The Winning Way of a Winsome Witness

May 12, 1991

Scripture: Ruth 1:1-18

If the absolute truth were known, if the inner recesses of the viscera could be laid out for inspection...a horrible image, by the way.... I would have to confess to you in all candor that preaching on Mother’s Day, for me, has always been difficult.

It’s not the fault of mothers, I hasten to add....I like mothers; I believe in mothers; I believe in honoring mothers, but something deep within me rebels at the way we have traditionally gone about expressing that honor, especially in Church. Most Mother’s Day sermons tend to be excessively saccharine and syrupy in substance, often embarrassingly so.... they tend to belabor the obvious, and canonize the frothy. Mothers deserve better. A little salt poured into the sugar can provide a wonderful corrective.

I wonder if you have heard the story of the venerable couple who were celebrating their Golden Wedding anniversary?  50 years of married togetherness! Their children planned a big day for Mom and Pop, complete with reception, and cake, and guests, and presents.... all the trimmings.         

It was a splendid affair. The people came, congratulated them, sang songs, made toasts. At the close of the day, when everybody had gone, and they were left alone, just the 2 of them, they went out on the porch to watch the evening sun sink below the horizon. The husband of 50 years, moved by the emotion of the moment, reached over gently and took his wife by the hand and said in her ear, “My darling, I admire you.”

She had gotten slightly hard of hearing, and said, “What?” So he repeated, a little louder, “I said, ‘I admire you.’”

She still couldn’t hear, so he turned up her hearing aid, and shouted, “I said, ‘I admire you.’” Her face lit up in a big smile, and she said, “Yeah, I’m tired of you, too.”

Now, that’s the other extreme, and that’s not the right note to strike, either, but at least it inserts an element of realism into the picture.

The Bible, maybe surprisingly, is remarkably realistic in the stories it tells about mothers, and wives, and about family relations in general. No cheap idealism or whitewashing. Except for a little extravagance in the Book of Proverbs, it rarely hits a falsely sentimental chord in dealing with matters maternal.

Especially in the Old Testament, which, quite honestly, can be pretty chauvinistic at times....it comes out of an unabashedly patriarchal society, remember, a male dominated society, and you need to remember that when you read it.

 The NEW Testament sees through broader lenses, thanks to Jesus. WOMANKIND OWES AN INCACULABLE DEBT TO JESUS OF NAZARETH, who treated women, all women, with a respect never before shown in the ancient world.

By the time you get to the Gospels, you’ve come a long way, Baby. There just aren’t many examples of ideal motherhood in the Old Testament.

There’s Rebekah, stunning in beauty, but totally unscrupulous, who clearly played favorites between her children, not only siding with one against the other, but openly aiding and abetting him in a duplicitous scheme to fool the father into changing the will....Dallas on the Jordan.[1]

And there’s Bathsheba, the lovely and irresistible charmer, who captured the eye of the King in her “au naturel” bathing attire.

She became the royal favorite after a while, but sacrificed honor and common decency to do it. Her child and grandchildren fomented much of Israel’s subsequent heartache.

There’s Gomer, Hosea’s wife and the mother of his children.....She abandoned both spouse and offspring to pursue a prostitute’s life..... would have probably died, too, in a filthy brothel if it hadn’t been that her husband still loved her. He went out and found her, languishing in the... pig pen, if you will, and brought her back home. He learned something out of that tragic experience about how God loves his wayward people......

MOTHERS IN THE OLD TESTAMENT GENERALLY DON’T GET TERRIBLY HIGH MARKS. You can count more examples of bad ones than you can good ones.

But there’s at least one basically unblemished portrait, I think. There is one story in the Old Testament that stands in contrast to that general picture...Maybe it was put there in part to redeem the others.

It’s the little story....not, not little, either. It’s the BIG story in the little book we call the Book of Ruth. It’s really the story of a mother-in-law, and while it’s not sentimentalized.... or maybe precisely BECAUSE it’s not sentimentalized-----there’s no fluff in it, no false idealism-----it seems to me it has something important to say about authentic motherhood, about humanity at its best, and about how a person within the family relationship, that most intimate and demanding of relationships, can make a witness that by the grace of God, can change a life.

On this Mother’s Day, 1991, let’s think about it.

The story begins in the midst of hard times.... nothing sentimental about that. A family of 4---call it a typical nuclear family, living near Bethlehem in Judah, is reaping the consequences of a severe economic depression.

There’s Elimelech, his wife, Naomi, and their 2 sons. Tough going...tough times all over. For months, no rain... drought, dust, famine....Sheep dying on the hillsides, grain, parched, withering on the stalk....no crop, nothing to sell, nothing to buy with, no feed for the animals...and no welfare assistance, either...no food stamps.

Elimelech and Naomi look out across the valley, out toward the southeast, toward Moab, where things don’t seem quite so bad. The grass, they say, always looks greener somewhere else.

So they go. “What can we lose?”, they rationalize. “It can’t be worse than this.” They sell the farm, pack up, pull up stakes, and migrate.... another country, a fresh beginning.

TEN YEARS THEY STAY...a full decade...TEN YEARS of hard work, and sweat, and muscle, and effort, and failure.... Not only did it not get better, it got worse. The boys grew up and married. That meant 2 more mouths to feed. AND NO NICE JEWISH GIRLS IN MOAB. They married local girls... pleasant enough, all right, but girls who practiced the local religion, the worship of Chemosh, a pagan deity, a fertility god, to be precise, a god scorned by the Jews as unworthy and immoral.

AND THEN, ON TOP OF EVERYTHING ELSE... DISASTER, CATACLYSM, REAL TRAGEDY STRIKES. Elimelech dies, and the two sons die.... all of them, her whole family snatched away before Naomi’s stunned eyes.

And just like that, she finds herself left alone, bereft, a widow, a woman by herself in a foreign land, perhaps the worst thing that could happen to a woman in that day and age.... no security, no protection, no resources.

And you know the story. Naomi decides the only thing to do is go back, back to Judah, back to Bethlehem, back to her own land, her own people, and she’ll have to go by herself.

So, her daughters-in-law, both of them, walk with her to the Jordan River to the boundary between Moab and Judah, to tell her goodbye. That was the custom in those days when a person left the country. You’d accompany them to the frontier to show respect.

And one of the daughters-in-law, Orpah, says her goodbyes there at the riverbank, and returns home. We never hear from her again.

BUT THE OTHER ONE, this young girl, Ruth, herself a widow now, simply can’t make herself say goodbye. There’s a pull there, an inner tug, an enticement, something that won’t let her make the break. Instead, there comes pouring from her heart what amounts to a magnificent testimony to another woman’s inner beauty. She says those words which I suppose are as lovely and as touching as any we could point to in the Scriptures---

“Entreat me not to leave thee, or to refrain from following after thee. For whither thou goest I will go. And whither thou lodgest I will lodge. Thy people shall be my people and thy God my God.”

WHAT MADE HER SAY THAT? Well, I think I know. I think I can understand. IT WAS HER

APPRECIATION FOR AND HER ATTACHMENT TO NAOMI HERSELF THAT PROMPTED HER RESPONSE.

Sometimes we read those words at a wedding, and certainly you can lift them out of context and apply them to male and female, but in the story, they were spoken by a daughter-in-law to her mother-in-law.

What a lustrous, noble woman Naomi must have been, inside and out, to have elicited that kind of affection. To be so winsome, so attractive in life, so decent, so honorable in manner and bearing that you’d make a person of another generation, another culture, another religious background willing to make that kind of commitment....willing to leave home, and family ties, and upbringing to be where you were, to adopt your worship, to make your religious allegiance her own...to me speaks volumes about Naomi’s character.

It also has some important implications for evangelism. You almost wonder if they didn’t make a mistake when they named the book. Ruth is the star, I guess, or becomes the star, but in a way the real heroine is Naomi.....coming through all those trials she had to face, withstanding the degradation of poverty, moving, resettling, starting over, making do....how easy could that have been? Call it anything but sentimental.

Then welcoming into her home those pagan girls her sons had chosen....maintaining her own faith all the while, preserving her Hebrew practices, praying to her own God without offending.... respecting them, yet not diluting her own integrity....week after week embodying before them a finer texture of womanhood than they had ever seen before....a grace of manner, an accepting patience, a rightness of conduct and understanding far in advance of the crude religious ideas of Moab---HOW EASY COULD THAT HAVE BEEN?

Even when cruel death struck down her men----husband and both sons! Sentimental? I don’t think so. EVEN THEN, holding on to her faith with stubborn conviction....

Not allowing even THAT to make her bitter.... what a woman! What a human being? What a witness! Over time it had an effect on Ruth. Can’t you see how it would? The Bible doesn’t spell out the details, but all of it together, the outward and visible, reflecting the inner and spiritual, was changing a life.

Nothing dramatic... it was all unpretentious, it was unobtrusive, maybe even unplanned, certainly unrehearsed, BUT NOT UNCHARACTERISTIC, I think, of the way these things happen.

Little by little, the best that was in Naomi called forth the best that was in Ruth. Deep responded to deep. It was like an infection, only a positive, healthy, life-producing infection, and as Ruth was drawn willingly into Naomi’s orbit, she was drawn unfailingly to Naomi’s God. The beginning of it was her affection for Naomi herself.

“Entreat me not to leave thee...” I want to go with you. Let me go, too. “Thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.”

Anybody know a good mother-in-law joke? FORGET IT.

Now, that’s the Biblical Mother’s Day story, at least the opening part of it. I want to say 3 things about it, and I don’t have time to elaborate sufficiently on any of them. I used to worry about how I would ever be able to fill up 20 minutes a week with stuff, but now I worry about how I can possibly leave out all that needs to be included.

1) A quick word about the SEQUEL to the story, because it doesn’t end on the riverbank. Ruth did go on to Judah with Naomi. You can read about it in the subsequent chapters of the book. SHE became the stranger in a foreign land, the outsider in a new setting, but she became acclimated and incorporated into her adopted land and adopted faith. She became a part of the faith community.

With her mother-in-law’s help, she found a new husband in Judah, and while obviously she had no way of knowing at the time how the ultimate story would resolve, her choice that day at the Jordan led her to becoming the great, great grandmother of David, Israel’s greatest and best loved King.

You never know. Remember Robert Frost’s poem about THE ROAD NOT TAKEN?

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth....

Then took the other....

He goes on to say:

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence;

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

YOU NEVER KNOW. The pebble dropped into the lake may send out ripples that will expand indefinitely; the influence of one life on another may produce repercussions that affect eternity. Ruth didn’t know all that then, of course, what her future and ultimate destiny would be, but the beginning of it was that ineluctable attractiveness of her mother-in-law. She was drawn to God and God’s purpose by the inner beauty of Naomi.

2) And that leads me to the 2nd thing I want to say. Call it maybe the evangelistic word. We’ve already touched on it in passing. WHAT NAOMI DID FOR RUTH, what Naomi imparted through the quiet manner of her life, is the very essence of effective witnessing. She did it within the home for someone close by, maybe the hardest place of all, by she didn’t do it by haranguing, she didn’t use the button-hole approach, or fear tactics, she didn’t even hit it head on.... that approach probably would have backfired anyway.

SHE LIVED IT....radiated her religion, AND MADE IT SO APPEALING THAT AFTER A WHILE IT MADE CONVERSION EASY TO THE GOD WHO WAS THE SOURCE OF IT.

Now, that’s evangelism at its simple best. And that’s how nearly every person is won for God, at least that’s where the process starts, when you see it in action in somebody’s life. The simple truth is that people choose your God because they’ve first chosen you.

Let me ask you. Are you doing that for anybody, anybody with whom you have influence? Whether you’re mother, mother-in-law, father, neighbor, business associate, WHATEVER, are you making your witness so contagious your faith so winsome that somebody else wants it, chooses it, elects to go with you because they’ve seen something in you, they know they want and need for themselves? That’s where it almost always starts, not in an argument, or a debate, but in a LIFE, a life that shines with an inner glow.

In the biography of Ernest Fremont Tittle, there is the account of how during the 2nd World War, a Japanese girl, released from one of the internment camps in California where Japanese-Americans were forcibly placed for supposed security purposes, went when she got out to Chicago to find work. Before she could get a job, she was stricken with appendicitis, and hospitalized.

There she was, young, sick, a stranger, a Japanese on top of that, with no work and no money. Hearing about her plight, some young people from the First Methodist Church of Evanston, Dr. Tittle’s church went to the hospital. In a wholesome, friendly way, they offered help and gave it. They befriended her, took her home, one of them did, when she was able to go, and helped her get back on her feet.

That young Japanese woman, though brought up as a Buddhist, soon decided that if Christianity made people like that, she wanted to be a Christian. AND THE OLD, OLD STORY OF RUTH WAS RE-ENACTED IN THE BOOMING CITY OF CHICAGO.

I bet you could tell a similar story. Maybe you’re even the product of one. That’s evangelism in its purest and most effective form. It’s how nearly every person finds his way into the Kingdom.... one by one as the result of a life with emulating.

I want to go with you.... That’s the way it happens. “Thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.”

3) Now this final, brief word, and we’re done. It’s interesting to me that by the time we get to the pivotal point of this story of Ruth and Naomi, by the time we get to the river bank, we’ve moved from a typical nuclear family situation to a non-nuclear, atypical family situation.

By the time Ruth made her decision, her “family” really consisted of only 2 people---that’s all there was left. More and more families today are like that....and on Mother’s Day we need to remember it. It’s happening with greater frequency.... single parent families, mixed families, step-parent families, single persons.... the traditional nuclear family now is probably in the minority. I read recently that in Harlem, N.Y., less than 20% of the high school students live with both mother and father.

The sociological and psychological implications of that are far beyond my capacity to deal with, but doesn’t it at least suggest that the Church, which likes to think of itself as the family of God, must broaden and sensitize itself to the realities of what FAMILY today means...and what it might mean.

How welcome really do singles feel at family life dinners? Where do divorced and widowed people go for wholesome fellowship? Where do single parent children find appropriate models? How do the perplexed and lonely of whatever age get in touch with caring, competent, Christian people who can help them?

I don’t know the answers to all this, but I think the questions come close to the target.

THE WORLD IS FULL OF RUTHS, people at the crossroads, trying to find their way, trying to make up their minds about life.... WHAT THERE’S A NEED FOR IS MORE NAOMI’S, WINSOME WITNESSES, good samples of the product.

That’s our challenge, it seems to me, and in a way that’s the glory of the Church when it recognizes and responds to the full measure of its calling.

The story of Ruth and Naomi, this lovely, ancient account of a woman’s unpretentious witness shows us that motherhood at its best transcends the merely biological, and that family at its best can be experienced wherever caring, acceptance, and loving nurture are found.  In the church of Jesus, water is thicker than blood.

--

[1] Dallas was a popular television show when this sermon was written.