Ruth Resisted. The Rev. Marvin Lance Wiser Eden United Church of Christ Hayward, California. Twenty-fifth Sunday After Pentecost

Transcription

1 Ruth Resisted The Rev. Marvin Lance Wiser Eden United Church of Christ Hayward, California Twenty-fifth Sunday After Pentecost November 11, 2018 Ezra 9:1-4 & Ruth 1:1-10, Have you ever heard the saying, you can t really understand the New Testament without reading the Old Testament? Well, I think it s about the same that you can t really understand the book of Ruth without reading first the books of Ezra-Nehemiah- at least in my reading of the texts. So that s why I paired a bit of Ezra with Ruth this morning. We ll explore their relationship a bit more in a minute, but first I just wanna ask, My goodness, have y all been watching the news this past week? I feel like we need a big long exhale. The mass shooting in Thousand Oaks, followed by the fires in both Northern and Southern California, but even before these tragic stories, we were already pretty beat up, weren t we?, having gone through the midterms and the last attempt campaigning that accompanies that. To be sure our prayers are with those affected by the mass shooting and the still raging fires. If you watched the news leading up to this past week s election, you probably couldn t help to notice that a lot of the rhetoric was racially charged and portrayed immigrants in a very disparaging light. The President ran an ad a week before the election that vilified impoverished migrants from Central America as criminal cop killers and invaders. After a few runs the main networks pulled it due to its insensitivity. Facebook too, stating: "This ad violates Facebook's advertising policy against sensational content so we are rejecting it. While the video is allowed to be posted on Facebook, it cannot receive paid distribution." 1

2 And on Monday even Fox News pulled the ad. So you know if Fox pulls it, that says a lot. These past couple weeks we relived campaign tactics that were built on fear, anger, and division - capitalizing on nationalist sentiments. A New York Times article from earlier this year, entitled, The Myth of the Immigrant Criminal, dispels for us these lies we are told. Research showed that in 136 metro areas, almost 70 percent of those studied, the immigrant population increased between 1980 and 2016 while crime stayed stable or fell. 1 And even a 2018 study by the CATO Institute demonstrates that foreign born persons residing in Texas commit crimes at a lower rate than their native-born counterparts. 2 Reports to the contrary are baseless propaganda feeding a false and harmful myth, stoking the flames of xenophobia and White Nationalism. Racially and ethnically charged rhetoric like what we have heard and seen ramping up these last few week leads to the proliferation of interpersonal violence and harassment, like the hate crime against Muslims that gave rise to our own local Eden Area Interfaith Council 3 years ago. And like the atrocity we bore witness to the Saturday before last, the death of innocents, the murdering of 11 Jews at Etz Chaim, Tree of Life, Synagogue in Pittsburgh. This weekend marks the 80th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the event that is often referred to as the beginning of the Holocaust, but, sadly, we are never far removed from the events of bias and hate that led up to it, as last week soberly taught us. Today I want to address nationalism and the false notion of ethnic purity, and how an unlikely biblical immigrant resisted, overstayed her welcome, and forever changed a nation. By way of doing so, let s return to Ezra. Ezra was a Jewish scribe and priest, who was a leader to the Golah community, or the Jews who returned to Jerusalem from the Babylonian Exile under King Cyrus of Persia s rule in the late 6th cent. BCE. Now we ve all heard of the story of the Jewish Exile, when Babylon came in and destroyed Jerusalem in 586 BCE, and all the Jews were taken into captivity. But this is only a small part of the story, because actually most Jews stayed behind. Only a small fraction of the elite and those with significant means were exiled to the capital, Babylon

3 Well, once Persia defeated Babylon, and these elite Jews returned to Judah, or Yehud as it was called then, they were empowered by Persia to repossess and settle the land. 3 Of all the periods of biblical studies, this Persian Period has been the least excavated, archaeologically. But there exist evidence of general demographic continuity in Judah throughout the period we refer to as the Exile. But the Golah community imagined their land of Judah barren, devoid of others. 50 years had passed. And so the original Myth of the Empty Land, to return to reclaim was concocted and given Imperial authorization. Many attribute the instating of the Year of Jubilee to this time, so that those Jews who remained would be required to return lands to the returning elite. The Exile was a true moment of existential crisis for ancient Judaism. On the one hand, those exiled and returning, numbering around 4,000 4 claimed to be the true people of God and thus the Holy Seed, because they were purified in exile and allowed to return to the Promised Land, while on the other hand those Jews who stayed behind in Judah claimed that they were the true people of God because, well, isn t it obvious, they weren t forcibly removed from the Promised Land. Their link of thinking was, God didn t have to kick us out. Well, Ezra is one of the leaders of the Golah Community, or the Returnees from Babylon, and he reintroduces the Torah. But he also initiates other programs to Make Judah Great Again. In spite of the Torah exhorting love of the foreigner some 36 times, he wants to deport all non-judahites. You see, upon their return they find that those who stayed in the land had inter-married with non-jews. And that s where our Scripture reading picks up this morning:...the leaders came to me and said, The people of Israel, including the priests and the Levites, have not kept themselves separate from the neighboring peoples with their detestable practices, like those of the Canaanites, Hittites, Perizzites, Jebusites, Ammonites, Moabites, Egyptians and Amorites. - Ezra 9:1 So, I wonder how a Moabite Migrant in Judah felt around this time? 3 John Kessler, Persia s Loyal Yahwists: Power Identity and Ethnicity in Achaemenid Yehud, in Judah and the Judeans in the Persian Period, eds. Oded Lipschits and Manfred Oeming (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2006: ). 4 Charles E. Carter, The Emergence of Yehud in the Persian Period: A Social and Demographic Study (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999),

4 Most agree that the authoring of the book of Ruth took place, not in the days when the Judges were judging as the book starts out, but during this Persian period. And I choose to think that it was written to protest the more exclusive community that Ezra was endeavoring to build after the Exile. Jeremiah (40:10-12) tells of other Jews who were exiled to other lands than Babylonia, including Moab. The book of Ruth starts ironically with a family emigrating from the Land of Bread, Bethlehem, due to famine, to the neighboring arid country to the east, Moab. According to the 1984 Cartagena Declaration, they would be classified as refugees. The husband Elimelech dies, as do his sons, Machlon and Kilyon, their names meaning Spent and Impotent, respectively, and only the women persist, becoming the true protagonists of this story. The Hebrew verb shuv, to return, in its varied forms occurs 12 times in the first chapter, beckoning our characters to return to the House of Bread. And so they do. Or at least two, No omi the Judahite with her widowed daughter-in-law, Ruth the Moabite. Where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God. -Ruth 1:16 Spoiler Alert: Ruth, a migrant in a foreign land, with seemingly one shot ahead of her to make it, with No omi as her coach implements keen skills of learning and gleaning, and sleeping with feet in order to regain the societal anchors that they had lost in their now widowed and landless reality in Judah. And to make a short story even shorter, Boaz quickly takes notice and, as if to counter the xenophobic nature of Ezra s request to cast all foreign wives aside, he exclaims, For all the elders of my people know that you are a worthy woman. The phrase, eshet chayil is used to describe the Worthy Woman in Prov. 31, the quintessential mother and wife, courageous, valiant, and prudent. Boaz s words echo these qualities for Ruth, the Migrant from Moab. It s as if the authors of Ruth are saying, why would we deport people like Ruth??? Proverbs describes the eshet chayil as harder to find than precious jewels. At the end of the book, the prominent Bethlehemite Boaz, Mr. Strength took the Migrant Moabite Ruth as his wife, and together they had a son, Obed, who, as the story is told, was the grandfather of King David, the King after God s own heart. 4

5 Who are your Grandparents? Where did they come from? Just last Sunday we had a family favorite s potluck that featured family favorites from all over the map. We celebrate diversity and inclusivity here. The Genealogy at the end of the book of Ruth makes quite a statement. Especially once we place Ruth in the context of Ezra. Obed, is half Moabite and half Judahite, and wholly the grandfather of King David, one of the most important Jewish figures. I m not going to bore us with what Levi-Strauss and other anthropologists thoughts about kinship systems and genealogies and how they construct ethnicity, but I will simply state that genealogies are political statements- who we choose to remember and how, and who we choose to forget. 5 The Book of Ruth s highlighting of King David s Moabite ancestry serves precisely to remind the readers that this proximal ethnic other that Ezra choses to deport (Ezra 9:1) is actually closer than they would care to admit. Migration and Ruth complicate Ezra s notion of the Holy Seed. The book of Ruth resists exclusive ways of community. The book of Ruth reminds us that we are traversed by the world and by others in such ways that we are never pure. Ethnic purity, much like the imagined myth of the empty land, is just that: an imagined myth, to serve a few at the detriment of many. Postcolonial thinker, Homi Bhabha asserts, All forms of culture are continually in a process of hybridity. 6 And by the way, let us not forget that King David was radically inclusive and open to crossing boundaries and bridging differences, and built a multi-ethnic kingdom, and oh yeah, he also married a foreign wife. 7 Hashtag awkward. There are those who would rather forget parts of their past. There are those who would deny their own family stories of migration, cultural hybridity, and hyphenated identities in order to consolidate power and wield control over a group. 5 Eviatar Zerubavel, Ancestors and Relatives: Genealogy, Identity, and Community (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), Homi K. Bhabha, The Third Space, in Identity, Community, Culture, Difference, ed. J. Rutherford (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990: ), Uriah Kim, Identity and Loyalty in the David Story: A Postcolonial Reading (Sheffield: Sheffield University Press, 2008),

6 Migrants are a way of figuring the relations between cultures. 8 Ruth represented a configuration that was not welcome by Ezra. But Ruth persisted and Ruth resisted. And as her-story goes, Israel was already great because of her courageousness to traverse borders and boundaries against all odds. May God grant us courage by the same measure, may we all be so chayil in our journeying and in our interactions with others. Amen. 8 Tina Steiner, Translated People, Translated Texts: Language and Migration in Contemporary African Literature (New York: Routledge, 2009), 9. 6