The Trust Network

Text: Ruth 3-4; Psalm 146

Put not your trust in rulers. This from today’s psalm is hard advice to hear after just finishing an exhausting but resolved election campaign. Though some are unhappy with the result, the ferocity of the campaign tells us that most people are willing to put their trust in rulers; the only question being which ones.

Psalm 146 is usually described as a psalm of trust. God is trustworthy because God keeps God’s promises, brings justice, feeds the hungry, lifts the downtrodden, and frustrates the wicked. Yet in another way the psalm is about distrust. It starts with the admonition about rulers, which it extends to all living creatures, or at least all humans. We and our thoughts perish. We are mortal, short-lived, and imperfect. And because of that, not worthy of trust.

Yet, we are creatures of the earth. The sun rises and sets, fortunes change, unexpected joys and troubles find us. We need to eat. We are social creatures, binding ourselves to others or fighting against them. Is it even possible to trust God without trusting humans? If we never trust other people, how can we actually in our day to day life trust God? When we trust others, we trust God.

Ruth is a foreigner, from Moab, married into an Israelite family. Yet when her husband dies, her mother-in-law Naomi, urges her to return to her own people. Ruth will not, and she famously says to Naomi, “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.”

There is a two-way connection of trust here. Ruth trusting that she will be safe with Naomi, and Naomi trusting that Ruth will act as a daughter to her. But it extends beyond these two protagonists. Later, Ruth trusts Naomi’s family to provide for her, which they do. And in today’s story, Ruth trusts Naomi’s scheming ways, which turn out in the end to be good for everyone. Naomi trust’s Boaz’s good nature and sense of duty. Boaz trusts Ruth’s good will and in God’s providence. It is a complicated network of trust. God is hardly mentioned in it—just in passing, really—yet trust in God is its foundation. Just because God is hardly mentioned does not mean that God is not present. Just because we do not always talk about the work of God’s hand does not mean that we do not feel it to be there. Too many negatives in that sentence; let’s try this: we know God’s hand guides us even when we do not chatter on about it.

There are strong cultural, local, and family connections in the story of Ruth. In the story of the Bible, for that matter. There is a tension between—or better to say a cooperation between—between the personal and the community in our relationship with God and what we hope from God. The church (not this church, the whole church) has been arguing for centuries about whether personal piety—one’s individual connection with God, with Jesus—or community behavior—how we as a culture are guided by God—is more important. But clearly the answer is Yes. Salvation is both singular and plural.

The community welcomes Ruth, an outsider, gathers around her, and takes her in, and feeds her (it is no accident that so much of the story has to do with grain, food, and drink). She and her mother-in-law Naomi are redeemed, it says, meaning claimed. As a consequence, the family line is extended on to David, Israel’s greatest king, and according to Matthew’s Gospel, on to Jesus.

Ruth and Naomi come to the story with nothing. They are impoverished and without stature. The widow who trusts Elijah in the second reading has nothing. Just enough food to eat one last meal. The widow in the Gospel story has nothing. Just a little to give all of it away. We don’t know what happens to that woman. But we do know that Elijah and the widow, and Ruth and Naomi, survive. They do so because of a mixture of God’s intervention plus God’s actions implemented in the actions of other people. People acting together and trusting one another as much as they are able.

In the Gospel reading, Jesus has contempt for the scribes. They are both arrogant and cruel, devouring widows’ houses and who knows what else. In their cruelty, they deny God’s commandment, reiterated by Jesus, to care for those who are in need. In their arrogance, they forget that God is the creator and source. They congratulate themselves, patting themselves on the back, think themselves especially worthy of respect and places of honor. They imagine themselves to be responsible for their lives of abundance.

They do not recognize how they are the product of God’s grace and the many graces of the people of the culture in which they live. They forget somehow—something that the characters in the story of Ruth would never forget—that people are interdependent. The fortunes of each of us are tangled up with the fortunes of all of us. The scribes in Jesus’ story are the rulers the psalm warns against.

The genealogical line from Abraham to Jesus that begins the first chapter of the Gospel of Matthew goes through Ruth. This is remarkable. Ruth is an outsider, a Moabite. The rules and tradition among Israelites against intermarriage were very strong. Yet Ruth marries Boaz, and they give birth to a child, even though Boaz is getting on in years. And that child becomes the grandfather of great king David.

The line runs through Ruth plus three other gentile women: Rahab, Tamar, Bathsheba, plus Ruth. Without these foreigners, these people otherwise despised, there would be no line. (In fact, Tamar is remembered by the townspeople as they give a blessing to Ruth). The righteous scribes need to remember that they would not have wealth and power without these four women.

We can conclude from Ruth’s story and the story of the others that God is not inclined to stand on ceremony when something needs to get done. It is not so much that God has a plan and finds the best people to implement it. It is rather that God makes good use of the people who happen to be there. It seems that God extracts the plan from the events that have already unfolded.

A corollary to this is that God works in the daily lives and decisions of people, and lots of different kinds of people—even leaders. And also that the interdependence of people is a form of God’s grace. A means of grace.

I’d like to say a word about Veterans Day, which is today. It used to be called Armistice Day, when the first World War ended. The eleventh hour on the 11th day of the 11th month. It was meant originally to celebrate the end of war in general. We see how well that worked out. But hoping for an end to war especially on this day is not foolishness.

We continue to hope for peace because we learn from these stories and others that even the very unlikely—the inconceivable—is possible with God. Using us, God’s children. And showing us again and again that we are all in this together. And teaching us to trust in God by trusting one another, God’s daughters and sons.