Ruth 1:19-22

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Clint Loveall
Hey, everybody. Thanks for being with us as we close out the week and as we close out the first chapter of the book of Ruth, we are in, the 19 verse of chapter one. And at this point, Ruth has stated very beautifully her commitment to Naomi and her desire to stay with not more than her desire, her intention to stay with Naomi.

00:00:24:54 – 00:00:40:19
Clint Loveall
And so this is the gist. The rest of the story through chapter one. So jump in here at verse 19 and we’ll come back and discuss it. So the two of them went on until they came to Bethlehem. When they came to Bethlehem, the whole town was stirred.

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Michael Gewecke
Because of them.

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Clint Loveall
And the women said, is this Naomi?

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Michael Gewecke
She said to them.

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Clint Loveall
Call me no longer Naomi. Call me Mara. For the Almighty has dealt bitterly with me. I went away full, but the Lord has brought me back empty.

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Michael Gewecke
Why call me Naomi when.

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Clint Loveall
The Lord has dealt harshly with me.

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Michael Gewecke
And the Almighty has brought calamity upon me.

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Clint Loveall
So Naomi returned together with Ruth the Moabite, her daughter.

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Michael Gewecke
In law, who.

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Clint Loveall
Came back with her from the country.

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Michael Gewecke
Of Moab. They came to Bethlehem at.

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Clint Loveall
The beginning of the.

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Michael Gewecke
Barley harvest.

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Clint Loveall
so, maybe a tough place to leave over for the weekend, but now we find, Naomi and Ruth returning to Naomi’s homeland. And I’m trying Michael, to do a little math. We have, we’ve been here several years in Moab. when they had lived there about ten years. So we’re somewhere about a decade removed, maybe a little over.

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Michael Gewecke
From when Naomi left.

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Clint Loveall
And she is still recognized. people know of her, know her when she returns. And yet she is not the person that left. And she literally, spells that out.

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Michael Gewecke
In this idea that they should call her a different name. But the idea is.

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Clint Loveall
That the young woman who was married with sons.

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Michael Gewecke
Went away ten years ago. and that’s not the woman who comes back. The woman who comes back is a widow who has lost deeply and has experienced bitterness and struggle. And she.

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Clint Loveall
Communicates.

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Michael Gewecke
That with this idea. Don’t call me Naomi, call me Mara. And Mara is just that’s the Hebrew word for bitter.

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Clint Loveall
And we can get into her.

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Michael Gewecke
Explanation of that. But I think it’s a it’s kind of a poignant moment, Michael. It’s a it’s a heavy moment, but.

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Clint Loveall
she comes back still fully encased in her grief, and, and I wonder if, if you’re a person who has been through difficulty the idea of.

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Michael Gewecke
Going back to a place.

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Clint Loveall
You know, there’s something if you think about home and what a treat it is to return to your home.

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Michael Gewecke
At times, and how good.

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Clint Loveall
That feels when that’s fraught with pain.

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Michael Gewecke
The exact opposite experience is true. And that seems to be the case here for Naomi.

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Yeah. No doubt. In fact, Clint, I think that we as modern readers may struggle a little bit to locate ourself within the culture of this text. And one of the key things that happens actually throughout the Old Testament is the importance of the name naming a person is not just about what that person’s called by their family. It also has something to teach us about their character and who they are.

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Names have a real significance. So in this particular story, when Naomi goes, the name Naomi, like you said, has in its meaning sweetness, but Mara has in its name the meaning bitterness. So the one who leaves sweet comes back bitter, the one who left with a kind of vivacious life, comes back deeply grieving and in pain. And that is not just a character it ization of Naomi.

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It’s not just something to teach us about her experience, it’s to give us some context ourselves to understand this is the state of Naomi’s soul. This has been her experience of the world. The Bible does not often give you a character’s internal thought. It’s not that kind of book. It’s not, a story told with our modern conventions where you, you hear in someone’s thoughts and then you hear what other people say about that person, and that gives you an opportunity to empathize.

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The Bible has its own way of doing that. And here that this shift in name is here to help us understand the person returning to the House of bread is a person who’s coming back with nothing. She’s coming back again in search of food. She left looking for food. Now she comes back without her family in grief, looking for food, and in this case, all that she has that she returns with is bitterness.

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And importantly, her daughter in law, Ruth. This is an unbelievably powerful connection that you go with your sons and husband and you come back with this woman from and we see this explicit named here, a woman from Moab, Ruth the Moabite, as if the author wants us to know, hey, remember where Ruth is coming from. She’s not returning as an Israelite.

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She’s returning to Israel with her mother in law. And I think that that is a really important way that this author helps us understand not just what’s happening, but what’s happening inside these characters.

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Clint Loveall
Yeah, I agree, Michael. The Bible doesn’t really do what we would call.

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Michael Gewecke
Psychology in a in a modern.

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Clint Loveall
Sense, but we are left here to, to to try and.

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Michael Gewecke
Resonate with some of Naomi’s pain, some of her struggle, you know, and.

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Clint Loveall
uncomfortably, she attributes that to God.

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Michael Gewecke
And I suppose on one hand we could say that that is a measure of faith.

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Clint Loveall
She lives in a culture that.

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Michael Gewecke
takes it as fact that God.

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Clint Loveall
Does good things and bad things, and that everything that happens is.

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Michael Gewecke
Directly from God’s hands.

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Clint Loveall
And she seems to she seems to believe that. And she says, the Almighty.

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Michael Gewecke
Has dealt bitterly with me.

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Clint Loveall
I went away full, which is not true in terms of food, because we know this story. They moved because of famine, but it was true of her family. Even more important than food. But the Lord brought.

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Michael Gewecke
Me back empty. Why call me Naomi when the Lord has dealt harshly with me? The Almighty has brought calamity upon me.

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Clint Loveall
And, again he we can quibble about these verses from a theological perspective. We could have very in-depth.

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Michael Gewecke
Conversations about the whole of the Bible and whether it teaches that God does or doesn’t bear responsibility for.

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Clint Loveall
The difficulties.

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Michael Gewecke
And struggles and pain in our lives.

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Clint Loveall
But if you’ve been through difficult waters.

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Michael Gewecke
If you have.

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Clint Loveall
Been through.

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Michael Gewecke
Painful moments.

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Clint Loveall
You know what this feels like. You know that it feels like abandonment.

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Michael Gewecke
You know.

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Clint Loveall
That it feels like.

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Michael Gewecke
Forsaking this.

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Clint Loveall
You know that these words from Naomi are not based in some theological.

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Michael Gewecke
Textbook of what is accurate in the big.

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Clint Loveall
Picture of Scripture. This is through the lens of her experience, and it feels.

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Michael Gewecke
To her like God has, brought this calamity, brought this struggle to her.

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Clint Loveall
And, you know, again, we could quibble with the content, but I don’t I’m not sure this is here as a teaching tool. I think it’s here as an a window into.

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Michael Gewecke
Naomi’s moment, into Naomi’s soul.

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Clint Loveall
And I think, you know, we have to be a little careful, making it something else, but. But certainly when we read these are hard words. This this is a woman who has been deeply.

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Michael Gewecke
Wounded and is.

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Clint Loveall
Struggling at.

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Michael Gewecke
Every level with, with family, with loss, with faith.

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Clint Loveall
She doesn’t even think of herself.

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Michael Gewecke
As the person she used to be because of what she’s been through.

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I think that there’s a aspect of that worth lingering on a little bit. Clint, don’t you think the times when people come to a text like this, verse 21, maybe especially the end of 20 as well, the Almighty has dealt bitterly with me. Lord brought me back empty. The Lord has dealt harshly. Almighty has brought calamity. You know the moments when we’re tempted to hone in on words like that and then to begin to try to create this big theological structure of making sense of, well, what’s God’s relationship to calamity and where is God?

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Actually, we try to get very specific about what’s God and what’s human and what’s free will and what we get all wrapped up into that. The problem when we do that, Clint, is that we completely blow past the intention of the text, which is to make it clear to us Naomi is suffering, and there are people in our lives who are experiencing suffering, if not you today, that real pain, real struggle.

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And when you’re in that moment, the human reality is this is these become our words. Not they’re not forced upon us. They just naturally arise out of people of faith. Because in the midst of that suffering, there is great struggle.

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Clint Loveall
Well, and I want to again, I hope we don’t overdo this, but having gone through Jonah recently, I want to paint the contrast, because in that book it was clear that God did things. The Scripture was very clear to say this was because of God’s action. And there are other parts of the Old Testament where, there are parts of the New Testament where something happens to a person and the text makes it abundantly, explicitly clear that that was done by the hand of God intentionally.

00:10:27:01 – 00:10:58:40
Clint Loveall
But if you remember the beginning of this book, there’s nothing that has confirmed that Naomi’s words are her words. These are her interpretations. The broader story has not laid responsibility for this at God’s feet. And I think that significant, because I think that that helps us with the intention not to understand the why in the big picture, but to understand the what Naomi is feeling and struggling with.

00:10:58:40 – 00:11:29:44
Clint Loveall
And so she returns to her, her former home, but she returns broken. She returns vulnerable. She returns with an uncertain future. And you said this, Michael, but I want to repeat it. notice how often the text reminds us of Ruth’s foreignness. She’s not just Ruth in this chapter. She’s Ruth the Moabite, and that matters. The one thing that Naomi brings back with her is a person nobody wants there.

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Clint Loveall
That’s her one, quote unquote, possession. It is a thing of no value in her circumstance. And I think, you know, this is a picture of a.

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Michael Gewecke
Woman in a very tough spot.

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Yeah. There’s four chapters of Ruth, and I believe the commentator, mentions that that phrase, the Moabite is listed five times, in those four chapters. So it’s a repeated phrase as if to let us know. Hey, don’t forget. Yeah. Remember, this is a foreigner coming back to the land. I also want to do very quickly point out, because we’d be quick to miss it, that when the whole town sees these two women arrive.

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And in verse 19, notice that while the whole town is stirred, it’s the women who say, is this Naomi and I really don’t have much to add to that other than just notice once again how consistently this author presents the story from the perspective of the women involved. It is very unique in the way that it’s telling the story.

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And I think that once again, this is one of the reasons why this book is so loved is you can enter into a text with which was written in a very patriarchal society. That’s the if you look at the way that it’s structured and the legal custom and code and all these things here, this story is not interested in that social order.

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It’s interested in telling the story of these two women. And it, it, it presents. I mean, I think all of us can imagine coming home and the women of town seeing these two women come in and it’s them who are asking, is this Naomi? Is this the woman who we gathered with? And we drew water from the well with, and that we celebrated festivals and weddings.

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But is this that person? And when she comes back and says, no, I’m a shell of a person. I’m a broken person. I’m a bitter person. I have lost all of these things yet. Yet the thing that the author does not say explicitly, but I think is really important to remember. The one thing she does come back with is the faithfulness of the foreigner.

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She comes back with the commitment of Ruth. She comes back with a moabite who has shown already a deep, deep character and a willingness to be a child of Yahweh, a child of the people, the God of the people of Israel. And I just think these these themes are, are mingling in important and interesting ways. It would be easy and quick in a narrative like this to, I think, just push past some of these details.

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yeah. She’s suffering. Yes, it’s been hard. Let’s get to chapter two. But if you slow down a little bit, there’s a lot of character work here. And I do think there’s also some reflecting upon that gap between the human experience and some of those larger theological questions. And when we are in the midst of the suffering, I think that a book like Ruth helps us see what it looks like to be honest about the suffering, without having to need to jump to making theology of how it all fits together.

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Clint Loveall
Yeah, I think there’s a lot here. There’s a lot of depth. you know, the good news is this the story is going it has a very rough beginning. This this first chapter is full of hard stuff, but it is going to get better ultimately, we want to make sure that we hear the difficulty in it so that we can also celebrate the movement in it.

00:14:56:54 – 00:15:06:13
Clint Loveall
But, thanks for being with us today as we look at it. I hope you have a great weekend. I hope you’ll be a be able and be, interested to come back and continue the story with us.

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Thanks, everybody. Have a great weekend.