Ruth 1:1-22
Wendy’s story: emptiness
Over the next 4 weeks
I want us to think about what’s our story
Where do you come from?
What’s shaped your life, influenced your decisions
Helped you or harmed you encouraged or rebuked you
The people and the places of where we come from
I want us to get a bead on over these next 4 weeks of where have you been seeing your life wrapped up in the story of God
Where Jesus intersected your life, and where you are seeing him on the move right now in the stuff you are facing
What’s your story?
We’ve got 4 stories to get us going in Ruth
A story about Naomi and her daughter in law
And their journey
stories about emptiness, seeking, finding and fullness
like Jesus would say speaking form a mountain side when it comes to the story of God and our lives
“Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened.” (Matthew 7:7-8)
In Ruth the door we open is to a story about a woman from Bethlehem
A women’s story of grief and emptiness
Of story of a journey of leaving and returning
Of bitterness and changes of fortune
A story about hope and finding
A story about fullness that looks up and forward to the bigger story of God
The story of the God who brings those who are far away close in
finding a commitment in life
that begins with committing your life to God
Ruth is a real story that in it’s parts is a little bit the story of us
What’s your story?
So as an exercise I would like you to think for a moment if you could use only 6 words to describe yourself, what would sum you up what would you write? A 6 Word Autobiography…
Like Mother, Father, Brother, Sister, Friend
Seeker, Finder, Sought-After Found
Fearful, Forgetful, Ambitious, , Angry
Trying, Stumbling
you get the idea 6 words you’d use to describe yourself truthfully
Have a think, each one of those words tell us something about ourselves and who we think we are, and shape our lives and direction
Just as it is in today’s story we come across a women called Naomi in Ruth 1
One of Naomi’s 6 words is Emptiness
Naomi is a woman who leaves with her husband and her 2 sons and sets out to find a new home in a new town when times get tough in the streets where she had grown up
So often in the stories of the lives of those we read of in our Bible we meet ourselves
Like who of have left our hometowns, the places we grew up in
Who of us have gone to places far away from where we knew
We’ve left because we needed a new job
We moved because we got married
We wanted a change
For Naomi she lived in a time when Israel had entered the Promised Land, Naomi lived in the time of the judges
Judges was a time of chaos, a land without a ruler
The short hand summary of life in the times of Judges is Judges 21:25
“every man did what was right in his own eyes.”
It’s during this time we meet Naomi and her husband Elimelech citizens of Judah living in a farming community of Bethlehem
The story starts with departures
Ruth 1:1-5
1 In the days when the judges ruled, a there was a famine in the land and a man from Bethlehem in Judah, together with his wife and two sons, went to live for a while in the country of Moab. 2 The man’s name was Elimelech, his wife’s name was Naomi, and the names of his two sons were Mahlon and Kilion. They were Ephrathites from Bethlehem, Judah. And they went to Moab and lived there. 3 Now Elimelech, Naomi’s husband, died, and she was left with her two sons. 4 They married Moabite women, one named Orpah and the other Ruth. After they had lived there about ten years, 5 both Mahlon and Kiliona also died, and Naomi was left without her two sons and her husband
A famine hit the land they knew
It was time to try their hand somewhere new like Moab
The verses speak for themselves we get the names
We get what happens
We get to see what unfolds in the loss and leaving
For Naomi the 10 years that pass are a spiral downwards
In those10 years Naomi looses a husband and 2 sons
She is left destitute now with the added burden of 2 Moabite daughters Ruth & Orpah
She is empty and without
So Naomi turns to the only way she knows she’s gong to survive
To returning
Ruth 1:19-22
19 So the two women went on until they came to Bethlehem. When they arrived in Bethlehem, the whole town was stirred because of them, and the women exclaimed, “Can this be Naomi?” 20 “Don’t call me Naomi,” she told them. “Call me Mara, because the Almighty has made my life very bitter. 21 I went away full, but the LORD has brought me back empty. Why call me Naomi? The LORD has afflicted me; the Almighty has brought misfortune upon me.” 22 So Naomi returned from Moab accompanied by Ruth the Moabitess, her daughter-in-law, arriving in Bethlehem as the barley harvest was beginning.
We live our stories
They are not inconsequential activities to get past or through
Each day is part of a much larger story of God’s salvation purposes going on all around us
My day to day life has an impact on me whether I want to acknowledge that or not
Widowed, impoverished returnee with an alien in tow
A refugee whose life is about to be interwoven into the tapestry of God’s salvation
we all have a life story like for Naomi, she may not have had much of a choice in the going away
Yet she takes on full responsibility in the returning
Just as it was for Ruth the widowed Moabitess refugee who now comes as Naomi’s daughter in law
Naomi doesn’t hide us from how she feels
She’s a plain spoken kind of gal
She is like a returning prodigal daughter
Who sought success far away
Who now returns with open empty hands
It is here we meet plainly with a reality of life
Where we place our allegiances
The thing that most captures my heart gets my time
It gets my attention
See what captures your eye in this story, it’s the remarkable passage between Naomi, Orpah and Ruth
Verses 8-9
8 Then Naomi said to her two daughters-in-law, “Go back, each of you, to your mother’s home. May the LORD show you kindness, as you have shown kindness to your dead husbands and to me. 9 May the LORD grant that each of you will find rest in the home of another husband.” Then she kissed them goodbye and they wept aloud
Orpah turns back returning to her home
Ruth shows us in to the door of grace
16 But Ruth replied, “Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. 17 Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the LORD deal with me, be it ever so severely, if even death separates you and me.”
we are only at the start of this story
here we meet with someone who reaches out for hope
finds she receives a mercy she never expected to receive
Naomi shows us she sees the kindness Ruth and Orpah had shown her 2 boys
And here Naomi expects no kindness for herself
In fact she can’t see the kindness that Ruth holds out to her
Because the story about grace is that this is story of the God who loves us and moves towards us in the most unexpected way
With forgiveness, tenderness and love
It is the story of compassion and forgiveness that is all about the God who comes seeking us out who finds us and redeems us even when he knows the stuff we’ve done and said and acted on and hurt
I am drawn to Ephesians 2:19-22
19 Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God’s people and also members of his household, 20 built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. 21 In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. 22 And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit.
With Naomi and Ruth newly returned , they are two destitute woman who arrive in Bethlehem at the start of the Barley Harvest each of them is met with a surprise in what would stat to shape their lives anew.
But that’s next week
Let’s Pray…