Today is stewardship Sunday. Today, we remember the truth that all that we have is God’s. To be a steward is to manage property for someone else. And it is our job to make decisions with that property for their best interest.
I think we often think of stewardship as the idea of deciding what it is I will give to God. What of my time and money am I going to give to spiritual things like church or volunteer work. That is thinking of it all wrong. It is not a decision of what to give and what to keep for myself. It is a realization that all of it is God’s. Everything you have and are is God’s. The recent Brief Statement of Faith begins, “We belong to God.” It is not ours to decide with how much we want to give. It is His. We give it all to Him. It is our job as stewards to decide how our time, our money, our lives, are best given to serve God’s best interest. It is not what we give, but how we give it. Andrew Murray once said, “The world asks, "What does a man own?"; Christ asks, 'How does he use it?”
The story of the spies and Rahab is not the first story that comes to mind for stewardship Sunday. But it is a perfect story, not just for stewardship in general, but even more so for our particular situation in this neighborhood. Rahab is a story of someone coming to faith and truly giving themselves in very specific ways to God. That is what stewardship is.
Sometimes, we think of becoming and being a Christian as giving ourselves to God in just spiritual, ephemeral ways. It is just a feeling and some words in a prayer. But the fact is, if it is real, it will work out in everything we say and do. If we our completely God’s, then so will our reaction to those people who push our buttons. If we are completely God’s, so will our moments when we are called to courageous actions. If we are completely God’s, so will our checkbooks and credit card statements be. Rahab is a great picture of faith.
More than that, she is a picture of a principle that runs throughout scripture. God does not choose to use the glories of this world to shine through. God chooses the weak, the discredited, the people of little value in this world through whom to work the glories of this world.
Rahab didn’t seem to have much going for her. First, Rahab is a Canaanite. Canaanites are hated as a people by virtually every culture and nation that surrounds them in this period. Over and over in the Old Testament, we find references to the wickedness of the Canaanites.
Rahab's second disadvantage is that she is a woman. Canaanite culture has a depraved, debased view of women. The reliefs and sculptures that we find show women as nothing more than sex objects and offspring-bearers. That attitude of sinful male chauvinism has been demonstrated in every society throughout human history. You may have heard the first-century prayer of the Jewish rabbis: "I thank my God that I was not born a woman." Today in many parts of the world women are legally second-class citizens who don't have the right to vote. In many cultures, women are still chattel, property to be owned; and girls are still killed at birth. We're all too well aware of the tragedy of domestic violence against women in our own country. In a fallen, sinful world, being a woman is a disadvantage. Some things haven't changed since the Canaanite culture. But God chooses to make this fascinating woman Rahab his servant, to honor her, and to focus on her.
Rahab's third disadvantage is that she is a prostitute. Most likely Rahab and her family lived in poverty. The bundles of flax that were laid out on the roof to dry will be used to weave linen. It suggests that her family lives by agriculture outside the walls of Jericho. Rahab's house on the outer wall serves as a place for her family to stay when they're in the city. Probably out of economic necessity, Rahab herself earns a living as a prostitute. And like prostitutes in all cultures, she is marginalized by society. In our day, as then, this profession is tolerated generally because of male sexual demands. But these women go entirely without recognition; they are non-entities in Jericho society, just as prostitutes are today in every country around the world.
But God loves to turn things upside-down. He chooses the most unexpected people to work with. He specializes in social outcasts. Remember, Jesus will be criticized for his involvement with publicans and sinners-those who are looked down upon because of lifestyle choices they have made.
Rahab was a female Canaanite prostitute with all the attendant prejudice and disadvantage. But God chose this unlikely woman as His own. John Hamlin says of her, "Rahab was a paradigm of hope, showing that the old idols, the old corrupt ways of the past, could be given up.....The contrast between Rahab at the bottom of the social scale and the king and nobles of Jericho at the top illustrates well what Jesus said: 'the tax collectors and prostitutes go into the kingdom of God before you.' (Matt. 21:31)" - footnote 1 - E. John Hamlin, Inheriting the Land. Wm. B Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, Mich., 1983, pp. 16-17.
Rahab doesn’t have much going for her. She is not of much value in the structure of that world, or of our own.
I have to tell you, there is almost a mantra that I hear when I tell people where I’m from. For the near six years I’ve lived in Buffalo, every single time I tell people I hail from Southern California, they raise their eyebrows and ask me what I’m doing here. Buffalo seems to have a self-image problem. Somehow, people seem to have a notion that Buffalo is not as desirable, as valuable, as Southern California.
It makes me wonder if Buffalo is the place that God is going to use to revive this nation. What good thing can come out of Buffalo? What good thing can come out of Galilee and Nazareth? It is exactly those places and people that the world does not value that God chooses to work through.
Years ago a Sunday school in Philadelphia was overcrowded, much like some of our children's departments today. A little girl was turned away. She began, that day, to save her pennies to help the Sunday school have more room. Two years later, she died. They found a pocketbook by her bed with 57 pennies and a little scrap of paper with a note saying to help the church build a bigger Sunday school.
The pastor of that church, Dr. Russell Conwell, used that note to make a dramatic appeal to his congregation. People's hearts were touched. One realtor gave the church a piece of land. He said he just wanted a down payment of 57 pennies.
The local newspaper picked up the story, and it was carried across the country. The pennies grew, and the results can be seen in Philadelphia today. I've never been to that spot, but I'd like to go see that church. It seats 3,300 people with a large Sunday school department. I'd like to visit Temple University and Good Samaritan Hospital that came about as a result of that initial effort. I'd like to visit the room at Temple University where that little girl's picture is on the wall with the reminder that she gave 57 cents with an amazing result (Bob Russell, "Take the Risk," Preaching Today, Tape No. 143).
You may not think you have much to offer. Rahab, if she had believed the world she grew up in, she probably would have thought she did not have much to offer either. But she did.
The whole city is frightened of the Israelites who are not too far away. But she takes that fear, and she turns it into faith. She decides that she will trust that God she has never known before. She’s had plenty of other gods to believe in. “The Lord your God is indeed God in heaven above and on earth below.” She took all she had and was, she trusted this new, one God. And it worked itself right out in what she did.
She trusted God, she trusted these strangers. They gave her directions about how she could be spared the judgment of the rest of the city. She is to mark her life with a crimson cord. The people of Israel had a generation before been spared judgment and set free by marking the doorposts of their homes with the crimson blood of a lamb. Christians have been set free and saved from judgment by the crimson blood of Jesus.
And from that point on, everything we have and are is God’s. We recognize it as God’s. And he can use it all for his purposes. Rahab saved the spies. She gave them her loyalty. It may not seem like this woman had much to offer, but she had a place for them to hide. The New Testament, in both Hebrews and James lifts up her example of faith. We come to see in the New Testament, she becomes the wife of Salmon who is the father of Boaz. King David is her great grandson. Jesus is born of the house of David.
It may not seem like you as an individual or as a small church, that we have a lot to offer. Neither did Rahab. But what we have is God’s to do with what he will. And what he will will be glorious.
