Loving our Jewish neighbor like Ruth

This sermon was given at St. Peter's Anglican Church in Butler, PA on October 12, 2025, sixth day of Sukkot. The Anglican lectionary readings were from Proper 23 - Year C:

Ruth 1:1–19a

Psalm 113

II Timothy 2:1–15

Luke 17:11–19

“Was no one found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?”
“...but Ruth clung to [Naomi].”

Happy Sukkot. Happy Feast of Booths (or Tabernacles). Our Jewish neighbors are celebrating the Feast of the LORD declared by him in Leviticus 23 and Deuteronomy 16. This is the festival when Israel is commanded to build booths or huts to remember God’s presence and provision in the wilderness.

I mention the feast because it is the only Feast of the LORD in the Torah to which foreigners are explicitly invited (Deut 16:11). The prophet Zechariah later sees a vision of God ruling the world from Jerusalem, at which time the nations will be required to celebrate the Feast of Booths before him (Zech 14). It is a vision of all the nations submitting to God’s rule and reign, his love and provision.

I opened with snippets from today’s Gospel portion and Ruth. In both these readings, we see the foreigner interacting with an Israelite. Let us consider how we are Ruth, we are the healed Samaritan leper, so that we may be encouraged but also exhorted to love our neighbors well.

The foreigner comes back to worship

In Luke, Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem to do the work he was born to do: die as the atoning sacrifice for the whole world.

Along the way, Jesus must walk along borders or even cross them. Jesus and his band are going along the Samaria-Galilee border. As happens in a border area, you meet different types of people.

I grew up on the border with Mexico. That has generally been a friendly border area. I’m from El Paso, Texas, the largest border city in the United States. Many inhabitants in the area have family on both sides. Many people live in one country and work in the other. It’s generally a friendly crossing, at least it was when I was growing up, before 9/11.

The Samaria-Galilee border was not that friendly. Even today, that region is a tense border area as it is where Israeli Galilee and the Palestinian West Bank meet. “The conflict between the people of Samaria and the people of Israel was as sharp then as it is” now.¹ One time when Jesus and his disciples passed that way, James and John wanted to call fire down on the Samaritans (Luke 9)!

In this tense environment, 10 men, probably in raggedy clothes and bandages, start coming toward Jesus, shouting. The disciples were probably jumpy.

But what these 10 shouting men want is healing. “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us.” They are lepers, outcasts from society because of their illness. And Jesus, the one who came to save Jew and Gentile, heals them with a word.

14 … as they went they were cleansed. 15 Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice; 16 and he fell on his face at Jesus’ feet, giving him thanks. Now he was a Samaritan. 17 Then Jesus answered, “Were not ten cleansed? Where are the nine? 18 Was no one found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?” 19 And he said to him, “Rise and go your way; your faith has made you well.” (Luke 17 ESV)

Jesus calls the Samaritan a foreigner. Another way to translate this would be “outsider” or “alien,” somebody not Jewish, according to the context of the conversation. Samaritans descended from the northern tribes who had married foreigners displaced by the conquering Assyrians. They ultimately return to the God of Abraham and the Torah, but they become Torah-only people who do not recognize the Prophets, the Davidic kingship, nor the centrality of Jerusalem in worship. So Jews like Jesus – who did recognize the Prophets, David, and Jerusalem – saw the Samaritans as strangers and foreigners. The Samaritans were just like the Gentiles, in the Jewish mind.² They were foreigners.

This same word foreigner is all over the Scriptures³ mostly speaking of non-Israelites.

So, much like in the parable of the Good Samaritan, it is the stranger who stops to do the right thing. In the parable, the Good Samaritan stops to aid the wounded man, whereas the priest and the Levite would not! Here in this healing encounter on the border between Jewish Galilee and Samaria, it is the non-Jew who stops, acknowledges his healing, and goes back to worship God.

Friends, we are that Samaritan. Here we are, most or all non-Jews, as far as I know. And we’ve gathered on a Sunday morning to worship the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to eat at the table of Jesus, the Messiah of Israel. We, the foreigners, are here to worship God and thank him for our spiritual healing!

In some way, as the service ends today, we will hear Jesus tell us, “Rise. Go your way. Your faith has made you well.”

“That was a short and sweet homily,” you might be saying. I could stop there and let us get on with it.

But the assigned readings won’t let us do that. We are compelled to look at the story of another stranger who chose to worship the God of Israel – Ruth. This complete foreigner – a woman from idol-worshiping Moab – challenges us with what loving the God of Jacob means for how we treat the children of Jacob among us today.

Let’s refresh ourselves on the story and context of Ruth.

The suspect enemy becomes a loyal Israelite

After the exodus, Joshua leads the second generation of Israelites into the Promised Land. They (mostly) conquer it and settle to live in the abundant Land of Milk and Honey.

But, as the book of Judges tells us, not long after Joshua died, the Israelites began to do what was right in their own eyes. The period of the judges was a brutal cycle of idolatry/sin, oppression and/or famine, crying to God, salvation, then return to idolatry/sin.

Famine was a marker of a people not right with God. The Land of Israel is on the edge of a great desert. When there’s rain, the desert blooms. When there’s no rain, nothing grows. God warns the Israelites in Deuteronomy that he is the provider of the rain and thereby the provider of their livestock and produce.

16 Take care lest your heart be deceived, and you turn aside and serve other gods and worship them; 17 then the anger of the Lord will be kindled against you, and he will shut up the heavens, so that there will be no rain, and the land will yield no fruit, and you will perish quickly off the good land that the Lord is giving you. (Deut 11)

At the start of Ruth, there is famine in the Land, communicating that there is idolatry in Israel.⁴ And Elimelech adds insult to injury by taking his family into Moab, a land of hostility and of idols.

Things do not go well. Elimelech dies. Naomi marries her sons off to foreign women, then the sons die. The text doesn’t tell us directly why they die. It’s not clear if the men’s deaths are a judgment.

What is clear is that we now have three widows. Widows at that time were among the most vulnerable people in society. Naomi is doubly vulnerable as a widow in a strange land.

After 10 years abroad, Naomi hears that “the Lord had visited his people and given them food.” If the famine was due to disobedience, the return of abundance signals that there has been repentance in the Land. She rightly discerns that it’s time to go back to Bethlehem.

She sees no place for her foreign daughters-in-law, so she releases them to stay in Moab and remarry. But Ruth is not having it. Ruth clings to Naomi. Ruth even vows her life to Naomi.

16 Do not urge me to leave you or to return from following you. For where you go I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge. Your people shall be my people, and your God my God. 17 Where you die I will die, and there will I be buried. May the Lord do so to me and more also if anything but death parts me from you. (Ruth 1)

• Ruth gives up her Moabite identity: “Where you go I will go… Your people shall be my people.”
• Ruth disavows her idolatry, “Your God will be my God.”
• Ruth gives up her homeland for the Promised Land: “Where you die I will die, and there will I be buried.”

She is pledging herself to the God of Abraham. She is joining the people of Israel.

Ruth is going into the Land of Israel sight unseen. Yet she professes and shows “greater righteousness and faithfulness than the Israelites” who will soon surround her.⁵

Who were the Moabites? They descended from one of the sons of Lot, the nephew of Abraham. During the exodus, the Moabites refused to give the Israelites food and water. They also hired Balaam to curse Israel. He ultimately tells the Moabites how to defeat the Israelites through seduction and idolatry, which they did! Therefore, all the Moabites were suspect.

Then we meet Ruth. She is faithful and loyal. She shows true friendship, which is what her name means. Rather than the Good Samaritan, she is the Good Moabite. Whoever heard of such a thing!

We ended our Ruth reading with Naomi and Ruth arriving in Bethlehem. Is this Naomi?” people ask each other. It’s been at least 10 years, but the women recognize her. “ In verses 20 and 21, Naomi answers them.

“Do not call me Naomi; call me Mara, for the Almighty has dealt very bitterly with me. I went away full, and the LORD has brought me back empty. Why call me Naomi, when the LORD has testified against me and the Almighty has brought calamity upon me?” (Ruth 1:20-21)

Naomi means pleasant but she isn’t somebody who’s going to pretend she’s OK. She is brutally honest about where she is emotionally and spiritually. God is against me and has taken everything from me. I am bitter, so call me Mara.

Naomi hasn’t heard of Job, it seems, and his worshipful lament: “The LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD.” (Job 1:21)

Naomi is bereft. She is empty. She blames God. Naomi is angry at God.

Our Jewish neighbors as Naomi

This is how many Jewish people felt after the Holocaust. Here’s one quote from a Holocaust survivor. The young man had been forced to dig out dead Jews and burn the corpses to hide them from the coming Allies. The task fell on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement:

There were about two-thousand bodies that lit up the sky, which was now read and smokey from the fire… Today I did not look up and no one from my family was left to look up, either… It was exactly as the sages had told us: that the two thousand corpses will change into extreme spirituality and, as during the time of the Temple on Yom Kippur, no longer occupy any space. Who cared today if the skies opened to receive our prayers? Our nostrils were not filled with spices but with teh smoke of burning bodies… Today on Yom Kippur… nobody spoke of God or about penance. We made a statement to ourselves, even if no one cared. It was a very hard day, as if God, too wanted to break us.⁶

A Jewish prisoner wrote on a concentration camp wall: “If there is a God, he will have to beg my forgiveness.”⁷

It’s been 80 years since the Holocaust, and not all Jews are atheists. But our Jewish neighbors – religious or not – are asking questions as antisemitism rises to all-time highs.

One of the questions they are asking is, “Who are our friends?”

Christians must love like Ruth

At the beginning, I said that we are the Samaritan leper coming to thank Jesus for our healing. We are also Ruth, Gentiles who have said to Jesus, “Your God will be my God. Where you die I will die, and there will I be buried” and raised back to life again.

Yes, we die with Messiah. We rise with Messiah.

Paul said in Romans 11 that we non-Jews were grafted into the olive tree that is the Jewish people (Rom 11:17ff) when we believed in Jesus. He warns us not be haughty about accepting Jesus when most of our Jewish neighbors don’t see or accept him.

In Ephesians 2, Paul says to us:

8 For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, 9 not a result of works, so that no one may boast. 10 For we are his workmanship, created in Messiah Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.

11 Therefore remember that at one time you Gentiles in the flesh…12 remember that you were at that time separated from Messiah, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. 13 But now in Messiah Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Messiah …19 So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God.

Paul says commonwealth of Israel – we cannot read in the modern state of Israel here – but the people of Israel, the sons of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to whom the Scriptures were given, to whom the promises of redemption were made.

Jesus invites us strangers in, not to replace the Jewish people, but to expand the commonwealth of Israel to cover the whole earth. Not all Jewish people know and accept Jesus as Messiah and Lord, but neither have all the nations heard the Gospel. Neither have we seen the New Jerusalem come down from heaven. Yes, Jesus rules and reigns at the right hand of the Father. But we have not seen the complete fulfillment. All you need to do is turn on the news and see the wars and rumors of wars to know the end is not yet. We are in an in-between phase.

So, how do we live? How do we non-Jewish followers of Jesus carry ourselves, as regards our Jewish neighbors.  We live as Ruth, ever concerned about the Naomis living among us.

Less than a mile from this church is a synagogue. Do you know them? Have you asked them how they’re doing? Are you prepared to care for them if some terrible antisemitic thing happens in your town?

Nothing like that will happen here? Nobody knows where Butler, PA, is?

Nobody knew where Butler, PA is… until some angry kid took a shot at the President of the United States in your backyard.

In 2018, a man who had bought into a lie called the great replacement theory, posted to his racists online buddies, “Screw the optics. I’m going in” and walked into Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh and killed 11 Jews worshiping God on a Sabbath morning. This man’s social media posts also used New Testament quotes taken out of context to justify his antisemitic hate.⁸

A few months later, a young man walked into a synagogue near San Diego, California on Passover and killed one person before being subdued.⁹ Another murderous attack, this time at a New Jersey kosher deli, happened a few months later.

Some Jewish commentators started to wonder out loud if the U.S. was safe for Jews anymore.¹⁰

Since 2023, people angry with Israel over the war against Hamas in Gaza began to verbally attack American Jews. Then synagogues got vandalized. Then Jews got physically assaulted.

No matter what we may think of the modern state of Israel’s actions in Gaza, it is wrong to hold those perceived sins against our Jewish neighbors.

Two weeks ago, a man angry about the Israel-Hamas War attacked a synagogue in Manchester, England on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. On what some call the holiest day in Judaism, a man decided to violently express his anger against Israel by running over Jews with his car and stabbing others.

Our Jewish neighbors here wonder when something like that will happen in the U.S. They wonder who their friends are.

They shouldn’t wonder. It should be us. We should be Ruth to their Naomi. In their fear, worry, maybe even anger and bitterness, we should stick close. We should serve them like Ruth served Naomi, out of love and kindness and gratitude.

Gratitude? For what? To paraphrase Paul in Romans 9, to the Jewish people “belong the adoption and the glory and the covenants and the giving of the [Scriptures] and the [liturgy] and the promises. To them belong the patriarchs—and from them, according to the flesh, the Messiah, who is over all, God, blessed forever. Amen.”

We are here in church today because Jesus sent 12 Jewish guys, Paul the Pharisee, several Jewish women to go tell the world that salvation had come. And it was those Jewish disciples who gave us the Scriptures and taught us how to worship God. Above all, Jesus has Jewish DNA for all eternity.

Do we want to tell our Jewish neighbors about Jesus being the Messiah of Israel? Of course we do. But when they say no to Jesus, can we love them like Ruth? Better yet, can we love them like Jesus? Can we be Jesus to them?

I encourage you to get to know your Jewish neighbors. They are right there, down the road, wondering who their friends are.

Go say, “Hi.”

Let us pray.

Almighty and everlasting God, you established your covenant with Abraham and his seed: Hear the prayers of your Church, that the people through whom you brought blessing to the world may also receive the blessing of salvation. Teach us to love them like you love them. In the Name of Jesus the Messiah, our Lord. Amen.

Footnotes

1. David H. Stern, Jewish New Testament Commentary : A Companion Volume to the Jewish New Testament, electronic ed. (Clarksville: Jewish New Testament Publications, 1996), Lk 9:53.
2. This is no longer so. The Samaritan community has been recognized as a sect of Judaism since the 11th century, even though they only recongize the Torah (not the Writings or the Prophets) and continue to see Mount Gerazim in Samaria as the center of worship. Shulamit Sela, “The Head of the Rabbanite, Karaite and Samaritan Jews: On the History of a Title,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 57.2 (1994): 265-66.
3. Ἀλλογενής - foreign, of another race, stranger. It appears only once in the NT but 46 times in the Tanakh.
4. “Proper 23 – Year C,” Sermon Notes from the Church’s Ministry Among Jewish People,” CMJ Israel, October 2025. Archive at https://www.cmj-usa.orAbrahamg/sermon-notes/year-c
5. “Proper 23 – Year C,” CMJ Israel.
6. Leon Weliczker Wells, Shattered Faith: A Holocaust Legacy (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky,1995) as quoted in Lassley, Jennifer. “A Defective Covenant: Abandonment of Faith among Jewish Survivors of the Holocaust.” International Social Science Review, vol. 90, no. 2, 2015, pp. 1–17. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/intesociscierevi.90.2.03. Accessed 10 Oct. 2025.
7. This phrase was featured in an Italian documentary screened for tourists at the site of the Mauthausen
8. concentration camp near Linz, Austria. See Giuseppe Ronzoni, Youtube post, July 21, 2011, accessed March 16, 2014, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r50t7 148sA&feature=youtube&t=19m20s; "Archive of the Mauthausen Memorial," Mauthausen-Gusen Concentration Camp, accessed April 24, 2014, http://en.mauthausen-memorial.at/index_open.php as quoted in Lassley, “A Defective Covenant.”
9. Julien Bellaiche, Imagined Threats: Demographic Conspiracy Theories, Antisemitism, and the Legacy of the 2018 Pittsburgh Synagogue Attack, George Washington University Program on Extremism, 2023. https://extremism.gwu.edu/imagined-threats
10. “San Diego Synagogue Shooting: One Person Dead in Poway, California,” 27 April 2019. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-48081535.
11. See Horn, Dara. People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present. Norton paperback. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2022.