Podcast Summaries

is taken from Ruth chapter 4 verses 13 to 22. So Boaz took Ruth and she became his wife. When they came together the Lord made her conceive and she bore a son. Then the woman said to Naomi, Blessed be the Lord who has not left you this day without next of kin and may his name be renowned in Israel. He shall be to you a restorer of life and a nourisher of your old age. For your daughter-in-law who loves you who is more to you than seven sons has borne him. Then Naomi took the child and laid him in her bosom and became his nurse. The women of the neighborhood gave him a name saying, A son has been born to Naomi. They named him Obed. He became the father of Jesse, the father of David. Now these are the descendants of Peres. Peres became the father of Hezron. Hezron of Ram. Ram of Aminadab. Aminadab of Nanson. Nanson of Salmon. Salmon of Boaz. Boaz of Obed. Obed of Jesse. And Jesse of David. This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Thank you Jonathan. Sorry there was some trickiness at the end of that. You did very well. It's great. I don't think none of us know how to pronounce any of these names. So if I pronounced them differently it's not because Jonathan did it wrong. It's just because we don't truly know. Today's talk is called Hope for God's People in the Story of Ruth and Today. Let's pray. Lord thank you that you are a God who opens the way for each of us into a future that is filled with hope. Help us to hear from you now. And where there are things about our thought lives or our actions that need to change so that they are better aligned with your hope-filled future. I pray that your spirit would help us to do that. In your name we pray. Amen. I've realized that not everybody will have been here for each of the talks throughout the series of Ruth. But right back at the beginning on the 19th of October when we kicked this off Julie was setting the scene for us and helping us to see that the story of this small seemingly insignificant family begins with the main characters going through a really tough time. But what I want to do is just to briefly zoom out a little bit further than that and consider what's going on for the whole of God's people, the Israelites, at this point in history when we meet Naomi and Ruth. Because as we do that we're going to discover that things were kind of perhaps even more bleak than we realized. So you can think back in terms of the history of God's people back to the Exodus, the escape from Egypt that was led by Moses and then as Moses died Joshua took over as the leader of the Israelites and finally 80 years after they escaped from Egypt they are settled in the land of Canaan and Joshua has died and so the people are now kind of entering into this period of time where they're in the promised land they are in that sense a settled nation but they don't really have a kind of an overall ruler. And the book of the Bible that we find this period of history in is called Judges and what we see is that there are leaders who were appointed by God who came and kind of rose up and rescued God's people every time they found themselves in a state of crisis. Judges makes for fairly bleak reading it has to be said. God's people go round in a cycle they start off disobeying God and then God causes them to be oppressed by neighbouring nations and tribes and so eventually because things have got worse for them they cry out to God and they say God help us give us a leader and God does that and a judge is kind of raised up and a victory is won and the good times return and then the people start disobeying God again and then the cycle begins again. And in the middle of that 400 years of that cycle happening again and again we find this story of Ruth and Naomi and Boaz. And as we've looked at it over the last few weeks I've been struck by the ways that God generously meets the needs of this little family. Physically their needs relationally and by ensuring that they have a future hope and for this family that means an heir a male in the family line. And we shouldn't be surprised that God does this that he faithfully provides for this family because on so many of the pages of scripture we see the same story. God is showing up in fragile desperate situations and he's using his faithful people to bring about hope and to turn things around. And it also shouldn't be surprising that there was difficulty and bleakness for God's people as a nation and also for this particular family because we know don't we that as human beings we're not immune to difficult things. Daily life is tough sometimes and sometimes it's a bit easier but our relationship with God can be constant through that. And so today what I'd want to do is two things really is to show how we see God's generous provision at work in the story of Ruth and then just to spend a little bit of time maybe more than I might usually to think particularly about our church here and maybe about half of you have read some emails that have gone out this week but I'll explain a bit more about what was communicated in those because we're in a particular season here as a church family at the moment. One where we do have some needs and where we might feel like things are a little bit fragile but God's going to help us to navigate those just in the same way that he helped Ruth and Naomi to navigate their own situation. So first we meet Naomi and her daughters-in-law Ruth and Orpah after they've suffered three bereavements in close succession and they're almost starving due to the famine in Moab where they were living. Naomi is an Israelite from Bethlehem but her faith in God seems really shaky at the beginning of the story and that's not surprising is it when we think of the trauma that she's experienced. Ruth and Orpah are Moabites so not Israelites but Ruth at least seems to have come to share the faith of her mother-in-law Naomi her faith in the God of Israel. And so Naomi and Ruth in chapter one arrive back into Naomi's hometown of Bethlehem. They're desperately hungry, they're feeling pretty hopeless but in this small yet significant town lives some faithful people including Boaz, a distant relative of Naomi's late husband. And chapter two outlined for us the ways in which Boaz is used by God to provide some of the things that these two women who had literally nothing needed in the short term. Suddenly their situation is a little less fragile and a little bit more hopeful. Their immediate need of food to fill their bellies is met through Boaz's gifts of grain, his generous gifts of grain and his willingness to let Ruth glean in his fields during the harvest. But he also helps them to find their place again within this community. He treats them kindly. You can't underestimate the value of kind actions and he protects them through the power that he has because he's a prominent nobleman in the town. That was chapter two. Chapters three and four are much more about that longer term security and purpose that these women...

needed if they were going to be able to survive long term. And what Boaz does is he generously and honorably navigates all the things that need to be done in order that he might take Rufus's wife and in doing so secure Naomi's future and the future of her husband Elimelech's line, family line, by giving Ruth a son called Obed. And just last week as we paused in the middle of chapter four, Obed had just been born to Ruth and to Boaz. But in the bit that we heard today, something extraordinary happens. It seems that what Ruth and Boaz did was they gave Obed to Naomi. And that isn't just a kind of a, oh here hold him for a minute or be a helpful granny. I'm sure there are lots of them in the room. It says she took him to her breast and she became his nurse. And it is specifically the Hebrew word for wet nurse that is used here. And then in verse 17, the women of Bethlehem declare Naomi has a son. It wasn't Naomi's son. It was Ruth's son. But they're declaring Naomi has a son. I did some maths and tried to kind of work out how old was Naomi. I decided that she was probably about my age. I'm 42. Theoretically could still have a child. So she could have actually done this. This isn't something that was kind of beyond her physiology. But it was beyond what would have been expected of Ruth and Boaz because Obed was theirs. And yet they give him to Naomi. Naomi came back to Bethlehem utterly empty after all those years of living in Moab. Devastated by the death of her husband and her two sons. Depleted through hunger and her faith in God had all but deserted her too. And now at the end of this story, four chapters and probably less than a year after it began, here she is completely and utterly full. Her physical needs have been provided for. She's surrounded by a loving family and a wider supportive community and her arms are full of this bundle of hope that is Obed. A son entrusted to her against all the odds. And there's something else extraordinary in this last little bit of Ruth 4. And that is what the women of Bethlehem proclaim over Ruth. They say Ruth is worth more than seven sons to Naomi. That is astonishing. The number seven is astonishing in and of itself. A really significant number. It kind of means worth more than as many sons as you could imagine really. But in a culture where male heirs were the ones that would have all the rights and all the status, Ruth is actually being likened to the great matriarchs of God's people, Rachel, Leah, Tamar, the others. These are the ones whose stories along with their husbands have been passed down and told throughout the generations. And now the women of Bethlehem are saying Ruth's going to be one of those as well. And she is because here we are reflecting on her story in 2025. Ruth, the foreigner from Moab, Moab becoming a woman, a symbol even of hope. And the genealogy at the end of the book reminds us that Ruth's son Obed becomes the father of Jesse. And if we were to think ahead to the book of 1 Samuel, we would find Samuel, the boy, the one who God called to in the night and he runs and he says, I can hear from God. Samuel becomes the prophet, the last of the judges, who then as an adult goes to Jesse's house and finds Jesse's sons, all seven of them. And then they realize, oh no, there's an eighth, the runt of the litter. It basically says that. And that eighth son is David. And God says to Samuel, anoint him. He's going to be the king, the king of Israel, the one after my heart. And so through that, the time of the judges with that perpetuating bleak cycle draws to an end and a new chapter, a new season begins for God's people when they're being ruled over by a king appointed by God and their communal worship becomes centered around the temple in Jerusalem. That bleak cycle in the book of Judges must have been a time where God's faithful people were crying out to him, prayers of when are you going to intervene, Lord? Make known your plans for your people. I wonder when we last prayed that prayer. I pray it quite often about all sorts of different things. When are you going to intervene, Lord? Come on. It's 2025. The world should be better than it is. And then those prayers are answered through this very ordinary family dealing with their own set of very difficult circumstances, a family line that seems extremely fragile, set to die out. But God makes a way. And what looks impossible to them is not impossible for him because where God is, there is hope. Hope for the future. And Jesus came and said famously in John 10.10, I've come that you might have life and have it abundantly or have it to the full, that you might know fullness of life. But I wonder how often we make a connection in our mind with the fullness of life and thinking it's full of good things. My life, I'm experiencing fullness of life if nothing difficult is happening. We might find ourselves in that situation, but that is not what Jesus meant. It's not what having hope in God is like. Fullness of life is a life that is full of good things and the challenging things that all of us face. And that is true for us personally. And I know that lots of you are going through difficult things at the moment. And it's true for us as a community, as a church. And the two different bits of communication that kind of went out this week, one was about people and one was about our services in 2026. And the other big factor, as I mentioned at the beginning, is that the building work on our hall is about to begin. And all of those things together might make us feel like, as we think about 2026 for our church, it's uncertain. We're dealing with scarcity. Things feel fragile. But I actually don't feel that. I feel excited about the coming year. But the facts remain that due to all kinds of things outside of our control, if we were to look back at the size of our kind of ministry and staff team five years ago, this time five years ago, and compare it to what it will be like at the beginning of 2026, it's now less than half the size it was, which was quite a startling thing for me to realize. Our finances as a church are in a more fragile position now than they have been since I became vicar here six years ago. And our reserves are set to run out this year. They will run out. We're having to reduce our expenditure in all kinds of ways. We're having to put some of our missional activities that we love to be able to offer on hold because of the developments on the church rooms. And we might justifiably worry, is that going to kind of make people think we don't care about them? They're going to think St. Mary's isn't there for them anymore.

But in the midst of all of those things, God is at work. And we have a hope-filled future. And even though we might view these things negatively, God can bring good out of them. And I am generally a very positive person. I always try and focus on the positives. So I want to give you some positives about our church at the moment. The first is that we're growing. And that's amazing. New people are kind of here each week wanting to worship with us. And not all of them are sticking and coming back. But some of them are. And some of those might be you here. And there are signs of what's being called nationally the quiet revival. We're seeing signs of that here. People just turning up and feeling a spiritual hunger that maybe they can't even really explain. That's like drawing them into church. And we want to say, God, would you bless that? Bring it on. Because we're ready to welcome people who are searching spiritually and to help them explore what Christianity means and what it looks like to follow Jesus. As we change in our kind of team and other people that kind of lead in different ways, what we're seeing is people stepping up to serve. And that's wonderful. And if that's you, thank you. Because it's awesome. It's awesome that we can be a family where everyone's kind of got something that they're like, yeah, that's my role. That's sort of one of the things that I do here to kind of bless the church family. I spent some time this week remaking all of the little name labels that we've had for a long time, but they needed updating. And I looked at it and I thought, right, I'm going to do everybody that's on a rota or a team. And that was about 130 people ranging from our teenagers all the way through to people in their 90s. Yeah. And that's awesome. And they're over there at the back. And if you're on a rota or a team and you haven't got one, please come and tell me. I will make you one quick as a flash. And I'd love to see it that actually everybody who calls this church their church has a name label because they're on some kind of rota or a team and doing something to contribute to the life of the church. And part of what we're going to be doing in 2026 is really continuing to invest in relationships. And the very first step towards that is knowing people's names. And so if you are here in the building doing something in the week or on Sunday, wear your name label because that will just like really help people to start to get to know you. And you'll start spotting people with their names on as well. And hopefully that will just be a good way in to begin to get to know each other better. And then the second big thing that was communicated was about our services and how in 2026 we are going to be having one 10 o'clock service every Sunday morning. And it's going to alternate in style between this format for our 1030s and our nine o'clock format. So on the weeks when it's like a 1030, we'll have our wonderful band and we'll have our Shine on Sundays groups and we'll probably use some videos and it will feel familiar to those of you that are familiar with this service. And then on week B, we'll have the choir who bless us at nine o'clock every week and the organ. And it will feel much more like the nine o'clock does now. And I really, really hope that lots of you will still come on week B. And those of you who don't come in the morning on week B might like to come along to explore at four, which will be in the afternoon on those weeks. And it is going to be a compromise. It is change. But God's with us in it. And it's going to help us to navigate what could be on paper a complicated year. But we're investing in the future of this church through our relationships with each other, through the finances that we need to keep doing all the things that we want to do and through future proofing building. And it will be worth it in the end, even though it might be a bumpy ride at times. And so in the story of Ruth, God is taking this fragile family and he's blessing them through the generosity of Boaz and the people of Bethlehem. And what he's doing is securing the future leadership of the people of the nation of Israel through the family line of Obed. And I really believe that God's going to do the same for St Mary's. The church has been through challenges in the past. It will go through challenges again in the future. And God is going to help us navigate this coming year with its challenges and its joys. And he will continue to remind us of his hope. And the seeds of that hope are all around us and within us, as they always have been.