Sit and Eat

Sermon: The Racy Bit

I preached this sermon at St. Lydia's on Sunday, June 27.  The text is Ruth chapter 3; read it here.

So, tonight we get to the racy bit.  The good part of Ruth, the part that, if the bible was being passed around a fifth grade classroom would be all dog eared and underlined. 

 

Last week we saw Ruth and Boaz meet one another, and Boaz showed quite a bit of interest in Ruth, and sees how loyal she’s been to her mother in law.  He was very generous toward her, making sure that she could glean from his field, and even sharing a meal with her  and sending her home with extra food.  This all takes place during the barley harvest, which happens in April or May, and the story tells us that Ruth gleans through the wheat harvest, which takes place in June.  Now that the harvest is coming to an end, Ruth and Naomi have to figure out what to do next in order to feed and sustain themselves.  Remember that they're living on the brink of poverty. 

 

I want to read the passage one more time, but first, here's a little more context for this story.

 

First, as you’ve already guessed, when Naomi talks about uncovering Boaz’s feet, it’s not actually his feet that she’s talking about.  In ancient Israel, feet was a very clear euphemism for genitals, and that's absolutely the meaning here.

 

Second, the threshing floor.  This was the place where, after the harvest, the grain was separated from the chaff so that it was edible.  It was usually a stone or dirt floor on the top of a hill.  The workers, all men, would pull a sledge over the grain to separate the grain from the stalk.  Then they would toss the broken stalks in the air to separate the wheat from the chaff.

 

The threshing floor was also the place where the men celebrated after a long day of work,

and there would be food and drink and there would probably also be prostitutes hanging around to see what kind of business they could pick up.  So the threshing floor is a really sexually charged and loaded place in Israelite culture.

 

Third, and perhaps most importantly, I’d like you to see if you can transport yourself to a world where religious people actually have fewer hang-ups about sex then we do.  It’s probable that for the Israelite audience who listened to this story, Ruth uncovering Boaz’s feet wasn't as big a deal as it is to us.  This story (and many others in the Old Testament) are candid and up front about sex.  It happens.  It can be used as a tool to gain power or as an expression of loyalty and devotion or, most often, as the means to bear children, and children mean financial security.  It was a pragmatic culture, and most often, women, sex, and children had more to do with property and ownership  than anything else.

 

So, with all that in mind, let’s read the chapter one more time, and see if we can imagine ourselves in Ruth’s shoes.

 

*

 

Here’s what doesn’t happen in the book of Ruth:

Naomi never says,

Oh Ruth, does he give you butterflies?

Ruth never says,

I feel like I could gaze into his eyes forever.

Boaz never presents Ruth with flowers,

and Ruth never waits three rings to pick up the phone.

No one dances cheek to cheek.

No one writes love letters.

Instead, this story, a story we might call a love story, has a two main ingredients:

food and sex.

The bottom line is that Ruth and Naomi need to eat.

As I was reading this chapter of Ruth this week, I kept on trying to make it a love story. I kept on trying to make it fit into this sort of rom com formula that I have in my head.  And then I’d go back to the text and take a closer look.  And what I saw could not be called romance.  It was food and sex, loyalty and security.

 

Romance is a fairly recent invention.

Up until the medieval period, when this idea of romance begins to blossom, (knights catching handkerchiefs and all that) marriages were business contracts: ways to form connections between families, secure property, and produce heirs.  The Israelites in Ruth’s time would have had a similar view.  In the Old Testament, we certainly read of attraction in courtship, of caring and companionship in marriage, but also of pragmatism.

 

There are researchers out there who take a look at the divorce rates in our country and make claims that romance is to blame.  We want too much from one person, they say.

We want romance:

the butterflies and the love letters,

and we want passion:

amazing sex and magnetic attraction,

and we want emotional support:

someone we can share everything with,

and a life companion:

someone to do fun things with, build a home with,

and, oh yes, someone to raise children with too!

 

It’s a lot to ask from one person.

 

 

Ruth and Naomi, on the other hand, just need to eat.

They’re focused on staying alive.

And there is this wonderful presence of life in its most basic form that exists in this story.  Food and sex: the two things in the world that give life.  The two are entangled in this sort of primal way.

 

When Ruth catches Boaz’ eye, what he does is feed her.  He makes sure she can glean from his field, and then at mealtime he shares bread with her, shares grain with her, and then sends her home with more food.  He literally gives her life.

 

And when Ruth spends the night with Boaz on the threshing floor, joins her body with his, in the morning, what does he do?  He loads her up with grain to take home.  Boaz won’t send Ruth home empty handed.  She goes back to Naomi, who earlier in the story bemoaned her emptiness.  But Ruth comes back full.  Filled with life.

 

Later in the story, Ruth will bear Boaz a child.  He gives her life and she gives it back to him.  Food and sex: signs of life.

 

Our courtships may be more concerned with butterflies and waiting for the phone to ring  than Ruth and Boaz’s, but at their very best, our relationships and partnerships give us life.

 

Someone who will feed us until we are satisfied.

Someone who will offer their body,

And receive our body as well.

Someone who will make us full

and not send us away empty.

 

These things give us life.

 

There’s a lot of talk these days, especially in the church, about love and sex and relationships and who should get to do what with whom.

 

But the only question I care about is: is your love making you more alive?

Are you offering one another life?

 

Relationships that give life,

no matter who they’re between,

are filled to the brim,

overflowing with God,

overflowing with the holy,

feeding us from within.

 

Where life is, God is,

and that is sacred ground.

 

 

We share the sermon at St. Lydia’s, and so I invite you to share a story that’s be brought up by the text or my words.

Sermon: Gleaning

Lydia's congregant Jennifer Goodnow preached this sermon at St. Lydia's on Sunday, June 20 as part of our exploration of the book of Ruth.  Jennifer is a teacher and life long Episcopalian.  You can read the text for her sermon, Ruth 2, here.

There are women who come to my neighborhood on a regular basis to go through the garbage bags that the supers leave out for sanitation pick-up the next day. These women are well-known by the supers, always work in a tidy and organized fashion, and clean up after themselves, tying up bags when they have collected what they need. The women collect cans but also go through the black garbage bags and collect clothing that Upper East Siders deem unworthy of the many local thrift stores. 

I have often wanted to talk with them but I don’t speak Spanish very well and I don’t want to scare them. I’m guessing they are undocumented and suspicious and fearful of being turned over to La Migra. I’d rather smile and say good morning and leave it at that instead of frightening them with the many questions I have.
They are foreigners. They speak Spanish and I believe are from South America. They may not speak English. They may have little education, little opportunity other than collecting cans and clothes. They are modern day gleaners, sweeping up the remainders of people who live n the wealthiest, highest educated zip code in the United States. They are the Ruths of the 21st century.

It’s easy for me to look at these disenfranchised women and compare them to Ruth. Ruth has chosen the life of a foreigner in a foreign land, just like them. Women during Ruth’s time had little power. Childless widows had no power. The gleaners on my block – if they are undocumented – are, technically speaking, against the law. If they were caught they could be deported, even though NY is not exactly Arizona. The gleaners I see on my block are poor. They are in a desperate situation, like Ruth.

However, I am gleaning as well. I’m a spiritual gleaner. God has laid out a huge feast for me … and I am eating crumbs off the corner of the table. I believe God sees more in me than I can see for myself. I think that God’s perfect paradise, enlightenment, full communion with God is just over my shoulder. But I am looking for it in the wrong place. I’m looking straight ahead and can only see a glimpse of it out of my peripheral vision. I’m standing and eating the crumbs that have fallen on the edge of a table and that’s all I can see. If I would shift my gaze a bit more, I would see an enormous banquet with dish after dish laid out on an endless table.  But, I seem to suffer from a myopia that does not allow me to realize what is present. The Hindus call it Maya – the mistaken belief that the world we are living in now is all that is real which leaves no room for the other-worldly or divine.

I used to go to another church, an Episcopal church, here in Manhattan. Dogs are allowed in the church and I would bring my golden retriever, Music with me to the service. A few years ago, we decided to switch the Eucharist from the wafer to homemade bread baked by different congregants. It’s a honey-infused, whole-wheat crumbly cake. Connor, my godson, hated it when he was younger. He would receive and then palm his communion bread and try to sneak feed it to my dog! I used to tell him that dogs don’t need communion because they are already in full communion with God. My dog, Music is pure love. We humans are the ones who need the help! We need the communion with each other and God. When I come to St. Lydia’s every week, I eat a piece of baguette and I drink three buck chuck from Trader Joe’s – but that’s not my communion. My experience of communion is being in community with everyone here. I have small moments in life when I’m not simply gleaning. When I’m not eating crumbs off the edge of the table, moments when I get a clearer sense of the feast that is laid out for me and everyone else in common union.

We share the sermon at St. Lydia’s and I invite you to reflect on your own experience of spiritual gleaning, communion, or anything else that resonates with you from the text or my words tonight.

A Poem for You

After a recent conversation about tradition and oceans, my friend and esteemed colleague Kurt Nelson sent me this sharp piece by Donald Babcock.  I'm pretty in love with it.

The Duck
Donald Babcock

Now we're ready to look at something pretty special. It's a duck, riding the ocean a hundred feet beyond the surf. No it isn't a gull. A gull always has a raucous touch about him. This is some sort of duck, and he cuddles in the swells.

He isn't cold, and he is thinking things over. There is a big heaving in the Atlantic, and he is a part of it.

He looks a bit like a mandarin, or the Lord Buddha meditating under the Bo tree.

But he has hardly enough above the eyes to be a philosopher. He has poise, however, which is what philosophers must have.

He can rest while the Atlantic heaves, because he rests in the Atlantic.

Probably he doesn't know how large the ocean is. And neither do you. But he realizes it.

And what does he do, I ask you? He sits down in it! He reposes in the immediate as if it were infinity — which it is. He has made himself a part of the boundless by easing himself into just where it touches him.

I like the duck. He doesn't know much, but he's got religion.

 

Sermon: Restoring Force

I preached this sermon at St. Lydia's on Sunday, June 13 as part of our five week exploration of the Book of Ruth.  The text is Ruth 1:14-22. 

 

  

My grandfather’s house was filled with clocks.  He collected them everywhere: yard sales and antique shops, church rummage sales.  My grandfather was an electrician and I remember loving it when I was allowed to go down into the basement of his house in Memphis.  There was a high wooden table that was his work bench, and he had old jars he had washed and filled with screws, their lids glued to the tops of the wooden shelves he had cut himself.

 

He liked things that he could take apart and put back together.  He liked simple machines that were graceful and elegant.  So he loved clocks.  They were in every room of the house and every morning he would go from room to room winding them all up.  When two o’clock, or three o’clock, or four o’clock came, the house would be filled with a clamor of ringing and chiming and dinging and tolling as all the clocks struck the hour at once.

 

But when I was visiting, I would sleep in the living room and Grandpa would come in in the evening and go around the room and stop all the pendulums.  And just like that, they would stop keeping time.

 

 

The book of Ruth is all about the swing of that pendulum,

steady and rhythmic,

as it oscillates from one extreme of its amplitude

to the other.

 

Ruth is a book of duality:

of the swing between the extremes of life.

There is the swing from Israel

to Moab,

and back again.

From homeland

to foreign land

and back again.

In the course of the book we swing

from the death of three fathers

to the birth of a child.

And finally, we have Naomi herself.

She tells us that she went away full,

but came back empty.

Her name means “pleasant,”

but now the pendulum has swung the other way,

and she wishes to be called Mara,

which means “bitter.”

 

Ruth and Naomi arrive in Bethlehem just in time for the Barley harvest, which occurs around the time of Passover.  The harvest itself is a living out of the swing of the pendulum.

The planting of seeds,

the nurturing of the plant,

the turning of the season,

the harvest of the fields.

The harvest is life and death intertwined:

one life coming to fruition to provide food for another,

death that in turn makes life.

 

We can fight it as much as we like, but in the end, there is a time and a season for all things under heaven (Ecclesiastes 3:1).  Naomi’s blunt, plain acknowledgment that her pendulum has swung from full to empty, from pleasant to bitter: there’s a sad sort of grace in that.

 

She’s lucky that Ruth is there with her.  For Ruth’s pendulum is swinging, for whatever reason, to love and devotion.

Where you go, I will go.

Where you lodge, I will lodge.

Where you die, I will die.

 

God only knows why she loves Naomi with such ferocity, who now seems nothing more than a shell of a person.  God only knows why she feels compelled to link her life with this woman whose life has become so bitter.  And God only knows why Ruth, after all she has lost, is able to sustain hope, love, and devotion.

 

But in God’s house, the hours don’t strike all at once.

The pendulums don’t swing in unison,

but in a unwieldy chaos from which pattern seems,

inexplicably,

to emerge.

 

When my pendulum swings to bitter,

God provides a foil:

someone who’s pendulum is swinging over to love.

 

And in this way, we bring each other though,

always in motion. 

On Heaven

We've all been friends for a while, but in that way that feels longer and deeper than just the years we've known one other.  Tonight the 14 of us threw some crab legs and corn on the cob and sausage and peppers in a pot and boiled it up, and dumped it out on tables covered in brown paper.  We sat out in the garden of the church and if you sat back and listened, you could hear everyone telling stories, wonderful stories, all at once.  And you could hear everyone laughing, and everyone listening.  We ate with our fingers and made a big mess.  The sun was setting out over the hills and it lit everything from the inside so the trees and the fields and the clouds were dusty and golden.

When I said goodbye it was with reluctance and with gratitude.  When we drove away I turned to catch a glimpse of everyone still sitting out.  The clouds moved across the sky and I thought that when I get to heaven it will be just a little like this.  Everyone will be there.  It will be like I've known them forever.  But also as if I'm knowing them for the first time.

Sermon: What Holds Us Together

I preached this sermon on June 6, 2010 at St. Lydia's as part of our five week exploration of the Book of Ruth.  The text is Ruth 1:1-14.  Read it here.

My first year at Divinity School, I had the privilege of watching two very good friends fall in love.  John and Kelly were close friends that first year we were all in school together, and at some point, the relationship just turned, and suddenly they were together.  I actually remember the night – it involved all of us exiting Kelly’s apartment very quickly after they had both consumed a certain number of cheap mixed drinks.

 

The rest is history, as they say.

 

I gave the toast at their wedding, and just this Thursday Kelly gave birth to a little boy.

 

They are a family.  They are held together, this new family of three.  Held together by history, memory, love, blood.  All these things hold them together.

 

During the time at Divinity School when John and Kelly were getting ready to get engaged, I was with a man named JC.  And all of us, John and Kelly and JC and me, pretty much lived together in that apartment on Canner Street.

 

And we did things that families do.

Sometimes we would have taco night.

Or movie night.

And on Saturdays there was always a big breakfast with all four of us.

 

We were a family.  We were held together by time, situation, a certain moment in life,  caring for one another, shared experience, love.  And then things changed, shifted, and we found family in different places.

 

People make family in a lot of different ways.  Among the folks gathered at this table tonight, I know of so many different ways people have found to make family.  We find our tribes, our people, and something holds us together.  Sometimes blood, sometimes experience, sometimes pure, unfettered love.  Sometimes choice.  Or obligation.  History: painful or joyful.  Some of us are more alone in the world than others.

 

JC used to say there’s the family you have and the family you choose.  He had found it necessary in his life to nurture that family he chose.  I learned how to do that from him. 

 

This story of Ruth and Naomi, they’re choosing to be a family.  What makes sense is for all of them to return home.  For Naomi to go to Israel and try and find someone, some distant relative who will take her in, because as a woman who can no longer bear children, and has no children, she faces destitution.  What makes sense is for Ruth to return to the family of her now-dead husband, to see if they’ll take her in.  Maybe another member of the family will marry her, and she’ll produce more children who will take care of her in her old age.  But she doesn’t choose what makes sense.

 

While lineage or religion or finance presents the clearest way for a family to be held together, Ruth and Naomi choose another way.  They’re held together through loyalty, love.  They’re unlikely and they’re foolish.  But they’re held together.  They decide to make a family.

 

The last image presented in our text tonight:

But Ruth clung to her.

 

The word used, “to cling” is the Hebrew "dabaq."  It’s the same word used in Genesis 2:24: Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother, and cling to his wife.

 

Families don’t always look how we think they might.  Forget picket fences and 2.5 children, try and a mother in law and a daughter in law who have decided they’re going through life together.  They’re taking care of one another, in exactly the same way a partnered couple is asked to.

 

The bible presents us with plenty of models for different ways of being family.  It’s not about blood or lineage or money.  It’s about love, and loyalty, and yes, choice.  We choose each other again and again, over and over.  Every day we choose once more to be family, to be in relationship, to sustain love, sustain loyalty.

One of the funny things about preaching from the Book of Ruth, is that, in some ways, God plays kind of a supporting role in this story.  It’s a story about

relationship,

harvest,

fertility,

and, oh yes, God is mentioned as well, almost in passing.

 

But then you take another look and see that it’s a story about

relationship,

harvest,

fertility,

death and loss,

pain and separation,

commitment and family,

love and sex,

and you see God

not mentioned in passing,

but woven in and through all things.

 

Often Christians will talk about God’s "presence" in all things.

I think it’s more than that. 

God is all things.

To bring in the harvest,

to birth children and loose them,

to choose love when it’s entirely foolish,

to find a way forward when everything seems bitter

and you believe God’s hand has turned against you,

this is God.

God experienced in and through the world, and most of all, in and through one another.

Ruth clings to Naomi.  We cling to one another in ways that are surprising and foolish and don’t quite make sense.  That defy boundaries and traditions.  And our love makes us like God.

 

Tonight I want to ask you to stop trying to figure out what you believe,

and if you believe,

what it means.

Instead, just throw yourself into loving,

into pain and joy.

Start there.

To know love, to know joy, to know pain,

to know birth and death and intimacy.

This is to know God.

We finish the sermon together at St. Lydia’s.  Please share a story from your experience that’s been brought up by the text or my words.