Speaker: Bethany Davey
Text: Ruth 1:8-22

The story of Ruth and her mother-in-law Naomi is first and foremost a story of women. No other biblical text is told from such an explicitly woman-focused perspective. Not only is this a story of women, but this is a story of societally vulnerable women: widows, immigrants, women without the protective cushion of older and younger generations or sweeping family networks (1). 

Jewish and Christian traditions highlight Ruth’s story for a variety of theological reasons. Ruth is often considered in Judaism to be the first convert, the first to choose Israel over her own Moabite heritage. Many Christians focus on Ruth because her uncertain beginnings eventually lead her to participate in King David’s lineage, and ultimately, the line of Jesus. Biblical scholars note a variety of themes throughout the book of Ruth: the power of women’s agency and solidarity between one another, the realities of migration, the connections between justice and land access. That’s quite a lot for such a brief text.

Yet, what draws me into the story is the relationship between Naomi and Ruth. What profound love must exist between them that Naomi—who is an immigrant in Ruth’s Moabite land, and knows the danger she faces in solo migration to Judah—insists that Ruth remain. What profound love must exist between them that Ruth, who knows the risks that she—a Moabite woman about to immigrate to Judah, might bear—goes anyway. Ruth and Naomi choose one another, against the odds, in spite of the risk. Their familial, marital bonds may be broken, but from that broken place comes a reformed linkage, a new kinship network chosen for the sake of one another. 

It is for this reason that Ruth and Naomi are often understood in queer theologies as engaged in a queer relationship—not necessarily in a romantic sense, but in a relational sense. As biblical scholars and theologians are fond of saying, they have “queered,” or complexified, traditional societal roles by choosing one another and this unexpected kinship network. Just as many trans and queer people experience harm or abandonment from families of origin that require the formation of “chosen families,” Ruth and Naomi—who are women alone and at-risk following the deaths of their family’s men—choose one another. They bind themselves to one another in a commitment that transcends cultural expectations and norms. 

This chosen binding between Ruth and Naomi is fascinating to consider in light of Margaret Hellwart’s story: all three women are chained—literally and figuratively—in ways they have not chosen, and in ways that they have. It may seem strange to consider chains as both unchosen and chosen, but let’s think about this together… 

To what, to whom are Ruth and Naomi chained? They are chained to their social positions, their status as women without husbands in a society that demands them for women’s survival. They are chained to their citizenship status with the state, an imposed reality that limits their mobility within and across borders. Naomi and her late husband fled to Moab to survive famine in Judah. Their migration was an attempt to survive, to reshape their lives in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds of which they bore no responsibility. This is not so different from realities of migration today. And in Naomi’s eventual return migration to Judah, it is Ruth who becomes an immigrant, who loses a final inkling of social status offered to her by the state. The chains of society’s structures are not made for them, and these women find themselves held, restricted by their burden, which cumulatively increases over time. 

And then we have Margaret, likely in her kitchen, literally chained to her household, her domestic life, in an attempt to silence her. She is a woman, how dare she defy the state, the church? How dare she encourage others to do the same? Such institutions had already flanked her with proverbial chains, so what are we to make of the literal chains she was made to bear on her body?  

All of these societal chains—meant to diffuse and silence the voices and lives of the vulnerable, of women—bore down on Naomi, Ruth, Margaret. 

And yet. 

Each woman refused this bondage in the ways they were able, their acts of resistance ones that we must not miss. Naomi and Ruth refused their assumed, windowed futures. Margaret refused to stop the work to which she felt called. Perhaps men in 1600s Europe, too, told women to smile more. Perhaps her smile, even while in chains, served as an act of utter defiance: smile more? Sure, I’ll smile more. I absolutely cannot be stopped.

Chains like those meant to lock up Margaret are carceral, punitive, enslaving, violent, meant to restrict, lock up and control human bodies. But those are not the only chains in our midst, nor are those their only function. Just as chains can lock up, they can also bond, connect, weave together. In crochet, you must form an initial chain before creating anything else; as our middle child reminded me, “the chain is what every single stitch is based off of.” 

Our very DNA is chained. 

Protein is made of chains. 

Braids are chains, interlocked in difficult-to-break beauty.

Ruth, Naomi, Margaret. Even as they refuse some chains, they actively form nourishing others: bound to one another, bound to holy work, interlinked, connected, unbroken through what they have refused and what they have chosen.

It is interesting and important to consider these three women together: a mother whose sons have died, a woman expected to bear children, but who had not yetdone so, and a woman who mothered a movement, but no children. Women, in biblical contexts and today, are often measured in mothering: are we mothers or not? Did our bodies bear children or not? Did we, will we choose mothering or not? From a young age, our bodies become the site of external scrutiny, a measure by which imposed notions of woman-mother render invisible the desperate love and ache of parenting, the trauma of infertility, the silenced abortions, the experiences ignored because they don’t fit the chains of expectation wrapped around women and femmes.

What is it to refuse these chains? 

What is it to choose others? 

The women highlighted today invite us to refuse the chains imposed, and to instead choose chains of our own making. Their chosen chains invite us to consider and live into more expansive notions of mothering, family, purpose, risk, commitment. 

This morning, we sang “Mothering God, You Gave Me Birth.” If God is Father, Parent and Mother, how might we bear witness to divine mothering energies: even in men, even in those who are not perceived as women or mothers in our communities, even within ourselves? Ruth and Naomi: divine motherers of one another, divine birthers of possibility, purpose, promise in defiance of a projected future-less reality. Margaret Hellwart: mothering women, mothering a movement. 

All three of these women: mothering one another, others, themselves. 

Divine maternal, evident within us all. 

Naomi, Ruth and Margaret remind us that we exist in interconnection. We need one another. We are linked together, webbed together, in chosen kinship chains that bind, connect and nourish. 

Mother God in us, in all. 

Amen.

Reference:

1) Sarah Augustine and Jonathan Neufeld, “Introduction to Ruth,” Anabaptist Community Bible (Harrisonburg, VA: MennoMedia, 2025), 303-304.