"Ruth clung to Naomi."
For some reason I've always imagined this scene occurring at dusk,
in the evening, at the close of day,
perhaps because Naomi seems to feel so much that she is at the dusk of life:
She is a widow, and she is bereaved of her two sons;
she feels that the Lord has dealt bitterly with her
and that she has nothing to look forward to.
And there, in the desolation of the dusk are these two figures,
the young woman clinging to the older woman.
"Ruth clung to Naomi . . . and said to her:
"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."

We've just finished singing,
"There is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole.
there is a balm in Gilead to heal the sin-sick soul."
My guess is that we all feel the need for balm of some kind
in this time of continuing recovery and now war.
We may feel sin-sick in the sense that the whole world is sin-sick.
We may feel fear-sick, catastrophe-sick, chaos-sick, uncertainty-sick.
In our woundedness, in our whatever-sickness
we feel in need of healing and wholeness.
I think the picture of Ruth clinging to Naomi can offer us some of the healing we need and long for.

We live in a time of what seems to be a loosening of relationships,
a weakening of the ties that relate people to one another.
We find ourselves asking, "What is relationship?"
What does it mean to be in relationship?
What does commitment mean?
What does loyalty mean?
What does intimacy mean?

These questions are asked in midst of variety of trends and counter-trends:
Almost daily there are the horrifying stories of escalating family violence.
We worry about what seems the progressive breakup of family structures,
marriages strained to the breaking point, and then breaking up,
large numbers of children growing up without fathers or mothers or both.
On another side I notice among many young people that friendships and romances are thought about very deeply.
Among the young folk in our family, I've had to learn that the phrase "being in a relationship" is no longer neutral:
if one says, "She's in a relationship with him," or "He's no longer in a relationship," we're talking romance,
and the terms and assumptions of those relationships are turned every which way as their possibilities, limitations and nuances are considered.
There's been a major reassessment of traditional family structures.
Have those structures been too hierarchical,
too oriented to the needs of men rather than women,
too focused on the notion of sacrifice rather than fulfillment?
Has the traditional family not respected personal boundaries enough?
Has it been based on the exercise of power rather than the expression of love?

What, after all, does love mean?
Does love mean blind loyalty even in the face of violence and oppression?
Does love mean the sacrifice of even one's own most cherished needs and goals?
How can people live in love and be magnified rather than diminished?
New configurations of relationship, family, and intimacy are forming,
especially with same-sex unions, and in those relationships lifetime commitment and the nurture of children have emerged for many couples.
Current political debates about family values go in and out of focus,
sometimes focused on real and important issues,
sometimes raising up out-dated images that have little to do with life as we know it today.

When life gets stressful, questions about relationship get asked in especially urgent ways.
A colleague of mine who pastors a church in the suburbs
reports that since September the Eleventh the marriages of five couples in her congregation have come to the point of separation, with one or the other partner leaving and setting up a separate household.
Obviously, these were marriages already severely stressed,
but the terrorist attacks brought them to crisis and then disintegration,
probably as issues long ignored came to the surface,
and questions never asked finally got asked.

And family is not the only issue.
Friendship is just as important.
Sometimes it seems we live in a society of strangers, not friends.
As family disintegrates, or at least recedes in importance, people are left in a vacuum,
with few ties on which to build community.
Neighbors may live nearby - across the street, across the hall, next door -
but those neighbors may not be friends,
indeed, we may not even know their names.
Many of us have many colleagues, but few friends.
We may live in complex networks of relationships and responsibilities,
but we may have few friendships, few relationships to count on for companionship, deep personal sharing, or help in time of need.

The sum total of all this is that when we need to be swimming deeply in the generous waters of human relationship
we find ourselves, instead, running aground in the shallows.

The story of Ruth comes to us in all this as a healing tonic,
truly balm in Gilead.
The story is set in ancient Israel, around 1100 B.C., in the time of the judges
when political and religious authority was not very clear.
It begins with adversity, a famine in the land of Judah,
which turns a particular family into refugees who move to the region of Moab to the east:
the man Elimelech and wife Naomi from the town of Bethlehem,
and their two sons Mahlon and Chilion.
Death stalks the family in that foreign land: first Elimelech dies.
Her sons marry Moabite women, Orpah and Ruth,
but then the sons die, leaving Naomi a widow without sons,
one of the most dispossessed, powerless and vulnerable situations in a male-dominated culture.
Naomi resolves to return to Bethlehem, for there is land there, the famine has lifted
and maybe she can be cared for by the extended family.
Naomi releases her daughters-in-law from the traditional obligation to raise up heirs for her sons -
she is returning to land of her ancestors,
and she encourages her daughters-in-law to do the same.

Ruth responds by moving beyond family obligation to genuine friendship:
Ruth treasures the genuine relationship she has developed with Naomi,
she honors what God has done with them both,
and she chooses to make her destiny one with that of her relative and now friend Naomi.
Her words are now famous:
"Where you go I will go, and 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."
They do return to Bethlehem,
and the rest of story of Ruth is about how God honors that commitment,
brings joy to both Ruth and Naomi,
and also joins the lineage of Abraham, down to David,
for Ruth the foreign Moabitess ends up becoming a great-grandmother of David and a distant ancestor of Jesus.

What can we learn from the story of Ruth?

First, relatedness is precious.
God brings us into touch with one another.
That touch has the potential for great depth.
That depth is a gift for which we give thanks.
That depth is a gift which must be nurtured.
On this Welcome Students Sunday, I'm aware that many of the students among us are far away from family
and probably feel deeply how precious relatedness is.
One of the heartaches of the bombing of Afghanistan in these days is the knowledge of how stressful that conflict must be for the people of that country as they in their many families become refugees,
doubtless leaving behind some family members who are unable to travel
and so making heart-rending decisions that tear apart the deepest human bonds.
You've probably seen the pathetic pictures and videos of families fleeing Kabul or Kandahar in ox-carts or donkey trains
with their few possessions strapped to the side,
a teakettle here, a plow there.
What is happening to those families?
So relatedness is precious.

Second, relationship becomes depth when we choose freely to commit ourselves.
Duties and obligations constitute helpful boundaries for relationships,
but if fulfilling duties and obligations is the only motivation in a relationship there is really very little relationship left.
The substance of relationship is choosing to offer our lives to one another,
whether in the relationships between parents and children,
relations between intimate partners,
or in neighborhood friendships or with colleagues in the workplace,
or in our church life together here in St. Peter's.
In all these contexts relationship happens when we offer ourselves freely to another.

Third, the images of family and friendship move in and out of focus in our thinking about relationship.
People sometimes use the image of family in a non-family situation to describe how close they feel to others in that environment.
For instance, when five staff members of the Boston-area offices of TJX were killed on Sept. 11, others at TJX tried to describe the impact this had on them,
and as they did so they said repeatedly, "They were just like family to us."
Conversely, sometimes people describe how good their family relationships are by referring to friendship.
I myself can say that one of the joys of having one's children grow up into adulthood is that they become, or can become, friends as well as children.
What a joy it is to hear someone say, "My brother (or sister) is one of my best friends."

Fourth, friendship is a useful model for a wide range of relationships, from our families to our neighborhoods to our workplaces
and, yes, to our life together in the church.
Family is important, indeed crucial, but friendship can plot a helpful future in many of our relationships.
Ruth continued to be related to Naomi as a family member,
but her commitment to Naomi moved beyond one kind of family relationship and into another dimension that included friendship.
I'm actually reluctant to use the term family to describe relationship in the church,
quite simply because so many people have had such poor experiences of family.
Jesus was one of those people -
you may recall that at one point folks said to Jesus, "Your mother and brothers are here and want to see you,"
and Jesus retorted, "Who is my mother, brother or sister, except the one
who hears the word of God and does it?!"
At another point, Jesus uses friendship to transform the traditionally strict authority structure of the teacher-disciple relationship -
he says to his disciples, "I no longer call you servants, but friends."
I envision our parish not so much as a family
but as a community of friends.

We live in a trembling time in these days.
We're still recovering from five thousand people dying in an instant in the midst of the ordinariness of their lives,
and we wonder what's next for our society
and what's next for ourselves.
Just yesterday a mother said to me:
"My husband and I were thinking of getting away this weekend, but we decided to stay home and be with the children.
"That seems so important these days, because we feel we can't know how long our lives will go on."
That kind of reaction recalls the injunction of St. Benedict, the founder of monasticism in the western church:
"Live every day as though it were you last."
In a remarkable way, recent events have re-centered people on what's important,
they're re-centered us on what unites us,
and, more than that, they've re-centered us on what defines us as human beings and as Christians.

So take away with you today that image,
that simple image of Ruth clinging to Naomi in the dusk, or the afternoon or the morning, or whenever it was,
Ruth clinging to Naomi and insisting on what was truly important,
insisting on what connected her to God and to another human being,
insisting on what defined her very being.
Meditate on Ruth, who lived out vividly both true Family and true Friendship,
Ruth who said, "Where you go I will go, where you lodge I will lodge,
your people will be my people, and your God my God. Where you will die, there will I die - and there will I be buried."