UCC Church of Charlotte

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Risky Trust
Ruth 3:1-5, 4:13-17
Mark 12:38-44

Grace and Peace to you this morning.  Grace and Peace.
    
So often the church encounters the story of the widow and her two
coins during this time of year, probably because the people who put
together the lectionary know that this is when churches do
stewardship.
    
Mark tells us it was a poor widow.  Just as today, some widows had
means and some did not.  Here is one that did not.  And yet even
without great abundance, she shows great trust, putting herself in
God’s hands, offering to God abundantly.
    
My friend Cliff DiMascio used to argue this text should not be used
for stewardship, because, he asked, “Where is the Good News?  Where is
the transformation?”  We have a witness to trust in God, and we have
Jesus praising her, but who gets changed?
    
This is why I think we need to read the whole story.  Before Jesus and
his disciples see the widow, Jesus warns of the scribes.  Scribes are
those who can read and write, but more importantly, they are the ones
trained in the Torah.  They are the ones trained in the law, the
teachings, the whole lore of God’s giving God’s self to Israel.
Scribes are the ones who make a study of the ways in which God is in
dialogue with humanity as found in the prophets.  Scribes are the ones
who are well versed in the covenant and so should be keepers of the
covenant.
    
What is the essence of the covenant?  We heard it last week:  to love
the Lord your God with all your heart and soul, mind and strength –
with all that we have and all that we are – and to love your neighbor
as yourself.
    
And we often confuse love and romanticism or sentimentality.  We think
love means to like an awful lot.  Or to have affection for.  So to
love my neighbor is to think well of them.
    
But love has a much deeper and more practical meaning in the covenant.
The Old Testament view of love, the love that Jesus then preaches, is
not about feelings.  It is about covenantal faithfulness.  It is about
living up to and into our relationships as fully as possible.
    
Now we can understand Jesus’ criticism of the scribes.  He says they
devour widow’s houses and then make long prayers to be seen as
righteous.

How do they devour widow’s houses?  By not keeping to the covenant of
the Torah.  By not teaching that moving the boundary stones in the
field to gain extra land from your neighbor is wrong.  By not teaching
that every seven years debts are to be forgiven so that those who have
sold their homes or themselves into servitude to pay a debt will not
be forever impoverished.  By not preaching that covenantal
faithfulness is, according to the prophets, about taking care of the
widows and the orphans, and that means not just being nice to them,
but not allowing people to take advantage of them.
    
Those in charge of keeping and preserving the scripture of the
covenant must do so in real and tangible ways or else the poor, the
widow and the orphan get devoured, and otherwise faithful people
merely shake their heads and say, “Well, I guess a market correction
was necessary.”
    
And failing to preach that God wants care for the widow and the orphan
more than God wants religious pretense, the scribe then puts on his
nice clothes, and gets invited to all the good parties, and sits with
all the in and hip people, and says nice long comfortable prayers and
everyone marvels at how holy he is.
    
Now we can better understand Jesus’ praise of the widow.  For the one
who should be about taking care of the covenant is putting on a show
so that people will marvel at how holy he is.  And when the covenant
of God becomes mere pretense, the effect is the devouring of the
houses of the widows.  But here we see one with nothing, who has put
all her trust in God.  Which do we expect Jesus to praise?
    
Somehow faith involves two things that seem contradictory at first
glance: risk and trust.  That is where Ruth comes in.  She is a
Moabite, a foreigner, a widow, and her mother-in-law wants her to
return home as her sister-in-law Orpah has done, so that she might
find a way to secure her future.  Naomi thinks she is far more likely
to secure her future in her own country than here in foreign Israel,
during this famine.  But Ruth will not leave.  She stays with Naomi.
She continues her faithfulness, even when she is free to leave.  She
chooses covenantal faithfulness over securing her own future.
    
So now Naomi plays matchmaker.  She sees Boaz, and she spots a likely
prospect.  And she and Ruth hatch a scandal of a plan.  When he is
tired from the day’s work, after he has eaten and had enough wine that
‘his heart was merry,” Ruth is to go to his bed, and uncover his
*ahem* “feet,” and lie down.  [Gotta love them Hebrew euphemisms,
don’t we?]
    
And she does, and he does, and they do, and they wed, and Ruth is
married and has children and everyone lives happily ever after.  If
that were the entire story, we would have a romance novel, but not
scripture.
    
But in this strange little story (and I would recommend reading the
whole thing), Ruth risks herself in order to fulfill what she promises
to Naomi.  It is a strange little story.  It is scandalous.  It sounds
more like tabloid headlines than scripture.
    
But then it concludes with the naming of the child: They named him
Obed; he was the father of Jesse, the father of David.
    
THAT David.  The shepherd.  The king.  The pinnacle of Israel.  No
faithful foreign widow, no David.  No David, no Jesus.
    
What startles us about this morning’s readings are not the sex scandal
of Ruth and Boaz, or that religious folks like the scribe can behave
badly.  We see and hear of such things every day.
    
What startles us is how often it is the risky faith of those the world
would count out, those the self-righteous would overlook, those we so
easily forget, that fulfills God’s covenant.  How often is it the
widow, the orphan, the fisherman, the shepherd, the foreigner, the
leper, the tax collector, the forgotten, who proves to be faithful?

And by their faithfulness, the covenant is kept.

By their faithfulness, the kingdom draws near.
    
My buddy Cliff says there is no transformation in this story.  I think
there might yet be transformation.  It might yet be Good News.  Not in
the story.  But in us.
    
Thanks be to God.
Amen.