Ruth: the Story of Biblical Border Crossings ~ Ruth 1:1-10

 

Many of us recognize the wisdom of this proverb: Don’t tell me what to do. Tell me a story. We know it because stories don’t merely inform us—they form us. Stories slip past our defenses. They soften certainty. They unsettle assumptions we didn’t even realize we were carrying. Rules tell us what is required; stories tell us what is at stake. Rules offer binary categories (right/wrong; legal/illegal; legitimate/illegitmate); stories offer complicated contexts. There’s a tension here, for sure. And we need both. And yet often, the word story gets reduced to something childish or imaginary, when historically it meant something far more serious. The root of the word carries meanings of wisdom and seeing. To tell a story well was to see clearly—to look at the world in a way that revealed truth rather than obscured it. No wonder Scripture is saturated with stories. Elie Wiesel once said, “God made human beings because God loves stories.” So here is the question that matters deeply in this moment of our shared life: 

 

For the next few minutes, we are going to sit with a story that refuses to remain abstract. A story that disrupts easy categories and resists tidy conclusions. A story that demands listening. It is the story of Ruth—a story of border-crossers, refugees  from enemy nations, and an immigrant woman whose ethnicity alone excluded her from belonging, and yet who becomes indispensable to God’s work and our future. Ruth is not a metaphor nor an issue. She is flesh and blood. And her story insists that we lean in close enough to hear it.

When Home is the mouth of a shark (vss. 1-2)

The book of Ruth opens the way many immigrant stories still begin: with failed politics, scarcity, and fear. “In the days when the judges ruled, there was a famine in the land.” This was a time of social collapse—violence, exploitation, chaos. The Book of Judges describes a society unraveling, and now famine sits on top of it all. Bethlehem—literally meaning “House of Bread”—ironically has no bread. And a house with no food is no home. So a Jewish family leaves. Not because they are adventurous. Not because they are irresponsible. Not because they want to threaten anyone. They leave in order to live. This remains true today. No one crosses borders casually. They cross because the alternative is hunger, violence, or death. According to the United Nations, the vast majority of displaced people are fleeing conflict, persecution, or economic collapse—not seeking advantage, just survival. The journey itself is often traumatic—physically, emotionally, spiritually, even in the best of circumstances. The poet and refugee Warsan Shire gives voice to that reality and this Jewish family’s plight:

 

no one leaves home unless

home is the mouth of a shark

you only run for the border

when you see the whole city running as well . . .

you have to understand,

that no one puts their children in a boat

unless the water is safer than the land

no one burns their palms

under trains

beneath carriages

no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck

feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled

means something more than journey.

no one crawls under fences

no one wants to be beaten

pitied

 

Warsan Shire and this Jewish family understand: no one leaves home unless they have to.

Notice something subtle but important about the beginning of Ruth, chapter one: at first, the Jewish refugees have no names. A man. A wife. Two sons. That anonymity mirrors how immigration is often discussed today. We speak in impersonal categories—migrants, illegals, refugees, aliens. When we do that, stories can disappear. Complexity flattens. And fear rushes in to fill the gap. But Scripture refuses to leave them nameless. So let us say them aloud: Elimelech. Naomi. Mahlon. Kilion. And later, Orpah and Ruth. Naming is a holy act. In the Bible, to name is to acknowledge full humanity. To name is to resist erasure. Names can also speak of trauma – Mahlon means “Critically-ill”; Killion, “Terminally-ill.” Most of us, if we trace our histories honestly, descend from people who crossed borders with names that also name trauma; that were mispronounced, shortened, changed, or ignored. And for many of us, immigrants are not theoretical—they are family. Spouses. Children. Friends. Worship partners. Immigration stops being abstract the moment someone you love has an accent. Say their name.

 

When Policy Meets Pain (What’s the mental background and legal history for this story? – Deuteronomy 23:4-5; Numbers 22 & 25)

This Jewish family is so desperate that they settle in enemy territory—Moab, a place thick with historical resentment. Every Jewish listener would have known this bitterness. It was codified in Scripture itself. Deuteronomy 23 makes it clear: Moabites and their descendants are excluded. No exceptions. No pathway to belonging. This is policy rooted in national memory and inherited trauma (Deut. 23:4-5, cf. Numbers 22 7 25). Moab once failed to show hospitality, so Israel responded with permanent exclusion: “Do not seek a treaty of friendship with them as long as you live” (23:6). But here is the uncomfortable irony Ruth invites us to face: the people once condemned for their lack of hospitality are now the ones offering it. Moab becomes refuge. Moab becomes home. Moab becomes the place where survival is possible. Moab, the enemy, becomes family. The sons marry Moabite women—Orpah and Ruth—and then tragedy strikes. All the men die. Famine drove them to Moab; death threatens to strand them there. Three widows. No protection. No income. No future security. Naomi decides to return to Judah – to “home,” (vs. 6) but as we heard last week, home is a tricky thing for immigrants. Bethlehem may be home for Naomi, but she quickly remembers it is not home for Orpah and Ruth (of the 5 appearances of “home,” four are used by Naomi to tell Orpah and Ruth NOT to come with her even as she calls them “daughters.”)

 

The Danger of a Single-Story and a Stereotype (vss. 3-7)

To the original audience, the deaths of the sons would not have been surprising. It would have felt inevitable. Of course the men died. Of course the marriages failed. Numbers 25 taught that Moabite women were dangerous—sexually immoral, unfaithful, and spiritually corrupt. Stereotypes are powerful storytellers. They offer simple explanations and quick certainty. We know who these immigrants are. We know how this story ends. We know who God favors. We know how God treats the unfavorable. Certainty often precedes cruelty. A Louisiana pastor recently told the New York Times that he would never knowingly offer communion to an illegal immigrant visiting his church. Apparently, Jesus dying for sinners isn’t enough, if communion requires papers. Naomi urges Ruth and Orpah to stay behind—not because she does not love them, but because she knows what cruelties might await them. Foreign women. From the wrong nation. Carrying the wrong history. When we believe we already know someone’s story, we stop listening. When we reduce people to a single narrative, compassion becomes unnecessary—and even suspect. This is not just ancient history. This is how fear and stereotypes still work –Latinos are gang members and drug smugglers, Somalis are thieves and hucksters, etc. Carlos reminded us last week that even though he doesn’t really remember the Philippines, even though he fully understands the US to be his home; his own racialized experience of not being white – leaves him, in real ways, an outsider.

 

An Immigrant Blessing (vss. 8-9)

And yet, despite all of this fear and uncertainty, Naomi does something astonishing. She blesses them: “May the LORD show you kindness, as you have shown kindness to the dead and to me.” Did you catch it? She will marvel at their kindness and asks God to be kind like them. The Hebrew word for kindness is chesed—meaning fierce loyalty, covenantal love, compassion that acts. It’s often translated “loving-kindness” and two-thirds of its usage in the OT is solely with respect to God’s character. And here is the theological earthquake: God’s kindness is revealed not through insiders, not through law—but through two foreign women from a despised nation. God never speaks in the book of Ruth. God performs no overt miracle, save ending the famine. Instead, God shows up embodied in the kindness of people an entire community had written off.

 

A Kindness that Repairs the World

In the Old Testament, chesed is central to God’s mission of tikkun olam—the repairing of the world. Not fixing people. Not winning arguments. But repairing what fear and exclusion have broken. 

 

Ruth—the excluded—becomes the great-grandmother of King David. Her words to Naomi become the standard promises that we save for weddings (vss. 16-17). And she even becomes part of the lineage of Jesus. God’s salvation story runs straight through the life of an immigrant woman whose story, according to the rules, shouldn’t have been included.This is the invitation Ruth places before us. Not to agree on every strategy. Not to simplify a complex issue. But to see, to listen, to learn names, to allow real stories to complicate our certainty and challenge existing policy. And to open ourselves to the unsettling possibility that God is at work through the excluded and despised. Friends, God loves stories because God puts people first and compassion does not begin with rules. It begins with attention to real lives, real promises, real kindness. The real challenge, friends, is whether any immigrant might say of us, “And now I see that God is kind like you.” Amen.