for each other and help each other move forward.
Jeremy Duncan:And I think for us, if we can learn to hold on to that, not only will we learn to grieve better, but perhaps we can find ourselves able to sit with each other's stories as well. In ways that bring real healing to our loss and real repair to our sense of self that can honestly sometimes feel like it is slipping away. That's what the story is about. The ways that we bring us back to ourselves. At the core of identity is the beloved children of a loving God.
Jeremy Duncan:Let's pray. God for this story that reminds us of all the things that we can lose and the one thing that we cannot. I pray that as we walk with these two women through their story, loyalty and courage, their fear and trust in you, that we might be able to see something of ourselves. Both in the losses that we experience, the grief that we name for ourselves, but also in the ways that we journey with someone else and remain stuck to them to pull them back to their sense of belovedness in the world. May that be all of our stories, recognizing that someone is sticking with us, helping us move forward even as we do the same for someone else.
Jeremy Duncan:And that as we do, holding on to that core of our identity, we can move forward toward a world where each of us is never left on our own to our own devices, but carried along by grace and love and commitment by the relationships that shape your kingdom and change the world. May this story slowly become part of ours, and may that take shed in the steps that we take toward each other. In the strong name, the risen God we pray. Amen. Hey, Jeremy here, and thanks for listening.
Jeremy Duncan:If you're intrigued by the work that we're doing at Commons, you can head to our website anytime, commons.church, for more information. You can find us on all of the socials CommonsChurch, and you can subscribe to our YouTube channel, where we're posting content regularly for the community. So, thanks for tuning in, have a great week!