1 post tagged “ruth & naomi”
Several years ago, my friend Ranjit Mathews spoke at the Presiding Bishop’s Forum on Global Reconciliation, held during the Episcopal Church’s General Convention in Minneapolis. Part of Ranjit’s talk included a personal conversion or transformation story of sorts, which I share with you today:
In light of September 11th, and in the light of globalization, [he writes] we need to create a new paradigm, maybe a Christian paradigm of tolerance. I feel this word reconciliation very deeply. For it was because of the reconciling love of Christ that I became a Christian. My family and I were traveling in India, now nearly four years ago and we were in the state of Karnataka. I was 20 and had recently completed my sophomore year at school. But within that, the form of Christian worship that I was a part of had a lot to do with fundamentalism. That means there were a lot of regulations put on me, such as I couldn’t listen to hip--hop because it wasn’t Christian music, or I couldn’t hang out with a certain group of friends because they weren’t Christian. I found this to be very problematic for it was not allowing me to be me. I felt like this wasn’t what it meant to be a Christian for it was putting me in a box.
Then my family and I went to India, and we stopped one day in the city of Mysore in the state of Karnataka. My family and I went to a cathedral, and as we were leaving it, at the top of the stairs were two leper girls. They had no legs and were rolling around on makeshift skateboards. One of them came to me, and we both stared into each other’s eyes, and then she took her hand, touched my foot and then brought it to her mouth. I had been reconciled very distinctly. I had come to know that Christ simply asks that we come as we are, and that we love with revolutionary fervor.
[St. Paul, in Ephesians, talks about the "new being," and it was at this point that I had believe I had become one — and isn’t that what we proclaim as Christians, that we are new beings. We are new creations.]
Ranjit’s story is the modern day story of Ruth, Naomi, Jesus and the Samaritan. He fleshes out what is a bit buried in today’s lectionary text—this idea of tolerance in its most welcoming form, being in the world as we are and loving with revolutionary fervor. The subtext of the Ruth and Jesus story is one of breaking societal rules and convention so that the world will open up a bit to be a more just, humane and happy place.
Ruth and Naomi’s story is the tale of two women, one young and one old, both husbandless, childless and vulnerable to the systems operating in the world around them. In a society that defined a woman’s worth by her marital status and offspring, Ruth, Orpah and Naomi had nothing to stand on. Living in Moab, it was even worse for Naomi who was husbandless and found herself a complete outsider in her late husband’s community. When the breaking point came and Ruth, Orpah and Naomi needed to make a decision and act in order to survive, each woman chose a path based on her needs. Orpah chose to follow a promising route—that of sticking around in her own land so to maximize the chances of finding a mate and with that a stable life. Naomi, the oldest of the three women, decided that she needed to return to her land and people. Ruth made the riskiest decision of all by braving the unknown and opting to follow Naomi to her homeland. In choosing to leave Moab, Ruth elected the status of outsider for herself when it would have been much easier to meet a fellow Moabite and start a family of her own in Moab. In Jewish Bethlehem, Ruth would have been forever marginalized by race and religion. But instead of clinging to security and what was known to her, she clung to the idea of a new life with Ruth. It’s what I consider revolutionary love on the scale of laying one’s life down for another. And so, the pair went off to Bethlehem, traveling with confidence in themselves and what they had to offer to one another and the world, knowing that God is with them on the journey.
To the women and men who through the ages continue to identify with Ruth and Naomi’s situation, their story is an inspiration. What woman in this generation has not had to face the possibility of breaking in a new path and the complexities and struggle that come from venturing out on that uncharted territory as we navigate the demands of past, present and future. Struggling to find themselves, Ruth and Naomi set off on a journey that brings them transformation, that process of coming to wholeness, growing into the skin of creation in a way that we become more than we ever thought we could become.
We can think of the encounter between Jesus and the Samaritan in the same light. Here is another story that puts front and center the issue of marginalization and lays out the politics of who is both in and out. Jesus, walking toward Jerusalem, is negotiating a zone of margin—the region between Samaria and Galilee. In this space, he encounters a group of outcast people—lepers—both Jewish and Samaritan who ask to be healed. We know that lepers kept distant from non-lepers, formed colonies and often positioned themselves at traffic ways in order to make appeals for charity. Jesus is unfazed by his interaction with this group. He sends them to their priests to receive healing. Yet, it’s the outcast of the outcast--the Samaritan leper--that returns to Jesus in order to share his profound gratitude. Thus, only the outsider earns the full blessing of Jesus’ ministry. This encounter is typical of the Gospel of Luke, which likes to highlights the plight of the marginalized. The fact that only the outsider is stunned into a public decry of thankfulness is a metaphor for the disintegration of Israel’s choseness into blindness and complacency.
The construction of non-negotiable boundaries in the form of constraining societal rules and regulations is a peculiar and particularly human thing. The orchestrators of such binding rules are driven by their fear of a loss of control – of what chaos might ensue if such rules were not in place. Yet the stories of redemption we hear about over and over again in the Bible are tales of intermixing on the margins—these stories embody the deconstruction and destruction of such rules, regulations and hurtful social conventions. Over and over again we read of one mainstream group finding its redemption through a marginalized group or of one marginalized group being redeemed by another marginalized community. For Ranjit it was the moment he received a kiss from the leper woman—a kiss of peace which has set him on fire to do the most incredible work in the world. Ruth’s catalytic point came when she set off to a far away place together with the woman she loved, trusting that the difficulties and joys would change her life and the lives of others in a powerful way. The relationships like the one between Jesus and the Samaritan leper dissolved the rules of out-castness so that as we read in today’s Psalm: “God takes up the weak out of the dust and lifts up the poor from the ashes, setting them with the princes, the princes of his people.”
I often find myself in a fury, studying these biblical texts knowing full well that in 2000 years of history, these lessons—these desires of God are far from heard and internalized, let alone realized. In Southern California, with issues that stare us in the face as we go about our daily lives, it’s quite easy to know this all too well. There are too many issues here we could lift up as examples. How many times have I found myself zigzagging Los Angeles (or even Santa Barbara County) before finally realizing how spooked I was driving through palatial to impoverished and back through palatial and impoverished as I traveled the same street across town. This disequilibrium is the pattern of any American urban layout. It’s also the sort of segregation that two millennia ago Jesus worked to dispel. So what does it mean, when formal institutions and informal groups of people reinforce the politics of who is in and who is out? What does it mean when self professed Christians and the institution of the Church create a culture where heterogeneity and plurality are not respected? The realities we read about in the Bible are so intimately human that they travel through time. We’re able to understand the power struggles of Jesus’ time because they continue to be played out before our very eyes today. Conversely, we are also able to glean from these stories the key to redemption. Just as the world is made wrong through people, it is also made right through people. And it’s made right in a very big way by those people hanging out on the margins, those people trekking between the margin and the center and those people choosing to leave the comfort of their margin to intermix on a new margin. You can’t be a person of faith, a new being or simply one who loves with revolutionary fervor all alone. Even the most secluded, out-in-the-cave hermit is supported by a community that makes life possible. God comes to us through one another, sometimes as one another. This is why we can’t afford to go it alone or manipulate who will be included and who will be excluded. Just as all words are defined in relation to other words, all selves are defined in relation to other selves. Truth or the Kingdom of God, then, is inscribed in larger and larger contexts. When people like Ruth, the leper-Girl, Naomi, Ranjit, the Samaritan, Jesus and countless others encounter that larger context, something shifts. It’s in this work that the multiplicity of God’s love bubbles forth into a new corner of the Kingdom. And, only multiplicity of relation—this form of relationship and coalition building between margin and center and margin and margin—only this form of relationship building yields new flavors and experiences of God’s love.
Amen.
Year C, Pentecost 19/Proper 23
