Ruth and the Remarkable Ordinary
I grew up with the belief that in order to make it big time in ministry, you needed to have a large and prosperous church. You needed to have a stellar worship band. You needed to have a constantly changing stage backdrop with modern illustration to stay in touch with the times.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned that big-time ministry with its bells and whistles is not the only way a church can be deemed as “successful”. How do we define success in the church? Is church success defined by how many people fill the pews? Is it based on how charismatic the preacher is? Who is successful: the church that hosts thousands of parishioners in its service or the church that holds 30 parishioners that come to worship every Sunday?
Where would-be worshippers make a mistake is putting one church over the other, usually in measurements of how impressive it is.
As we read the broad, comprehensive biblical story of God at work in the world, most of us are entirely impressed: God speaking creation into being, God laying the foundations of the life of faith through great and definitive fathers and mothers, God saving a people out of a brutal slave existence and then forming them into lives of free and obedient love, God raising up leaders who direct and guide through the tangle of difficulties always involved in living joyfully and responsively before God.
This is very impressive. So impressive, in fact, that many of us, while remaining impressed, feel left out. Our unimpressive, very ordinary lives make us feel like outsiders to such a star-studded cast. We disqualify ourselves. Guilt or willfulness or accident makes a loophole and we assume that what is true for everyone else is not true for us. We conclude that we are, somehow, “just not religious” and thus unfit to participate in the big story.
And then we turn a page and come on this small story of two widows and a farmer in their out-of-the-way village.
The outsider Ruth was not born into the faith and felt no natural part of it--like many of us. But she came to find herself gathered into the story and given a quiet and obscure part that proved critical to the way everything turned out.
For some time, American churches have tried to show the world just how impressive it can be with the creation of the mega church.
What is concerning is this type of church presentation setting precedence for generations “who did not know the Lord or the works he had done for Israel.” With technology making the experience of a worship gathering enter into homes across the world, people can customize their church experience to their taste. They don’t even have to get out of bed on Sunday morning to go to church--it’s on their phone screen. If something is offensive on a particular Sunday, that sermon is jettisoned and a new one can be slotted in its place. If the worship is top-shelf, but the preaching is sub-par, what results is piecemeal worship. “I’ll listen to this worship team, but not the pastor. I’ll listen to this pastor, but play some other music.” We have the ability to tailor our worship experience as personal as we want, and mega churches provide such experiences.
What piecemeal worship results in is not souls being formed in the ways of God, but “consumer congregants” unwilling to “wrestle with God” (Gen. 32:24-29) and unwilling to search out truth (Acts 17:10-12). Consumer worship has trained us in laziness. Rather than embrace the challenge of critical thinking, we settle on amputating the parts of the Church body (1 Cor. 12:14) we don’t agree with. We don’t get the body of Christ when that happens; we get a bloody corpse from a horror movie and say, “This is what my religion looks like.”
But there is the local church. The church where everyone knows one another’s names, what sports their kids are doing, who’s in the hospital and could use a visit, and who could use prayer to get a job. It’s more personal, but it’s also pretty ordinary.
On the surface, Ruth tells a very ordinary story. There are no archaic battles, there’s no glitz and glam, there’s simply no impressiveness to the story. There is just the story of a girl from another country trying to find her place in the life she married into.
Very ordinary, but we will soon see it as remarkably ordinary.
She gets married and is introduced to her mother-in-law and sister-in-law. Through tragic circumstances, both her and her sister-in-law lose their husbands (we aren’t given the details of what happens) and her sister-in-law decides to return back to where she came from. Ruth’s mother-in-law, Naomi, bids Ruth do the same, but for Ruth, there is more here in this new life than there is back home. So, she doesn’t capitulate to Naomi’s orders.
And as we read, we have to remember that we are reading when “everyone did what was right in their own eyes.” So, we expect to read a similar story from the previous stories in Judges where a left-handed man sinks a blade into the gut of an oppressive ruler (Judges 3:12-23), or a story where a single man defeated 600 Philistines with the equivalent of a cattle prod. We read to hear about Deborah, Gideon, and Samson: all warriors who delivered the people out in very powerful and impressive ways.
And the book of Judges ends with the verse, “In those days Israel had no king; everyone did as they saw fit.” (Judges 21:25) There is still strife and there is still oppression: the outside force coming in to exercise authority.
Then we start a new scripture book, Ruth. We expect blood to be spilled, heads to roll, victories to be won. The account is four chapters long, so the action needs to get going from the first sentences. What we get is a situation: famine. A family has the spotlight thrown on them. The most action we get is the men in this family dying off, leaving the women to carry the story and even all three of them don’t stick together.
If the book of Judges showed us the spectacular extraordinary that God does in the midst of enslavement and persecution, the book of Ruth shows us the remarkable ordinary where metaphorical King Anarchy is still the ruling monarch and people are just trying to get by.
Ruth reminds us that we all have a part to play and that there is no one person (or organization) that has the God-life cornered and figured out. And even though this story might read like a Hallmark movie, its crescendo comes in the last verses where Boaz marries Ruth and they conceive and give birth to a son, Obed...
“Salmon the father of Boaz,
Boaz the father of Obed,
Obed the father of Jesse,
And Jesse the father of David.”
The great-grandmother of eventual-king David tells her story to us. It is ordinary, but it is remarkably ordinary.
