Readings:
Psalm 4 Ruth 1:1-18 1 Timothy 1:1-17 Luke 13:1-9
Sermon:
Answer me when I call to you, O my righteous God.* Give me relief from my distress; be merciful to me and hear my prayer. Psalm 4:1
For Naomi, it must have seemed as if God had completely abandoned her: her husband dead, her sons dead with no children of their own, and their two young wives to provide for. Besides the personal grief of seeing her family devastated, she now faced an unenviable future as a penniless widow in a strange land, reduced to begging or starvation.
But as bad as this was, it was a fate that was common enough for women of her day, and which at her age she probably wouldn’t have to endure long before she joined her family in death. What particularly grieved her was the fate of her two daughters-in-law, young widows who had lost not only their beloved husbands but all chances for future happiness. Under the law of Moses, if they remarried, their first son would be considered the child of their dead husband, so that his name would not forgotten nor his line become extinct. Few men would be willing to marry them under these circumstances even if they were wealthy heiresses; as destitute beggers, their chances of finding a new husband were virtually zero.
Standard Podcasts [33:39m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download | Embeddable Player | Hits (8)You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
| Rate it: |
 Email it
|
      |
|
