It's Parents' Weekend here and, through some act of divine serendipity, the lectionary has assigned as our first reading a passage from the book of Ruth.

The book of Ruth is a family story, an ancient novella which may be three thousand years old. It's an old story, but I'm claiming that it's a true story because it's a story about a family in trouble. Here is a middle-class family that's hit on hard times and has to move, a father who dies leaving his wife and sons poorly provided for, two sons who marry women of another religion and race, a stepmother who doesn't understand her daughters-in-law yet finds herself linked to them in misery. It's a story about a family so beset with problems, and bills to pay, and children who won't do right, and tensions between a mother and daughters-in-l…