Picture this – it’s a quiet, misty morning, and there’s a field of grain before you. Workers dressed in simple wraps and tunics are gathering grain with hand sickles, bending low as they gather the stalks. An ox pulls a wooden cart, where young children sit, bundling the stalks of grain together into sheaves, and tossing the sheaves onto an ever growing pile on the cart. Later, these sheaves will be threshed and winnowed, separating the grain from its hull, and made ready to be ground into flour. But today, the focus is in reaping and bundling.

At first glance, the workers in the field seem to be doing an inefficient job – they’re leaving stalks of grain behind, at the edges and turns in the field. But then, you notice a woman, clearly a poor foreigner from the way she’s dressed. She’s following behind the main work group, collecting grain from the edges. “Gleaning,” this is called. And it’s only the first step for her – she’s still got to thresh, winnow, grind, and mix the grains to make enough food for herself and her mother-in-law.

The sun burns off the mist by midday, and a man walks out to the field, to meet the workers with warm bread and porridge for their lunch. He is well-dressed, wearing not just a tunic, but a robe edged with dyed wool in a bright orange that seems to match the autumn weather. He notices the woman gleaning, checks with his workers, and invites her to join them. In a simple gesture, he invites her to sit, to eat, to drink from the same jar as he and the workers. Ruth, a foreigner and a widow, finds this moment extraordinary. It’s more than charity would have been. It’s dignity restored. It’s acknowledgement, belonging, loving-kindness.

The text tells us that the man, Boaz, instructs the workers to let her glean grain even from the sheaves that have already been stacked up. To leave extra, to help her. Not to shame her. Not to stop her.

That’s grace in action. The grace of gathering, instead of gatekeeping. Grace that creates belonging instead of measuring worth. Grace that reveals abundance when others see scarcity.

In Hebrew, this concept of loving-kindness is called hesed. It is one of the primary attributes of God, to be reflected in the lives of those who live in the world. Hesed is complicated enough that there’s not a single English word to translate it. Loving-kindness is traditional, but there’s a good argument to be made to call it “active grace.” Going above and beyond what’s expected for no reason other than to build others up.

But David LaMotte reveals hesed in a different way in his song, The Work of Light:

The work of light is to warm and nourish
to show the way and reveal what’s true.
The work of light is to weave together,
from the soil and refuse, making something new.

Boaz and Ruth are participating in that work of light – seeing each other, acting with compassion, making something new from the leftovers of the field. In gleaning the field, Ruth risks even greater ostracism, but she and Naomi must eat. In offering hesed, Boaz builds her up, encouraging her to see herself as worthy of community, and love. In turn, Ruth shows hesed to Boaz and Naomi, and the virtuous cycle continues. Eventually, of course, Boaz and Ruth marry, securing a legacy of loving-kindness that leads, one day, to King David and, through him, to Jesus.  

Just as the Work of Light reveals what’s true, the gift of night gathers what the light has shown.

The gift of night is to stop our struggling
to rest our spirits and rest our bones
The gift of night is to draw together
to collect what’s scattered, and bring it all back home

That’s the rhythm of grace. The light reveals, and the night gathers. The light makes visible what’s possible, and the night gives us space to rest in that possibility – to bring it home, to make it real.

When Ruth gathers the grain she’s gleaned and brings it home to Naomi, she’s doing the work of grace in both directions. She’s bringing together what the light of Boaz’ kindness made possible. She’s gathering the harvest that the light of grace revealed. She’s embodying gratitude – and gratitude in Scripture is never passive. It’s what Paul calls, overflowing grace.

In his second letter to the Corinthians, Paul reminds the church that grace moves through us, not just to us:

God is able to provide you with every blessing in abundance, so that by always having enough of everything, you may share abundantly in every good work. (II Cor. 9:8)

Paul isn’t talking about prosperity, but about participation. He’s describing the same kind of hesed that Ruth and Boaz lived: the grace that gathers, multiplies, and blesses others.

Grace that turns thanksgiving into bread for the world.

We’ve talked about hesed, loving-kindness. In Greek, the word for this is xaris, usually translated grace. And, as amazing as it may seem, that word xaris is at the root of eucharist. Eu-xaris-tia. Eu, meaning good. Xaristia, meaning abundant grace. When we pray the prayer of Great Thanksgiving at the communion table, we’re directly translating the ancient Greek of Euxaristia!

At the table of grace, we step into the ancient rhythms of light and night that connect us with God and each other. We see what the light reveals – the love of Christ made visible in bread and cup – and we gather it in, like Ruth and Naomi at day’s end, resting in what God has provided.

Paul says:

You will be made rich in every way so that you can be generous in every way. Such generosity produces thanksgiving to God… [the people] will pray for you, and they will care deeply for you because of the outstanding grace that God has given to you. Thank God for his gift that words can’t describe! (II Cor. 9:11, 14-15)

We are called to reflect God’s hesed of loving-kindness, God’s xaris of grace, to the world, through generosity, openness, and peace. At the table, we gather in that grace, welcomed, fed, restored, so that we might rise again, filled with light, sharing that grace with the world.

So, let’s see the light that shines in Christ’s love. And then, in holy rest, let us gather what grace has revealed – the work of light and the gift of night, the rhythms of life itself.

The gift of night is to calm the chatter
And to hold the boundary where the candle shines
The gift of night is the swirl of dreaming
When spirits whisper across the borderline

And the planet keeps on turning
And the oceans fall and rise
Show me all the light that’s shining
Then let me close my eyes.[1]

May we walk in that rhythm – seeing what grace reveals, gathering what love provides, living as people of light and night, gathered in grace.

[1] The Work of Light by David LaMotte. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDru455gZeY) Used with permission. davidlamotte.com

Featured image: “Harvest at Dusk” by Lauren Rees from CreationSwap (2011)