God’s Quirky Family

Living in The Story reflections from

Ruth

Acts

I looked up “quirky” in a dictionary and they agree with me: the word really is a compliment.  “Quirky = not quite normal but cool. Unconventional and surprising. Different in a good way.”

When the Living in The Story scriptures couple the story of Ruth in the Old Testament with the stories in Acts in the New Testament, then we can see some of the ways God’s Story has always included all kinds of quirky people. Ruth from Moab and Cornelius from Rome are good examples of unconventional additions to the community of God’s people. It’s not quite normal that these outsiders would have been included; but it’s cool, don’t you think?

The Ruth story is really about Ruth and Naomi and Boaz. Each is a strong, important character; each shows us how God has always been about the business of bringing unlikely people together and redeeming impossible situations.

Old Naomi is a daughter of Israel, part of the 12 tribes sprung from the 12 sons of Jacob. (Now there was a quirky bunch – and not always in a good way! When we read their stories from Exodus and Joshua and Judges, we wish some of their skeletons had stayed in their closets.) But this is Naomi’s family tree for better or worse and even so, everything we know about her causes us to respect her, while the losses and pain of her life make us grieve along with her. Naomi is barren. She has been a wife and a mother but now she is a woman alone who has buried her husband and two sons. She has been full but now she is empty.

Do not call me Naomi anymore, she says to her kinsfolk. Call me Mara now for my life has turned to bitterness (1:20-21).

But Naomi does have Ruth, a faithful daughter in law who refuses to leave the mother of her heart. Ruth is another woman who understands grief and emptiness and who will cling to this woman she loves, refusing to be parted.

Entreat me not to leave thee, Ruth pleads with Naomi, nor to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God. (1:16).

Young Ruth is also a widow and thus lives in poverty and uncertainty. Ruth - a foreigner, immigrant, stranger, alien - will face suspicion and distrust from the people of her new home. Ruth, the Moabite will live with disdain and resentment. “Ruth’s ancestry and culture were held in contempt by the people of her new homeland. Moabites were banned from the assembly of the Lord because of their ancestors' sins,” says Kathleen Farmer. There would always be someone who would look down on Ruth and judge this Moabite woman to be an enemy.

Boaz is an insider, a man of Israel endowed with privilege and power and position but - in a risky act of grace - he becomes protector and provider for these two vulnerable women. Out of the fullness of his fields, they find food. Out of the fullness of his character, they find respect. Out of the fullness of his commitment, they find a new home where their emptiness is transformed into abundance.

Ruth bears a son; Naomi becomes a grandmother. And David, the greatest king Israel would ever know, is born from this unlikely heritage. Redemption all around. God has always been about the business of bringing unlikely people together and redeeming impossible situations. Quirky indeed. Quirky in a good way.

Another story in Acts 10 is about Cornelius, another foreigner. Cornelius is not your typical Roman army officer; not your conventional brutal occupier and oppressor as was the practice of the Empire. Somehow, Cornelius had formed a sense of Someone bigger than himself. He had a sense of a greater responsibility to others – to the poor and the under privileged all around him. He had this quirky yearning for Something More.  And so Cornelius’ story reminds us that God honors every yearning; that God will respond to even the slightest breath of hope. Cornelius reminds us that we should never be surprised at the people God may well be bringing together in God’s own time, in God’s own quirky way.

But the Acts 10 story is also very much about Peter and his ongoing conversion. Peter, named by Jesus as “rock,” could be famously hard headed. He was one of the 12 apostles (yet another quirky, unlikely group of people brought together by Jesus.)

Peter was the one who preached that bold Pentecost sermon (Acts 2) proclaiming that God was doing a new thing, an unconventional and surprising work of grace and welcome. But it still took quite a while to recognize what this divine work might mean; it took some time to understand that all people were to be invited and included in God’s grace and welcome. It kept on surprising them (just as it keeps on surprising us) what this quirky new family of God would actually look like.

I have never in my life set foot in the house of a Gentile, Peter protested to the Heavenly Voice. Peter was challenged to rethink everything he had been taught about who is in and who is out; he was forced to re-read his own Scripture and re-interpret what God may be doing and where God may be taking this ever larger, ever quirky Story.

But once Peter was in the home of Cornelius, in the company of real people who also had been touched and changed and redeemed by God’s own Spirit, he finally got it. “Ah Hah! I once was blind but now I see!” Peter – like Paul - had his own ‘Damascus Road’ experience.

The book of Ruth is 85 verses long, but the words "redeem" or "redemption" are used some 23 times. God's way of doing business is to redeem every situation, every person, every community of people and to bring everything into the fullness and shalom of God’s ultimate purposes for creation. Ruth and Naomi and Boaz and Peter and Cornelius all experienced this grace-full redemption.  

Conventional wisdom is that people tend to form homogenous groups because only like-minded humans can become solid, stable communities. But in God’s Story, there is always a vast and wonderful variety. Like the lively mix of birds sharing my backyard feeder – cardinals and cowbirds, sparrows and doves, starlings and jays – God’s way is a joyful mix of creatures living their lives together in a lovely, eclectic eco-system. This kind of unity in diversity represents God’s own kingdom; it represents God’s way in the world.

God’s way, God’s kingdom means we recognize that we all need each other; that the whole messy mix of us IS God’s plan to bring about our fullness, our wholeness; that the whole lot of us existing together in the community of Christ actually demonstrates and lives out God’s redeeming purposes for the world. This mélange of differences gives powerful witness to Spirit’s ability to break down barriers and build up strong communities of grace and welcome.

When we can relax and rejoice that all of us with all of our differences are vital parts of God’s family; when we can marvel at the unconventional and exceptional people we become when we live well together as God’s community; when we can celebrate that this kind of diverse people may not be typical or normal but it is very, very cool – then I think we’ve got a sense of what it means to be included in God’s quirky kingdom.

Online Urban Dictionary: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=quirky

Kathleen Robertson Farmer, "The Book of Ruth," The New Interpreter's Bible, Volume 2 (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1998) 919.

Copyright Charlotte Vaughan Coyle 2014