Sermon Tone Analysis

Intro me

War.

Inflation.

Political turmoil.

Strikes.

Social turmoil.

Our world is a little crazy just now, right?

Well, imagine this: imagine someone walks up to you in the street and there, just out of the blue, offers you a family ticket to a place where there’s peace, stability, security, provision, rest - a way out of this mess, a way to leave it all behind.

Who wouldn’t take it?

I do like a bit of excitement in life - I was in Hamburg last week for a conference and the city has electric scooter hire as one of the main ways to get around.

Scooting 22kmh in a foreign city in the dark was definitely exciting.

But we have way, way way too much excitement in our world at the moment.

Who wouldn’t grab that ticket right out of their hand and wave a hasty goodbye to whoever was around and just go right now? Bye everyone!

Well, imagine there’s just such a ticket - but to get it, you have to complete a secret agent-style mission, you have to take some pretty serious risks?

Would you give it a try?

That’s our bible story today - an ancient drama.

But it’s not just an ancient drama - it’s an invitation for us too, speaking to us about how we can find a resting place.

Let’s read together and then we’ll explore.

And as we read, bear in mind this is a three thousand year old story.

Three thousand years - even older than Facebook, kids.

So if there’s stuff in here that’s a bit weird, a bit strange, that shouldn’t be a massive surprise.

Hang on to your hats and then I’ll try and open some of it up so we can better understand.

Suzi’s reading for us this morning.

Ruth chapter 3 and that’s page 269 in these blue church bibles.

Thanks Suzie.

Three main characters in the passage - Naomi, Ruth and Boaz - and each one gets a turn leading the action.

So we’re going to navigate through the passage that way, and start with Naomi.

Naomi in some ways is the central character for this whole book.

She’s an ancient Israelite who, with her husband and two sons, left their home country and went as refugees to Moab, one of the neighbouring countries, to escape a famine.

There in Moab she knows joy, as her sons find wives, and then sorrow as first her husband, and then her sons pass away.

Widowed and childless, Naomi decides to head home.

Her two daughters-in-law, now also widowed, have become so close they want to come with her - but she tries to turn them back: there is nothing there for them, she says.

One takes her advice - but the other won’t be turned away; Where Naomi goes, she will go; where Naomi lives, she will live; Naomi’s people her people, and Naomi’s God, her God.

Two weeks back, Pat was helping us consider Naomi and Ruth’s experiences through the harvest season.

There’s a glimmer of hope for the hopeless pair.

There’s welcome and help for Naomi - and even for Ruth, the outsider - through this bigwig Boaz.

But harvest is over.

What now?

Well, Naomi has a plan.

But I want you to see it’s a pretty mysterious plan.

And it really smells like a bit of a dubious plan, too.

Naomi has this big plan - but the more I thought about it, the more mysterious it seemed..

If the big goal is to find a home for Ruth - and the word translated “home” here has lots of the things we might associate with home tied up in it too: a place of rest, of security, of provision.

If the big goal is to find a home - through Boaz - why wouldn’t Naomi, as the more direct relation, as the native Israelite, well-known in the town, welcomed back - why wouldn’t she just have a wee word herself?

In the daytime, like.

Or at least send him a message.

“Hey Boaz, can you help us out?”

But instead Naomi sends Ruth outside the city wall, away from its protection and security, to what would be a shared place for winnowing and threshing.

If you’ve never winnowed or threshed - for the record, I haven’t; I had to look this up - those terms mean separating the head of the grain from the stalk, and then separating the kernel inside the grain - the edible bit - from the husk or chaff which covered it.

It reads like no-one else is there - but remember Boaz is a wealthy land-owner.

In the last chapter we saw him greet his overseer and labourers in his fields.

It’s unlikely he’d be doing the hard work of winnowing and threshing himself - he’s probably there overseeing his team, at most, joining in with them.

That makes sense of why Ruth would need to note the particular place where Boaz lies down - because his team is there, too.

The harvest is over and it seems like that’s something worth celebrating because there’s eating and drinking - and these places, these threshing floors were public, community facilities.

It’s the end of harvest for the whole town so this is probably a wider celebration.

Naomi sends Ruth to the big end-of-harvest party, not just a private meeting with Boaz.

She tells Ruth to dress up, to wait until the party’s over, then to sneak up on Boaz once he’s asleep.

Why get all dressed up, then opt for secrecy and nocturnal action?

What’s with the weird foot fetish?

What is Naomi hoping might happen if everything goes to plan?

See, it’s not so obvious to us as modern readers, but the ancient audience’s eyebrows would have been going up and up and up and Naomi keeps laying out the plan.

It is filled with things that look suspect.

A woman out alone in the middle of the night, dressed all fancy?

She’s not going clubbing.

Hanging out at the threshing floor on a party night?

That was no place for a woman - at least a woman of any repute.

And that whole “uncover his feet” thing?

So much ink has been spilled speculating about exactly what Naomi was asking Ruth to do - what it would mean.

Pretty much all the experts agree ancient readers would be thinking of more than just Ruth sampling Boaz’s delicious eau-du-pieds, or just using an odd and subtle method to eventually disturb his night through cold toes.

Naomi doesn’t say it straight, but our author, in the narrative, is deliberately making this plan look questionable.

Especially once we remember that Ruth is from Moab, a nation who, as far as these Israelites are concerned, have exactly that dubious, questionable reputation.

“A nod is as good as a wink to a blind bat” as Monty Python would say.

What a strange set-up.

But let’s turn our attention to Ruth.

She’s been given a risky mission, no question.

Now I’m a bit of a gamer - any other gamers out there?

Hello friends!

This makes me think Assassins’ Creed; this makes me think Metal Gear Solid.

This is all about sneaking around - covert ops - hiding in the shadows, waiting for your moment.

Ruth, amongst her other gifts, is also a ninja, so it seems.

She reaches the target location.

She stays undiscovered, out of sight.

No “alert” sound, if you know it.

She IDs and tracks her target through the party.

She waits until the very last party-ers standing are done, patiently lurking.

Then it’s time to move in on the target.

Fun when it’s just a game - but for Ruth, this is high stakes.

Given the compromising nature of the plan, the risk to Ruth’s honour involved, you could easily imagine her listening as Naomi lays out the plan, growing more and more pale as the blood drains from her face.

“You what me to do what?”,

she might ask.

“You know what people will think, Naomi.

You know what would happen if I was spotted.”

Yet, verse 6 tells us, Ruth “did everything her mother-in-law-told her to do”.

Mission accomplished.

And then the surprise.

Having followed Naomi’s instructions word for word, step by step; having accomplished all mission objectives, rather than waiting to for Boaz, as Naomi had told her to (remember v4 - “he will tell you what to do”) when her moment comes, when Boaz is disturbed and wakes to find her there, she makes a gutsy move: needy and vulnerable, a young, poor migrant widow, in the presence of a rich, powerful, older man, she takes the initiative.

In a culture where that’d be the last thing anyone expected.

This is her moment.

The mysterious plan, the risky mission.

Now the big ask.