Is this Naomi?

The Season of Lent

February 25, 2024

Pastor Mike

Ruth 1

Up to now in this Lenten series on Ruth we’ve come only as far as the first seven words: “In the days when the judges ruled…” (1:1). We had to pause there last week and inquire about those days, the days between Joshua’s leadership over Israel’s twelve tribes one the one side and David’s united Kingdom on the other. The days of the judges were bad days. Days of social insecurity, ongoing warfare, and faithlessness. Local chieftains called judges were raised up by God to bring about deliverance and repentance, but their success was only ever temporary. Upon their deaths, the people would relapse into sin.

Reading Judges is like listening to a record skip. Sick of itself, the book throws up its hands after 21 chapters and spits out a final condemnation: “In those days…everyone did what was right in their own eyes.” That’s the 10,000-foot view; that’s the headline.

Only – turn the page, and the story of Ruth has something different to show us. In a little out-of-the-way corner of this precarious and divided country, God’s law has become one community’s way of life. Individual persons like Naomi, Ruth, and Boaz are upheld by a strong community fiber as they honor one another with lovingkindness and contribute to each other’s redemption.

When “the days” confound us, the Book of Ruth calls our focus back to the ground on which our feet stand, shows us the eternal importance of our next word or action, small as they may seem. A community can defy the diagnosis of the times, it seems, and all things end well in the story of Ruth.

Even so, just as we miss much about this story if we don’t first consider “the days,” we will miss even more if we don’t let ourselves begin where the story begins, in the utter desolation, anguish, and vulnerability of Naomi, a bereaved widow and mother, far from home and at odds with God. It doesn’t get much worse than that.

We have to linger with Naomi’s losses and bitterness and elemental need to simply survive if we are to feel viscerally her final reversal of fortune and love of those around her which makes it possible. It is very much like this Lenten season, which we must start with the dust and ash of our mortality and brokenness. This is the way of conversion and ongoing healing – from cross to empty tomb; out of darkness, into light. Let us consider Naomi, a sweet woman turned bitter by life.

In a dark twist, famine has come to the House of Bread. That’s what Bethlehem means – House of Bread. The famine causes Elimelech, Naomi’s husband, to uproot his family and lead them away from their home in Judah. He takes them to the fields of Moab, a country with deeply entrenched animosity toward the Israelites. But in that hostile place they are able to find what they need to get by. Suddenly, Elimelech dies. Husbandless in a foreign land is a fragile place to be for Naomi. Luckily, she has her two sons to protect and provide for her.

Time passes. Her sons take Moabite wives and mingle their Israelite bloodline with the bloodline of the enemy. In theory, this was a big deal. Hebrew Bible scholar Robert Alter explains that “for biblical Israel, Moab is an extreme negative case of a foreign people. A perennial enemy, its origins, according to the story of Lot’s daughter in Genesis 19, are in an act of incest. The Torah actually bans any sort of intercourse, social, cultic, or sexual, with the Moabites” (58). But we are not told what Namoi thinks about her sons’ actions. Life must go on.

After moving from place to place in Moab for ten years, both her sons die, leaving now three widows from two different nations unprotected and awkwardly linked by what they have all lost. Having heard that the famine in her home country ended, Naomi decides that she has no other option but to return. She tries to free her daughters-in-law from their obligation to go with her. Somehow, even in her pain, she concerns herself with their future and wants to give them another chance to become wives and mothers while they are young. After an initial objection, one of the women, Orpah, accepts Naomi’s blessing and turns back to remain in Moab. But the other woman, Ruth, clings to Naomi and vows by the name of Naomi’s God to be with her for as long as they are both alive.

Ten years earlier, Naomi had left Bethlehem with her husband and two sons. Now, she returns with only a Moabite daughter-in-law in tow. When things got tough at home back in the days of famine, she sure tried to better her circumstances! She and Elimelech made the hard call, leaving home for a better opportunity, trying something new over there. But the effort completely backfired, and she has ended up worse than before. She went off sweet and full. She has returned bitter and empty.

Remember, Ruth’s companionship, while beautiful in our eyes as readers, is not necessarily a comfort to Naomi. What is Namoi going to do with this woman when she’s back on Israelite soil? How is she going to care for her? How is she going to explain her? Will she need to protect her? Ruth’s presence may at first make Naomi’s predicament more insecure, not less. 

And, oh, how she blames God for it all. “The Lord’s hand has come out against me” – that’s what she says. God is behind it: the deaths, the emptiness, the bitterness. Naomi is still willing to use God’s name, has not thrown it completely out in disgust. But she has resigned herself to the fact that for some unexplained reason God has decided to become her enemy.

When she comes through the town gate, the women lean toward one another and ask in hushed tones, “Is this Naomi?” Ten years is a long time to be gone, so we might hear their question as simply an attempt to recognize and remember her. But there’s a deeper meaning to their question. It is as if they are asking, Can this really be the same woman, the same Naomi, who left us? Is this what’s become of her? This is not the person we once knew?  What has life done to her?

It's one thing for life to fall apart; it’s another thing to have to walk back into town and face your community. Being perceived in suffering can be an additional form of suffering for many of us. We’d prefer to hide it. But some losses just can’t be hidden.

Is this Naomi?

Happily, we are still just at chapter 1 of the story. But we shouldn’t rush past it. We shouldn’t let Ruth’s compassion and poetry, inspiring as they are, eclipse the fact that this is a story that starts with Naomi, her shattered life a microcosm of those very bad days in which she lived. Only from here does this become a story about the difference love and community can make for someone whose life has gone to pieces.

Naomi at rock bottom gives us permission to face up to our own brokenness. Sometimes, before we can heal, we have to be able to admit in the presence of the townsfolk, No, you’re right. I’m not who I once was. My suffering has changed me. And God is against me. Call me Mara, which means bitter.

For this, our congregational life and witness, to be a House of Bread, a house of abundance and healing, we first have to be okay walking through those doors and being seen in all our mess. God’s holy assembly is a place to be seen and asked about, a place we can come to even when we’re worse off than the last time we were here.

That’s the first gift that the community gives Naomi. They are there to receive her back, not as they remember her but as she actually is. They don’t judge her or minimize her pain. They don’t give advice. They don’t say a thing about this strange Moabite woman who’s with her.

Instead, they adjust their sight to match her reality. Because of that, they earn the right to speak blessings over her at the story’s end, when what was bitter becomes sweet again, and Naomi brings the son of Ruth and Boaz to her own breast.

Friends, Jesus did not come to save the righteous but sinners. He did not come to heal the healthy but the sick. So let us show ourselves to one another, and let us adjust our vision to properly see one another, not as we’d like them to be but as they are. In those basic acts of showing and seeing, there are already great energies of courage and compassion at work.

In that honest showing, in that disciplined sight, we are on our way to new beginnings.

Thanks be to God. Amen.