Restoration

Ruth 3:1-5; 4:13-17

At 11 am on the 11^th of November, silence fell abruptly on the Western Front as German guns finally stopped firing. One hundred years and a few hours ago, church bells began to ring across shattered fields of trenches and in villages and cities, as the final Armistice of the First World War took effect and the long, hard work of peace began.

It wasn’t easy work, and history is littered with failed attempts at peace. But all those attempts – the ones that fail as well as the ones that succeed – are testimony to the dream of restoration and peace that has been part of humanity for as long as we’ve known loss and war and pain and division.

That longing seems to have been particularly strong a hundred years ago. From the early years of the war, drawing on a 1914 article by H.G. Wells, people had begun to speak of the war devastating Europe as “the war to end war”, with a profound belief or a faint hope that the destruction unleashed in the trenches and fields would ultimately destroy Europe’s – or humanity’s – capacity to make war on one another. 

The founding of the League of Nations was an attempt to make the dream of restoration practical, permanent, and self-sustaining – a dream that sharing the practical business of daily life: postal services, safe working conditions, health initiatives – as well as disarmament and dispute resolution – could create a world where war could not even begin.

The hymn we sang just now – Hubert Parry’s setting of William Blake’s poem “Jerusalem” – describes a longing for restoration and peace set to music in the midst of that first devastating World War. The hope of “building Jerusalem” is a dream of building a place of heaven on earth, inspired by the visions of the Book of Revelation.

And today, one hundred years (and a few hours) after the guns fell silent, we heard part of the story of Naomi and Ruth, another story about the longing for restoration and wholeness, and of God working through us.

Naomi, at the beginning of the story, is an economic refugee, forced by a famine in her hometown of Bethlehem to flee with her husband and sons to the land of the Moabites – a people whose ancient division from Naomi’s people runs so deep that scripture forbids any Moabites to take part in the assembly of God’s people.

Naomi and her family survive the famine and make a home in the strange land of Moab. But when her husband and sons die, Naomi sets out to return to her land and people. She’s accompanied by one of her Moabite daughters-in-law, Ruth, who has declared her fierce and unyielding loyalty to Naomi, committing to share her life, her God, her people, and her fate.

So these two widows, one of them foreign, from a land of ancient enemies, come to Bethlehem, to a community that has no particular place for them. They survive by gleaning in the fields, hard and practical work, picking up the grain left after the harvest. And they find kindness and concern for their well-being in the fields of Boaz, distant kin of Naomi.

So when Naomi wants to seek some longer-term security for them both, she sends the younger (and apparently attractive) Ruth to offer herself to Boaz.  And when Ruth comes to Boaz at night, she invites him to take up his right and responsibility as Naomi’s kin to restore her to the community.

Boaz accepts this invitation, negotiating among the neighbors and community the practical details of the right – and the responsibility – of restoring an inheritance to Naomi’s family.

In the excerpt we heard today, we hear the results: When Boaz and Ruth are married, and have a son, Naomi is made whole. This grandchild is proclaimed “a restorer of life, and a nourisher or old age,” a heir who ensures her place in the community, now and for generations to come.

It’s a restoration that requires strange alliances and an expansion of our sense of unity – an immigrant, a Moabite, long forbidden from joining God’s people in worship, now welcomed at the center of community and helping to create a holy future.

And then, with a little end note, the dream of restoration is expanded, inviting you and me in:

This child Obed, born to Ruth, is the grandfather of David, king of Israel.

Naomi’s dream of restoration, Ruth’s hard work in gleaning and in building relationship, not only restore them and assure the permanence of their peace. It also produces David, who becomes a promise and a dream of the restoration of all God’s people to their home, and to God’s peace, for generations and millennia.  Naomi’s dream of restoration brings to you and to me the David whose distant grandchild will be Jesus of Bethlehem and Nazareth, God made flesh to bring about the restoration and wholeness of the entire world.

Naomi’s story, Ruth and Boaz’s story, are about how God acts across many generations to create wholeness and renewal when we pursue restoration faithfully in our own lives and place. When we pursue our own restoration generously, like Naomi and Ruth and Boaz who each consistently put one another before themselves in this story.

Naomi’s story, and the stories of David, build up the dream that God has come to us in Jesus to make real.

Because the dream of restoration and lasting peace, of an entire world made whole and holy, isn’t just a human dream from the midst of war or loss or famine. 
It’s not just a human longing, triggered by the remembrance of war or the weekly horror of gun murders or the inflated divisions of an election season.

That dream of wholeness, of restoration, of peace that heals, isn’t our human dream at all.
It’s God’s.

It’s the dream and the purpose of God, through ages and generations.

It’s the dream and the purpose that God works to make real in Naomi and Ruth and Boaz, Obed and David. In the leaders and the unsung ordinary people who try over and over to build peace out of the devastation of war, whom we remember today. The dream that God makes flesh in Jesus as a baby in Bethlehem, a teacher in Galilee, and a resurrected Lord in Jerusalem. The dream that God is working, right now, to make real in Moorestown, in our county and our country, in you and in me.

God takes your longings and dreams, and mine, and the faithful and generous work they inspire, and uses that to create wholeness and renewal that will outlast us.

Today, one hundred years and a few hours after the guns fell silent,

two millennia after Jesus lived in Israel,

an uncountable number of generations after David inspired God’s people,

after Naomi and Ruth dreamed of and worked for restoration in Bethlehem,

today, God dreams of restoration and peace in you and me.

and invites us to share that dream, now and forever.