Walking with Ruth

What Ruth and Naomi Teach Us About Being Sanctuary People

By Dr. Gina Perez

It is an incredible honor to offer this morning’s sermon.

I am not a religious studies scholar. But I am a religious woman who has been raised in the Roman Catholic Church and who, along with my husband, has raised our children in the Catholic church as well.

As our children were growing up, they often asked me why we are Catholic–at one point when our sons were young, they asked me why we couldn’t be Anglicans because they had been inspired by a truly inspiring and charismatic Anglican priest connected to their school.

My answer to them was pretty unoriginal and simple–I raised them Catholic because I was raised Catholic and it’s the religious tradition that I love, that formed me, and the only way I believe I could provide religious, moral and spiritual grounding for them.

This answer didn’t make them happy, but it’s an honest one that offers an invitation to share stories with them my experiences growing up Catholic. And as I prepared my sermon and reflected on what I wanted to share with all of you today, I remembered that a central story of my religious upbringing is the way the songs we sang at mass together moved me in a profound way and how they have stayed with me all my life.

My father, Felix Antonio Perez, was an incredible singer and it was easily his favorite part of mass. And while he was often asleep for part of each sermon on Sunday mornings, singing in church elicited a deep, deep joy in him.

One of the songs I remember and loved most was the Song of Ruth, the plaintive song filled with words of loyalty, longing, and commitment to be in deep communion with someone. At mass on Sunday mornings, this was easily one of my favorite songs to sing. But I also loved hearing my dad sing it beside me with such beautiful abandon:

Wherever you go, I shall go. Wherever you live, so shall I live. Your people will be my people. And your God will be my God too. Wherever you die, I shall die. And there will I be buried beside you. We will be together forever and our gift will be the gift of our lives.

As a young girl, I didn’t really understand that this song came from the Book of Ruth–that realization came to me later in life. But the song was deeply resonant, as is Ruth’s story of binding her life up with that of Naomi, her mother-in-law, as they faced the world alone together–women, widows, with no men to offer protection–and having to make the decision to leave the place they know and that is Ruth’s home, to return to Naomi’s homeland of Judah, a place that she left long ago with her husband and that Ruth was unfamiliar with. Returning to the land of Judah, Naomi hoped, would offer them a better life. It was this hope for a better life, the Book of Ruth tells us, that first brought Naomi and her husband to Moab. And it is what leads Naomi to return many years later–a widow, childless, but still with some kind of hope.

This movement and mobility of Naomi and Ruth–we see this around us every single day as people make hard decisions to leave parents, friends, families, communities they love to seek something different. These decisions are not made lightly–being a stranger or a newcomer is never easy–and is something many of us can relate to.

It’s similar to Edith’s story–the story of how her family came to the United States and how she came to Columbus decades ago, to build a better life for herself and her family, a life that she fiercely wanted to defend and protect and preserve and she sacrificed a great deal to do so.

Ruth’s story also seems resonant with what I have learned about Mennonites and the history of seeking refuge and safety in the face of religious persecution.

And Ruth’s story is a story that resonates deeply with me and my own family’s very mobile life–from Puerto Rico, to New York City, to northern California–that entailed both hope and loss–the hope for a better life, the loss of dissolved marriages and new family and household arrangements, of rebuilding new families in new places.

So the Song of Ruth not only reflected something my family and I knew without really knowing it, it was also a model for how we should live and move and love in the world: With determination, hope, faithfulness and loyalty to those who show love, mercy and welcome us.

When Naomi assures Ruth it is ok for her to remain in her homeland as Naomi returns to her own, Ruth says to Naomi:

“Do not press me to leave you or to turn back from following you! Where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God.

17 Where you die, I will die— there will I be buried. May the Lord do thus and so to me, and more as well, if even death parts me from you!…When Naomi saw that [Ruth] was determined to go with her, she said no more to her.”

This kind of determination has always inspired me.

Ruth made the decision to stay with Naomi not because Naomi needed her (although I believe Ruth knew Naomi did, in fact, need her), but because Naomi had been faithful to her. Had shown her love. And loved her enough to let Ruth go and told her to stay at home and not risk the journey back to Judah where the Moabites were not always welcomed. Naomi and Ruth were doing for each other what my father taught me was the sign of true love–of putting the other person’s wants and needs before your own.

I think this is one of the reasons why when Baron and I married 27 years ago we chose the Book of Ruth as the reading for our wedding. It was sort of a curious choice since on the face of it, it’s not a story about a husband and wife. I was actually encouraged by friends to find a racier passage from Song of Songs, but that didn’t seem to fit what I wanted to convey when I married Baron, namely that his family, my family, our lives are now one. His people are my people. And my God is his God too.

This has been a defining feature of our marriage.

And while marriage is obviously very different from offering sanctuary, offering a home to someone who is threatened to be separated from her family, here too Ruth’s story offers important lessons and a roadmap for how to navigate the world: For more than 3 years, for 40 months, Edith’s well-being and safety were bound up with this congregation’s well-being and safety. Your welcoming of Edith transformed her life. But she also transformed your lives as well. It’s a faithfulness and steadfast commitment to caring for each other that other faith communities and sanctuary leaders chose to embrace as well. And it is precisely this ethic of care that defined what our beloved Ruben Castilla Herrera reminded us we were all called to be–to be sanctuary people to and for each other.

In the second Book of Ruth (which we didn’t read for today) Boaz is truly a sanctuary person. He is a man of means who looks after Ruth and Naomi and offers her work in his fields and also offers protection. This part of Ruth’s story was not one I fully appreciated until this past February when I attended a gathering of faith leaders, activists, and organizers at Bridge City Church on Cleveland’s West Side to address the needs of new migrants arriving to Cleveland and throughout Northeast Ohio. At this gathering, Dr. Dan Hawk, a theologian from Ashland Theological Seminary, opened the meeting with a reading of the Book of Ruth that would serve as the biblical framework for the day’s discussion and that emphasized the lessons Boaz offers about how to treat strangers in need–protection, respectful employment, community, and trust. Like so many biblical stories, Boaz reminds us that our God is a God of refugees who calls us not only to follow and love God faithfully, but also to welcome, protect and love the stranger, those who are driven to move by necessity, tragedy and suffering; those who suffer from the trauma of family separation and who seek to be whole again; and those who seek and also create communities of welcome and hospitality.

These are some of the lessons of the Book of Ruth. And while I never could have imagined how singing the Song of Ruth by my father’s side would set me on a journey to walk with Ruth and learn from her throughout my life as a wife, mother, community member, researcher and friend to Edith, Ruben and many of you here today, I am inspired by her determination, her faithfulness, her trust in the journey even when she does not know where it would lead. This is the kind of faith we are all invited to cultivate as sanctuary people. To say as Ruth did, “Where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God [will be] my God too.