Sermon – God’s not done with you

(I preached this sermon on May 31, 2026 at Christ Lutheran Church in Harrisburg. It is based on Ruth 1:1-22. You can listen to the audio of the sermon at this link.)

There is an old story about a farmer and his son.

One day the farmer’s horse ran away. His neighbor came over and said, “That’s terrible news.” The farmer shrugged and said, “Maybe.” A few days later the horse came back, and it brought two wild horses with it. The neighbor said, “That’s wonderful!” The farmer said, “Maybe.” The next week, the farmer’s son tried to tame one of the wild horses, fell off, and broke his leg. The neighbor shook his head and said, “That is just awful.” The farmer said, “Maybe.” And then the army came through the village looking for young men to conscript into a war that most of them would not survive. And they passed by the farmer’s son because of his broken leg.

Good and bad. Bad and good. The story keeps turning.

We know that story. We have lived that story. We have sat in the middle of something that felt like pure disaster, and later, sometimes much later, we could see how it cracked something open that needed cracking. And we have sat in the middle of something that felt like pure a blessing and watched it crumble into pain we did not expect.

The world is not simply good or bad. It is both, all the time, all together. That is not a reason for despair. That is actually the ground of hope. And that is what the book of Ruth is about.

The story starts with one of the saddest sentences in the Bible.

“In the days when the judges ruled, there was a famine in the land.”

Sit with that for a moment. A famine. Not enough food. Not enough to eat. If you have ever been hungry to the point where you don’t know where your next meal is coming from, then you know what what’s going on in the story. 

The name of the town where the famine hit is Bethlehem. You know that name from Christmas. But before any of that, Bethlehem was just a small town whose name meant “house of bread.” The place named for bread had no bread.

That is not an accident. That is the whole story in a single image. The thing that was supposed to be there, was not. The promise that was built into the very name of the place had run dry.

This is what the people of God were living in during the time of the judges. The book of Judges, which comes right before the book of Ruth, ends with a line that hangs over the beginning of Ruth like a shadow: “In those days there was no king in Israel; all the people did what was right in their own eyes.” Everyone grabbing for themselves. No one looking out for the person next to them. No shalom. And a society like where the powerful take more than they need and the vulnerable are left with nothing is an unhealthy and unsustainable society. The land itself suffers. The people suffer.

So a man named Elimelech packed up his wife Naomi and their two sons and left Bethlehem for Moab. They were refugees. That is what they were. They did not cause the famine. They did not vote for the judges. They did not create the system that broke down. They were just living in it, and they had to move or else starve.

A refugee, by definition, is a person who has been forced to leave their home because of war, persecution, famine, or disaster. They did not choose the crisis. They are running from it, trying to stay alive.

We know people like that. In our congregation, in our neighborhood, in our city, there are people who left home because staying meant death. They did not make the corruption that took over their country. They did not choose the violence. They did not create the poverty. They were simply there, and survival meant moving. The Bible has a word for those people, and the word is neighbor. The Bible’s word is stranger to be welcomed, cared for, protected. That theme runs from Genesis to Revelation, but right now it runs through Ruth.

In Moab, Elimelech died. His two sons married women from there — Orpah and Ruth. And then, after about ten years, both sons died too.

Three widows. No husbands. No sons. No income. No safety net. In the ancient world, that was about as exposed as a person could be. A widow with no family connections was one of the most vulnerable people in that society. And there were three of them.

Naomi heard that the famine in Bethlehem was over. There was food now. She decided to go back. And she told her daughters-in-law to go home to their own families, find new husbands, start over. She was being honest. She had nothing to offer them. She could not protect them. She was going home as a broken woman to a place where people would remember who she used to be.

Orpah kissed her goodbye and went back. The text does not blame her. That was a reasonable thing to do. That was the practical thing. That was survival.

But Ruth would not go.

And what she said to Naomi has been quoted at weddings for centuries, which is a little ironic because it was not spoken at a wedding. It was spoken in great distress. It was spoken by a woman with nothing to a woman with nothing.

“Where you go, I will go. Where you lodge, I will lodge. Your people shall be my people, and your God my God.”

This is not a romantic speech. This is a declaration of loyalty that cost Ruth everything she could have gone back to. She chose Naomi. She chose this broken, bitter woman who told her to go away. She chose a future she could not see over a past she knew.

That is love. The action of it, the cost of it. She made that choice not because things looked good. Things looked terrible. She made it because of who she was, and because of what she believed about how people ought to treat each other. She chose the harder, truer thing. And in doing so, she became the hinge on which the whole story turns.

When they arrived in Bethlehem, Naomi told the women who came to greet her not to call her Naomi anymore. Naomi means pleasant. She said, call me Mara. Bitter. “I went away full and the Lord has brought me back empty.”

That’s pretty raw.  

Naomi was telling the truth about her life. She had lost her husband. She had lost both her sons. She was older, poor, with nothing to show for the years she had been gone. And the text does not correct her. The text does not say, “Cheer up, Naomi.” The text just lets her say it. Sometimes people need to say the true thing about their lives without someone immediately trying to fix it or explain it away.

Loss is real. Death is real. What was, is no longer. And that is not just a phrase. It lands on people. It changes everything. There are people in this room who know what it is to come back empty. To walk back into a life that used to hold something it no longer holds. You know Naomi why she changes her name.

The Good News is not that the loss was imagined or trivial. The Good News is that the loss does not get the last word.

Now here is where it gets theologically interesting.

God is not mentioned in this chapter. God does not show up and fix things. There is no vision, no angel, no voice from the sky. And yet, if you are reading carefully, God is everywhere. God is in Ruth’s loyalty. God is in Naomi’s honest grief. God is in the fact that they arrived in Bethlehem at the beginning of the barley harvest, meaning they arrived just when there would be food.

Martin Luther wrote about what he called the theology of the cross, and part of what he meant was that God does not always show up with lights and sounds and trumpets. God is often hidden. God works through what looks like weakness and loss. God was in the cross before God was in the resurrection. And because of that, we cannot write off the hard moments as times when God has left. The hard moments may be exactly where God is most at work.

The famine was the consequence of a society that had stopped caring for each other, stopped living by the covenant, stopped looking out for the vulnerable. And into that wreckage of human unfaithfulness, God was still present. Still working. Still planting seeds that would grow into something nobody expected.

There are policies being enacted right now that are making life harder for people who are already barely making it. Policies that cut food assistance. That make healthcare harder to get. That crack down on immigrants and refugees. That treat the poorest people in the country as problems to be managed and made someone else’s problem rather than neighbors to be loved. Those policies are causing real harm. Ruth and Naomi would recognize the world those policies are making.

And here is what history shows us. The first Gilded Age in America was in the late 1800s.  It was a time when a handful of men controlled almost everything and workers had every ounce of worth sucked out of them and children worked in coal mines.  The Gilded Age was followed by the Progressive Era. People organized. People demanded change. Monopolies got broken up. Food became safer. Workers got protections. Women got the vote. Terrible conditions produced determined people who refused to accept those conditions as permanent.

Suffering has a way of producing unity. Oppression has a way of producing resistance. This is not a reason to welcome suffering. It is a reason not to be crushed by it. The famine is real. The harvest is coming.

There is something else I want you to notice about Ruth.

She was a foreigner. She was from Moab. The Israelites and the Moabites had a long, complicated, hostile history. She was the outsider, the stranger. And she became, according to the last lines of this book, the great-grandmother of David, the greatest king Israel ever had. That king’s line runs straight to a manger in Bethlehem, the house of bread, where God shows up in a baby born to a young woman far from home.  A baby who would later talk about himself as the bread from heaven. 

The whole salvation story runs through a refugee widow from the wrong country who refused to abandon an old woman with nothing left.

That is what God does with the people the world writes off.

So here is the Good News.

You are not an accident. Your story is not a mistake. The hard road you have walked is not evidence that God has forgotten you. God is walking with you.  

God has a habit of showing up in the broken places. Not announced, not obvious, not with big signs and wonders. God shows up in the person who refuse to leave when everyone else has gone. God shows up in the unexpected harvest after a long famine. God shows up in the stranger who becomes family. God shows up in the moment when people who have been hurt choose to stand with each other rather than give up on each other.

Ruth had nothing, and she gave everything she had to a woman who had nothing. And God used that to change the whole world. Not a king. Not a general. A widow, a foreigner, a person the powerful would have looked right through.

God is still doing that. God is doing it here. In this neighborhood. In this room. In the people who show up to our health clinics and the people who run them. In the folks who have been pushed to the margins and keep going anyway. In the community that keeps forming around shared meals and shared struggle and stubborn hope.

The house of bread ran out of bread. It got it back. That is not a fairy tale. That is a testimony. It is the testimony of Ruth and Naomi, and it is the testimony of this church, and it is the testimony of every person in this room who has had a bitter season and made it to the other side.

God is not done with you. God is not done with this community. God is not done with this world.

The harvest is coming. Look around you. It is here.

Thanks be to God.