{"id":5023,"date":"2025-11-07T09:07:23","date_gmt":"2025-11-07T14:07:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/?p=5023"},"modified":"2025-11-07T09:07:23","modified_gmt":"2025-11-07T14:07:23","slug":"ruth-11","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/2025\/11\/07\/ruth-11\/","title":{"rendered":"Ruth 1:1"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast,\u00a0click here<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n


\u00a0Each day this month we\u2019re looking closely at one of the 1:1 verses of the Bible \u2013 exploring what we can learn from chapter one \/ verse one of various Old and New Testament books.<\/em>

\u201cIn the days when the judges ruled,\u00a0there was a famine in the land.\u00a0So a man from Bethlehem in Judah,\u00a0together with his wife and two sons, went to live for a while\u00a0in the country of Moab.\u201d

Tucked away amongst the voluminous historical and prophetic narratives of the Old Testament, like a Mom and Pop grocery store on a street that is lined with skyscrapers, there is a surprisingly humble Bible story called the book of Ruth.\u00a0

It has a surprising hero \u2013 a foreign-born woman whom no one expected to give a rip about the God of Israel, let alone God giving her<\/em> so much as a second thought.

It has a surprising theme \u2013 ordinary people trying to find hope in the midst of the scariest kind of hopelessness.\u00a0

And it has a surprising ending \u2013 Ruth, whom many saw as a nobody, becoming Ruth the great-grandmother of David, Israel\u2019s greatest king, and thereby becoming a crucial link in the genealogy of Jesus himself.

Ruth is all about hope.

What stands out in this story is that hope appears almost out of the blue.\u00a0As Bible scholar Robert A. Watson puts it, these four short chapters take us \u201cfrom emptiness to fullness; from aimlessness to direction; from hopelessness to purpose; from impossible to already done; and from loneliness to love.\u201d\u00a0

The first sentence in the first chapter sets the scene. And it\u2019s a difficult one.

When famine strikes Israel, a man from Bethlehem in Judah (whose name is Elimelech),\u00a0together with his wife (Naomi) and two sons, go to live for a while\u00a0in the country of Moab. By moving to Moab, Elimelech has made a disastrous mistake. This would be like an Amish family experiencing some bad harvests and choosing to move to Las Vegas to seek a better life.\u00a0

Moab had a reputation for corruption and immorality, and God had specifically warned his people not to put down stakes there.\u00a0The two sons then go a step farther and marry Moabite women, something expressly forbidden by Jewish law.\u00a0

By the time we reach verse five, all three men have died. The family line of Elimelech is teetering on annihilation.

Real families have real problems.\u00a0In the Bible, as in real life, we learn that families should not be idealized.\u00a0David Frost once interviewed Billy Graham\u2019s wife Ruth.\u00a0He pressed her: \u201cIn all these years, haven\u2019t you had problems? Have you never once contemplated divorce?\u201d\u00a0\u201cNot once,\u201d she shot back.\u00a0\u201cMurder, yes, but not divorce.\u201d

Naomi\u2019s family and consequently her very life have been shattered.\u00a0

Her widowhood falls into the most precarious category.\u00a0She is an old widow who has no sons.\u00a0In the ancient world, women depended on male guardians for protection and financial security.\u00a0Now she has no husband.\u00a0Her sons were her retirement package \u2013 her 401(k).\u00a0But that safety net has also been taken away.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0

Employment wasn\u2019t an option for mature women.\u00a0Thus she is facing the likelihood of a future in which no one will be there to take care of her.\u00a0She is the ancient world\u2019s version of a bag lady.

She feels hopeless and uncertain.\u00a0What\u2019s going to happen next?\u00a0How will these three widows eat?\u00a0No one is going to sponsor a brainstorming session in which creative new solutions will be proposed. Naomi and her daughters-in-law have entered a spiritual and relational wilderness.

Here we need to pause and acknowledge an uncomfortable truth.\u00a0A great deal of the teaching that is heard in contemporary churches turns out to be what we might call \u201cWilderness Avoidance Theology.\u201d\u00a0

Its core message is that if you\u2019re faithful to God, God will be faithful to you.\u00a0He\u2019ll protect you from disaster, disease, and depression \u2013 not to mention unemployment, bankruptcy, and humiliation.\u00a0If you end up in dire straits, like Naomi, you really only have yourself to blame.\u00a0

But it just isn\u2019t so.\u00a0

All it takes to refute the Gospel of Prosperity is to glance at the life of Jesus.\u00a0If God\u2019s own Son was led into literal and metaphorical wildernesses, why \u2013 in the light of his assurance that his followers will always be called to follow in his footsteps \u2013 should we think ourselves exempt?\u00a0

When St. Teresa of Avila (1515-1582) was thrown from a cart into a creek, she came up out of the water and exclaimed, \u201cLord, if this is how you treat your friends, no wonder you have so few!\u201d

The Bible doesn\u2019t teach Wilderness Avoidance Theology.\u00a0

It offers something infinitely better: the assurance that there is always hope in the wilderness.\u00a0Even if we are the ones who have stranded ourselves in spiritual cul-de-sacs, God is at work.\u00a0And few of us can predict what he\u2019s going to do next.

Naomi certainly couldn\u2019t.\u00a0

Things begin to turn when she decides to trudge, broken and defeated, back to Bethlehem. She urges her two daughters-in-law to go back to their families of origin, through which they might be able to meet new husbands.

One of them, Orpah, decides that\u2019s an entirely sensible recommendation. She bids farewell. Her one consolation, from the perspective of history, is that in 1954 an unwed Mississippi teenager would give birth to a little girl to whom she was determined to give a biblical name. She settled on Orpah. But her family and friends had so much trouble spelling and pronouncing her name that eventually she became known as Oprah<\/em> \u2013 Oprah Winfrey.

The other daughter-in-law is Ruth. The love and loyalty that she pours out on Naomi, whom she refuses to abandon, has been celebrated as a model of virtue for more than three millennia.

The two widows will somehow need to put food on the table. Back in Israel, Ruth volunteers to glean in a local field \u2013 an exhausting and even dangerous task in the males-only world of harvesting. In Ruth 2:3 we read, \u201cSo she went out and began to glean in the fields behind the harvesters.\u00a0As it turned out, she found herself working in a field belonging to Boaz\u2026\u201d

As it turned out<\/em> is a fascinating phrase in the original Hebrew.\u00a0It literally reads, \u201cas chance chanced it.\u201d Chance here is both a noun and a verb.\u00a0

Now before we jump to the conclusion that the Bible teaches there is some kind of impersonal force called Chance that\u2019s at work in the universe, we need to smile along with the author of Ruth and say, \u201cHmm, what are the odds that Ruth would end up gleaning at just the right place \u2013 leading her to meet the gracious man she is destined to marry?\u201d

Did that happen by chance? Not a chance.

The first verse of the first chapter of Ruth introduces us to a family in crisis.

We encounter famine. Misguided decisions. Heartbreaking losses. Destitution.

But then comes hope. \u00a0

And this little book of hope may turn out to be exactly what we need in our own day and time.
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast,\u00a0click here \u00a0Each day this month we\u2019re looking closely at one of the 1:1 verses of the Bible \u2013 exploring what we can learn from chapter one \/ verse one of various Old and New Testament books. \u201cIn the days when the judges ruled,\u00a0there was a famine in the land.\u00a0So a man from… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5024,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1029,18],"class_list":["post-5023","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-11-series","tag-hope"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5023","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5023"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5023\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5025,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5023\/revisions\/5025"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5024"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5023"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5023"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5023"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}