Sermon - Caroline Nuthall: Ruth 2 [12/5/24]

God’s scandalous generosity

Part 3 of our 5 part series on Ruth

Ruth Chapter 2

Full Transcript

Today we are heading into our third Sunday of looking at the book of Ruth. When I was a little girl, my parents bought a parcel of land in a developing suburb on the outskirts of Geelong and built a house for us, connected to a private home for the aged, named Cottersfield. This was pioneering stuff, and mum and dad found themselves in an unfamiliar suburb with a new business in which they had zero experience, 30 elderly residents, and five young kids to care for. Early on they actually sold the business and moved us back into the heart of the city, but not long after that there were complications with the sales, so we returned to Cottersfield. Let's just say neither mum nor dad was thrilled about the decision. As we returned, I remember rolling around in the back of the golden brown Kingswood station wagon, no seats, let alone seatbelts, with a four year old James. And to my delight, James was repeatedly singing a little song he had made up, with such heartfelt gusto. "Going back to Cottersfield, going back to home." Over and over he sang it, his eyes closed such sincerity. "Going back to Cottersfield, going back to home." He had the country and western twang going on and everything. You'd think he was singing the most sentimental, heartfelt song ever. He was simply thrilled to be going home. I've since learnt mum and dad were entertained by the irony. There they were, with teeth greeted, a failed sale, having to return, wondering how they would make all this work again. And James is singing away, as if we are returning to the promised land. Since that move back to Cottersfield, I have moved to house 21 times. So relocating and being displaced has become a bit of a theme for me. But we are all born spiritually displaced. Some of you were born in Bretton Perth or somewhere else here in WA. Some of us have uprooted our lives to move here from across the other side of the country. Or further still, you've come from the other side of the world. For some of these decisions were a choice, built upon adventure, hope and even romance. Maybe you moved and uprooted your life for a job, or perhaps because God asked you to. For others the move was a geographical cure. Maybe it was a matter of survival. But whether we have travelled far or not, most of us here still know what it feels like to leave something behind. A marriage, a house, a garden, a relationship, a church, a job, a family. Whichever one of those categories resonates with you, we are all in a spiritual sense, like the two women in today's story, Naomi and Ruth. Because we, just like Naomi and Ruth, seek to find rest in this life. See all our lives echo the question, how will we find our way home? When are we going back to Cottesfield? Where is our hope? We heard in the first week of looking at the book of Ruth that Naomi, which means gentle or pleasant, changed her name to Mara, meaning bitter. There have been times in my life when I thought my name should also be changed to bitter. There have been losses, just like Naomi, that I wasn't sure I could endure. Naomi describes her loss as though she was full, but the Lord made her empty. I know most of us have experienced some form of this emptiness. This rock bottom, this personal wilderness. Maybe it was the friendship that fell apart, the death of a long hoped for dream, yours or someone else's health was taken away, or perhaps you've experienced homelessness, poverty, or a displacement that just shook your very identity. Maybe it's been about a wrestle with an addiction or enduring domestic violence. You may be in one of these empty seasons now. If you are a Christian, these seasons might make you wrestle with the hard questions. Does God really care? Is God actually good? Can I really trust Him? If you are here today and you are not a believer, these seasons of emptiness make confirm your doubt that a God could even be kind and loving, let alone trustworthy. This afternoon, I want to encourage you with a resounding yes. Yes, God cares. He is good and we can trust Him. Today's sermon is called God's Scandalous Generosity. I have two main points to make about this scandalous generosity. The first point looks at how the story of Ruth, which we just heard read, shows that God pursues us with scandalous generosity. The second point states that God's scandalous generosity is offered to us in Jesus. The story so far tells us there was a woman named Naomi, who with her husband and their two sons left their hometown of Bethlehem because there was a famine. People were starving. That's pretty rock bottom. They moved to a country named Moab. There, the two sons married two women from Moab. Then tragedy struck. Naomi's husband died. Moa Rock Bottom. But still she has her sons. Then more tragedy struck. Both her sons died. The emptiness is great. A new rock bottom. And so her daughters-in-law join her in their own rock bottom seasons. Naomi then hears that the Lord has provided food for people back in the hometown of Bethlehem. So she decides to leave Moab with her two daughters-in-law and return to Bethlehem. This was very dangerous because that society was extremely violent and women travelling or living on their own were at risk of being raped and murdered. So Naomi said to her daughter-in-law, "Look, you guys do not need to come with me. Go back to your hometown in Moab and find new husbands. At least that way you'll be safe." One daughter-in-law obeyed Naomi and returned to Moab. But the other, named Ruth, stayed. Fast forward a bit and we have today's story. They are now back in Bethlehem, a small town perhaps of about 300 people. Ruth, the daughter-in-law, has gone to a farm because she's trying to pick up some of the leftover grain from the harvesters and take home to Naomi for flour to make bread so they could survive. They're still at rock bottom, empty. She meets the farmer-owner named Boaz and today we see his overwhelming kindness to her. And that brings me to my first point. As the story tells us that Boaz is scandalously generous to Ruth, he is the princess of a god who is scandalously generous in his pursuit of us. Francis Thompson lived in London from the mid-1800s through to 1907. He began to study to become a minister, but he didn't finish. He then studied to become a doctor, but he dropped out of medical school. Next he joined the military, but was dismissed after just one day. Eventually, tragically, he became an opium addict in the slums of London. I share a little of his story because he was also a man who knew about God's relentless pursuit of him. He wrote one of the most loved and powerful poems of English literature entitled 'The Hound of Heaven'. The poem compares God to a hound chasing him, pursuing him, no matter what personal wilderness he was going through. He describes how he had run away from God at every twist and turn in his life, like this. I fled him down the nights and down the days. I fled him down the arches of the years and in the midst of tears. I hid from him. Thompson then goes on to tell us that God's love knew how to pursue him far better than his fear knew how to run away. Did you get that? God's love knew how to pursue Thompson far better than Thompson's fear knew how to run away from God. God's scandalous generosity pursues us and continually calls us to repent, to turn away from the things that bring God and us harm and to give our lives back to him. The poem describes many rock bottom moments and concludes that no matter how he tried, he simply could not escape the hound of heaven's persistent love for him. And this is the good news. The hound of heaven, Jesus, pursues us also. The story of Boaz's generosity gives us hints of Jesus's scandalous generosity towards us. It is like a clue that helps us discover what Jesus is like. Boaz's generosity is scandalous because it pushes back against the normal expectations of society. See, he extends generosity to Ruth, a young, poor woman. And this is just not the done thing in that society. Scandalous. Not only did Boaz extend generosity to a young, poor woman, she also didn't belong to his staff, didn't belong to his farming community, and she didn't even belong in his town, Bethlehem. Ruth was of a different ethnicity to Boaz, and this was just not the done thing. It's scandalous. When we zoom in on Boaz's generosity, this is what we hear him say to Ruth. "Come over here. Have some bread. Dip it in the vinegar." And to his workers, "Let her gather. Don't tell her off. Pull some extra good stalks from your bundles and drop them for her sake. Don't be harsh with her." Then again to Ruth, "Don't go. Don't lean elsewhere. Don't go away. Stay here. Watch the field. Follow along. Stay." Scandalously generous. This brings me to my second point. The reading finishes by telling us how Ruth and Naomi benefit from Boaz's scandalous generosity. Ruth gathered far more grain than she and Naomi could eat that evening. She would have carried about 13 kilos of wheat home. Can you picture her scooping the grains, laying the stalks carefully, quietly thrilled, maybe using her headscarf to bundle it all into, excited to see her depressed mother-in-law's reaction to this scandalous generosity? By the way, for context, carrying home 13 kilos of grain would be like carrying one and a half slabs of soft drink home, or a French bulldog, or little Micah Vanderpia, one of our residents adorable two-year-olds. I can just hear her mother-in-law stunned by the amount of grain saying, "Wow, Ruth! Where did you glean today, girl? God bless the bloke who allowed you to gather this much." Here we see just a glimpse of Naomi's emptiness being returned to fullness. And so Ruth tells her about this farmer named Boaz, and Naomi says, "Boaz? Boaz? He's a relative of mine, which means he is one of our kinsmen redeemers." A what? A kinsman redeemer. It is not a term we use in the 21st century often, but a term used in the book of Ruth 21 times. So your kinsman redeemer is a person in your family line who has a responsibility to look after you, and in those days this idea kept society going because men died often. The white Australian middle-class culture these days is probably not as bound by this responsibility, but it is very common still in many societies all across the world, and is a core part of Aboriginal culture also. A once full, then empty experience happened to me six years ago. A picture of my personal wilderness might be helpful for us, as we try to imagine what a 21st century style kinsman redeemer could look like. When my life reached a new rock bottom, Jane and James invited me to stay in Perth with them. Then further invited me to live in Perth with them, with my children, and they were willing to leave their home and find a bigger home to house the four of us with the five of them, all while we were freshly broken. Now I question this scandalous generosity often, and when I did, Jane and James would explain to me how God's generosity poured out to them, to pour out to me, but still I questioned it as I saw the sacrifices it required. This was tough. Still they answered, "Kuka, this is God's generosity for you." Scandalous generosity. I'd like to mention also that God's people, the church, has been radically generous towards me in some scandalous ways, but that's another sermon. God's scandalous generosity is not just for Naomi and Ruth in ancient Bethlehem or me in modern-day Australia. God's scandalous generosity is extended to every single one of us here today and across all time and all cultures, and seen perfectly in Jesus. It is extended through what Christians call the Gospel. The word Gospel means the good news that Jesus died to crush the power of sin, death and evil. All of these things are our enemies. Sin, death and evil are the powers of darkness that stop human flourishing. Jesus then came alive again, and one glorious day, He's coming back to make all things new. See, the Gospel is scandalous generosity on so many levels. I mean, it's saying that God, the King of the world, the Creator of the universe, came as a human and died for humanity. That's scandalous. He became frail for our sake, for you and for me. A vulnerable baby born in a cave to a teenage unmarried mum into a poor family who then became refugees in Egypt. He related to and affirmed the humanity of those on the social and religious margins. Tax collectors, women, the poor, prostitutes, children, the sick, those who were not Jewish, and those who were tormented by demons and addictions. The weak, the lonely, the forgotten. But more than that, he didn't just come and hang out and heal those people while he was on earth. No, he died for them. The weak, the lonely, and the forgotten. This is not just about the list of people I've mentioned or the other people we might read about in Bible stories. I'm talking about us. For you and me, Jesus died. Jesus is the only one who will always meet us in our weakness, be with us in our loneliness, and cannot forget us when we feel forgotten. See, I believe God did organise for that little brother of mine once singing, "Go on back to Cuddersfield to bring me into his family home and life 30 years later." And I believe he has ordained every day of your life too. The great ones, the awful days, the wasted and the fruitful days, the unbearably dark days, and the joyous days. So we have seen God's love is scandalously generous because the strongest became the weakest for us. And because the God of the universe knows each of us intimately, he knows exactly what we are like and loves us still. No, in fact, it's in our darkest places when we think he has turned away from us that he stands, arms outstretched, towards us. See, God's scandalous generosity is not about us. It is about what God is like. Morally speaking, there is nothing loveable about me or you. Boas was Naomi and Ruth's kinsman, Redeemer, because that was the good and right thing to do culturally. Naomi and Ruth weren't his enemies though. See how Jesus' love goes deeper. Can you see why Boas is a small R-redeemer and Jesus is our capital R-redeemer? Boas sacrificed to love some family members. Jesus died to redeem the very ones who killed him. This God died for his enemies. And that's us. Jesus is the God from whom by rights we should expect nothing. Yet he gives us everything. And that's a scandal. Each of the signposts we have looked at today point us to Jesus. A family, gone back to Cottisfield. A woman empty and being refilled through her kinsman, Redeemer. The hound of heaven chasing you and me. A scandalously kind family taking me in. But their only signposts. Naomi being resilient isn't the focus of the story and Ruth's faithfulness doesn't steal the show. Not even Boas' scandalous generosity is the headline. No, the star of the story is the scandalous generosity of Jesus. You might be sitting here today thinking, Caroline, I have all I need and I know I am redeemed and made clean by the blood of Jesus. Amen. That's great. And in that case, can I encourage you to run to him more often? Let me encourage you to gaze more upon his willingness to endure the shame of the cross for you. Because looking at Jesus more is what makes us more like him. Then let me encourage you to go and show his beautiful scandalous generosity off more with the gift of the fullness of life that he has given to you. Or you may be here this afternoon and your life is just hard. You are feeling empty every day is about surviving and you're not sure how to keep going. You aren't sure where home is or where real hope is to be found. Let me encourage you. The story of Ruth and Naomi and their kinsman, Redeemer Boas, is whispering to you about the promise of a Redeemer, Jesus. Can you hear him? Can you hear the capital R, Redeemer, pursuing you, saying, "Don't go. Come here. Follow along. Have some bread. Come to me. Stay. I am your home and your hope. Come and rest in the scandalous generosity of Jesus."