Ruth 1
In the days when the judges ruled, there was a famine in the land. So a man from Bethlehem in Judah, together with his wife and two sons, went to live for a while in the country of Moab. The man’s name was Elimelek, his wife’s name was Naomi, and the names of his two sons were Mahlon and Kilion. They were Ephrathites from Bethlehem, Judah. And they went to Moab and lived there. Now Elimelek, Naomi’s husband, died, and she was left with her two sons. They married Moabite women, one named Orpah and the other Ruth. After they had lived there about ten years, both Mahlon and Kilion also died, and Naomi was left without her two sons and her husband.
When Naomi heard in Moab that the Lord had come to the aid of his people by providing food for them, she and her daughters-in-law prepared to return home from there. With her two daughters-in-law she left the place where she had been living and set out on the road that would take them back to the land of Judah. Then Naomi said to her two daughters-in-law, “Go back, each of you, to your mother’s home. May the Lord show you kindness, as you have shown kindness to your dead husbands and to me. May the Lord grant that each of you will find rest in the home of another husband.” Then she kissed them goodbye and they wept aloud and said to her, “We will go back with you to your people.”
But Naomi said, “Return home, my daughters. Why would you come with me? Am I going to have any more sons, who could become your husbands? Return home, my daughters; I am too old to have another husband. Even if I thought there was still hope for me—even if I had a husband tonight and then gave birth to sons—would you wait until they grew up? Would you remain unmarried for them? No, my daughters. It is more bitter for me than for you, because the Lord’s hand has turned against me!” At this they wept aloud again. Then Orpah kissed her mother-in-law goodbye, but Ruth clung to her.
“Look,” said Naomi, “your sister-in-law is going back to her people and her gods. Go back with her.” But Ruth replied, “Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the Lord deal with me, be it ever so severely, if even death separates you and me.” When Naomi realised that Ruth was determined to go with her, she stopped urging her.
So the two women went on until they came to Bethlehem. When they arrived in Bethlehem, the whole town was stirred because of them, and the women exclaimed, “Can this be Naomi?” “Don’t call me Naomi,” she told them. “Call me Mara because the Almighty has made my life very bitter. I went away full, but the Lord has brought me back empty. Why call me Naomi? The Lord has afflicted me; the Almighty has brought misfortune upon me.” So Naomi returned from Moab accompanied by Ruth the Moabite, her daughter-in-law, arriving in Bethlehem as the barley harvest was beginning.
You’ve had guest preachers for the last two weeks, and I hope it's been refreshing to hear other voices, but you're back with me this week, and we return to our series asking “What does Christianity about...?” Before we began this series, I asked for suggestions as to what we might fill in the blank with, and one of the first ideas that was shared was marriage. As I thought about it, I realised scripture often talks about marriage alongside other familial relationships, so I thought we could widen our view a little to think more broadly about what Christianity says about families. That also gives me the chance to say right from the outset that it's important to recognise that marriage itself forms a family, and that people belong to families even without being married, something which the church hasn't always been very good at, often using ‘family’ as shorthand for ‘married couple with young children'. That has at times made church an uncomfortable and even isolating place for those who don't fit that description, and I apologise if I have ever contributed to that through being lazy or careless with my language.
It is strange that the church should have become so fixated on the nuclear family, because we really don't see that obsession in scripture at all. In the first place, the Old Testament is full of complex and sprawling multigenerational families. I'm not going to preach on the story of Ruth, but I chose that passage for our reading because I wanted us to hear an example of a biblical family. That wasn't the whole story, as Ruth goes on to marry another member of the family, and has a child who the townsfolk seem to recognise as belonging more to Ruth and her former mother-in-law than Ruth and her new husband. In Ruth's story, we see that families can be shaped by chance and tragedy, that they can be places of pain and grace, that they can be biological and extended and chosen. We might also have heard the story of Abraham, and the sons he bore to his wife and her slave, one of whom he cast out and one of whom he nearly sacrificed. Or of Jacob, who married sisters and turned them and their children into rivals, creating such a mess of things that one of his sons was sold into slavery by his brothers. I'm not going to suggest they are model families - Abraham and Jacob make their fair share of mistakes - but perhaps the point is that there is no such thing as a model family. All families are at least a little bit messy, and so we don't need to be ashamed of that, we just need to do our best by those we are family to, and ask God to bless our particular mess.
By the time we get to the New Testament, we find quite a lot of deconstruction and reconstruction around ideas of what it means to be family. In Matthew 12:50 Jesus seems unfussed by the arrival of his mother and brothers and declares that “whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother”, and then in Luke 14:26 there is that curious incident in which he says that "if anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters...such a person cannot be my disciple". Reading a little into the language, it seems that hate was often used as hyperbole to set up a comparison, and so it is likely that Jesus was saying we are to love our family less than him, not that we must despise or reject them, but there is still a sense in these verses that family in its traditional sense is not to be our first priority or primary orientation. We see that come through even more strongly in the epistles, where Paul is really quite dismissive of marriage and little interested in parental or sibling relationships, and we more often see familial language used in the context of the church. Paul uses the metaphor of adoption to speak of being brought into God's family, and describes the church as the household of God. The author of the Johannine letters speaks of their readers as brothers and sisters to one another, and in more paternal moments addresses them as dear children. It is not that the family we are born or adopted or married into does not matter, but that what matters more is that there is a much wider family of faith that we now belong to. That wider family can be just as messy as the rest, but there is a lot of blessing in it too.
We're asking what Christianity says about families, but it seems that the Bible and the church are not always saying the same thing. That tension is particularly clear when it comes to the specific question of marriage, perhaps the hottest of theological potatoes at the moment, with the church often disagreeing with itself over how to use the Bible. For all that there is much talk of biblical marriage, which usually means one man and one woman for life, the scriptural picture is much more complicated. The Bible variously describes marriage between one man and one woman, between one man and many women, between one man and many women plus concubines, between a woman and her rapist, between a widow and her brother in law, and between a soldier and his prisoner. There are marriages where the wife's slaves are treated as part of the package, and there is an assumption that masters may arrange marriages between slaves. Wives are instructed to obey their husbands, and husbands can divorce their wives on a whim, although we do see both of those challenged. On balance, it would appear that what many call biblical marriage is really church marriage. Now I do not want to advocate for all of those understandings of marriage, and in fact I would argue quite strongly against many of them, but I draw attention to them because if we recognise that the biblical picture of marriage is a lot more nuanced than the church has often taught, we can open up conversations about it.
So if what Christianity says about families has become confused, with Bible and church not always in agreement with each other or even themselves, what are we to do? I think we have to approach it all with a spirit of discernment. It is my belief that neither scripture nor tradition is infallible, with both being human responses to divine action, and so we always need to be asking what is God's word and where is God's will in all of this. It may help to try and cut through to first principles, so let's begin with the first thing that either scripture or tradition says about families. In Genesis 2, God creates Adam and then declares it is not good for him to be alone, and so creates Eve as a suitable partner for him. Right from the beginning we see that we are made to be in relationship with others, and so I think the most foundational principle is that family is a good thing. That doesn't mean that all families are good, but it does mean that families are meant to be good, and that we can break away from families when they are not good. I don't think we should give up on them easily, because we can and should work at them, but we do not have to stay trapped in them either. That is why so many people create chosen families when their birth families fail them. We see that in scripture too, as in Psalm 68:6 the psalmist says that “God sets the lonely in families”. It is part of God's desire and work for us to bring us into families that are safe and loving and supportive, even if not always conventional, and when they are at their very best, this is the gift and blessing of church families.
As well as first principles, we might think of trajectories. We looked at this before when we worked through Ephesians and then Colossians, as both have passages in which the readers are told that wives should submit to their husbands and husbands should love their wives, while children should obey their parents and parents should respect their children. The first half of each of those pairs of instructions would have been familiar to those communities of faith, but the second half feels like something new, shifting relationships away from being hierarchical and transactional towards being mutual and loving. I believe that God is seeking to draw us ever closer to the kingdom, to the world and life for which we are made, and I see this trajectory as part of that. I think we are meant to keep moving along it, until we understand that mutuality and love are the very foundations of family, and the fruit by which we recognise good family. I believe it is following that trajectory that has led us to affirm same sex marriage here, and I believe that is a sign of the emerging and flourishing of the kingdom of God. I realise that not many churches would say that, but if what Christianity says about families has become confused, I think that is because we are caught in the now and not yet of that kingdom, still learning and still growing. Families are messy and so what we understand and believe and teach about families will be messy. We can only seek to do our best by those we are family too, and ask that God continues to bless this mess.
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