Night Travelers: Sorrow—Good Grief Ruth 1:1-22

Night Travelers: Sorrow—Good Grief
Ruth 1:1-22

Rev. Dr. Rhonda Abbott Blevins
May 3, 2026

In the days when the judges ruled, there was a famine in the land, and a certain man of Bethlehem in Judah went to live in the country of Moab, he and his wife and two sons.  The name of the man was Elimelech and the name of his wife Naomi, and the names of his two sons were Mahlon and Chilion; they were Ephrathites from Bethlehem in Judah. They went into the country of Moab and remained there. But Elimelech, the husband of Naomi, died, and she was left with her two sons. These took Moabite wives; the name of the one was Orpah and the name of the other Ruth. When they had lived there about ten years, both Mahlon and Chilion also died, so that the woman was left without her two sons and her husband. Then she started to return with her daughters-in-law from the country of Moab, for she had heard in the country of Moab that the Lord had considered his people and given them food. So she set out from the place where she had been living, she and her two daughters-in-law, and they went on their way to go back to the land of Judah. But Naomi said to her two daughters-in-law, “Go back each of you to your mother’s house. May the Lord deal kindly with you, as you have dealt with the dead and with me. The Lord grant that you may find security, each of you in the house of your husband.” Then she kissed them, and they wept aloud. They said to her, “No, we will return with you to your people.” But Naomi said, “Turn back, my daughters. Why will you go with me? Do I still have sons in my womb that they may become your husbands? Turn back, my daughters, go your way, for I am too old to have a husband. Even if I thought there was hope for me, even if I should have a husband tonight and bear sons, would you then wait until they were grown? Would you then refrain from marrying? No, my daughters, it has been far more bitter for me than for you, because the hand of the Lord has turned against me.” Then they wept aloud again. Orpah kissed her mother-in-law goodbye, but Ruth clung to her. So she said, “Look, your sister-in-law has gone back to her people and to her gods; return after your sister-in-law.”  But Ruth said,

“Do not press me to leave you, to turn back from following you!
Where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge;
your people shall be my people and your God my God.
Where you die, I will die, and there will I be buried.
May the Lord do thus to me, and more as well,
if even death parts me from you!”

When Naomi saw that she was determined to go with her, she said no more to her.

So the two of them went on until they came to Bethlehem. When they came to Bethlehem, the whole town was stirred because of them, and the women said, “Is this Naomi?” She said to them, “Call me no longer Naomi; call me Mara, for the Almighty has dealt bitterly with me. I went away full, but the Lord has brought me back empty; why call me Naomi when the Lord has dealt harshly with me and the Almighty has brought calamity upon me?”

So Naomi returned together with Ruth the Moabite, her daughter-in-law, who came back with her from the country of Moab. They came to Bethlehem at the beginning of the barley harvest.

______

We are in the middle of a six-week series called Night Travelers — drawn from the ancient image of the spiritual seeker who turns toward the darkness rather than fleeing it, trusting that the light they are looking for is found precisely in the places they were most afraid to go. Each week we are turning toward one of the difficult emotions — not to be consumed by it, but to discover that God is already there.

Today we turn toward sorrow.

And I want to say something before we go any further: this morning is going to feel different.

The last three weeks we have been doing vigorous theological work — defining terms, making distinctions, offering frameworks. That kind of engagement serves anger and rage and shame well. Those emotions need structure.

But sorrow is different. Grief does not respond well to being analyzed. It does not fit in a framework. Grief wants to be witnessed. It wants someone to sit down beside it and stay.

So this morning we are going to do something less didactic and more experiential — let a story, three poems, and a few voices that know grief from the inside speak to us. And we are going to resist the urge to tie it all up too quickly. Because one of the most important things we can do for grief — our own and each other’s — is to stop rushing it toward resolution.

Barbara Brown Taylor writes that the church has developed what she calls “full solar spirituality” — the assumption that faith means living in constant light, that darkness is always the enemy, that the goal is to get back to brightness as quickly as possible. This instinct, however well-meaning, leaves grieving people feeling spiritually deficient for not being further along — as though their sorrow were a failure of faith rather than an expression of it.

Naomi would recognize that feeling.

You have just heard her story. I want to sit with it for a moment.

Naomi has lost everything. Husband. Both sons. She is in a foreign country with no protector, no economic future, no path forward she can see. And she is going home — if you can call it that, after all this time — with nothing but a foreign daughter-in-law who refuses, against all reason, to leave.

When she arrives in Bethlehem the women come out to greet her. “Is this Naomi?” And she says: don’t call me Naomi. Call me Mara. Bitter. I went away full and I have come back empty.

Notice what she does not say. She does not say: but God is good. She does not say: everything happens for a reason. She says: I am empty. I am bitter. And I am telling the truth about it.

This is one of the most courageous acts in all of Scripture. Naomi refuses to perform a recovery she has not experienced. She will not answer to a name that no longer fits. And in doing so she models something the church has largely forgotten: that honest grief, addressed directly and without decoration, is itself a form of faith.

Theologian Walter Brueggemann calls this lament — taking pain directly to God in a way that keeps the relationship alive and real. Naomi’s bitterness is addressed to God — which means she still believes God is listening. You only argue with someone you believe is present.

Which brings me to the first of three poems.

Mary Oliver wrote Heavy — and I want to read it not as illustration, but as permission. Permission to name what you are carrying without apology.

That time
I thought I could not
go any closer to grief
without dying

I went closer,
and I did not die.
Surely God
had his hand in this,

as well as friends.
Still, I was bent,
and my laughter,
as the poet said,

was nowhere to be found.
Then said my friend Daniel,
(brave even among lions),
“It’s not the weight you carry

but how you carry it —
books, bricks, grief —
it’s all in the way
you embrace it, balance it, carry it

when you cannot, and would not,
put it down.”
So I went practicing.
Have you noticed?

Have you heard
the laughter
that comes, now and again,
out of my startled mouth?

How I linger
to admire, admire, admire
the things of this world
that are kind, and maybe

also troubled —
roses in the wind,
the sea geese on the steep waves,
a love
to which there is no reply?

Oliver does not rush past the weight. She names it with the same precision Naomi brings to the gates of Bethlehem. And then — quietly, without fanfare — she notices laughter returning. Not because the grief left. Because she learned to carry it differently.

Taylor writes: “We grieve what we have loved. The depth of the grief is a measure of the depth of the love. There is no spiritual bypass around it — only through it.”

Naomi’s bitterness is proportional to her loss, and her loss is proportional to her love. This is not a spiritual problem. This is a spiritual testimony.

The theological center of this story is not Naomi’s grief. It is Ruth’s response to it.

Ruth has every cultural permission to return to her own people, her own gods, her own future. Orpah — the other daughter-in-law — makes the practical choice. She weeps, she kisses Naomi, and she goes. Nobody blames her.

Ruth stays.

Where you go, I will go. Where you lodge, I will lodge. Your people shall be my people and your God my God. Where you die, I will die, and there will I be buried.

These words are so familiar — so often read at weddings — that we have domesticated them into sentiment. But this is not sentiment. This is one of the most costly acts of human solidarity in the biblical narrative. Ruth is choosing to enter someone else’s darkness rather than staying in her own light. She is not fixing Naomi. She is not arguing her out of bitterness. She is not offering a silver lining. She is simply — stubbornly, sacrificially — refusing to leave.

Taylor argues that healing from grief requires communities of witness — people who stay present to pain without rushing toward resolution. Ruth is that community of one. Her loyalty is not a solution. It is a presence. And presence is what grieving people need most — not answers, not the assurance that everything happens for a reason — but someone who will sit down in the darkness and stay.

This is what the church is called to be. Not a place that fixes grief. A place that accompanies it.

Let us hear another poem.

Jan Richardson is a Methodist minister and poet whose work lives at the intersection of liturgy and lament. She wrote Blessing for the Dailiness of Grief.

Sorry I am
to say it,
but it is here,
most likely,
you will know the rending
most deeply.

It will take your breath away,
how the grieving waits for you
in the most ordinary moments.

It will wake
with your waking.

It will
sit itself down
with you at the table,
inhabiting the precise shape
of the emptiness
across from you.

It will walk down the street
with you
in the form of
no hand reaching out
to take yours.

It will stand alongside you
in every conversation,
nearly unbearable
in its silence
that fairly screams.

It will
brush its teeth
with you at night
and climb into bed
with you
when finally
you let go
of this day.

Even as it goes
always with you,
it will still manage
to startle you with
its presence,
causing you to weep
when you enter
the empty kitchen
in the morning,
when you spread fresh sheets
on the bed you shared,
when you walk out
through the door
alone
and pass back through it
likewise.

It is here
you will know it best—
in the moments
that made up the rhythm
of your days,
that fashioned the litany
of your life,
the togethering
you will never know
in the same way again.

But I will tell you
it is here, too,
that your solace lies.
It will wait for you
in those same moments
that stun you
with their sorrow.

I cannot tell you how,
but it will not cease
to carry you
in the cadence that has
forever altered
but whose echo will persist
with a stubbornness
that will surprise you,
bearing you along,
breathing with you still
through the terrible
and exquisite
ordinary days.

Richardson names what Oliver prepares us for: grief is not an event. It is a daily practice. A recurring visitor. It shows up in the ordinary hours — Tuesday morning, the grocery store, a song on the radio, a chair still empty at the table.

Naomi knows this. Her grief is not a single wave. It is a tide that never fully goes out.

Don’t ask God only to remove the grief. Ask God to meet you inside it. Because the God of Scripture — the God of Naomi and Ruth, the God of Lamentations, the God of the cross — is not primarily a God who removes suffering. Our God is a God who enters it. All the way down.

Jurgen Moltmann writes that the cross shows us God has entered the full depth of human pain — that in Christ, God is not a distant observer of suffering but a participant in it. Resurrection does not cancel the cross. It redeems it. The grief is not erased. It is held.

One more poem.

David Whyte draws deeply on Celtic spirituality and — like Rumi — on the tradition of turning toward darkness rather than fleeing it. He wrote Sweet Darkness.

When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.

When your vision has gone,
no part of the world can find you.

Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.

There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.

The dark will be your home
tonight.

The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.

You must learn one thing.
The world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn

anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.

Whyte’s invitation — to give up the exhausting performance of false light, to trust that the darkness belongs to us and we to it — is the night traveler’s invitation in poetic form. And it connects to something Ruth understands instinctively: belonging is found not by fleeing the difficult places but by entering them together.

Give up all the other worlds except the one to which you belong.

Naomi belongs to her grief right now. It is the most honest thing about her. And Ruth is saying: then I belong there too. Wherever you are is where I am going. Even into this.

The book of Ruth does not end with Naomi’s grief resolved. It ends with Naomi holding Ruth’s son Obed in her arms — unexpected, unearned grace that does not undo the losses but redeems the future. The grief does not disappear. Life continues alongside it.

This is the most honest thing I know about sorrow: it does not have a finish line. It changes shape. It makes room, gradually, for other things — a child in the arms, the smell of barley, the sound of a friend’s voice — without ever entirely leaving.

The grace that meets us in grief does not look like rescue. It looks like Ruth. It looks like a poem that blesses the dailiness of it. It looks like sweet darkness that has something to teach us we could not learn in the light.

Mary Oliver’s question hums beneath everything she writes: what will you do with your one wild and precious life?

Naomi cannot answer that yet. She is too empty, too bitter, too freshly broken. But she is beginning to be able to ask it — because Ruth is beside her. Because she is not alone in the dark.

That is enough for today. That is, sometimes, everything.

So here is the only invitation I want to offer — and it is a gentle one.

Let the grief be what it is. Do not rush it. Do not apologize for how long it has lasted or how deep it goes. Name it, as Naomi named it, with whatever word is most honest.

And then find your Ruth. Find the one person who will sit in the darkness with you and stay. Or be that person for someone else. Show up. Don’t fix. Don’t explain. Don’t offer silver linings.

Just stay.

Because that is what God does. That is what God has always done.

And the darkness, it turns out, is not as empty as we feared.

Come, night travelers. We do not walk alone.