Narrative Lectionary Key Verse for Today
“So Boaz took Ruth and she became his wife. When they came together, the Lord made her conceive, and she bore a son.”
NL Daily Devotion for Sunday, June 21, 2026
by Madison Johnston, Clergy Stuff
Main Idea: This text serves as both a witness and a promise. It tells us that where there was once famine, there can be abundance. Where there was once death, there can be new life. Through God and with God, we experience miracles—the upending of what oppresses us, and the infusion of what makes us free.
The very beginning of this passage can throw us off a little, because it takes on a goofy tone that we haven’t yet experienced in the Book of Ruth.
Earnest Boaz offers Ruth’s next-of-kin her late husband’s inheritance. (To underscore his credibility, Boaz does this in public with multiple witnesses, all the while narrating how his actions fit perfectly into local laws, precedents and tradition.) The next-of-kin, whose name we very intentionally never learn, ends up playing the part of the fool. At first, he is eager to take Boaz up on the deal. But when he learns that it would require him to marry Ruth, he makes up a shoddy excuse and leaves just as quickly as he came. It’s like something out of a bad romcom.
The very end of this passage can throw us off, too, because it crams generations worth of miracles into just a few verses. Ruth, who never had children in her first marriage, conceives immediately in her second with a son, Obed. Naomi, Ruth’s perimenopausal mother-in-law, serves as the Obed’s wet nurse. Oh, and as a casual aside, Obed’s lineage will grow to include David the most significant king in the history of Israel. All of this all together makes things feel too perfect. Too tidy. Too good to actually be true.
But what if the promise we need to hear today is that there is no such thing as “too good to be true?” Not in a life with Christ, at least.
Sure—the hyperbole and almost absurdity of the joy and the success throughout the entire ending of the Book of Ruth sits in direct contrast to the bleak, wanting set of circumstances we started with in Chapter 1. But who among us can’t name drastically different highs and lows in our own experiences? Moment to moment, day to day, month to month and year over year, we are transitioning between extremes.
Most of us have experienced a kind of survival mode, and most of us have experienced genuine success. When we stop to reflect on our journeys, it isn’t so crazy to think that we could author something just as hyperbolic and just as absurd—just as miraculous—as this story of Naomi, Ruth and Boaz.
And that is our good news in this story—that we dwell in and with a God of miracles. The God of Ruth. The God of Mary and her Magnificat.
God is the hope and the beauty that persists in times of little. The force that pulls us and drives us. And God is the challenge and discomfort that breeds skepticism in times of plenty. The force that convicts us and emboldens us. God’s presence is what sustains us. God’s promises feed us and, in turn, shape the entire cosmos.
Today we are reminded to take the most ridiculous times and the most incredible times in our lives seriously; to treat them like the miracles that they point to; and to continue leaning on the God who knows them as intimately as we do.
