One of life’s most essential lessons is that we are never meant to go alone. And yet, modern culture pushes us more and more into lonely silos. If Ruth had followed her culture’s norms, she would have gone home to her family of origin after her husband died, but instead, she commits herself to her mother-in-law, Naomi. Together they form a new family and covenant. Ruth and Naomi travel together to Bethlehem at the beginning of the barley harvest, foreshadowing the journey Mary and Joseph will one day take to be counted in the census. Both Ruth and Naomi as well as Mary and Joseph are unconventional pairs, but if God can bring unlikely people together, God can form us into a covenant community too. Worship this morning at The Table holds this reading of Ruth alongside the quilters of Gee’s Bend in inviting us to rethink the ways God longs for us to create communities of justice and care beyond convention and with a critical eye to systemic forms of oppression which always already threaten our wounded world and fragmented connections. Worship online with thetable.live. CCLI #805699 / CCLI Streaming #094804