What do we do the other days of the year, though? Sometimes, we deal with fear by denying it. “Afraid? I’m not afraid!” we say louder and louder, hiding our anxiety even from ourselves. Sometimes, we deal with fear by clinging to power, hoping that strength, invulnerability, status, and wealth will protect us. Sometimes, we deal with fear by clinging to distraction. We fill every minute with activity, with work, with chatter, with acquiring possessions, so that we don’t have time for fear. Sometimes, we deal with fear by clinging to pleasure, by drowning our fear in alcohol, by silencing it with drugs, or food, or sex. Sometimes, we simply cling to fear itself, shutting down joy and gratitude so that we won’t be disappointed when disaster comes. When fears rise up within you, how do you cope? To what—or to whom—do you cling?
Ruth clings to her mother-in-law Naomi. On first glance, Ruth’s choice might not seem like a very wise one. As her story opens, Ruth, along Orpah and Naomi, are in deep trouble. “The days when judges ruled,” were chaotic, violent times. Picture Ruth and Naomi living in a “failed state” like Somalia or Haiti. They are poor peasants in a hungry, drought-stricken land. They are women alone in a culture controlled by men. They are childless, in a time when a woman found worth only in bearing children. They are refugees, Naomi having fled Judah to Moab in an earlier famine, and Ruth preparing to take refuge in Judah during this one. They are surrounded by death and sickness. Naomi’s husband has died, and her sons—whose names actually mean “Illness” and “Wasting Away” in Hebrew--sound like they were doomed to sickness from birth.
To make matters worse for Ruth, Naomi clings only to despair. Believing herself abandoned by God, Naomi doesn’t want her daughters-in-law to return home with her. She doesn’t see how they can help her now. She pushes them away with her strong arguments. Besides, if Ruth goes with Naomi to Judah, she’ll be a hated foreign refugee in the eyes of her neighbors. Moabites, after all, are known in Judah as the product of incest between Lot and his own daughter. As a Moabite in Judah, Ruth will be at the bottom of the caste hierarchy.
And yet, Ruth clings to Naomi and to Naomi’s foreign land, people, and God. Ruth drapes herself over Naomi, clinging with as much faithfulness and love as a wife who leaves her family and “clings” to her husband in marriage, according to the famous passage in Genesis. Why this exaggerated language? “Clinging” doesn’t have good connotations in English, that’s for sure. We buy “Cling Free” to unbind our clothes in the dryer. We read parenting articles on how to liberate oneself from a “clingy child.” We dump a “clingy” romantic partner as too needy and annoying. Can I really be advising us today to react to fear with clinginess?
Ruth’s “clinging” isn’t a sign of neediness in our reading, however. It’s a sign of her faithfulness, of her unwavering devotion to her late husband’s mother. Ruth’s clinging is a sign of over-the-top loving-kindness, called “chesed” in the Hebrew. Chesed is one of my favorite words in the Bible. It means steadfast, tenacious grace. It’s more than a feeling of love. It involves commitment. It’s what God promises in God’s covenant with Israel. “Though the mountains be shaken and the hills be removed,” promises God in the book of the prophet Isaiah, “yet my unfailing love (hesed) for you will not be shaken.” By clinging to Naomi, Ruth reaches with this same solid, determined love across all that divides us humans from one another—across race, across custom, even across religion. She steadfastly unites herself to active hope in a new land, a new god, a continuing family, a future. And what a future it is: Ruth is the great-grandmother of King David … and the ancestor of Jesus of Nazareth.
We too live in fear-filled times. Imagined fears, real fears, private fears, and public fears. Covid, yes, but also fear for our changing climate, for our planet, for jobs and the economy, for the survival of our own parish, for our children, for the safety of the marginalized in a hate-filled world. The list goes on and on. In these times, I do hope that we at St. Ambrose will choose cling to one another with steadfast love and grace, no matter what. I hope that we can cling with unwavering devotion to God and to this community, with acts of steadfast mercy, even when we don’t agree, even when we disappoint one another. I hope that we will make up our minds to walk together with determination, wherever God’s path will lead.
But that’s not really where I want to stop with this sermon. In
these fear-filled times, I especially want us to get a good glimpse of God in
Ruth’s unbounded clinginess. As Ruth throws herself on despairing Naomi,
refusing to be turned away, I want us to see our God clinging to you, to me, to
all creation, with all God’s might. I want us to grasp a mercy-filled God who
doesn’t waver when we turn aside, or when we give up, or when we are afraid. I
want us to see a deep love that, if we try to remove it, simply pops up
somewhere else. A love that, if we try to kill it, roars up from the grave. As Serene
Jones writes: we are at the same time “God’s inevitably broken, [fearful] children”
and “God’s constantly renewed beloved.” Both. All the time. “To be saved is not
to be taken elsewhere,”
she continues. “It is to be awakened—to mourn and to wonder. And to stand
courageously on the promise that grace is sturdy enough to hold it all—you, and
me, and every broken … soul that wanders through our history. To all, love
comes.”[1]
That’s the gift that Ruth shows us today.
So cling to the healing grace, the unstoppable loving-kindness, of our crucified and risen God… And dance with the skeletons. And eat candy with the ghosties.
[1] Serene Jones, Trauma and Grace: Theology in a Ruptured World. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2009), 165.
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