A Woman Called Faithful: When there is no Bread

Ruth 1:1-22

There once was a young girl, whose mother died when she was very young, and before she was fully grown she lost her father as well. She was left to live with her step-mother and two step sisters, who made her clean all day and at night she was forced to sleep near the fire among the cinders and they called her Cinder-Ella.

There once was a beautiful princess whose hair was as black as ebony, her lips as red as blood and her skin as white as snow and her name was Snow White.

When telling a story, names matter.  Sometimes a person just so happens to be named the right name like when a person with the last name Major is a Major, so his name is Major Major, but most of the time when you have heard a story where the Chiropractor’s name is Dr. Bones, the Medic’s name is Dr. Healer, or the nicest guy in the story’s name is Mr. Goodman, you know that the names were put there to make a point.

The story given to us in the book of Ruth is no different. When you are reading this story in the original language that is exactly how this story feels. In fact many scholars believe that although the events of the story are real, most, if not all of the names of have been changed.

 I almost feel like before we begin to read this story we need a deep voiced narrator:

 “Ladies and gentlemen, the story you are about to hear is true. The names have been changed to make the point more evident.”

Oh, and the story itself is rife with word plays and puns. If there is one thing I learned about the ancient Hebrews from learning to translate Hebrew, is that they are a people who love their puns. The Bible is seriously full of corny word plays and groan worthy puns that we all miss simply because we read it in English.

At one time there was a famine in the city called The House of Bread, where there lived a woman named Sweetness, her husband, God is my King and their two sons. They were from the Tribe whose name literally means Fruitful or Fertile. There in the House of Bread, nothing was fertile, the land was not fruitful so therefore there was no bread. The three of them, Naomi, Elimelech, and their two sons, decided that the living some place with actual food and not merely named for food, would be best. So they traveled to the far off land of Moab to live. They made a pretty good life for themselves there. There was food and apparently women, because both of the sons found wives for themselves. And for a while Sweetness had a pleasant life. That is until her husband died and her sons, whose names were Sickness and Consumption (Mahlon and Chilion) died (perhaps of sickness and consumption – but we cannot be sure the Bible does not tell us).

Now Naomi heard that there was no longer famine in her homeland and decided there would be more bread for a widow woman in the land of her relatives, than here in a land full of strangers, who might not be willing to take care of her. With this in mind, she decided to journey back to the House of Bread (Bethlehem) in hope to find a better life there among people she knew and who knew her, than here in this strange land where her husband and her two sons had died.

Now each of her sons, had a wife, one them was named, Back of the Neck, and the second was named Faithful Friend. When she decided to leave she instructed these two women to go back to their mother’s houses and find for themselves new husbands.

This is when Back of the Neck (Orpah) turned her head and left Naomi there in road, and as she went away Naomi saw nothing but the back of her neck. Faithful on the other hand clung to Naomi and refused to leave her, journeying away from the land of her mother and her father, and everything that she had ever known to go back to Naomi’s homeland, because she could not bear to leave her.  Would that all mothers of sons had daughter-in-law’s like Faithful Ruth.

The story we have before us this morning is actually all about Naomi. And her story is not a pleasant story. Nothing is as it should be, the land is not fertile or fruitful, there is a famine and there is no bread. So they have to leave the land where they belong and travel to a far off place and try to make things work there. And they go alright for a while. Her sons find wives and things are going well. But then her husband dies, and then her sons die and Naomi is left alone, in a foreign land with no one to take care of her. Her life has not been pleasant, nothing is sweet, everything is bitter. In fact at the end of the chapter she asks for the women of the town to change her name to bitterness because she feels the God of all faithfulness has abandoned her and left her empty.

She has lost it all. She has no husband, or no sons. She has no one to take care of her and no means of taking care of herself.  And although the root of the word used in Hebrew to talk about the Covenant Faithfulness of God is used throughout this chapter and the next, Naomi, sees none of it. It seems that even God has abandoned her. The forever faithful God is unfaithful.

Naomi’s story is a story we can all relate to. There are times when it seems that there is no goodness in sight, the people we love have died, we have lost any means of providing for ourselves or our family. Our lives or the lives those closest to us are plagued by illness. It seems we can never get out from under the continual barrage of bad things that just keep happening to us. We feel like Naomi. Even the God of all faithfulness seems to be unfaithful.

Last year was like that for me. I had a list, it started with Estelle and I getting food poisoning, and then due to some very poor customer service on the part of Best Buy my family went 5 weeks without a refrigerator, my wallet was stolen out of my office on a Sunday morning during worship, my father got sick, you would think that I would end the list with his death, but then I got back from the funeral and broke my foot. And then the Summer that followed was long and I fought with depression for what felt like forever. I felt like Naomi, maybe at one point my name was Sweetness but I sure felt like my life was full of bitterness.

All of us have had a week where we felt like this, most of us have had months like this, or seasons, and some of us have had years that are like this, years that seem to never end, one bleeds into the next and there seems to be no end to the heartache and the pain, to the disappointment and the bitterness. Where is the God of covenant faithfulness when our lives are so full of misery and pain? That is where Naomi is in our story today. She is in the middle of that season where there is no goodness, there is nothing to cling to, but yet in the middle of it all there is someone who is willing to cling to her.

She may be bereft of all that is good and beautiful in life. There is nothing that is going well for her, and yet Ruth refuses to leave her side, even though it is in Ruth’s best interest to go home to her own family and get on with her life, she refuses to leave Naomi. Naomi has nothing of value left to her, but Ruth will not leave. Ruth sees Naomi in her distress; Ruth knows Noami in her abandoned state and stays with her through all things. Even when God seems to be unfaithful, Ruth (whose name literally means Faithful Friend) remains faithful.

The thing is, Ruth staying probably did not entirely look like a good thing to Naomi at the time. Now, Naomi has to not only worry about herself, taking care of her own needs, but now she has to take care of Ruth as well. But it is through Ruth that God’s faithfulness is seen, it is through Ruth that Naomi will one day be restored (but let’s not rush to the end of the story quite yet). Right now Ruth is small crack in the clouds of what is otherwise a very dark and dreary day.

And that is the way it is in our lives. There are times in our lives when nothing is going right, when our lives are full to over flowing with nothing but darkness and pain. We hurt, we cry, we look around and we have lost everything. We look around at the shattered broken mess that is our lives, we see our pain, we see our loneliness, we look in the mirror and we are not even sure we know who we are anymore, are we Sweetness or Bitterness. And we begin wonder if we can even believe in the faithfulness of God.

But let me tell you God is always faithful. Sometimes we cannot see it, but there is something in our lives, perhaps it is small, perhaps it even feels like an extra burden at the time, but it is there, clinging to us like Ruth and it never leaves. It could be a person, the kindness of friend, or it can be something, a thing of beauty that we find each day, or even the love of a pet. But there always is a way that God is continuing to be faithful to us, even in the darkness. And because of the darkness we may not be able to see it. In the midst of the despair, and heartache we may not be able to find it, even when we are looking for it, but our “Ruth” is there. God is always there, faithful, clinging to us just as assuredly and as steadfastly as Ruth clung to Naomi.  

The hard thing is to never lose faith in God, to go on trusting, even when it is hard, to go on trusting even when we feel we have no trust to give, to go on trusting, even when our trust feels like it is being mislaid. God is faithful. It is who God is. No matter how rough things are, no matter how many pieces our lives have been shattered into, even when we have lost absolutely everything, God is still there, always faithful, even when we doubt, and find it hard to trust. God is still there, even in the darkness. And when it seems like the only thing to take hold of us is heartache and pain, death and destruction, know that God is faithfully clinging to us in all things through all things. God is always our faithful friend.