9th Sunday After Pentecost 2024

A reading from Ruth.

In the days when the judges judged, it happened that there was a famine in the land, and a man of Bethlehem and Judah went to sojourn in the country of Moab, he and his wife, and their two sons.

And the name of the man was Elimelech, and the name of his wife, Naomi, and the names of his two sons were Mahalan, Chilon.

They were Ephraithes from Bethlehem and Judah.

They went into the country of Moab and remained there.

Then Elimelech, the husband of Naomi, died, and she was left, she and her two sons.

They abducted Moabite women for themselves.

The name of the one was Orpha, and the name of the second Ruth.

And they lived there about ten years.

They also died, both of them, Mahalon and Chilon, and the woman was left without her two sons and without her husband.

Then she got up, she and her daughters-in-law, and she returned from the country of Moab, for she had heard in the country of Moab that the faithful one had considered God's people and given them food.

So she set out from the place where she was while there with her two daughters-in-law, and they journeyed on the road to return to the land of Judah.

Then Naomi said to her two daughters-in-law, Go, return, each to your mother's house.

May the Holy One deal kindly with you as you have done with the dead and with me.

The saving God grants that you may find security, each in the house of your own husband.

Then she kissed them and they wept aloud.

They said to her, We will return with you to your people.

Then Naomi said, Turn back, my daughters, why will you why will you go with me?

Are there yet sons in my belly that may become your husbands?

Turn back, my daughters, go your way, for I am too old to be with a man.

Let me say I have hope and even was with a man tonight and gave birth to sons.

Would you then wait and hope until they were grown?

Would you then refrain from marrying?

No, my daughters, it has been far more bitter for me than for you, because the hand of the saving God has turned against me.

Then they wept aloud.

Orpha kissed her mother-in-law, but Ruth clung to her.

For the word of God in Scripture, the word of God among us, for the word of God within us.

The psalm for today is Psalm eighty.

We will read responsively by the half verse.

Shepherd of Israel, pray, hearken, you who lead the line of Rebekah like a flock.

Before Ephraim and Benjamin and Manasseh, God restore us and let your face shine.

Sovereign of heaven's vanguard, you have fed them tears for bread.

You make us the scorn of our neighbors.

God of heaven's vanguard, restore us and let your face shine.

Because of your work.

Be at peace among yourselves.

Now we urge you, kindred, to acknowledge the undisciplined, encourage the discouraged, support the weak, and patient with all.

Rather, always able to do good to one another and to all.

Rejoice always.

Pray without ceasing.

In all things and things, for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you all.

Witch not despair.

Do not despise the words of women or men who prophesy.

Rather examine everything to do what is good and bad.

Avoid every appearance of evil.

Be the very God of peace sanctify you all holy.

And may your spirit and soul and body be heavy and blameless at the coming of our Redeemer, Jesus Christ, and the one who calls you is evil.

For the word of God witness.

Many rich people put in much.

One poor widow came and put in two small Greek copper coins, which together are worth the smallest Roman coin.

Then Jesus called his disciples and said to them, Truly I tell you all, this poor woman has put in more than all those giving to the treasury, for all of them out of their abundance have given, but she out of her lack has put in everything she had, her whole livelihood.

The Gospel of the Lord.

Okay, maybe you've heard this story.

In general, the King James calls this the widow's might.

And I've often heard evangelicals call this the mighty might, as in like a little goes a long way, which is a great message.

It's a great message.

And of course, we understand that, hey, we give proportionally, because if we have to compare like what we have against, say, what a multi-billionaire has, what we have pales in comparison.

So like we have some understanding about that.

But I do want to suggest to you that this story, I'm going to talk about generosity first, and then I'm going to make a suggestion that this story might call for a different kind of generosity than we normally think of.

Okay, so proportional giving.

I want to tell you that one of my friends a few years ago, probably 10, uh, got their first job at a major law firm, and fortunately also had a science background from UCal Berkeley.

So the starting salary was really good.

And uh the friend said to me more than once, I have more money than I know what to do with.

Now, that wasn't literally the case, right?

But this was like a large salary, right?

Bonuses were like five figures.

Said that for a couple years.

One day asked me, Do you give 10% of your income?

And I said, Well, actually I do.

And the person said to me, I've looked at how much that is, and I can't do it.

And I want you to know, in general, Bob, correct me if I'm wrong.

In general, the people who make less give more.

That's in every denomination I've been a part of.

I'm not saying that scoldingly, I'm saying it's an interesting thing because sometimes we look at our abundance and we say, I can't give that much away.

Whereas people who are living subsistence, they often find where to give it.

It's very interesting.

Very interesting.

In fact, when Ludmilla, the artist who made these pieces you see up here behind the altar, these abstract pieces that were reactions to Russian icons, there was one she made in the hallway that was a four by eight uh sort of box of plywood with the characteristic eyes on it, and they were covered with copex, which are like mites.

I mean, they're kind of worth nothing.

And uh she called the piece green because she perceived that the Russian Orthodox Church was preying off of widows, taking their last Copec.

Although when she went to visit, what she learned, so it's interesting that there's this kind of this switch happening, what she learned was that those Copex kept the Russian Orthodox Church afloat uh during strict communism.

And that those widows were very happy to give it the ones she spoke to.

So it's sort of interesting to think about that sort of switch.

Okay, now I told you, I don't think this is necessarily about the kind of generosity.

And by the way, if we took this to its extreme and everybody gave everything they had to the temple treasury, we'd have problems.

Like I think we know that.

Which is why I want to tell you, I don't think this is simply about give as much as you can.

See, it turns out that, and I've read quite a number of articles on this, it turns out that in order to qualify for temple welfare, you couldn't have any currency at all.

So even if you had a dime, which is going to buy you what?

Nothing.

You can't have food until you give your last dime.

Now you may say, that makes sense, but I do just want you to consider when you own nothing, you also don't own any independence or dignity.

So one way to hear this story is that this woman exists in a system that requires her to sacrifice her last shred of dignity in order to have subsistence.

And Jesus says she's given more than anybody else because she gave everything she had to live on.

And he's not just talking about money, he's talking about her independence and her dignity and her freedom.

I think that's probably right.

And uh I do want to share, you know, because there's a lot of stories in the media about what it's like being on the welfare.

We get really concerned about people being on the welfare, and I'm gonna tell you what it's like being on the welfare because I was on it one time, uh, not for my own income, but because I adopted a child out of foster care.

And when you do that, the government sees fit to give you Medicaid, which is welfare.

Just to be clear, Medicaid is welfare.

And Medicaid was really great because every time we needed a provider, the Medicaid system would generate for us a list of five potential clients we could visit, like providers that we could visit.

It's just that more often than not, two of them were dead.

And one of them had lost their license, and one of them had retired like two years ago, which means Medicaid gave me one provider to choose from.

His case file was so big they didn't often look at us when they were writing prescriptions.

Medicaid welfare was so great that when my son's tooth was growing in sideways and a detriment to not just his future ability to like chew and swallow, but like his overall health, right?

Because a sideways tooth can kill your other tooth and give you an abscess.

Um, Medicaid was so good living on the welfare that it didn't cover any of that.

Medicaid was amazing, it was so amazing.

Government welfare was so good that when I gave my son a new social security number, which is what they told me to do, they turned off the benefit in the middle of the night.

So what did I do?

I took my baby, who was two months old on a Friday, because I had Fridays off in the middle of the day, to the Medicaid office, which was 25 miles away from where I lived.

I had a car, I didn't have to ride a bus.

And when I waited an hour to meet the person, and I got there right when it opened, when I met it, waited an hour to get to the person, they told me, guess what?

You need to go to the other office, which is 15 miles away.

And the only reason I resolved that, I guarantee you, is not only because I was college educated, because I was a white male, and I said, you call them.

You call them.

And she did.

But I guarantee you, the other people behind me didn't push, didn't push.

And what did they have to do?

Take another day off, take another day off to go to a different office.

That's what welfare was like for me.

I want you to hear.

Medicaid is welfare.

So there are these scripts that is glorious, and there's these wonderful entitlements, and maybe that's true for some people.

I want you to hear it isn't always.

And sometimes, perhaps, our generosity looks like not just giving of our time and of our talent and of our service and of our thoughtfulness and of our prayer.

It does include all of those things.

Sometimes, though, I would suggest to you that generosity looks like thinking about the systems that are creating abject poverty and debasement for other people and saying something's not right here.

That is real generosity, and that's real prayer to consider that some people are being asked to give all they have to live on, including their human dignity, in order to have subsistence that looks like five providers, and two of them are dead.

Now, I'm not just going to use this word because it's on the bingo card, but I'm going to talk about structural misogyny because it's happening in the story.

This is the case that widows find themselves in, not widowers.

Why is that?

Because widows can't own property.

And until the 1970s in this country, widows couldn't have their own credit card.

That's structural misogyny.

So, what is this woman going to do?

Nothing.

She has no resources except for the temple welfare and how interesting she's paying her last bit into it.

Now, the Ruth story is a lovely short story, and I hope you'll consider reading it because it's not just about structural misogyny, it's about xenophobia and other kinds of sin.

Has anybody read Ruth before?

It's a short book.

It's about xenophobia.

That is, being afraid of immigrants.

Specifically, the Bible has this long conversation with itself.

Immigrants are bad, immigrants are okay.

Get rid of all foreign wives and their practices, some of them are really good.

Ruth turns out to be a good one.

Did you read what happens in the story?

There's a famine in the land, there's this guy and his wife, and they're looking for wives for their sons.

So they go to a different country and put a flower bag over two women and steal them.

Did you read that part?

Abducted the wives.

That means stole them.

And then what do you know?

The boys are named Mahlon and Silyon, which mean weak and sick, and then two verses later they die.

Because that's weak and sick people.

That's what they do.

And then mom says to the girls, I ve, I can't have any more sons for you to marry.

Now that probably sounds really weird.

There's no way your mother-in-law offered to give you a baby in replacement of your husband.

But it's really important to hear in the ancient world, women had one job: produce a male heir.

Because the name dies with men, not with women.

So if women don't produce a viable male heir, they have socially failed in their very personhood.

Structural misogyny.

I hope you hear this.

So Naomi says, Look, we abducted you.

You were good.

Really, you're gonna have to read this with a smile.

It's kind of crazy.

You were really great slave wives.

Now go on back home because I can't give you another baby.

And one of them leaves and one of them stays.

Now, uh the rest of the story, and we're going to hear a little bit more next week, is predicated on something called leather.

Marriage.

Have you heard of this before?

Leverite marriage.

You can read it in the book of Leviticus.

It's actually how Henry VIII was able to marry his older brother's wife, Catherine of Aragon, which led to our church existence.

Here's how it goes.

It's going to sound crazy, because it's not how we do things.

Leverite marriage says the oldest male is the heir.

He's going to carry the family name.

He's going to get the land.

So if the oldest son dies without a child, there's a problem, right?

The oldest male has died without a problem.

So Leviite marriage suggests that the second oldest male should marry his brother's widow and have a baby.

And here's the twist: the baby will be his older brother.

Not his son.

The baby will be his older brother.

When you read the rest of Ruth, which we're going to do, spoiler alert, Ruth is going to have a baby.

It is going to be Naomi's son, not hers.

That way, Naomi can be redeemed.

See, she's worthless.

She's had no boys.

And then she gets a replacement child to stand in for weak and sick.

So now she has value.

Structural misogyny.

Now, I want to suggest to you that generosity is important.

It is.

And that sometimes there's a different kind of generosity in acknowledging problems which we don't always do very well.

And I already mentioned the welfare story because it's important to hear that in the middle of this political season, you can find anybody on the internet to say what you already want to be true.

You will find all kinds of false information that's based on anecdotes of, well, all these people do this and that.

You will find that this whole political season, and I'd like to encourage you to be a little more generous with your research than just accepting an anecdote because you want it to be true.

There are structures at work in the world that are impoverishing people.

And I am, for one, particularly worried about what's going to happen to women.

And that's a convenience I get because I'm a man.

It's very convenient.

It's very necessary for my partner.

I'm worried about it.

I don't see us going forward.

I see us trying to go backward.

I'm worried.

I'm also worried about the following structure, and I don't know if you've read really the law that happens in the Chevron case that the Supreme Court just overturned.

See, I have a family attorney, and my family attorney says, according to the way that the decision was written, that if you buy milk from the grocery store and there's a melamine in it, the FDA can't control that.

You'll have to take that to court.

This is the way the decision is written.

And we hope it doesn't come to this.

So you're going to fight, what, a major dairy that has multi-billion dollars because you've got melamine poisoning?

To its logical conclusion, you could buy a prescription from your doctor, which doesn't have what it says it has, because the FDA can't regulate it anymore.

And you'll have to go to court to adjudicate that.

And you better hope the judge believes, well, the prescription should have what it says.

I don't know if there's more than one Aaron Brokovich around.

But I want to be really clear, it's very possible that Flint replicates and you find lead in your water.

Why?

Because municipalities can no longer regulate their own water.

You have to go to court to challenge that.

That's how the law's written, according to my family attorney.

Now, is it going to be practiced that way?

I don't know.

But structurally, that's pretty darn scary, friends.

I know that we don't like to hear words like government regulations.

We get worried about government regulations.

I want the government to regulate what's in my prescriptions and what's in my water.

I want that.

I do.

I want to know that what's in my prescription is what the pharmacist says.

Don't you?

I want the municipality to regulate what's in my water.

I don't want lead.

I don't want giardia.

You're going to hear these things like we're anti-government regulations.

Okay, that's fine, except at what end?

These are important things for us to pay attention to.

Why?

Because they replicate widows who have to give their very last shred of dignity.

I could buy bottled water.

I can do it.

Not everybody can do that.

I probably could, you know, get guaranteed prescriptions somewhere.

I have the means to do that.

But there's people who are living on pennies.

So I think the story is about generosity.

I do.

But I think it reminds us that sometimes generosity says there is a really big problem.

It's creating not just second-class citizens, it is taking advantage of people who are poor.

I can't solve these problems.

Not by myself.

I don't even know what the solutions look like.

And once again, you'll notice there's another board here.

And you'll notice that there's what you don't notice is there's another one in the mail.

That's 10.

It's 320 mass shootings this year.

320.

It's almost two a day.

I don't know how to solve that problem, but I know there's a lot of people living on their last little Copec or their last little penny that are suffering from that problem.

So I think the scriptures ask us to consider not just what we give in terms of our money and our time.

I think our scriptures ask us to consider in what ways, other ways we are generous structurally.

What other ways we are generous structurally?

And what we say here, I think, is true.

One person is going to have a really hard time with this, and that's why we say we can do more together.

And boy, uh nobody is looking forward to the next couple of months that I know politically.

Nobody is.

But we got to do more together.

We gotta do more together.

This isn't just us, this is our children.

This is widows, this is women without options like Ruth.

Just keep in mind, Ruth's gonna have this baby, and then what for her?

What for her?

The baby won't need to be hers.

So we got a lot of ordinary time left.

We do got a lot of ordinary time left, like 10 weeks.

And remember, that's not play time.

That's time to reorder how it is that we live.

And I do here today as being called to be ordered.

What generosity looks like for each and every one of us.