The Book of Ruth is set in the time before Israel had its first human king, in the time of the judges, and it ends with the human king par excellance, King David – for we learn that Ruth is David’s great-grandmother.

Our reading for today contains most of the first episode of Ruth’s story, a tightly compressed telling of how three widows wind up on the road together, in perilous circumstances. The author of Ruth assumes her readers know that which may escape us – that in this patriarchal society, in this man’s world, women are disadvantaged, socially and economically weak, dependent on men as husbands or sons for their security. In this time before social security and insurance, before women could work outside the home to earn a living, to be a widow meant to be destitute. How these women will survive is the central question of this story.

Naomi finds herself out on the road again, leaving home, but the only thing she is singing is the blues.

It is not the first time Naomi has been on the road or left home. Some ten years earlier Naomi and her husband and two sons had fled their home in Bethlehem of Judah, had taken flight to escape a famine that had swept the land, had headed to a neighboring country, to Moab, in the hope of finding a better life. In an ironic twist, Bethlehem, literally, in Hebrew, the “house of bread”, had proven empty of food.

We can imagine the fears and questions coursing through Naomi’s mind: What will our new home be like? What will be the same, what will be different? How will we get by? What will the people be like, will they accept us, will they be nice? What about the kids, how will they handle the changes, how will they fit in, how can we keep them good Jewish kids in this land of foreign customs and practices and even gods?

Naomi and her family had taken to the road in the hope of finding a better life, a new home. But Moab, the supposed land of plenty, turned out not to be paradise but instead the site of death and sterility, or so it seemed to Naomi. Her husband, Elimilech, dies, and then their two sons marry local girls, foreigners, Moabite women – only they, too, die before bringing any children into the world. And so when Naomi, a stranger in a strange land, hears that the famine is over back in Judah, she sets out on the road once again, leaving home in the hope of finding a better life elsewhere. And the old questions arise once again: how will I get by, will the people accept me back, will there be a future for me?

I think one of the reasons the Book of Ruth has proven so popular over time and tradition is Naomi’s plight is a universal one, and not just in a metaphorical sense. Being on the road again, forced to leave home in the hope of something better down the road, is something few of us escape in this life.

This past week, for instance, I have not been able to stop worrying about Rev. Rajkumar, his wife Thaya, and their little boy, just one year-old on Thursday, and all the trouble in Sri Lanka. During the two-decade long civil war, hundreds of thousands of Tamils became “displaced people” refugees, forced out of their homes by the opposing armies and resettled in tent villages in the jungle. Those who could afford to do so often fled the country or moved to the south, away from the worst of the violence, deprivation, and hardship. The disintegration of the cease-fire agreement over the past year has forced tens of thousands more to flee their homes, and the closing off of the one highway to the north three months ago now threatens to increase the suffering of those in Jaffna as a humanitarian crisis looms. And I wonder what is going through Raj’s mind, as he must struggle with his call to ministry to an oppressed and endangered people, at the same time as he faces the call to protect his new wife and young son.

We aren’t forced by famine or war to take to the road or leave our homes, and yet many of us find ourselves leaving home and on the road for other reasons. I think of the family forced to put their home on the market because a spouse has lost their job and they can no longer meet the monthly mortgage expenses. I think of the elders who have lost their spouses of many years who find themselves unable to take care of the home or themselves, and face a move to a retirement community or an assisted living facility. I think of the high school senior headed off to college, the college graduate taking a job in a new city, a graduate of the “Tech” trying to make a go of it on their own away from the family nest. At times, yes, leaving home can be a grand adventure, but even then there are often doubts and worries and questions. We mourn the loss of the home we knew and loved, the security we knew there, the familiarity of the rooms and the neighborhood, the memories that are so intimately connected with the dining table where so many meals were shared, with the favorite chair where he always dozed off after dinner, the family room were we played Scrabble together. And we wonder how life will be up ahead, down the road, how we will be able to make a home in a new place, an alien setting, among different people. We wonder, who will care for me, who will watch over me, am I really all alone?

Naomi believes that she has lost everything, that with the loss of husband and sons her resources have run dry, that she is alone and even God has turned against her. Reeling from all these losses, imagining an empty future at the end of the long road ahead, Naomi cannot see the grace which comes to her even as she sets her first footstep on the dusty road back to Bethlehem. For Ruth, her daughter-in-law, goes beyond what custom and the law required, and vows to stick with Naomi, to leave her own land and people and gods behind, to bind herself to Naomi through life and even unto death itself: “Where you do, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God. Where you die, there I will die – there will I be buried.”

Where is God in all this? The narrator does not tell us directly, does not give us an answer to Naomi’s complaint that “the hand of the Lord has turned against me.” And yet there, standing with Naomi at the beginning of the long, dangerous road that stretches from a shattered home to who knows where, there stands loyalty, faithfulness, commitment, love incarnate. Naomi is not alone. Grace has reached out to shelter her even as she leaves one home in search of another.

Which is why the story of Ruth – a Moabite, a foreigner, a gentile – was remembered by the Jews, because it reminded them that God is like that. That God does not leave us when we leave home, that on the road of life we can be at home with God.

So when we face the wrenching move from a home we have come to know and love, when we take the first fluttering wing beats from the family nest, when we face an unwelcome downsizing, when we make the move to a retirement setting or an assisted living community, even when we find ourselves making the hard choice to stay or to flee famine and war, we can be assured that we are not alone. We can know that we have a home with God, wherever we wander -- even on the road. -----------