The story of Rahab is found in Joshua chapters 2 and 6. In order to make the reading a manageable length for the reader,details of the story not directly pertinent were cut. The reading heard in worship was: Joshua 2:1-9, 12-15, 22-24; 6:1-5, 15-17, 20-23, 25.
Our theme word for this second Sunday in Advent, as you’ll notice on the Advent calendar banner growing on the wall behind me, is hope. Hope is a slippery little word in English, what does it mean to have hope? Sometimes hope gets itself mixed up with unrealistic optimism. For example, “I hope it is sunny today” and “I hope I get an A on the test I did not at all study for,” while technically proper uses of the word in English, do not capture the meaning of hope in a biblical sense. Hoping for weather is out of our control. If I hope for sunny and I live in Arizona, I can be reasonably confidence that the event will turn out in my favor. If, however, I live in Michigan and it’s winter, then if the lake effect turns on, it’s going to snow and there’s nothing I can do to change it. Similarly, hoping for an A on a test for which we haven’t prepared is really to sell hope short. You can hope all you want, but if you haven’t put the work in first, then what you have is not hope but vapid optimism. Hope that leads to passivity or inactivity is not hope at all. Rather hope, true hope, is the force that keeps us going in the face of opposition because of a trust that, despite all evidence to the contrary, something good will come out of it. What does hope look like? It looks like Rahab.
My first read on the Rahab story was a bit of annoyance at the author for introducing her as “a prostitute whose name was Rahab.” After all, Rahab’s profession does not come into play in this story. It makes no difference if she was a prostitute or a Sunday school teacher, this story isn’t about her occupation. I assumed it was an attempt to cast her as morally suspect for some reason. But the commentary I read had a very different take on it. The commentary pointed out that the story is not about Rahab’s home, but her father’s. This is, remember, the ancient near east, it was the responsibility of the men of her household to provide for her. That Rahab lived with a father, a brother, and others, presumably some of whom were men, who belonged to them, and yet this is a story where the central character was Rahab tells us something about the economic situation of the family, they were poor. Casting Rahab as a prostitute does not bring down her moral standing, rather it made her relatable to other debtor families, who would hear in this the desperation that forced Rahab into the central provider role for her family, and would then cheer for her against the king of Jericho who had so poorly provided for his people that families like Rahab’s were forced into destitution.
So Rahab’s poor, poor to the point of needing to support this whole household, most of whom by cultural standards had the obligation of supporting her. She’s an outsider to the Joshua story, as a Caananite and a resident of Jericho, but she’s also an outsider to her own society. In case we missed her outsider status, the author makes the point even more pointedly by literally positioning her home on the outside of the exterior wall of the community. In a time when the only thing standing between a community and conquest was the exterior wall, the most highly valued of society did not make their homes on the edge of it. The location of her residence demonstrated that the king of Jericho, despite his appeal to her to turn over the potential spies, saw Rahab and her family as throwaway goods.
Rahab was stuck between what looks like bad and worse. From her own community she was poor, an outsider, no more than a roadblock for conquest by her own community, and from the side of the invaders she was poor, a outsider, and easy pickings for looting. We can’t really portray Joshua’s troops as the just conquering heroes in this story. Verse twenty-one, “then they devoted to destruction by the edge of the sword all in the city, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and donkeys.” The army of Joshua was not coming into Jericho to establish utopian democratic rule where everyone’s needs are met and everyone’s voice heard and understood, no, they were coming for conquest. Facing oppression from within and conquest from without, with really neither side at all invested in her well-being, I think we can agree that Rahab had every excuse in the world to give up, to throw in the towel, pull the blanket back over her head, and to just stop trying. Now, you can argue that quitting wasn’t an option for her, as the wall her house was in would certainly be destroyed, but the truth is, we always have the option to quit, to give up, to stop fighting. Oftentimes it’s not as dramatic as the crisis facing Rahab, but we can all certainly think of times when faced with a hard task, we chose quitting. When we’re silent in the face of injustice, or we let a relationship wither away rather than do the hard work of fixing it, or we let ourselves be pushed around rather than stand up for our own value, these are all choices we make.
But Rahab didn’t choose to quit, because Rahab had hope. Hope for a better future, hope that God would somehow make tomorrow different from today. This hope isn’t some sort of passive, pie-in-the-sky optimism, it isn’t blind escapism, it isn’t even built on our ability to be hopeful. Rather hope is something that comes not from within, but from without, it is hope in the God of Abraham, and Joseph, and Jacob, and Judah, hope in the God who worked through Tamar, it is this connection to a larger story that stretches from the prophets through the cross. Rahab could not know about her place in the story, she could not know the future so many centuries in the future, but somehow this gritty, determined hope that she had a place in this unfolding story of God’s redemption moved her to outsmart the oppressive king of Jericho, to barter with the enemy, and to end up a part of the heritage of Jesus.
Hope, the unexpected, unexplainable, gritty determination of hope is the central point of the Christian story. How else can you explain a religion who’s central symbol is the cross, but a faith that clings to the impossible promise that life is born from the midst of death, and that the worst thing that can happen has never been and will never be the last thing that will happen, but God is always at work redeeming God’s people and bringing forth the promise of a new future. This hope is not blind or weak or passive, but this hope in the promise of God’s redemption moves us to action, and if it does not move us, then it is not hope.
Our Gospel reading for this morning features that most odd Christmas figure of John the Baptist. Side note: Why doesn’t this guy get more play in our Christmas cards? I went Christmas card shopping with friends over Thanksgiving, and all the cards were of angels, or manger scenes, or bells. There was not one card featuring a madman in the wilderness hollering about snakes fleeing from forest fires, and I feel like the greeting card market is the poorer for it… But anyway, John the Baptist is a crazy character. His clothing, his diet, his language all served to identify him as an outsider, one who was separate from the religious elites and part of the wilderness out of which he appeared. John preached “repent, repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near.” Repentance in Greek literally means to “turn around.” It is a call to dramatic change of mind and direction, to turn from the old values and practices of self-service, idolatry, fear, and greed, to turn to the values and practices of God, to hope, to faith, to justice, to love. Repentance is a powerful and hopeful, if challenging call, but from the lips of John the Baptist it comes across, both the message and the messenger, as harsh and more than a little bit terrifying. Yet people from all over Jerusalem and Judea were going to him to be baptized. We don’t hear much about those people, but we do hear his response when the Pharisees and Sadducees showed up. Now, it is worth noting that the Pharisees and Sadducees were arch enemies. They were constantly in conflict with each other as to who was correctly interpreting scripture, which, as an aside, may sound familiar; there really is nothing new under the sun. Scripture seems to indicate the only force strong enough to bring these two warring factions together will eventually become their mutual fear and distrust of Jesus. But here they’re coming to John for baptism. Probably because John was gathering large crowds, and folk like this always want to be seen where the crowds are. The Pharisees and Sadducees were not coming to John because they heard in his message of repentance a promise of hope. They were coming because they wanted to make sure they were in with this potential new power. This wasn’t repentance, a dramatic turning away from the old ways and toward the new life John was proclaiming, this was playing both sides of the coin, waiting to see who to follow based on who was doing the best. The Pharisees and Sadducees have not come to John to be moved into action, and John has no time for hope that is not hope.
The baptism John proclaimed Jesus would bring, a baptism of the Holy Spirit and of fire, is a baptism of hope. It is a promise we can cling to, a force of our identity that can give us the courage to step forward boldly, secure in the promise that God is guiding us. It is a hope that Jesus learned from his ancestor Rahab, a hope that led him all the way to the cross, where hope shined the brightest. This is the world-shattering, life-changing power of hope. Thanks be to God. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment