A sermon on Ruth 1 & 2 by Rev Richard Keith on Sunday 1 March 2026
Imagine a friend calls you up and says they need company for a trip. If they said they were catching the train to Melbourne, you might say yes — a few hours’ travel, maybe a night or two in a fancy hotel. That’s not too hard. But what if they said they were driving up the east coast with no fixed plan, no bookings, no certainty about how long it would take? You’d think more carefully. And probably say no.
But what if your friend had lost everything, and they had this mad plan to hitchhike across the country to go back where they came from, to a place you’d never been, among people you do not know? They ask you to go too, but at the last moment they have a change of heart because it’s too dangerous. They say: stay here, stay with your family and friends, this is not your problem, you owe me nothing. But they still insist on going themselves. What would you do? Would you risk your life on the road for a friend who didn’t even want you to come?
That’s the choice Ruth faced. The book of Ruth is a story about costly love — love that puts itself out for the sake of loyal friendship. But it’s also a story about God who was quietly at work long before anyone could see what he was doing.
The story doesn’t begin with Ruth. It begins with a decision made by a man named Elimelech that led to disaster. The opening verse tells us this happened in the days when the judges ruled Israel — a dark and faithless time, a period characterised by a recurring cycle of Israel forgetting God, suffering the consequences, crying out for help, being rescued, and then forgetting God again. The book of Judges summarises the whole era in one devastating line: every man did what was right in his own eyes.
Into this world comes a famine. Elimelech, a man from Bethlehem in Judah, decided to take his wife Naomi and their two sons and emigrate to Moab, where there was food. On the surface it sounds sensible, practical, even responsible. But a famine in Israel under the old covenant was never simply a natural disaster. The Law was explicit about this. Deuteronomy 28 spelled it out in detail: obedience to God would bring rain and harvest and blessing; unfaithfulness would bring drought and crop failure and famine. A famine was a warning to Israel, a sign that something had gone wrong spiritually, a call to examine the nation’s heart and return to God. The right response to a famine was not to leave. It was to repent. Instead of hearing the warning and turning back to God, Elimelech trusted his own judgment and took the exit door. He packed up, left God’s good land and God’s people, and headed for Moab.
The road he chose unravelled everything. Elimelech died in Moab. His two sons married Moabite women, Orpah and Ruth. And then both sons died too. In ten years, three men were gone and three women were left with nothing — Naomi, now a widow in a foreign land, and her two daughters-in-law, living in a man’s world with no provider, no protector, and no future. The road that led Elimelech and his family away from the land ended in emptiness. But God was not finished.
News reached Naomi that the famine in Israel was over. The Lord had visited his people and given them food again. Naomi decided to make the long, dangerous journey home to Bethlehem, and she set out with both daughters-in-law walking beside her. But somewhere on that road she stopped and turned to them and said: go back — back to your mothers’ homes, back to your own people, back to the possibility of new husbands, new families, new lives. “May the Lord show you the same kindness you have shown to your dead husbands and to me.”
Naomi understood exactly what she was asking these two women to walk into. For her the journey was hard and the grief was real, but at least she knew where she was headed. She knew the people, the land, the customs. She was going home. For Orpah and Ruth, following her had all the same risks and none of the rewards. They would be foreigners in a strange culture with no family network, no status, and no protection. They would arrive knowing no one and owed nothing by anyone. Naomi, to her credit, was telling them clearly: do not do this, you owe me nothing, go home.
Orpah kissed Naomi goodbye and turned back. We should not be hard on her — she made the reasonable, human choice, and walked by sight, not by faith. But Ruth clung to Naomi and then she spoke: “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. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the Lord deal with me, be it ever so severely, if anything but death separates you and me.”
Ruth was not making an empty gesture. She was making a permanent, irreversible decision in full knowledge of what it would mean. She was burning her bridges with Moab entirely — the trip to Israel was a one-way journey. Notice how faith and love are woven together in the same breath. “Your people will be my people” is costly loyal love, Ruth giving herself entirely to Naomi’s welfare. “Your God will be my God” is faith, Ruth’s confession that she has come to know who the true and living God is and has chosen to take refuge in him. Ruth does not separate these two things, and we should not either. Her commitment to Naomi and her embrace of Naomi’s God are a single, integrated act. Her love is her faith made visible, and her faith is what gives her love its extraordinary, costly depth. Each one generates and authenticates the other.
Because Elimelech ran away from God’s covenant land when it became hard, trusting his own judgment over God’s purposes — but Ruth ran toward it, choosing Naomi’s God precisely when there was nothing easy or obvious about that choice. In the darkest days of the judges period, when most of Israel had forgotten what faithful love looks like, a woman from Moab walked toward Bethlehem embodying it.
The two women arrived in Bethlehem and the whole town stirred. “Can this really be Naomi?” the women asked. And Naomi’s response is one of the rawest, most unguarded moments of grief in all of Scripture: “Don’t call me Naomi — call me Mara, because the Almighty has made my life very bitter. I went away full, but the Lord has brought me back empty.” Naomi means pleasant; Mara means bitter. She was renaming herself, shedding the identity that no longer fit the woman her suffering had made her. Her pain was real and it deserves our compassion. She had lost her husband and both sons, spent years in a foreign land. The grief she carried is not self-pity — it is the accumulated weight of genuine loss. But grief, when we hold it too tightly, can blind us to the grace that is already present. She said she went away full and came back empty, but she did not come back alone. Ruth was standing right beside her — the woman who refused to be sent away, the woman who said “where you go I will go,” the daughter she had almost turned back twice on the road.
Naomi’s bitterness had closed her eyes to the grace already surrounding her. The God she was blaming had already given her something better than she could see — a friend whose love was stronger than death, whose faithfulness had not wavered even when Naomi told her to leave. She had walked away from the promised land, but the promised land had not walked away from her. The home she had left was still there. The people who knew her name were still there. And they arrived, the text tells us, as the barley harvest was beginning. God had not only kept the door open — he had timed their arrival to the day.
So we see Ruth’s costly love at work again in chapter 2. She knew that she and Naomi needed food, and so she did what faith always does: she acts. “Let me go to the fields and pick up the leftover grain from behind the harvesters,” she says. Ruth had heard of the provision God built into Israel’s law — the command that harvesters must leave the edges of the fields and the gleanings on the ground for the poor and for the foreigner: “When you harvest your crop, do not harvest to the edge of the field and do not pick up what falls to the ground. Leave them for the poor and for the foreigners. For I am the Lord your God.” Long before any social safety net, God had woven provision for the vulnerable into the fabric of his law.
So in Bethlehem’s fields Ruth worked hard. She went out in the heat of the day, following the harvesters through the fields, gathering what they left behind to take home and thresh and mill and bake. This is faith expressing itself not in grand declarations but in calloused hands and aching shoulders. She walked by faith when she left Moab, and now in Bethlehem she walked by faith still — one day at a time, doing the next faithful thing, doing the work of three people to keep the two of them alive.
Not by coincidence, Ruth found herself in the field that belonged to a man named Boaz — because Boaz was the son of Rahab, the Canaanite woman from Jericho whose story we looked at two weeks ago: the outsider with the wrong nationality and the wrong past, who confessed her faith in Israel’s God, sheltered the spies, tied the scarlet cord in her window, and was welcomed into God’s people. Rahab was Boaz’s mother. Boaz grew up in a household where the story of grace to an outsider was not ancient history — it was his own mother’s story. He knew what it looked like when someone from the wrong place, with the wrong background, chose to take refuge under the wings of Israel’s God and was welcomed in. He had seen it lived out at his own dinner table.
Boaz arrived at his field and noticed Ruth following the harvesters picking up the grain. He asked his foreman who she was, and was told: “She is the Moabitess who came back from Moab with Naomi.” The foreman could only see her ethnicity, her foreignness, the category that put her on the wrong side of every line that determines who belongs. But Boaz went to Ruth and spoke to her: “My daughter, listen to me. Don’t go and glean in another field and don’t go away from here. Stay here with my servant girls. Watch the field where the men are harvesting, and follow along after the girls.” He didn’t call her the Moabitess — he called her daughter, a family word, a relational word that cut straight across the label the world had given her. He was seeing her the way his mother would have wanted to be seen.
When Ruth was astonished and questioned why he would notice her, a foreigner, Boaz replied: “May the Lord repay you for what you have done. May you be richly rewarded by the Lord, the God of Israel, under whose wings you have taken refuge.” Boaz looked at everything Ruth had done — leaving Moab, walking with Naomi, working in a stranger’s field — and he named it as an act of faith. He connected her loyal love for Naomi to her trust in Israel’s God, because in Boaz’s eyes they were the same thing. Her costly love was what her faith looked like in action. Ruth’s love for Naomi was not sentiment — it was not affection that stopped short of sacrifice. It was the kind of love that cost her everything and kept on giving. It flowed from a faith that had taken refuge under God’s wings and expressed itself in every decision Ruth made.
It is a love like God’s love. It is a love like Jesus’ love. As 1 John chapter 4 says: “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.” But it wasn’t found in the Israelite Elimelech who ran away from the Promised Land the moment things got tough, and it wasn’t found in Naomi who blamed God for what life had done to her. The love like God’s was found in Ruth, who wasn’t born in Israel’s faith but chose it for herself.
This is where we are going to leave Ruth’s story, and we are only halfway through her book. But we can already see the shape of what God has been doing. He was at work in Ruth’s heart in Moab, stirring a faith that would prove stronger than grief, stronger than fear, stronger than every reasonable argument to stay. He was at work in the timing of the harvest, so that two women with nothing arrived in Bethlehem just as the fields were ready. He was at work in the life of Boaz, whose own mother’s story had given him eyes to see an outsider as family. He was at work in the law, providing for the vulnerable in the fabric of his covenant long before Ruth needed it.
Ruth’s story doesn’t end here. Follow the thread forward: Ruth and Boaz will marry, their grandson will be Jesse, and Jesse’s son will be David — Israel’s greatest king, the king after God’s own heart. And a thousand years after David, in Bethlehem, another child was born in his line: the one to whom this whole story points, the one whose love was costlier than Ruth’s and whose faithfulness was deeper. Jesus, who said to us what Ruth said to Naomi — I will not leave you, I will not forsake you, where you are, I will come. Who walked toward us when we had nothing to offer, when we were strangers to his love with no claim on his kindness. Who loved us at the cost of everything and kept on giving. And who proved, when he walked out of the tomb on the third day, that not even death could separate us from his love. That is the grace of God, and it was hiding in plain sight in the story of a woman from Moab who chose to risk her life on the road for a friend who didn’t even want her to come.