Ordinary, Everyday Habits and Decisions
POST BY MATT MCCOY
3 minute read
In our last blog, we looked at how God speaks to us through the big decisions we make in life. We read about when Boaz and Ruth indicated that they wanted to marry each other, and how there wasn’t any direct speech from God, angelic visitors, or any other miraculous signs to confirm that they were making a good decision. I contrasted this absence of a miracle with Denise and me, and how we also made the big decision to get married without a miraculous sign (though I really wanted one).
This week, we’re going to shift our focus from the big decisions in life to the ordinary, everyday decisions.
Life is full of ordinary, everyday decisions.
Let’s go back to an earlier scene, where Ruth and Naomi have returned to Bethlehem, and Ruth has to figure out a way to avoid starvation. By some way unexplained in the biblical text, Ruth knows about the Israelite law we call “gleaning” (Leviticus 19:9), where a field owner was commanded to let poor people come behind the harvesters and pick up the leftovers. Note that, in my translation below, I translate “gleaning” into “picking up the leftovers” because many people have never heard of this Levitical law, and we prefer to use everyday language in our worship services.
Ruth 2:2-3 And Ruth the Moabite said to Naomi, “Please let me go to the field, and pick up the leftovers from among the ears of grain, following after some harvester who will treat me kindly.” And she went and started picking up leftover grain in a field behind the harvesters, and it just so happened that she ended up in the field belonging to Boaz.
In this blog, we’re looking at everyday decisions, and eating is about as every day as it gets. Ruth and Naomi need something to eat, and Ruth goes out and picks it up. While this is a story of basic survival, this is also one of many stories in the Bible that highlight how our decisions around food connect us to Creation, our community, and God. {1}
Ruth doesn’t know it yet, but she’s going to get to join Boaz on his lunch break, as he invites her to sit with him and his crew and shares his meal with her (2:14), and Ruth brings the leftovers home to Naomi (2:18). {2} Then, as we saw in our last blog, Ruth chose the celebration meal at the end of the harvest to make her marriage proposal to Boaz (3:7). These details around eating together aren’t dramatic details added to give the story a rhetorical flourish, they’re demonstrations of how our everyday decisions around something as ordinary as eating, help us walk in the direction God is walking in. {3}
Eating together, as an expression of our common discipleship, is a fundamental part of Spring Church. Embodied discipleship invites us to, well, use our bodies, and eating is fundamental to what it means to be embodied. As we read stories like Ruth, we discover how people learn how to walk in the direction God is walking in as they eat together. When we read the New Testament, we discover the early Church “was not a community in which eating was an incidental activity, but one in which the shared meal forms the basis for communal life.” {4} When it comes to discipleship, there is so much we all have in common, in part because we all have bodies that have so many basic needs in common!
Yet the narrator of the story of Ruth highlights the importance of uncommon friendship as we pursue our common discipleship. In 2:2, as in so many other places in this story, the narrator takes the time to point out that Ruth is a Moabite. To a modern reader, the narrator adds “the Moabite” to the name “Ruth” that it can become difficult to realize that the narrator didn’t need to keep saying her nationality over and over again. The narrator chose to highlight her immigrant status, in part, because of how often God uses uncommon friends to disciple us. In this case, Boaz directly connects Ruth’s behavior to that of Abraham (2:11), and illustrates how she is embodying their common discipleship through her everyday decisions.
If you want to do something FOR an Uncommon Friend, like an immigrant like Ruth, you have a lot of options ahead of you. There are organizations where you can donate money, time and expertise. There are elected officials to whom you can write letters. There are grassroots efforts in which you can participate. If you want to eat a meal WITH an immigrant, you’ve got a harder task ahead of you.
If you want to do something FOR an Uncommon Friend, like someone experiencing poverty like Ruth, you have a lot of options ahead of you. There are organizations where you can donate money, time and expertise. There are elected officials to whom you can write letters. There are grassroots efforts in which you can participate. If you want to eat a meal WITH someone experiencing poverty, you’ve got a harder task ahead of you.
In the wake of the social unrest after the murder of George Floyd, my daughter Emma and I were talking about the cultural difficulty of eating with people of a different ethnicity. She had read a statistic (I don’t want to cite a specific number in this blog because we were unable to verify it) that a significant percentage of white Americans have never eaten a meal in their own home with someone of a different ethnicity. That is hard to believe, and yet it is easy to believe.
If you want to discover how your uncommon friends (in this case, non-Americans) can help you walk in the direction Jesus is walking in when it comes to racial reconciliation, we have a year-long small group forming. Grab a few friends (or your own church small group, or your neighbors) and join our community of practice called Healing Our Broken Humanity. More can be found HERE.
Before we conclude this blog, I want to highlight one of my favorite verses, because it’s a place where the narrator reveals a goofy sense of humor.
In 2:3 then the narrator says, “and it just so happened that she ended up in the field belonging to Boaz.”
It just so happened? Like, by chance, or by luck, Ruth ends up in the field belonging to Boaz? The narrator doesn’t even believe in luck or chance, because all things are guided by God’s hand! There isn’t such a thing as luck in this story.
Saying that Ruth “just so happened” to find the field of Boaz is kinda like the world’s best golfer sinking a three-foot putt and attributing it to luck. It’s like a world-class musician who “just so happened” to write an incredible song. It’s like a brick mason with thirty years of experience being able to lay yet another brick “by chance.”
While we don’t know (because the narrator doesn’t tell us) what sort of habits and practices helped Ruth become the sort of woman who was walking in the direction God was walking in, we see the fruit of those practices when she’s making ordinary, everyday decisions like trying to find a place to get food. She has to find food, there isn’t any angelic voices or miraculous signs to lean on, and her bitter mother-in-law is counting on her.
The everyday decisions we make around meal time, and walking in the direction Jesus is walking in as we do it, is beautifully described for the Church and for a family by Samuel Wells:
“Just as it does for the Church in general, so for the married couple in particular, sharing food becomes the practice by which they come to understand play, friendship, and the common purse. By learning to eat the same food at the same time they learn the gift of bodily presence with one another. By learning to share the attendant pattern of planning, purchasing, preparing, clearing, washing, and the putting away they learn the disciplines of partnership. And by making the family table the place where manners are articulated and rehearsed, they discover what it means to become a new community with a particular vocation.” {5}
Just as Boaz and Ruth discover their vocation as they eat together, so Spring Church discovers its vocation as we eat together. Ahhh, I’m weary of the Covid restrictions, and I miss eating with you…
FOOTNOTES:
1 - Many people have written insightful things on these connections. I particularly appreciate Leon R. Mass, M.D. The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfecting of Our Nature, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994) 11-12.
2 - Discipleship is on display whenever we eat, and particularly in the everyday decisions we make around everyday meals. My favorite book on this topic, and the author who has had the greatest influence on me personally (so, you know, bias admitted) is Robert Farrar Capon, The Supper of the Lamb, 2nd Ed. (New York: Modern Library Press, 2002). Read Chapter 3, and then imagine Ruth and Boaz at lunch break with the rest of the barley harvesting crew. God is with us, even on lunch break. Hallelujah!
3 - For a more robust engagement on the ethics of our discipleship on display in everyday decisions, again there’s so many sources to cite, but I think Ronald Rolheiser has a helpful analogy to understand modern mistakes in light of a biblical worldview in The Shattered Lantern: Rediscovering God’s Presence in Everyday Life, (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1994) 48.
4 - Robert Song, “Sharing Communion: Hunger, Food, and Genetically Modified Foods”, The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics edited by Stanley Hauerwas and Samuel Wells (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004) 391.
5 - If you like that quote, you’re gonna love the whole book: Samuel Wells, God’s Companions: Reimaginng Christian Ethics, (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006) 95-6.
