The lectionary only presents us with the beginning of the story of Ruth, and so I hope you will indulge me as I fill in a few of the details, using a measure of poetic license where I think I can get away with it. As the story opens, we meet a family of refugees who have fled a famine in Israel: Elimelech, his wife Naomi, and their sons Mahlon and Chilion. They have traveled to the bordering country of Moab. Everything about Moab is different from Israel, in language, customs, cuisine--as different as Mexico is from the United States, though we, too, border each other.

They weren't rich, and at first they didn't speak the language, but over time they were accepted by the people of Moab, given hospitality and shelter, and became model citizens. They worshipped only one God, however, and the Moabites might've thought that Israel's God wasn't very powerful if He had allowed some of His people to starve to death, while forcing others to flee their homeland if they wished to escape the same fate. But Elimelech's family stuck to the ways of the Old Country, much in the way of Italian immigrants who keep votive candles lit before statuettes of the Virgin Mary, or of British expatriates who keep framed pictures of the King and Queen over the loo.

Yet despite these differences, this family from Bethlehem managed to settle down, to fit in; eventually, they were accepted, though foreigners, and Mahlon and Chilion ended up marrying two lovely Moabite girls named Ruth and Orpah.

When Ruth married Mahlon, she must have thought like all newlyweds that they would live "happily ever after." I imagine the way Mahlon stumbled over the simplest Moabite phrases made Ruth laugh. He was so helpless without her to do the haggling in the marketplace. But they managed, and though Ruth's parents might not have approved of the match at first, even they would have to admit in the end that Mahlon had been a good husband.

The end came all too soon, however. Young Mahlon died, as did his brother Chilion, leaving both Ruth and Orpah widowed.

Widows were all-too-common in those days. By the end of a decade in Moab, of the refugees from Bethlehem, only Naomi remained alive, her two sons and her husband having predeceased her, leaving no heirs. Her only claim to family consisted of two Moabite girls, and as a foreigner she felt she had no legitimate claim on their affections. So she gave them permission to return to their parent's houses. She told them to try to find nice Moabite boys to settle down with. Reluctant as she was to see Naomi go, Orpah felt it was time to move on, so she kissed her former mother-in-law goodbye, and made a tearful exit into the obscure desert of unwritten history.

But Ruth was not so easily dissuaded. The prospect of losing yet one more loved one must have seemed too much for Ruth's grieving heart to bear. Her husband dead, her father-in-law dead, her brother-in-law dead, her sister-in-law striking out on her own, and now, dear old Naomi was announcing her intention of leaving Ruth behind. The burden of loss must have been intolerable. In that moment, Ruth did the only thing that made sense to her: she clung to the relationship that gave the most meaning to her life.

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.
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!

In times of loss and grief, such as our own times, we do well to remember Ruth. For she reminds us that faith is both risky and grounding. Faith is risky because it calls us to take chances just as Ruth did. It was not a small thing for Ruth to throw in her lot with her mother-in-law. Economically speaking, at least, her chances were far better as a widow in Moab than as a widow supporting another widow in a foreign land. She would now be the one with the accent, the helplessness in the marketplace. But Ruth took that risk.

What made the risk worth the taking was the grounding nature of faith. When we put our faith in those relationships that lead us closer to God and each other, we ground ourselves in the truly important matters of life.

Luckily, this story has a happy ending. The risky, grounding faith Ruth displays pays off. When Naomi and Ruth arrive back in Bethlehem, Ruth just happens to go to work gleaning grain in fields belonging to a distant relation of Naomi's late husband Elimelech. His name is Boaz. With a little sage advice from Naomi, Ruth plays the maiden in distress to Boaz's knight in shining armor. She is humble, demure, and disarming; he is rich, pious, and above all, kind to Ruth. Yet though Boaz plays the hero, what the Book of Ruth doesn't tell us is that Boaz was not to the manor born. He was, in fact, the son of a prostitute, Rahab, the same Rahab who in the Book of Joshua helped the spies escape Jericho, making the spies promise that when the city fell, they would save her and her family.

Perhaps it was because Boaz had a mother who had once been a foreigner and a fallen woman that he felt so kindly toward this beautiful foreign girl down on her luck. In any event, we see that Boaz steps out on faith as well, taking a risk in promising to marry Ruth even before he secures the legal right to do so from another kinsman who has "first dibs." But his faith, too, is grounded in the priority of relationships over individual concerns. Like Ruth, his faith is at once risky and grounded.

I'm sure there were people in the town who thought Boaz was "marrying down," just as his father before him had when he had stooped to marry a former harlot. What those naysayers didn't know, however, is the real ending of the story. In fact, even Ruth and Boaz aren't aware how important their risky, grounded faith turns out to be. For I'll pose you a riddle: what do a prostitute, a foreigner, a king, and a saviour all have in common? Answer: a family tree. Rahab the harlot gives birth to rich Boaz, who marries the foreign Moabite Ruth. She, in turn, has a son named Obed. In time, Obed fathered a son named Jesse, who himself had seven sons. The youngest of those sons was named David, who became the greatest king Israel ever knew. And with that surprise genealogical ending, the book comes to a triumphant, romantic end.

But wait, there's more. For Matthew and Luke provide the sequel. Not only are Ruth and Boaz the great grandparents of a king, but they also turn out to be ancestors of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ himself. God does indeed work in mysterious ways, through prostitutes and poor foreigners, as well as through kings and rich men.

We could end there with an "isn't that nice" sort of feeling. I enjoy happily ever after endings. But something about this story still bothers me. What about poor Mahlon? Remember him, Ruth's first husband? Does he fade into insignificance, swept away by the same desert winds as escorted Orpah into oblivion? Did God kill Mahlon so that Ruth could marry the guy she was fated to marry? For while this story ends in love, it begins, remember, in loss. What are we to make of that loss?

For Mahlon was a real human being of flesh and blood, just like us, just like all those who die suddenly, too young, before their time. It behooves us, therefore, to ask where God really is in the midst of such suffering and loss.

I don't believe for a moment that God willed the death of Mahlon so that Ruth and Boaz could become the progenitors of King David and Jesus Christ, any more than that God in some twisted way willed the death of all those innocent people in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, or the suffering of the refugees and people of Afghanistan. We are the ones who inflict pain and suffering, not God. We hurt each other. I don't think that God needs bad things to happen to good people in order to teach us important lessons, but I do believe that when we do evil things to each other, God works through those events to bring about healing, reconciliation, and lasting peace.

While I believe God's grace works through us whether we want it or not, the process of healing and reconciliation is assisted when we become aware of how important our own response to God's grace is. When we cooperate with God by nurturing our faith through lives of intentional commitment to God, we are not only better able to be transformed by grace, but we become agents of God's transforming reconciliation and healing in the world.

In times like these, we need to take a page from the Book of Ruth. Like Ruth and Boaz, we need to have a faith that is at once risky and grounded: risky, because we're in the midst of an uncertain world, and none of us is guaranteed security. But grounded, in that by putting our priority in relationships with each other and God through Jesus Christ, we know that whatever happens, we will have our priorities in order when priorities matter most.

In the end, one of the most important lessons we can learn from the story of Ruth and Boaz is that our faith matters all the time, in love and in loss. We do not know what God will do with our faith, but whether we end up like Mahlon or like Ruth, God is with us even to the end of the age. Our lives of faith will not have been lived in vain, even if, like Ruth and Boaz--or even like Mahlon--we are completely ignorant of what God has in store for us in God's redeeming work of bringing love out of loss. Amen.