Recently, I heard a sermon preached almost entirely on Jesus’ genealogy in Matthew. I was visiting a church I attended in my youth, a place where I learned a lot of what I’ve needed to unlearn about theology of women. I was delighted to see that the pastor immediately picked out the women in the narrative, a little disappointed to realize that he did so only to point out that they were all foreigners, with the exception of Mary. But this got me thinking in another direction, as sermons so often do. I began to think through these five women, to question what else they might have in common.
The Women of Advent: Ruth
Ruth is the third woman named in the lineage of Jesus recorded in Matthew 1. Her story, told in the Old Testament Book of Ruth, is a familiar one to many of us, a drama in four acts.