4 August The Widows Cry

Proper 13: Ruth 1:15–22; Psalm 44:1–4, 8, 17, 23–26; Acts 6:1–6; Luke 18:1–8 (AWL)

May God who is Majesty, Mercy, and Mystery speak words of life, love, and liberation through these words. Amen.

Come, let us talk story. The story I will tell you is not my story but it is all of our story. Once upon a time, there were some time travelers. Not in a fancy machine from a science fiction movie. But people who found their world flipped, turned upside down, trying to figure out what had happened to them and why. They decided to look back over the course of their history and see where it and they had gone wrong; my ancestors called this “Sankofa,” looking back over your shoulder to see what you have left behind and going back to get it. Sometimes looking back and going back are the only ways to go forward. So they told the stories of their people, going back to the dawn of creation when God whispered a word and the womb of God quickened with earth and sea and skies.

These time travelers could look back because there were keepers of their story who talked story from generation to generation. They were fortunate that there were not those among them who told them they could not teach or pass on the parts of their story they wanted to pretend never happened. There were not those among them who said that their story could not be retold if it made somebody feel bad or made their ancestors look bad. They told and passed on their stories no matter how bad it made certain individuals or even all of them look to their descendants and those of us they could not imagine from new worlds who would read and recite their stories.

They told the stories of the golden age of ancient Israel. In my sanctified imagination I see them gathering in what my people would call a hush harbor, a secret place, a sacred space, a hiding place safe from the eyes of their Babylonian enslavers and traffickers and their informants, infiltrators and collaborators, just as my enslaved ancestors hid from the preachers of slaveholding Christianity who cut all the words of freedom and liberation out of the Bibles they gave to the enslaved, including taking out the entire book of Exodus.

As these time travelers talked story they began like all good storytellers, in an unexpected place. They started with climate refugees fleeing what was supposed to be the promised land flowing with milk and honey to the land of one of their longtime rivals and sometime enemies and, crossing the border into a foreign country. They crossed the border without climbing a wall. They crossed the border without having to risk their lives in a treacherous river. They crossed the border without the risk of family separation. They crossed the border into Moab because they were hungry and there was food there. And there was no one at the border to turn them back.

There was a famine in Israel meaning not just that people were hungry but the crops failed and with the failure of the crops came the death of their flocks and herds. Perhaps the water dried up. Perhaps the crops and grazing land were blighted. Whatever happened, their ecosystem was no longer able to sustain life. Their climate became inhospitable; so they fled becoming climate refugees as my friend and colleague the Rev. Tawnya Denise Anderson pointed out to me. Then the man, the husband and father, died. And now the ears of ancient hearers and readers would perk up, anticipating a melodrama about a poor widow woman.

In a time in which some people saw women as little more than walking wombs to be controlled – as do some today – the time travelers began to tell the story of the poorest and most vulnerable type of woman in the world they knew, a widow. And rather than having some superhero, some man, swoop in to rescue her, they told the story of her doing whatever was necessary to keep the family going. She and her sons took young women – they would have been teenage girls – and trafficked them back to Israel in what scholars, myself included, call a forced marriage for the purposes of reproduction, also known as reproductive slavery. This is a time traveling story. The values of the story are not our own. This is a good time to be reminded that everything biblical is not good or godly.

As the story goes, the widow Naomi was faced with tragedy upon tragedy: the loss of her husband followed by the loss of what was most precious to her, her children. And yes, Naomi’s sons were grown men, but that does not mean they weren’t still mama’s babies. There is no grief like the grief of a mother who has lost not just one of her children, but all of them. We don’t know how she lost her boys, whether it was famine, pestilence or violence. We do know that no matter what else happens; a happy ending doesn’t erase the pain.  

Now the person who doesn’t know the end of the story, hearing it for the first time in the world of the time travelers, might just think it was all over for Naomi. But Naomi takes her story and her life into her own hands; she is more than just a walking womb. Though she is living in a foreign land, she has never lost touch with the people back home and when she hears that the famine has broken in the land of her mothers and fathers, she packs up her two daughters-in-law and crosses the border again. She returns home but like so many of our Maui ohana, there is no home to return to after the disaster.

On the way home, Naomi gives her daughters-in-law their freedom; one returns to the home of her mothers but one, one stays with her. If I had the time, I would tell the story of Orpah. I would tell you of her return to her people, of her embrace by her weeping mother who had not known if she was alive or dead, of the feast they threw to welcome her home. But that is my sanctified imagination. In truth she might have had a much harder time. Some of her family might have died in the famine. She might have had no home to which to return. And having been carried off and forced into marriage, she might have no options and find herself impoverished and hungry. But knowing all of that, she still chose to go home. For some of us, freedom at any cost is preferable to any kind of life with those who have held us in bondage. But Ruth who had been living the same reality as Orpah had a completely different reaction because more than one thing can be true at the same time.

Naomi tried to send Ruth back but Ruth would not go. She clung to the woman who was all the family she had left – perhaps Ruth knew there was no family for her to return to in Moab – so Ruth and Naomi became hanai long before the practice of formal and informal hanai adoption here in these ainas. Sometimes families of choice, are more family than families of birth and blood and marriage. Sometimes the hurts run so deep in our first families that we can never go back home. Our LGBTQIA kin folk know all about that and have showed us how to build loving sustaining and sustainable families of choice.

Ruth and Naomi went home together but there was no happy ending because this is not a fairy tale. This is the story ancient Israelites in one century told about their ancestors from another century in what I call time traveling talk story. While they are telling the story of Naomi’s homecoming they are also telling the story of their own, the story of their return from Babylon to an Israel that is no longer flowing with milk and honey, if ever that were true.

And so Naomi says dramatically don’t call me by my name that means all things pleasant and lovely, there is nothing pleasant and lovely about my life and my journey. Call me Mara which means the bitterness of my tears, the bitterness in my heart, the bitterness of my journey and even the bitterness I feel towards God because God who is mother and father has failed in their duties to nurture, feed and comfort me. Naomi reminds us it’s ok to tell God how you feel; she already knows anyway. Let it out.

And then like an old TV serial, this chapter of their story ends on a cliffhanger. They return at the beginning of the barley harvest. Harvest means that they have been successfully able to grow crops in Israel. Harvest means that there will soon be barley to grind into flour and bake it into bread and Bethlehem will once again live up to its Hebrew name as the House of Bread. But that is not my story to tell because there is another preacher waiting in the wings.

Widows in each of our lessons represent not only abject poverty but also the failure of society to provide for them. In the world of these texts, there should have been some relative to take them in and in some cases marry them. A widow on her own is like an unhoused person today, the time traveling storytellers would expect us to ask: “Who are their people? Where is their family? Who will become family to them?”

Last week we sang “Is it I Lord.” We should ask ourselves how we are called to the women and children who make up the vast majority of the poor in our world, to those who are unhoused, to those who are fleeing fire and famine, to climate refugees, to those who are immigrants at our gates and inside our borders. Then as now the solution to houseless and homelessness is houses and homes. Bringing them home with you was the only possibility in the ancient world, in ours we have so many ways to address poverty and houselessness, we don’t even have to disrupt our own households or bring a stranger home to meet the needs of keiki a ke akua, of God’s children, around us.

As the lesson in Acts makes it clear, it is the job of the Church to provide for those in need. That is why the Church re-organized itself for the sole purpose of meeting the needs of the widows who were going hungry.

Lastly, Jesus tells the story of a widow woman who prays until she gets justice. Those are the prayers that reach the throne of God with priority delivery – the prayers of the poor, the prayers of the powerless, the prayers of those seeking justice. The Gospel lesson is that God is on the side of the poor and against systems that keep them in poverty; even when the law is on their side, God is on the side of the poor. But the Church has not always been on the side of the poor. Sometimes the Church backs legislation against the poor and unhoused, anti-loitering legislation and anti-encampment legislation. The work of justice should be the work of the Church and not in spite of the Church.

The Church is called to be on the side of the poor, for to be on the side of God is to be on the side of the poor. We are also called to be the answers to the prayers of the poor, the vehicle through which God’s abundance is shared and, through which unjust systems, legal or not are torn down. We are called to pray against the systems that hold people in the captivity of poverty and then criminalize them; we are called to speak out and act out against those systems and structures. We are called to pray and do more than pray.

At the end of his story, Jesus asked the question, “When the Son of Woman returns will he find faith [or faithfulness] on the earth?” The answer to that question will come from the poor, the widows, the climate refugees and other immigrants, from those who went hungry while we were full, from those who have had their lives stolen from them at the hands of the systems we tolerate and perpetuate. It is they who will testify to the faithfulness or faithfulness of the Church. Will we be the community that welcomes the poor widow and with her immigrant daughter-in-law who crossed the border or, will we be the ones the poor widows cry to heaven about? Amen.