The temple deserving of destruction

"... The woman’s devotion is undoubted. But we have taught her, in part, to increase her poverty in the name of God. “They kill the widow and the stranger...” (Ps 94:6) Families are destroyed by husbands at too many meetings and working bees, or wives working too long in the church office. Except it is not the husband or the wife, it is the church. Young women are destroyed by the structures; it has been happening all my life and I am only finally seeing.

.... In this picture of a more fundamental corruption, those “inadequate people seeking power” (Loader) are often tolerated, and even encouraged,  by other inadequate people seeking an inadequate God. Great is their rage and destructiveness when they see they have idolised God and gotten only a poor minister.

And in the middle of it all those who are true become the “collateral damage” of the church; the ones we deny we have destroyed.

I once saw a man stand firm under fire and give everything he had. What an appalling thing if the widow was doing this, too, with her two coins, and it turned out we had built a temple which turned her love into a lie!

It would deserve its destruction."

Andrew Prior (from https://www.onemansweb.org/theology/a-difficult-day-of-the-lord-mark-13-24-37/the-trickle-down-theory-of-church-mark-12-38-44.html)

Back then

Dates and times are vague

in the story of Ruth;

in the days that the judges ruled

there was a famine in the land.

That is all we are told, but it is enough.

How old were Mahlon and Chilion

when they took local Moabite girls,

Orpah and Ruth, to be their brides?

Old enough to take on the responsibilities

of wife and family. And how old

were the girls? The usual age;

pubescent, most likely.

And how old would they have been

when they were widowed?

Ten years older, we are told,

but that may be an exaggeration

since neither of them had yet produced a child.

So it is, at least according to the story,

that thrice-bereft Naomi packs up her tragedy

and returns with her young daughter-in-law

to her home town and country.

There she must trust; both in God

and in the generosity of her wider family.

Ruth, a young woman who is presumably

not yet past her mid-twenties,

will, for all time, become the standard

for loyalty and devotion;

not bad for a foreign widow.

© Ken Rookes