“Don’t Let Grief Change Your Name”

Ruth 1:6 (ESV)

Then she arose with her daughters-in-law to return from the country of Moab, for she had heard in the fields of Moab that the Lord had visited his people and given them food.

“Don’t Let Grief Change your Name”

Sermon in a Sentence: Naomi struggles with her grief; Ruth supports her. Grief is something all will encounter. Knowing how to support and acknowledge this part of life and the mental health struggles it provokes is important for every believer.

Introduction:

Loss impacts everyone, and we each manage it a little differently. The kids show Bluey, season 1, episode 8 “Copycat” has an episode that age-appropriately conveys how a parent and children of varying ages handle the concept of death when a bird “budgie” dies: “Just as Bluey and Bingo’s ages—6 and 4 in this episode—are indicative of the way they play from a developmental point of view, so too does it inform how they process the death of the budgie. Bluey is just the right age to begin to understand death as permanent and irreversible. Though there’s a final glimmer of hope that the bird will come back from death, which is also for this cusp age, she understands that the budgie is not coming back. Bingo, on the other hand, at 4 years old, is at a different developmental age than her sister. When the family is mourning the bird in a group hug, she seems a bit aloof and maybe even a little confused. Afterwards, she is unfazed by her sister’s sadness and is just happy to be asked to play. When her ‘character’ is supposed to die during their game, she gets up again and starts tweeting: “she’s too young to get death as permanent.” We will all process differently. Allow room for others to move through grief in their own way without a time limit.

When people read the book of Ruth, they are fixated on the Boaz/Ruth dynamic as Naomi arranges for Ruth to be redeemed by a kinsman-Redeemer. Ruth is read as a love story, but in reality it is a story of catastrophe, companionship, death, decisions, depression, disobedience, grief, heartbreak, and eventually healing and restoration. Ruth is not a manual to “find Boaz.” It is a blueprint for managing grief towards healing and restoration. The authorship of this book is unknown, but it is included in the canon of Scripture for our benefit. Ruth’s name means neighbor, friend, or female companion. Ruth 1 introduces the characters and their problems; characterized by death and emptiness. Ruth meets Boaz in the harvest field in chapter 2. Then, she meets him on the threshing floor in chapter 3 and God provides a complete reversal of the problems: life and fullness take the place of death and emptiness in chapter 4.

Don’t Miss God’s Voice in your Grief

While Naomi has a relatively more difficult story, Ruth has also lost her husband. We cannot pigeonhole grief into an easily managed process. Those who have experienced profound grief often don’t get over it; they merely grow in the capacity to deal with the sadness though it never disappears for good. Yes, there are some generalized stages, including denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. But this process is not often a straight line toward an everything-is-peachy mindset. Naomi has encountered significant hardship. Famine forced her to move. Her husband dies. Elimelech is a sentence name meaning “My God is king, or El is Milku” expressing the faith of the one who gave and/or bore the name. His departure for Moab may reflect his own doubts about the truth his name declared. “It is not wise to leave the WORD for the WORLD.” Then her sons dies. She has nothing except for two daughters-in-law looking to her for support. What does Naomi do now? The “king” is dead….now what do these ladies do? How do they survive in Moab without their husbands? The dark cloud of grief looms over them as they now have a “new norm” without their husbands…Death creates a new norm that creates uncomfortable adjustments. It is hard to hear God’s voice in grief because we hear the questions that death presents us: Why, How, and When….It would be in this moment that God breaks through the clouds in Naomi’s live and gives her hope in her dark place…First, it was a gift from God in the midst of her grief and pain…..Second, Naomi heard Yahweh had intervened on behalf of his people…Third, the object of the divine favor is identified as ‘ammo’ “his people,” the nation of Israel…Fourth, God had given his people bread…Bethlehem is the “place of bread” so the place that was empty is now full again. The narrator’s eyes of faith undoubtedly recognized in this gift of food the grace of God. He does not explicitly speak about divine grace, but the absence of any hint of repentance on the part of Israel as a whole or Naomi in particular suggests that the motivation behind the lifting of the famine and the provision of food lies elsewhere. The reader will recognize here the providential hand of God, guiding natural and historical events for the fulfillment of his purpose and setting the stage for the ultimate emergence of David’s ancestor. Naomi’s response to the report of good news from the homeland is decisive, expressed in three simple verbs: with her daughters-in-law: she arose, she returned from the territory of Moab, and she went out from the place where she was staying.

Grief Shrinks your Circle

Even in her grief, she had to make decisive decisions when she heard the voice of God…when you hear God’s voice it is imperative that you heed to what God says. Naomi knew what her plan was, yet, she was concerned about the well-being of Orpah and Ruth. Naomi assessed her reality and determined that it would be better for them to stay in Moab. The death of a husband meant the loss of one’s economic support base and the serving of connections to the kinship structures. Widowhood often meant inevitable alienation and destitution. These were Gentile women who married Hebrew men, but would be outcast if they returned to Bethlehem with her. Often, we try to spare people grief by trying to put them in places to get over things….She combines tough love, combining firmness with tenderness…while at the same time conveying urgency, she begins with a double command, “Go, return.” They were en route on the way to Judah, and she wanted them to return home. Naomi pronounced two blessings on these Gentile women: that God blesses them and that they begin a new life. She invokes the name of Yahweh when she addressed them, apparently assuming that the authority of the God of Israel extended beyond the nation’s borders into foreign territory. Second, the blessing assumes that Yahweh is interested in the affairs of this family and can be invoked to deal favorably with these Moabites. The author uses the word king (1) Naomi asks them to rhetorical questions: (1) why would you come with me? (2) Do I have any more sons in my “guts” that they could become your husbands? At first, both determined to go back with her until she provided the reality….In her eyes, she was no longer useful because she had no sons for Orpah and Ruth to marry. Naomi’s grief led her to a dark place where she doubted herself as a woman and if God was even for her (vs. 13). Orpah returned to Moab and her gods, but Ruth continued with Naomi…”For every Ruth, before there was a Boaz, there was a Naomi.”

This pledge involves four significant elements: (1) an appeal to resist all pressures to break the relationship; (2) a commitment to the other person for life; (3) the adoption of the other person’s family and faith as one’s own and the abandonment of prior allegiances; and (4) an awareness that God is a witness to all the promises we make.11 Daniel Isaac Block, Judges, Ruth, vol. 6, The New American Commentary (Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 1999), 643.

Don’t Allow Grief to Change your Name

Naomi acknowledges her bitterness because she feels betrayed by God….It is okay to feel sad. t’s okay to feel sad. Naomi has not sugarcoated her pain. Instead, she leans into it. When we feel our feelings, we move through them and into processing and acceptance. Keith Evans writes, “In God’s economy, the believer can rightly call anguish what it is: awful and unpleasant. We can go to the house of mourning,rightly taking these griefs to the Lord (1 Peter 5:7) and rightly taking them to heart(Eccl. 7:2). After all, the Psalms are replete with godly expressions of lament. In fact, there’s an entire book of the Bible dedicated to it (Lamentations)! We also simultaneously hold the hopeful truth that God has overcome the curse in JesusChrist. He has triumphed over this sphere of sin and misery and has redeemed even all our woes, commandeering difficulties for His good purposes in our lives… We rightly grieve, but we also rightly trust the Lord’s good providence in the midst of grief. … Let us allow our brothers and sisters to mourn and not place a moratorium on their grief—an amount that is Christianly acceptable before they ought simply to smile again” (Keith Evans, “Is It OK for Christians to Grieve?,”

Ligonier, March 1, 2024, https://www.ligonier.org/learn/articles/christians-grieve).