Ruth's Framily

I preached Sunday on the book of Ruth and, in particular, Ruth 1:16-18. I used several sources and had a lot of fun putting it all together. 

An Act of True Love: The "Framily" Plan

The story of Ruth was one of the first love stories I remember reading. Smack dab there in the middle of the Old Testament with its talk of war, famine, and disease, is a love story. Seemingly out of the blue. And just like any good Disney movie, Ruth starts with grief and loss.[1]

Did you ever notice that about Disney? They like to clean up old fairytales and give them happy endings but they always start with some kind of sadness.

• Cinderella’s dad dies at the beginning and she’s left with her evil step-family. However, she finds her prince and lives happily ever after.
• Again, in Snow White, her father dies in the beginning, she’s left with the evil queen and she’s almost killed, but she finds her true love and lives happily ever after.
• Even the movie Frozen, which we’ll revisit a little later, starts with the tragedy of the death of her parents, the king and queen.

For me, the synopsis of Ruth (which I read multiple times front to back, minus the genealogy at the end) was this:

• Ruth marries Naomi’s son and they live happily until Naomi’s son dies. Then, both stricken with grief, they move back to Naomi’s home. Ruth finds a kind man who saves her from her sadness and poverty and all three of them—Ruth, Boaz, and Naomi—live happily ever after.

Ruth seemed on the surface a “sweet romantic interlude,” as Carolyn Custis James writes in her book, The Gospel of Ruth. It followed the wonderful world of Disney’s take on true love.

But as I got older, my idea of a love story, and love in general, changed.

I started to see the braveness of Ruth’s actions and how much she loved Naomi as a mother and as a friend. Enough to leave what she knew and travel into a new land, believing in a new God. Naomi was her family now. And her love for Naomi was a true love.

James’ book is filled with new views on my old favorite that I had never unpacked before. For her, “[Ruth] emerges, not as the passive, deferential, demure woman we once thought we knew, but as a surprisingly gutsy risk taker.”

James starts to give the reader a new picture of this brave woman. She writes, “The young Moabite widow discards cultural protocol, her own hopes of happiness, and even plain reason when she embraces Naomi’s terrifying God and binds herself for life to her mother-in-law. In one pivotal moment, Ruth’s identity and center of gravity change forever.”

It seems there’s more of a twist to Ruth and Naomi’s story than I first thought.

This blows Disney’s unrealistic expectations of true love out the window. But recently, the Disney Corporation has started to redeem themselves. I have to admit that when I first heard about the movie Frozen that Disney recently released, I avoided going to see it because it looked like it had all the elements of the classic Disney movie. A princess in distress, an evil queen, and a prince to save the day with true love’s kiss. I was so wrong.

When I finally went to see the movie, I couldn’t believe how many things Disney corrected in one film that it had taken them years to mess up.

Let me just preface this next part with saying that, I’m very sorry if you haven’t seen Frozen yet, but I’m about to throw out some spoilers.

The biggest thing and the most important, I believe, is the notion of what true love is. It’s not only romantic love, it’s friendship like that of Ruth and Naomi. Elsa, one of the main characters in Frozen, has accidentally frozen her sister, Anna’s, heart with her powers of controlling ice and cold.

Anna is told that the only way to save herself is an act of true love. She, all those around her, and even the movie theater audience, all jump immediately to the one conclusion Disney has taught us through the years—she needs true love’s kiss! Her prince’s kiss will save her.

She, all those around her, and even the movie theater audience would be wrong for once.

A few scenes later, we find out that the act of true love had to come from within her. Anna, had to break the curse herself by performing an act of true love. AND it didn't have anything to do with romantic love! Anna breaks the curse by saving Elsa from the very prince we all thought would break the curse!

What a twist, Disney!

The true love of sisters. Of friends. Of Ruth & Naomi.

Alise Wright, a guest blogger for Rachel Held Evans, wrote, “We have made marriage and [romantic love] the ultimate expressions of intimacy. And while they are beautiful and worthwhile, they are simply one way for us to experience intimacy with another person. We have relegated friendship to a position of “just” and “only” when the Scripture refers to it as a weaving of souls together. We use Ruth 1:16-17 in our marriage ceremonies and forget that it was a pledge of friendship.  We allow the absence of [romantic love] to lessen intimacy.”

It turns out that there’s more to true love than just romantic love. There’s the love of family and the love of friendship. And that can be just as true as any romantic kind of true love. There are more and more groups of people now-a-days calling themselves a family, having family dinner, and living together who are not, in fact, related at all by blood or marriage.

Oddly enough, someone who gets this, and is now taking advantage of this idea, is the Sprint Corporation. Recently they've started to market their new “Framily” plan. I don’t love that they’re trying to make money off the idea, but I do love how they've captured this idea of the changes to the traditional family dynamic in that one, silly word: “Framily.”

On their website, it says, “The Sprint Framily^SM Plan is a revolutionary pricing program that lets consumers decide who they consider family.

They then ask the question, “Why is Framily a good fit for today’s consumers?” and they list a few facts to answer this. If you listen between the “we’re trying to make money” kind of talk, you’ll hear some interesting things.

They tell us that Framily is a good fit for today’s consumers because:

1.      “More than half – 60%- of U.S. households are made up of fewer than three people and are growing more quickly than larger households, according to the 2010 U.S. Census.”

2.      “Married couples without children have grown 11 percent since 2000, and make up more than 40 percent of family households. (2010 U.S. Census)”

Finally they tell us that “Sprint recognizes that family can mean something broader – including both traditional families but also extending into a group a friends or community…”

I have personally experienced this idea of a “framily.” This concept is what drew me to the idea of living in an intentional community house in BVS. There were 4, 5, or even 6 people from different families that were living together and starting our own kind of family. We had family dinner and family meetings. We went on family trips and went to church together as a family. None of us were related by blood or marriage, but we formed our own kind of family unit.

In this sense, it seems that Ruth and Naomi had formed their own kind of framily. Maybe their friendship was more modern and progressive than we give them credit for. Yes, at one point, they were related through the marriage of Ruth and Naomi’s son, but once he was gone, they stuck together, never giving up on each other.

In a New York Times article entitled, The Changing American Family by Natalie Angier, a modern example of this kind of family is described. Angier tells the story of Matthew Tanksley and his friend Caleb Reese’s family.

She writes, “When Caleb got sick, Matt visited him in the hospital almost daily, and briefly took on the role of nurse during a memorable trip to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. But he was also there for Ms. Reese, of Costa Mesa, Calif., who says she depended on him for emotional support as her son’s illness progressed.

“Through that ordeal, that nine-month period, I became like a full-fledged member of the family,” Mr. Tanksley said. “We were having family dinners together, we were going out to eat, we were talking to each other every day on the phone. Hard times build bonds, and that definitely happened.”

Mr. Tanksley’s own mother had died when he was 13, so he welcomed the Reese clan’s embrace. Seven years later, he and Caleb’s mother remain close: She calls him her son, and he introduces her as “Mom.”

Though there was no marriage or blood to hold this family together, the true love Matthew felt for his friend Caleb, made him part of the family. Caleb’s family had the same true love for Matthew who was not, by the old definition, part of the family.

Angier concludes their story by writing, “Families, they say, are becoming more socially egalitarian over all, even as economic disparities widen. Families are more ethnically, racially, religiously and stylistically diverse than half a generation ago — than even half a year ago.”

But, she tells us that maybe this kind of family is not as new as we think. Ruth and Naomi are, after all, a biblical version of this kind of family.

“Relationships like these,” she writes, “— independent of biology but closer and more enduring than friendship — have been documented in various cultures throughout history…Anthropologists have traditionally used the term ‘fictive kin’ to separate such relationships from ‘true’ kinship based on blood or law, but many researchers have recently pushed back against that distinction, arguing that self-constructed families are no less real or meaningful than conventional ones.

The bond of a framily is just as strong as any traditional family unit. They never give up on each other.

“Ohana means family,” Lilo tells her alien friend Stitch in the animated movie Lilo & Stitch. “Ohana means family and family means no one gets left behind.”

Though spoken from the lips of little girl cartoon to her new, blue alien friend, they could have just as easily come out of Ruth’s.

I imagine the scene in my mind of Ruth and Naomi. “Naomi,” Ruth could have said, “We are family and family means no one gets left behind.”

This image of the true love of friendship and family, of not giving up on each other, is why I found the song played during the offering so perfect.

Jason Mraz’s song, I Won’t Give Up, was obviously written with the romantic kind of true love in mind. But if you listen to it again with the Ruth and Naomi story in your mind, you start to see how this works for any kind of love. I won’t play the whole thing again, but let me just give a few lines.

Well, I won't give up on us

Even if the skies get rough

I'm giving you all my love

I'm still looking up

And when you're needing your space

To do some navigating

I'll be here patiently waiting

To see what you find

'Cause even the stars they burn

Some even fall to the earth

We've got a lot to learn

God knows we're worth it

No, I won't give up

I don't wanna be someone who walks away so easily

I'm here to stay and make the difference that I can make

Our differences they do a lot to teach us how to use

The tools and gifts we got, yeah, we got a lot at stake

And in the end, you're still my friend at least we did intend

For us to work we didn't break, we didn't burn

We had to learn how to bend without the world caving in

I had to learn what I've got, and what I'm not, and who I am

Ruth didn’t give up on Naomi. She loved her like a friend, like a sister, like a mother. She found it inside of herself to stick with her friend. Ruth and Naomi teach us that the definition of family is fluid. It is always changing, even today. But true love is still the same no matter where it’s found, in our friends, in our family, or in our framily.

~*~

Sending:

Whether we are related by blood, marriage, friendship, or circumstance, let’s not forget that we go together. And that God’s true love is with us always, wherever our life journey takes us. Amen.

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[1] Virginia Wiles, …