Ordinary Faithfulness

Stage Four — Community: How should people live together?

My friend,

When I reached this point I expected a treatise. Something on how to organize a congregation, resolve disputes, structure a shared life. I was ready for it; I like that sort of thing.

Instead I was given a short story about a destitute widow and her foreign daughter- in-law picking up leftover grain in somebody else's field.

I was, briefly, insulted again. You may be noticing a pattern in me.

But the Book of Ruth is in this curriculum for a precise reason, and here it is: community is not built by structures. It is built by particular people being reliable over long periods in unglamorous circumstances.

You can construct any framework you like. If the people inside it are not faithful in small things, it will be a beautiful machine full of lonely people.

The Vow

Naomi has lost everything — husband, sons, future. She is returning to Bethlehem empty and bitter, and she releases her daughters-in-law from any obligation. There is nothing left to be loyal to. The sensible thing, the thing Naomi herself urges, is for Ruth to go home.

Don't entreat me to leave you, and to return from following after you, for where you go, I will go; and where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God; where you die, will I die, and there will I be buried. Yahweh do so to me, and more also, if anything but death part you and me.

Ruth 1:16–17

Notice what is absent from that vow. There is no expectation of return. Naomi has nothing and Ruth knows it. Ruth is binding herself to a bitter old woman with no prospects, in a country where she will be a foreigner, and she is doing it permanently.

This is loyalty with the transaction removed. And I want to be careful about how it gets read, because it is often used badly.

This is not an argument for staying in every situation. Ruth was not being harmed by Naomi. There are relationships a person should leave, and there are arrangements where "loyalty" is the word used to keep someone in a place that is damaging them. Do not take a vow of steadfastness and hand it to someone who is using you. That is not what this is.

What this is: a picture of what commitment looks like when it is not contingent on the other person's usefulness to you.

The Three Pillars in a Barley Field

Truth is Ruth's integrity. She gave her word and then did not look for the exit when it became difficult. In community, truth is largely this — being someone whose statements about the future turn out to be accurate. Naomi's broken hope was rebuilt on the simple fact that Ruth kept doing what she said she would do.

Humility is Ruth in the field. She was a woman of considerable character and she went and did the back-breaking, low-status work of gathering what the harvesters dropped, because Naomi needed to eat. She did not consider herself too significant for it. Her lack of self-importance is the reason an old woman did not starve.

Mercy is what both Ruth and Boaz do beyond requirement. The law provided for gleaning; Boaz went well past the law. Ruth's obligation to Naomi had legally ended; she went well past that too. Mercy is what happens in the space after the requirement has been met.

The Witness

See how good and how pleasant it is for brothers to live together in unity!

Psalm 133:1

We met this Psalm at the close of the last stage, and it belongs here too. The oil and the dew both descend without being pushed.

And there is a larger pattern in Ruth worth seeing. Boaz is a kinsman-redeemer — a man with resources who notices a destitute foreigner, extends protection over her, pays what is required, and brings her into his household. She had no claim on him. He acted anyway.

If that shape seems familiar, it should. We were the alienated and impoverished ones. Christ noticed, paid, and brought us in. Which means the loyalty being asked of you here is not an original demand. It is a response — extending to your neighbor the kind of steadfastness that was extended to you first.

The Practice: Ordinary Faithfulness

Loyalty in a lean season. Identify someone in your circle going through a stretch where they have nothing to offer anybody. Be steadily present. Not dramatically — steadily. Turn up more than once.

One stranger made welcome. Find the person on the edge of your community who has not quite been let in. Do the small specific thing that lets them in.

Notice the overlooked. The elderly, the grieving, the person struggling quietly and not mentioning it. Small mercy applied to an unnoticed person is worth more than large mercy applied to a visible one.

Ask yourself this week: Whose loyalty have I received without ever acknowledging it? Where have I stayed only as long as it was convenient?

A Blessing

May you become someone whose word about tomorrow can be relied upon. May you be found faithful in fields nobody is watching.

And may you have the grace to say to at least one person, and mean it: where you go, I will go.