Sermon Tone Analysis

The Looney Tunes “mirage”

Water… water… How many of you grew up watching Looney Tunes on Saturday morning?

One of the tropes quite frequently utilized by the cartoon writers is that of being in a desert without water.

The "mirage" becomes part of the cartoon play, meant to make us laugh.

Whether it's Bugs Bunny, Wile E. Coyote, Daffy Duck, or Yosemite Sam, we empathize with the need for water in a hot and dry desert.

We also empathize with the mirage.

The cartoon writers use the mirage trope or idiom as a mechanism to make us laugh… for 5 minutes of hilarity.

But we would not laugh if there wasn't something inside of us that resonates with the basic need for refreshment when there is no water to be found, especially in deep south Texas.

We've all experienced this.

What is it that sustains your faith?

What do you do to keep looking at Jesus?

When the life is at its worst and your husband is oblivious?

Worse… when your soul feels dry?

Have you ever had those times in your life when God seemed distant?

On the outside you are the warrior, the champion, the example to be followed, the testimony to good Christian living, and inside you are the prodigal, a wandering heart chasing mirages, and slowly finding yourself internally destitute and dry and cut off from Jesus.

We have someone in our lesson today who is all those things.

She has spent her life chasing mirages, and it has come up bitter and empty.

Without hope, until the unexpected and unexplainable happens.

Famine: From Bethlehem to Moab

The book of Ruth is considered "adorable", a historic "love story."

Choices of destiny.

It also has all of the earmarks of a great novella: the tragedy, the dilemma, a champion who saves the day, and the boy gets the girl (or is it the other way around here?).

Epic love born in adversity.

Make no mistake.

This is a great love story.

There's a reason why Ruth is a favorite bed time story.

But also make no mistake: this is no typical love story and we must be careful not to impose a Western sense of touchy feely on to the text.

There is judgment and heartache and self-righteousness and unbelief and epic unfaithfulness to the covenant.

This story isn’t simply about Boaz and Ruth and they live happily ever after.

This story starts off with the camera on another woman, another wife.

Her name is Naomi.

Naomi and her husband lived during the time of the Judges in the Bible.

They live in a small town called Bethlehem.

And the time of the judges wasn’t a very good time.

There's this rhythm of obedience and disobedience, faith and unbelief.

Everyone did what was right in their own eyes.

There is a sense of anarchy and apostasy.

Life in Canaan was not supposed to be this way.

It was not supposed to be a time marked by idolatrous infidelity.

At the time of Naomi, there is famine.

This famine has been caused by God because his people stopped believing in him.

So Naomi and her husband, Elimilech, leave Israel and go to live in another country that has food.

However, this country is Israel’s enemy.

Moab.

They not go to Moab for food, they stay.

They build a home, build a life, put down their roots.

They raise kids… two sons… the two sons get married, and life is good.

That is, until Naomi’s husband dies.

And then both sons die.

Ruth 1:5 “Naomi was left without her two children and without her husband.”

This is serious, serious stuff.

In a foreign country living with foreign in-laws, Naomi has no husband and no sons.

She has nothing.

She is at rock bottom.

The pain and anger and depression and bitterness (which comes up later) from losing a husband and two sons in a foreign country is something that resonates with all of us.

She probably wonders "was it worth it?"

when they left Bethlehem all those years ago.

She is as low as she can go as an Israelite.

Outside of the land with nothing to show for it.

There’s no inheritance in Bethlehem to go back to.

Elimilech had sold it all.

This is the horror of barrenness in the Old Covenant.

This is why Sarah, and Rebekah, and Rachel and Manoah's wife, and Hannah and Elizabeth are compelling stories and a focal point of the storyline of the Bible.

To be barren is to be excluded from a destiny of participation in the covenantal blessings promised to Abraham.

You have no husband, you have no heir, you’re too old to have a husband, you’re too old to have an heir, you have no land, you have no inheritance, you have no destiny with God’s people.

The Return

She hears there is food in Bethlehem, the house of bread, so she decides to go back to Bethlehem any way.

This "return" is the rhythm of faith beginning to work in the heart of Naomi.

Her faith is still weak.

But there is a stirring.

All of a sudden, there is moment of clarity.

Moab brought pain and heartache.

God is providing his people again with bounty.

Naomi is stirred to relocate her life within the boundaries of God's blessing.

And when she returns, she isn't by herself.

She has a daughter-in-law by the name of Ruth, a widow.

And Ruth says she’ll go with Naomi.

Ruth 1:16 “Wherever you go, I will go, and wherever you live, I will live; your people will be my people, and your God will be my God.”

The widow Ruth cling to Naomi.

Few images speak to saving faith in God as the ultimate provider of all things than the posture of clinging.

We see this in Jacob with the wrestling angel… Jacob clinging to the angel upon the point of death desperate to be blessed by the only One who can ever give blessing.

Here, Ruth clings to her only hope.

Like Naomi, Ruth faces the impossibility of ever having a husband.

But it’s not because she’s too old.

She is a Moabite.

No one in Israel is going to marry a Moabite.

Unlike her husband, no good Israelite would marry an outcast, an enemy, an infidel.

There would be no heir for Naomi, because there would be no marriage and no heir for Ruth.

Yet in an amazing display of true faith, on Ruth's lips is the grandest of the covenantal formulas of the Old Testament, the covenantal mantra that occurs dozens of times throughout the Old Testament.

This statement is Israel's identity.

From the very beginning, the covenant has been God’s promise: I will be your God and you will be my people.

God first said it to Abraham and then repeated it again and again: I will be your God and you will be my people.

All of Israel's hopes and dreams were bound up in that statement.

And here in Ruth it occurs on the lips of a foreigner, who in the face of the impossible, is embracing the core identity of what it means to be "God's people".

In fact, she doesn’t simply state the covenantal formula… she personalizes it, she makes it her own: “Your people will be my people.

And your God my God.”

God is at work.

God's grace is on display.

Ruth has been graced by God and is giving grace to Naomi.

And God’s grace is at work through the rest of the story.