Celebrities from the Hall of Fame – 6
Rahab: Risking it all

One nation’s traitor is another nation’s hero. This is basic a fact of history.

Whether you think George Washington or Louis Riel was a hero or a traitor has a great deal to do with whether you are American or British, Francophone or Anglo-Canadian.

If you were to look at a history of the Cold War between the West and the Soviet Union, you would find that people who were condemned, or even executed, as spies in North America (like the Rosenbergs) were heroes of the Soviet Union. People like Igor Gouzenko, who died a few years ago in Mississauga, and whose defection in Ottawa in 1945 was one of the triggers of the Cold War, became heroes here, but were condemned in their home countries.

To bring it more up to date, while none of the 9/11 bombers were US citizens (most were Saudi nationals), all of the men who have been involved in the bombing of targets in the UK were British nationals. About 18 months ago a tape turned up on which one of them explained that he was a soldier fighting for his “people” and that there were many more like him. To the majority of people in the Muslim world he’s a hero; even as his fellow British citizens struggle to understand how he could betray them like this.

We’ve been looking at selected members of the hall of fame of faith in Hebrews 11. Last week Cindy talked about Joshua and challenged us to have the same kind of radical obedience to God. One of the people mentioned in the book of Joshua is Rahab, the only woman to be listed in the hall of fame.

Among the things that make Rahab so interesting are all the things she’s not. She’s not a man. So she can’t be the head of a lineage. She’s not a political leader, like Joseph. She’s not a religious leader, like Moses. She’s not a military leader, like Joshua. She’s not even an Israelite – she’s Canaanite.

Then there’s what she is or, perhaps better, what she does. We’re told she’s a prostitute, and the main focus of her story is about how she betrays her fellow Jerichoans, mainly by telling a bare faced lie.

So what in the world is she doing in this list of the great heroes of faith?

I have a couple of suggestions.

1. Rahab risked it all

The first has to do with what we mean by that word “faith.” A lot of the time we talk about faith as if it were some body of knowledge that we’re supposed to know or at least agree with. Churches and denominations and Christian organisations often have a “statement of faith” that deals with what they believe about things like God, Jesus, The Holy Spirit, the Bible, baptism… Some statements of faith go on for pages and pages.

There’s nothing wrong with those kinds of “statements of faith.” I wouldn’t stand up here and preach and teach every Sunday if I didn’t think the content of what we believe is important. But the Christian faith is not first and foremost about something you believe, so much as someone you trust.

That’s the other way we use the word “faith” isn’t it? We can talk about a statement of faith; “We believe in God the father…” or “There is no God but God and Mohammed is his prophet.” But we can also talk about having faith in a person, like when we hired a roofer to re-shingle the church roof, we put our faith in him that he would do what he said he would in the quote. (And he’s done a great job, by the way.) That’s what faith is primarily in the Bible. It’s first and foremost about trusting a person, and that person is God.

And that’s good news for Rahab, and for lots of other people too. You see, Rahab didn’t know much about God. She was a Canaanite. The Canaanites believed that there was a High God. They even used the same name for him as the Old Testament sometimes uses, “El.” But most of their religious focus was on a form of fertility religion. The basic idea behind fertility religion is that the worshippers have to sort of remind the gods to make the land fertile. So a large part of their worship involved going to the temple to have sex with ritual prostitutes.

Rahab wasn’t that sort of prostitute. They worked in the temple in the centre of town. Rahab ran a rooming house on the very edge of town, built right into the city wall in fact.

But running a rooming house has its own benefits. One of them is that you get to hear all the news from travellers as they pass through. And Rahab had heard about the Israelites moving up from the desert in the south. It had been the topic of conversation for months in the bar and over meals. “What’s the news?” “Where are those Israelites now?” (They probably didn’t call them Israelites. Some people think that they might have called them Habiru, which could mean _______ and might be where we get the word Hebrew from.) “Where are those Habiru now?” “Well, the last I heard they were moving up through the country of Sihon and Og. Nothing seems able to stop them.”

[I remember when the Taliban first appeared on the scene in Afghanistan. No-one could believe how fast they could move. You could sit down in any gathering of Afghans, at a house, in a tea shop, in a restaurant and, if there was someone there who had just come across the border from Afghanistan, the conversation would immediately turn to the Taliban. Where were they? How fast were they moving? Where do you think they’re headed? Will they go straight for Kabul or do you think they’ll come this way and take Jalalabad first?

There were stories of town after town and city after city falling to these guys, who, according to the stories, had little more than souped up Toyota trucks with heavy machine guns mounted in the back.]

This was what Rahab was hearing every night from her clients. No wonder she said to the spies, ⁹ … “I know that the Lord has given this land to you and that a great fear of you has fallen on us, so that all who live in this country are melting in fear because of you. ¹⁰ We have heard how the Lord dried up the water of the Red Sea for you when you came out of Egypt, and what you did to Sihon and Og, the two kings of the Amorites east of the Jordan, whom you completely destroyed. ¹¹ When we heard of it, our hearts melted and everyone’s courage failed because of you, for the Lord your God is God in heaven above and on the earth below.

This is hardly a well thought out theology. Rahab’s basic motivation is that these men in her inn are part of something big, something that will come through her town like a steamroller, and she wants to be on the right side. Really she has nothing more than some vague sense that this God called “The Lord” was doing something and that she wanted to be part of it.

¹² Now then, please swear to me by the Lord that you will show kindness to my family, because I have shown kindness to you. Give me a sure sign ¹³ that you will spare the lives of my father and mother, my brothers and sisters, and all who belong to them, and that you will save us from death.”

Note that she’s already hidden the spies, lied to the king’s messengers, and sent them off on a wild goose chase. She’s taking a huge risk. What if the rumours aren’t true? What if they were just part of some huge disinformation programme to scare the living daylights out of the Canaanites?

[In 1998, when al Qaeda bombed two US embassies in Africa, Clinton sent in cruise missiles against bin Laden in Afghanistan. Their problem was that they didn’t want to kill any Western aid workers in the process, but they couldn’t warn them without warning bin Laden as well. So, for the weeks leading up to the strike, they spread rumours of a terrorist threat against Western aid agencies in the hope that the westerners would pull out. There was no threat; they just wanted to make sure there weren’t any Western collateral casualties. It didn’t work. (Aid workers tend to be pretty stubborn.) In the end they missed bin Laden, but no aid workers were hurt either so they were back where they started.]

What if these stories that Rahab was hearing were just part of a really good propaganda ploy? Or, then again, what if they were true? Rahab chose to believe that they were true and she picked sides. If God was doing this, then she wanted to be on God’s side. She put her faith in him, she trusted him.

We like to think that we come to faith for good, pious reasons like wanting to serve God or recognizing our sin. But many of us, especially those of us who are first generation believers, make a much more basic decision. Like Rahab, we look at our lives and we see that connecting with God might just make a difference. So we decide that we’ll take the risk and throw our lot in with God and with God’s people.

That was true for me. I like to think that I became a Christian in my late teens because the gospel made sense to me and gave me answers to questions I was asking; questions about life and meaning and reality. But that’s only part of the truth. The other part of the truth is that my family was a mess, my life was falling apart and God’s people took me in and made me a part of their community. Like Rahab, I took the risk and threw my lot in with God and God’s people.

And that’s what it is, a risk. John Wimber used to say that faith is spelled R.I.S.K. Where there’s no risk, there’s no need for faith. And that’s what we do when we put our faith in God. We take the risk that life with God will be better than life without him.

Rahab risked everything. If she had been wrong; that rope that she had used to let the spies down from the window would have been used to string her up. That’s what they do to traitors. That’s still what they do to Christians in many parts of the world today, Christians who have to choose between serving the state or serving God and his people.

Rahab made her choice. Even though she knew very little about God, she knew she wanted to take the risk and side with him and what he was doing in the world. She believed that that choice would result in a better future for herself and for her family. And she was right.

2. And discovered there’s always room for an outsider

And in the process she discovered that there’s always room for an outsider in God’s plan.

[I met with my supervisor this week.

Part of the process for ordination in the Baptist Convention of Ontario and Quebec is that, for a year, I have to meet regularly with a supervisor who is appointed by the convention. And part of what we talk about is something called an “ordination statement,” in which I have to put together one of those statement of faith things, and tell something of my story of how I came to be a candidate for ordination in the BCOQ.

In the next couple of months three of my colleagues will be going through their ordination councils, the final stage of the process, so I have their ordination statements on my desk right now. I’ve also been to (I think) three or four other ordination councils in the last few years. And I’ve noticed an interesting similarity in the stories that people tell.

Now, I want to be clear that I mean no disrespect here. Many of these people are my friends as well as my colleagues. But I think that all of their ordination statements tell of growing up in loving Christian homes, praying to receive Jesus into their heart sometime between the ages of 5 and 10, being part of the church youth group, and so on. Half of them are the sons or daughters of pastors!

Then there’s my story. It starts off like this, “I grew up in Scotland in the sixties and seventies, on a working class housing estate that was best known for the violent gang that operated out of it. My father was a merchant seaman, which meant I saw him for a few weeks every couple of years, and by the time I was 16 I was essentially living alone. My sister had moved away from home, my father was at sea and my mother was in and out of psychiatric hospitals for dementia associated with Parkinson’s. It was at this time that I first heard the gospel.”]

With that kind of background, and then hearing the stories of my colleagues, it would be easy for me to think I don’t have the right kind of story to be a pastor. Especially when I’ve heard other pastors speak from the pulpit about being carried into the church as a baby, as if it were some kind of credential.

You know what? Rahab didn’t have the right kind of story either.

She had the wrong ethnic background

She wasn’t an Israelite. She was a Canaanite. She was one of the enemy, one of “them,” whoever “them” are to you.

She had the wrong religious background

The Bible is the story of the one creator God who made the universe, and his plan to redeem and restore it all. He doesn’t take kindly to people fooling around with fertility gods and such like. Rahab had not grown up as a good Israelite girl. She didn’t know the right stories about Abraham and Isaac and Joseph.

She had the wrong occupational background

Jericho was like Amsterdam. Prostitution was legal. It was even part of the religion! Can you imagine the scene after the fall of Jericho as she and her family are entered into the roll of the people of Israel? “Name?” “Rahab.” / “Place of birth?” “Jericho.” / “Occupation?” “Prostitute.” / “Well, we’ll have to find something else for you to do, won’t we?”

But the good news is that taking the risk and choosing for God changes everything. It didn’t matter what she used to be, or what people used say about her, she could make a new start in this new community under God.

It didn’t matter that her theology was a little weak, because – and remember this – faith is not primarily about believing the right things. It’s about who you’re trusting with your life. The “what” comes with time, as you study the Bible, learn to pray and worship and grow in your knowledge of God. The “who” can be almost instantaneous as you put your faith, your trust, in a God that you’ve perhaps only heard a very little about.

And it didn’t matter that she wasn’t an Israelite, because God does love all people and it’s always been his plan to have a multiethnic community of followers.

So Rahab entered the community of God and she eventually married a man by the name of Salmon. Perhaps having an “outsider” in the family had some lasting impact because their grandson, Boaz, ended up marrying a young Moabite woman by the name of Ruth, and you can read about that little love story in the book of Ruth. And their grandson was none other than the great king David, whose greatest descendant was the Lord Jesus himself.

Take aways

So what can we take away from Rahab’s story?

1. Rahab made a choice. She took the risk, turned her back on her past, and hitched her wagon to what God was doing. And she never looked back. You don’t need to know a lot to follow God, you just have to trust him.

2. It doesn’t matter where you come from, or what your background is, God can always give you a new start. You don’t have to come from a good Christian family to be used by God. Rahab was the first believer in her family and God used her.

3. Faith is often spelled R.I.S.K. If there’s no risk involved, there’s no faith needed. Are we willing as a congregation to take the risks needed to see God’s will done in our neighbourhood and in our lives?