I am really glad you are here with us today. Today is part two of our series Finding God’s hand. We are walking through the book of Ruth. I am really excited where we are in the story today, as it takes some new twists and turns. Today we are going to meet a guy named Boaz, which right off the bat, because of his name, you know he is going to be cool.
Have you ever gotten to the end of your day and thought, I didn’t really see God today? Kind of felt like an ordinary, nothing special kind of day. Maybe on the flip side of that, you lay your head down at night, and you are able to see God all over your day. You saw how he intervened for you, brought people into your life. But how do you get to that point? How do you live in such a way that you are constantly aware of the presence of God in your everyday life? Or, have you ever sat down to do your devotions and just didn’t learn anything, maybe you walked away from the experience feeling like you didn’t connect with God. How do you raise your awareness so that you connect with God in ways that make sense to you.
If you weren’t here last week when we talked about chapter 1, let me catch you up. The story of Ruth is one of the most well written stories in all of the bible. The story starts off by telling us that it takes place during one of Israel’s darkest days in their history and about 1000 years before Jesus was born in a time known as the days of the Judges.
We are told about this family, a very ordinary family of a husband, wife and two sons. The country they were living in was going through a severe famine. So, the family gets up and moves.
But soon after arriving in their new home of Moab, the father dies. A few years pass, their two sons get married, but then they die. The mother Naomi is left with her two daughter in laws. Naomi decides to return to her home, but only her one daughter in law Ruth returns with her.
This is where the story picks up in chapter 2. If you have your bibles, you can open them to the book of Ruth. Last week we talked about how we find God’s hand in the midst of our pain and tragedy. One of the things we ended with was thinking about it like this. That our pain and tragedy doesn’t necessarily come from the hand of God, but it must pass through the hand of God. It is the same in our everyday lives.
For many of us though, looking for God’s hand in our everyday lives is not a priority, just getting through our day tops our list. So the question has to be asked before we even talk about it, is there a point to finding God’s hand in our everyday lives? Does it really make a difference? Or should I just go on as business as usual?
I think it does matter, because I wonder how much pain and tragedy we would not live through if we saw God in our everyday lives. Look at the beginning of chapter 1 in the book of Ruth, why did Elimilech and his family leave Bethlehem? Because of the famine. What would have happened if Elimelech and Naomi saw God in the famine? Instead of looking for the easy way out. If they would have stayed in Bethlehem, I wonder how their story would be different.
So Naomi and Ruth get back to Bethlehem. As widows they are in a terrible position. They don’t have children or husbands to take care of them. They are at the mercy of other people. Enter Boaz. We are told about him in verse 1 of chapter 2, he is somebody that is related to Elimelech.
Instead of waiting around, Ruth is resourceful and says in verse 2: "Let me go to the field and glean among the ears of grain after him in whose sight I shall find favor."
What is gleaning? Gleaning is something that was very important within the nation of Israel and to God. Out of concern for the helpless, the poor and the traveler, the law in the book of Leviticus required workers in the fields at harvest time to leave a portion of the crop, including the edges of the grain fields, to be collected by the needy. The workers were also not to go back for the grain they had missed or dropped.
So Ruth tells Naomi, I am going to glean. Naomi’s response, “Go my daughter.” She might as well have shrugged her shoulders and said, whatever. Naomi seems resigned to live in her despair. Let me say this so that you don’t think I am being callous here. When we go through pain and tragedy, we must grieve what has happened. We must let God heal us. This takes different amounts of time for different people. We have no idea how long it has been since the death of her husband and children. We know it has been at least 10 years since her husband died, but I think it is interesting that the author of Ruth puts this here. The angle that we are looking at, it is almost like Ruth is saying, let’s see where God is here. But Naomi doesn’t seem to care.
So Ruth goes and gleans. Boaz notices her, in verse 5 he asks one of his workers: “Whose young woman is this?” That is how they hit on women 3000 years ago. His worker tells him. Since Ruth is a foreigner, from a country that Israelites despise, I am sure everybody knew who she was.
In verse 7, the worker said this about her, Ruth said ’Please let me glean and gather among the sheaves after the reapers.’ So she came, and she has continued from early morning until now, except for a short rest."
What is interesting about the fact that she asked was that she didn’t need to ask. She had the right to glean, everybody did. Nobody needed permission, but she asked. She was not taking anything for granted. Have you ever met somebody who seemed to know that everything they had came from God? Like every breath, every cent, every child, every happy moment, every sad moment? They had this awareness about them? That is what we are going to talk about a little later, how you get that.
In verse 8 Boaz says to Ruth, 8"Now, listen, my daughter, do not go to glean in another field or leave this one, but keep close to my young women. 9Let your eyes be on the field that they are reaping, and go after them. Have I not charged the young men not to touch you? And when you are thirsty, go to the vessels and drink what the young men have drawn." 10Then she fell on her face, bowing to the ground, and said to him, "Why have I found favor in your eyes, that you should take notice of me, since I am a foreigner?"
I think the surprise in her tone and question show that Boaz is going above and beyond what he has to. He doesn’t have to talk to her, he doesn’t have to do anything. She is receiving a gift that he as a land owner is giving. Even though it was Jewish law to allow the poor to pick food, there were plenty of landowners that broke that law. Plus, he is going above and beyond the law.
11But Boaz answered her, "All that you have done for your mother-in-law since the death of your husband has been fully told to me, and how you left your father and mother and your native land and came to a people that you did not know before. 12The LORD repay you for what you have done, and a full reward be given you by the LORD, the God of Israel, under whose wings you have come to take refuge!" 13Then she said, "I have found favor in your eyes, my lord, for you have comforted me and spoken kindly to your servant, though I am not one of your servants."
14And at mealtime Boaz said to her, "Come here and eat some bread and dip your morsel in the wine." So she sat beside the reapers, and he passed to her roasted grain. And she ate until she was satisfied, and she had some left over. 15When she rose to glean, Boaz instructed his young men, saying, "Let her glean even among the sheaves, and do not reproach her. 16And also pull out some from the bundles for her and leave it for her to glean, and do not rebuke her."
So he is allowing her to take grain and food from his harvest, not just the leftovers. He even tells his workers to take food out and give it to her outright.
17So she gleaned in the field until evening. Then she beat out what she had gleaned, and it was about an ephah of barley.
An ephah, this is important so you see just how much food she had. An ephah is about 200 pounds. So she was taking home about 200 pounds of food. Which some historians believe would have been more than a week’s worth of food.
18And she took it up and went into the city. Her mother-in-law saw what she had gleaned. She also brought out and gave her what food she had left over after being satisfied. 19And her mother-in-law said to her, "Where did you glean today? And where have you worked? Blessed be the man who took notice of you." So she told her mother-in-law with whom she had worked and said, "The man’s name with whom I worked today is Boaz." 20And Naomi said to her daughter-in-law, "May he be blessed by the LORD, whose kindness has not forsaken the living or the dead!" Naomi also said to her, "The man is a close relative of ours, one of our redeemers." (which we will talk about next week) 21And Ruth the Moabite said, "Besides, he said to me, ’You shall keep close by my young men until they have finished all my harvest.’" 22And Naomi said to Ruth, her daughter-in-law, "It is good, my daughter, that you go out with his young women, lest in another field you be assaulted." 23So she kept close to the young women of Boaz, gleaning until the end of the barley and wheat harvests. And she lived with her mother-in-law.
If you think about it, most of us would probably say Ruth just lucked out. Some people have all the luck. It is like the saying, without bad luck, I wouldn’t have any luck. Don’t we chalk a lot of things in our life up as luck or chance?
We hear a story about how a woman’s flight was delayed and someone sat in her seat, so she got moved next to a guy. And they got married a year later. We call this a Southwest success story.
We refer to it being in the right place at the right time. Is it really that?
Here is another way to think about it, we think in terms of sacred and secular. We have church and work. We worship on Sunday and work on Monday. We have Christian and secular music. While I don’t want to get into that debate, that is how we think. In the Old Testament, they did not think in those terms. In the Old Testament they saw everything as being lived before the face of God.
Abraham Kuyper put it this way, “There is not an inch in the whole area of human existence in which Jesus, the sovereign of all, does not cry, “It is mine.”
The people who are hearing this story when it first happened wouldn’t think, what a lucky girl. Good thing she lived near Boaz. What we call chance, luck, or fate, they would see as the hand of God moving in their world.
If we are going to believe what we said last week. That if all our pain and tragedy does in fact pass through the hand of God, then our blessings and everything in between passes through his hand as well.
But that isn’t the tough thing to believe is it? I think the tough thing to believe is that God cares about the little details. That God is living in the mundane of our lives. But think about the New Testament. People in the New Testament encountered Jesus while working, eating, praying, conversing, traveling, and engaging in other ordinary human experiences.
If that is true, how do you notice God in the everyday details of your life? How do you live with the awareness that God is every breath, every tear, every laugh, every hug, every moment of our life.
What I want to do with the time we have left is to let you into my journey as a Christian and my journey into the world of spiritual practices. When I became a Christian, I was taught that it was important to have a daily quiet time. Most of my friends and mentors got up early in the morning to do this. Each time in our discipleship group they would all talk about how God was speaking to them, what they learned when they read the Bible, and how they were seeing God move in their world. For me though, I wasn’t getting any of that. First off, I am not a morning person. So when people say we need to be like Jesus and get up early to meet with God, I have always kind of tuned out. If I could stay up all night to meet with God in the morning, then we’re talking.
So inevitably, it would be my turn to share about my week and the things God was not showing me, the prayers I didn’t think he was answering, and the divine encounters I was not having. Because I was new at this, I quickly felt like a failure. What we think about as a quiet time is not bad or wrong, the way my friends and mentors did it just did not work for me. I couldn’t connect that way.
A few months later, I was sitting in my first theology class. My professor is talking about prayer and having a quiet time. I raised my hand and shared this story with my class. I didn’t know yet that if you can’t connect with God, you are supposed to keep it to yourself. I didn’t get my Christian manners yet. As I got done, I felt like every head turned to face me and the looks on their faces you would have thought I have 6 eyes?
He came up to me after class and thanked me for my honesty and asked me to come to his office. We sat down and pulled in a 3rd chair. He said, let’s talk to God. I thought, awesome. He has 2 Ph.D.’s, he is going to say something profound. So I get ready and nothing happens, no one says anything. Then he says, Josh, talk to God. The thoughts running through my head right now are wondering if my teacher is losing it.
After seeing that I wasn’t getting it, he said, God is in our world. He is among us, he is in us. We should be able to talk to him anytime. Just talk to him like you are talking to anybody. If you were going to call up an old friend and catch them up on your life, what would you say? Tell God that. So I did. I sat there with my teacher and started talking to God. It was the weirdest thing I had ever done, but it also started me on a journey that has brought a lot of freedom and excitement to my relationship with God.
When I would drive, I would talk to Jesus sitting in my front seat. This had to look weird at red lights, as I chattered away to an empty car. But I started seeing God, I started sensing God.
This teacher also introduced me to a wealth of knowledge on spirituality I didn’t know existed. The reason I didn’t know it existed is that for the last 1000 years of church history, it has been mostly Catholics who have written about these topics. But as I did my homework and discovered more about them, I learned that all of them have their origins from the times of the scriptures.
I started reading about monks and the desert fathers and mothers. I learned about new ways of reading the Bible and praying and how to raise my awareness to God.
I would encourage you to go to our blog site after today because there are numerous websites and resources on there to help you on this topic. More than what I can get into today. This is something I could talk about for hours. What for me was an area of frustration and disappointment, has now become a joy. That is the area of seeing God and connecting with him in my everyday life.
Here are a few ways to do this. Prayer walking. If you walk or run or bike, pray while you do it. Ask God to show you himself as you do it. I knew one guy who had lived in his neighborhood for years. Everyone on his street knew that he walked everyday and that he was a Christian. He sent a note to all the houses on his walk that said, “when I walk by your house, I am praying for you. Let me know if there is anything you would like me to pray about.” And he gave his e-mail. He still gets e-mails from people with requests. But he sees God in the people that he walks by.
Next time you are sitting at a restaurant, starbucks or in the mall ask God to help you see the world and the people around you through his eyes. Pray for the people sitting at the next table. Pray for your waitress.
One of the practices that I use on an almost daily basis is on a website called sacred space. It is the practice known as the Ignatian Examen named for St. Ignatius which goes all the way back to 1541. I try to start my day by going to sacredspace.ie. the prayer follows 5 steps:
Give thanks to God for the all the benefits received
To ask for his grace to know and get rid of my sins
To question my soul about the sins committed during the day, examining myself.
To ask for forgiveness for the faults committed
To ask God to help correct me
Then say the Lord’s prayer.
This has been for me a great way to focus. To raise the awareness of God in my life. Or as my friend put it in the cheesiest way possible, to raise my God antennas. This is a great way for me to start my day, by thinking through who I am and who God is.
John Ortberg in his book The life you’ve always wanted which is about spiritual practices for the rest of us. He tells the story of a man who struggled with patience and struggled to understand the patience of God. To help with this, whenever he was at the mall, movie theater, grocery story, anywhere with a line, he got in the longest line so he would learn and understand the patience of God.
Someone else I knew who lived life at a frantic pace made a commitment to always drive the speed limit to learn to live at a manageable pace.
Another practice is called sacred reading or lectio divina. One way to do this is to pick a verse and just read it over and over. Asking God to show you what he wants you to see. Reading it over and over, you start to see new things almost everytime you read through a verse.
Another one Katie and I are beginning to experiment with is what is known as the daily office. Phyllis Tickle has written some great books called the divine hours to help with this one. The daily office is considered to be the oldest spiritual practice in Christianity, going all the way back to old testament times. The daily office is 3 times a day taking a break in your day to pray. The morning, lunch and at night. We are starting to work at this on our own with the hope of making this a family spiritual practice.
Another one that is incredibly helpful is the practice of Sabbath or rest. This Friday is mine and Katie’s 5th anniversary. To celebrate, we are spending the day at a Catholic retreat center. The whole day is centered around easter and good Friday. The day will have the daily office, as well as times of silence and journaling, and the day will end by going through the stations of the cross.
Maybe you like to write and you start journaling about your day. Often, you can read those thoughts and start to see how God worked. Maybe you write down prayer requests and put a date next to them when they were answered so that you can see God moving in your prayers.
These are just little things to help raise the awareness of God being in the details of our everyday life. Like all good things, they take practice and some are harder than others. What I hoped would happen today is to expand our idea of what connecting with God and experiencing a relationship with God looked like, and how that affects how we see God move in our everyday lives. Everyone is different. Just like my friends I told you about earlier, the things I do would feel foreign to them. I have friends who do practices that do not help me connect with God. I know a lot of this is a little overwhelming and a lot of information, but I hope that like me, you will want to find out more about these and see how you can expand your relationship with God.
What I think this does, is it helps us see God in our world as those who followed him in the scriptures. That is what the Bible is. The Bible was written by people who asked themselves how God was present in their experiences and then wrote down what they noticed.
Let me close with this story. In his book Contemplative youth ministry, Mark Yaconelli tells this story. He said, “When I was working as a youth minister in Portland, Oregon, there was a group of girls who would cut class in the middle of the day and gather on a downtown corner to smoke cigarettes. Over time I befriended them. One day they asked me about my job as a minister. I responded with something like, “I’m trying to help people become aware of God’s presence in their lives and in the world.”
“Well, I can tell you God isn’t in my life,” said one young woman, whom I later learned had been abused and abandoned by her father.
We talked for awhile, and then I asked if they would try an experiment with me. I asked them to move back from the curb and stand against the outside wall of a coffee shop, observing the sights around them. I invited them to look at the cars and the people, the trees across the street, the buildings, and the cloud formations in the sky. “Just for a moment, allow yourself to believe in God,” I said. “Just suspend your doubt for a moment and imagine that God is present in the world. Then reflect on how God would be here, in this moment.” For about five minutes the girls stood, taking in the activity around them. I asked them what they noticed.
“God would be in that sleeping drunk across the street, waiting for someone to give him a place to sleep.”
“I think God would be in the sound of the birds singing in those trees. I don’t know if anyone notices, but I do every time I’m down here – and it makes me peaceful.”
On and on they went, noticing the God they didn’t believe in. and then the girl who’d been abandoned by her father said, “If God exists, he would be in the seeds of the grass that are still waiting for the sunlight, waiting to grow, underneath the pavement and cement.”
Where is God in your world? Are you able to look over this past week and see how God has moved in your world?
