Sunday, April 17, 1994
A TALE OF TWO WOMEN
Key Scripture—Ruth 1: 1-18
The idea for this sermon comes from a friend who defines herself as a Wasco woman. (The Wasco is a small cup-like rock formation in the Columbia river, that is now at the bottom of a dam on the river.) Her people were hunters and fishers, and the guardians and caretakers of the Wasco which gave them their name. We’ll talk more about her in a moment. The other woman in that tale is Navajo. She was raised on the reservation in native ways and customs. She went to mission schools and has now completed seminary, and tries to continue to define herself as a Navajo woman.
The two women with whose story we begin, are from another tribe in another time and place. Orpah and Ruth belonged to the tribe of Moab. When the tribe of the Hebrews crossed the Jordan they found other cultures and other people on the other side in the land of Canaan. The Amorites, the Jebusites, the Hivites, the Perizzites, the Amalekites and the Moabites called this land home. When a famine overtook the Hebrews an Ephratithe of Bethlehem-Judah named Elimelech and his wife Naomi and their sons Mahlon and Chilion went to live in Moab.
Their sons grew up among the Moabites and in due course married Moabite women: Orpah and Ruth. In the course of time Elimelech died followed, in time, by his two sons. Naomi and her daughters-in-law were widowed. Naomi had heard that things were now better back home, and she decided to return to her people. She urged her daughters-in-law to return to their families while she returned to her family.
We are familiar with Ruth’s story. We have admired her love and loyalty for her Hebrew mother-in-law and her determination to stay with her, to return with her to a people who were not her own. Her words have been immortalized in story and song:
Whither thou goest, I will go; and wherever thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.
Ruth becomes an ancestor of David and the genealogy of Jesus includes this Moabitess as a great-grandmother many times removed.
Have you ever wondered what became of Orpah? I have to admit that I have never thought much about Orpah, largely, I suppose, because the focus I learned was clearly on Ruth. I never gave a thought to Orpah until my friend, the Wasco woman, told me that she identified with Orpah. Orpah had been married to a Hebrew, yet she seemed to have remained a Moabite. She apparently retained her relationship with her family, and it would not be unreasonable to assume that she retained the customs and culture of her Moabite family and ancestors.
That we have so easily identified with Ruth, that we have so highly valued her loyalty, that we have honored her value as an ancestor of Jesus is an indication that we believe she did the right thing. She is obviously the heroine of the story. We feel a tinge of regret, even of recrimination that Orpah did not have the same loyalty, the same depth of devotion to Naomi as did Ruth. That she chose to remain and live in her culture, and to worship her gods is unfortunate in our minds. That she would not trade her myths for the myths of the Hebrews was not only disloyal it was pagan. That she would not give up the customs and traditions that shaped her life was to choose to disappear into forgetfulness so far as we are concerned.
What ever became of Orpah, do you wonder? Whatever becomes of those who choose to retain their own cultures, their own language, their own myths, their own religion? Is it automatically better to become converted? Is the value of becoming “Christian” of embracing European culture and values, unquestionably the better course of wisdom? Are the urban Indians who have left the reservations, who have adopted the values and lifestyle of the dominant white culture, wiser and better off than reservation Indians? And those who have renounced their traditional religion and have embraced western Christianity, who have traded their native myths for the Hebrew and European myths, are they better, wiser, are they better off, have they secured a better relationship with God?
My friend, the Wasco woman, graduated from seminary last year. I told her that I was not sure that I was truly happy for her. I am not sure that being schooled in our house theology would better equip her to serve. She assured me that she knows who she is and that she will always be Wasco. She has embraced Jesus, but she has not renounced her traditional myths. The Navajo woman of whom I spoke is in much the same situation. Except that she has already completed seminary, but her District Committee on Ministry, District Superintendent and whatever powers that be actively blocked her ordination and attempted to take her out of the process.
Shirley Montoya, the Navajo woman, will not trade in the myths of her culture. She has embraced Jesus but she continues to hold on to her traditional religion and beliefs. Ordination in this man’s church, and I say that intentionally, demands that she reject and repudiate the culture and customs of her ancestors. To this Navajo woman this is tantamount to denying who she is at the very heart and soul of her being.
Orpah’s and Ruth’s stories are Carol and Shirley’s stories, not as two separate individual stories, but as one story. Each one of these women is both Orpah and Ruth. They are both attempting to embrace Jesus while retaining their own cultures and traditions. The stories and beliefs that has shaped their lives has made them the persons they are. Is it possible for a person to embrace Jesus, his life and his teachings, and retain the traditions of their ancestors? Or is every other belief system to be regarded as nothing more than inferior pagan myths that must give way to superior Christian enlightenment?
Don’t you see that to affirm these two women is to repudiate what we have been doing in the church for centuries? Older Native people, like my Muskogee Creek friend Harry, were raised in mission schools where they were beaten for speaking in their native languages. That pagan nonsense had to be eliminated if they would become christian. In God’s name the christian church has committed cultural and religious genocide on every continent on earth. The Tale of two women is also my story, as well as it is Carol’s and Shirley’s story, so I understand it well.
That is why I keep calling us to move toward a “post-Christian” theology. Our ancestors in the church did what they did, at least partly, out of what they believed to be, a zeal for God. They acted out of the best understanding they had. Theology, as the church has defined it, is not the only theology that is possible. The Hebrew and European myths are not the only, nor are they the most effective myths. Why can’t we learn from each other? Why can’t my spirituality, why can’t my understanding and experience of God be informed by Biblical tradition as well as the tradition of my ancestors? Is it not possible that other people in other places and times had genuine and valid experiences of God? Is it not possible that people in other cultures, people in other theological traditions may have had experiences of God that can enrich and enlarge my own experience?
Why is it so important to us in the church that we need to be the only people who are right? Why do we feel that we have to be always right? Why do we have this fixation that for anyone else to have any valid experience means that our own experience is invalidated? Why are we so insecure about who we are, so uncertain about what we believe? Is the Christian God so weak and uncertain that He needs to be defended by mere mortals? Do we know for sure that the God of the Hebrews is different and superior to the Wakan Tanka of the Sioux, or the Allah of the Muslim?
A Tale of two women, of two Moabite women, of a Wasco and a Navajo woman, becomes the tale of many people in our world today. The truth is that there is a great wealth of mythology, there is a great wealth of spiritual experience, there is a great wealth of knowledge of God, that to close ourselves off from anything is to choose to limit our own faith experience, to impoverish our own spirits, and to seek to limit the very nature of God.
May the God of Abraham and Sarah, the God of Orpah and Ruth, the God of Tulsi Das and Kabir, the God of Black Elk and Black Hawk, the God who has become known in every tradition, enrich and enlarge our vision and our faith.
