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Fidelity is a word that I think we don’t hear much anymore. One place that I think it oddly shows up is the financial world pertaining to investments. The idea is that we take our money and we enter into an agreement with an investment specialist who gets paid to have our best interests in mind and we entrust our wealth to him/her and they will make it grow. We can trust them because they make their money based upon how much they make our money make for us. In essence, we can trust this investment specialist because we have bonded his or her skills, knowledge, and indeed their greed to work for us rather than to take advantage of us. We have to trust that they won’t just take our money and run as does sometimes happen. In proving faithful to us by seeking what’s best for us and our financial needs, the specialist is rewarded.
Fidelity is also a word that shows up in the context of marriage. Spouses bound one another on oath that they will set their own needs aside to seek what is best for the other rather than seek their own self-fulfillment or fulfillment with another. Fidelity doesn’t pertain simply to the bedroom. It is the whole of the relationship. In fact, if you want to know what the biblical definition of love is, it is fidelity. Fidelity goes beyond feelings. Feelings come and go. But choosing to remain faithful, choosing fidelity to another, when feelings have waned and even at times in the face of adversity, that is love. If you read the Psalms, the two words that show up most frequently to describe God are steadfast love and faithfulness. The two words together are fidelity. God’s love for us is God’s fidelity to us.
The story of Ruth, the Story of Ruth is about fidelity and its reward. In a way it is like Job’s story, a sort of "lose it all, choose fidelity, get it all back” thing. Yet, her story comes at it from a different angle. Ruth’s story is more about fidelity to people, whereas Job’s was about fidelity to God. Let me tell you a bit about her.
Ruth was a Moabite woman. In the Bible, the Moabites are not viewed favorably. They come from the bad side of the family tree so to speak. The Moabites are not direct descendants of Abraham, but rather of Abraham's nephew Lot, if you remember him. Well, Lot had two daughters who never married and were afraid they wouldn’t have children thus leaving Lot without descendants. So, taking matters into their own hands, they got Lot oblivious drunk on two consecutive nights and had sex with him respectively and they each got pregnant. One had a son whom she named Ammon, the father of the Ammonites. The other daughter named her son Moab. Because the Israelites and the Moabites shared borders and were always fighting each other, the writers of the Old Testament kept that story alive to tarnish the Ammonites and Moabites as being the children of incest. Thus, there was considerable prejudice against the Moabites.
It is surprising that in the continuing story of God’s people that Ruth even though she was a Moabite in the end became the great-grandmother of King David, Israel’s greatest king and the royal ancestor of Jesus. This turn for the better came about as the result of Ruth’s simple choice of fidelity, her choice to be faithful to her mother-in-law Naomi. Ruth is a reminder that we must be careful about looking down our noses at people because we never know what God has in store for them.
The story of Ruth begins with an Israelite family taking a turn for the worse into infidelity to their God. They were a family who turned away from their God to try and save themselves from dying during a famine. Hard times, famine, came upon the land of Israel. In order to survive this famine Elimelech, his wife Naomi, and their two sons left Bethlehem, left Judah, left the Promised Land of their God, Israel’s God, to go to the land of Moab because things were apparently better there.
Leaving the land was an act of infidelity. Back in those days people believed that gods were tied to particular plots of land. In the Promised Land, the god was the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The God known as Elohim or Yahweh, the warrior God who brought the Hebrew people out of slavery in Egypt and led them to conquer the land of Canaan, the land he had promised to give to Abraham, their ancestral father, and his descendants. Elimelech, whose name interestingly means "my God is king", left his God and king to go to the land of another god. That god's name was Chemosh, another warrior god like his God Yahweh. In the land where Chemosh was god, there was no famine. Apparently, the Hebrew God Yahweh was only good at making war and wasn't so powerful when it came to making rain come and crops grow. So, Elimelech took his wife, Naomi, and their two sons and left for Moab where it seemed apparent that Chemosh could make crops grow. To top it all off, in Moab his sons married Moabite women, an even greater act of infidelity.
The outcome of Elimelech's infidelity was that he and both his sons died leaving Naomi and his two daughters-in-law widowed and in grave circumstances. Back then, the only honorable way for women to survive was either they had to be married or live with family. Women were usually not allowed to own property for they themselves were considered to be property. Without a man and his piece of land, a woman didn't have a chance. Naomi, realizing that she was now widowed and in essence son-less decided to return to her homeland and to her God for her God, Yahweh, was now blessing the Promised Land. The famine was over. In the Promised Land she had family who could help her. Elimelech’s infidelity to Yahweh, his moving to the Land of Moab, the land of the other god Chemosh, left Naomi being nothing more than a victim of someone else's poor decision.
Naomi decided to turn back to her God and head back to her homeland. She tells her two daughters-in-law to go back to their own mothers’ houses because she could not promise them any security. At least there in Moab, there in the land of their god Chemosh, they had a secure way to survive among their people and families. If they were to leave and forsake their god as the family of Elimelech had done with Israel’s God, Chemosh might turn against them as Yahweh had turned against Elimelech. One daughter-in-law, Orpah, turned back. But Ruth for no other reason than love and loyalty to Naomi, something we call fidelity, Ruth decided that no matter what she would go with Naomi to Judah. This act of fidelity by a young woman maybe not even yet seventeen or eighteen sets the stage for God's means of salvation for all humanity. She becomes the great-grandmother of king David, the royal ancestor of Jesus.
Ruth's act of fidelity was very involved. It was a turn for the better. It required her to become a completely different person. She had to forsake her family identity and become Naomi's family. She abandoned her people to become one of the Hebrew people. She turned away from her god to worship the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
Though it was a turn for the better, this act of fidelity came with great risk. There was no guarantee that Naomi's family would accept this foreigner…this Moabite. If they didn’t, she had no real alternative. There was no guarantee that the Hebrew people would not treat her with prejudice. Could she dare to hope that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob would bless her as she was not one of “his people” but rather a child of Moab?
Well, in the end Ruth's act of fidelity has a reward. Naomi's skill at matchmaking leads to Ruth marrying Boaz, a wealthy kinsman of Elimelech. She and Naomi live happily ever after. The son of her son’s son became Israel’s greatest king. Further down the line, a grandson of hers would be Jesus, the Messiah, Son of God. Fidelity has its reward.
The story of Ruth is a powerful one for it makes us ask ourselves some difficult questions. The first one is simply to what extent are we willing to exercise fidelity towards God, towards Jesus? Are we willing to stick with him through those times of proverbial famine - when our relationships are sour, when our kids are going their own way, when money is tight, when other people persecute us? Do we trust God to see us through the tough times or do we start looking out for ourselves?
Our second question pertains to our fidelity to others. We live in a culture that teaches us to be faithful to ourselves over and above fidelity to others. We like to misinterpret Shakespeare’s character Polonius who said: “To thine own self be true.” We mistake “true” there as meaning fidelity rather than honesty and think it means to put ourselves before others, to be faithful to ourselves above being faithful to others. Polonius was giving advice to his son who was leaving home and it was to be honest with himself and that will help him to be honest with others. That’s a far cry from speeches that turn up at High School graduations in which this line is quoted and interpreted as follow one’s own dreams, seek one’s own happiness, above all else. Put fidelity to self before fidelity to others. This is why marriages and families are disintegrating, addictions are rampant, volunteerism and community involvement have fallen by the wayside, civic organizations and churches are a thing of the past, and mental health crises are off the scale. We are miserable because we have misplaced our fidelity.
Ruth presents us with the challenge that it’s highly probable that the happiness everyone seems to be seeking these days can’t be found in focusing on being faithful to oneself as a matter of first course. Ruth’s story demonstrates that fidelity to God and to others is blessed with contentment. Fidelity has its reward. Amen.
