WELCOMING PRESBYTERIANS CONFERENCE May 23, 2004

“CRIMSON CORD” Joshua 2:1-21 The Rev. Heidi Peterson

In 1977 the moderator of the GA of the UPCUSA was a short, bearded campus pastor from the state of Oregon. John Connor was his name and one of his extended moderatorial mission visits was to SE Asia. I was not long out of college, working as a VIM for the UPCUSA in ChiangMai Thailand---there not so much because I burned with evangelical zeal as because I had had a seriously difficult time peddling my philosophy degree in the market place.

Still, I was there as a servant of the church and John Connor was there as a servant of the church, we met, and shared a meal and he went to Bangkok where he addressed the General Council of the Church of Christ in Thailand (CCT)—this is the only protestant denomination in a country that is 98.9% Buddhist.

He conveyed to the CCT the obligatory greetings a moderator would bring to a corresponding ecumenical partner, and then he told how after he had been elected moderator there had been a press conference, and that at this conference a reporter had asked him, “If you could be removed from this planet for 5 years and could come back, what would you hope to find?” He said to the General Council, “If I were to go around this room and ask each of you to put down on a piece of paper in two sentences what you would hope to find if you came back to this planet five years from now, I am sure that we would have a variety of answers and you would even make a different answer tomorrow than you made today. However, the answer that I made at that time is one that I still would affirm. I said that I would hope to find a church united in the quest for love, peace and justice. We are indeed in the quest for love, peace and justice.

Then he got more specific…”Our goal is having difficulty in some ways because of the tension and discord that is in our denomination over the question of shall we ordain those who are practicing homosexuals. Presbyterians feel very strongly about this in different ways, and there are tensions, hurts, many ill words are being spoken. This is a great concern for me as Moderator of the church. I recognize that this is the mantle that has been laid upon me and it is my responsibility to see that our church shall work through this controversy and remain united in Love. I have reason to hope and expect that can happen.”

John Connor is no longer living. But if he were to come back to this planet now—not five but twenty-six years after he spoke those words—I am sad to say I think he would find he had less reason to hope and expect that can happen, than he had in 1977.

I don’t like that I feel that way. I don’t need it to be that way. I would dearly love to be proved wrong in my perception. But ever since the paragraph notated as G-6.0106b* became a part of our Book of Order, codifying selected sexual orientations and practices as sin, the ultimate uniting love on which John Connor pinned his hope for the church has become a scarcer and rarer commodity.

One word in this paragraph in our Book of Order stands out for me above all others as the telling motive and desire of its authors—“conformity”.

I vowed at my ordination, as did you all who are ordained to any office of the church, to live in obedience to Jesus Christ, under the authority of scripture and guidance of the confessions. This is the traditional order of authority in our church, and it springs from our theology. Jesus Christ, scripture, confessions. But G-6.0106b requires me to live in obedience not to Jesus, but the scripture—and tells me not to be guided by the confessions of the church, but to conform to their historic standards. Jesus doesn’t even make a mention in this paragraph. He doesn’t appear at all in this order of authority. Perhaps because he was a non-conformist.

One of the stories contained in the verses read this morning is the story of the danger inherent in choosing conformity as the driving value and ruling principle for a community. Now God is good and so we have inherited many books in the compendium we call the Holy Word. But if we were to construct a picture of ancient Israel based solely on a read of the book of Joshua, we would understand it as a male society whose primary mission was the launching of holy wars against nations which posed no eminent threat to them. Sort of like the idea you would have of our beloved country if you based your understanding solely on this morning’s newspaper.

God has chosen men to bring the nation of Israel into being. And they are going to do it by military force. They are going to claim for themselves a land occupied by other people. They are going to dominate. And they are going to purge that land of everything that doesn’t look, act, walk, talk, believe, love and worship like they do. The men of Israel do not discriminate among the foreigners. ALL the foreigners are equally an abomination: men, women, old, young, the cattle, the goats, and in this story, yes, even the sheep. The goal is to obliterate any sign that the land was ever home to anyone else, or to anything else. The silver and bronze they are to salvage for objects that might be a value to the community, but every other personal item belonging to the people doomed to be slaughtered---it must not be collected, but burned.

This is a story of purging the land of all that is thought to be impure; it is a story of destroying everything and everyone that does not conform to the Hebrew man’s culture. It’s what they thought was necessary for the survival of their community.

But in order to accomplish this, they needed help from someone on the roster of those slated for destruction. Two spies ventured into the land to scope it out and to gather strategic knowledge. They are shameless in their exploitation of foreigners for their own purposes, never flinching at the thought that later they would slaughter these same persons in battle. But they got themselves in a bit of a tight spot.

They went to the home of Madam Rahab, a harlot, to conduct surveillance and perhaps because her house was right there on the edge of the city, or perhaps –who knows but what the spies delayed for a little mixing of business with pleasure—or maybe because homeland security was just that sophisticated but however it happened, they were caught, and trapped at Rahab’s house. Now the king’s men had not exactly been close personal friends of Rahab. In her own world she was a marginalized person.

She was a woman. She practiced neither fidelity in the covenant of marriage nor chastity in singleness, in fact she made her living by being sexually promiscuous.

She couldn’t do or be any of the things that would give her standing in society. She couldn’t be a warrior or a priest; be educated or own land. That was in her own culture. Add to those things the fact that as a foreigner and, as a woman she was innately ineligible to bear the mark of belonging—circumcision, and to the Israelite spies she was the epitome, the essence of the enemy outsider.

She could not be made to conform to the standards of the Israel and so according to the plan she had to be eliminated, except that now the survival of all the people of Israel depended on her willingness to keep their plan for world domination to herself. And she does. Not, I don’t think, because she has grown fond of the spies. Not because she trusts them. But because she is the one, in the story, who understands the nature of God. “Yawh your God is indeed God in heaven above and on earth below.” She helps them not because she has faith in them, but because she has faith in God. Because from her vantage point on the margin of society, from her window high on the city wall, she sees that God is powerful, and that God is lovingly kind and that God can be trusted to save her from Israel’s attempt to establish a pure, chaste, unadulterated nation of conformists.

She hides the men, and then helps them escape but not before she presses on them the idea that they need to widen the circle of their community to include her, and not only her, but her entire clan—mother, father, brothers, sister-in-law, nieces, nephews—the whole family who apparently is not ashamed of her and her lifestyle and to whom she is very loyal. The sign of their inclusion will be a red cord in the window.

The battle happens, in the bloody way it was planned, and Joshua himself orders that Rahab and her family be rescued. They are, and they become, over time, happily part of the people of God that they always were, and Rahab is blessed of God, and remains steadfast in her faith in the God who saved her. And the people of Israel do not suffer any ill because they spared her and her family. No bad thing comes to the community for having widened the circle and included the ones who lived in the house with the crimson cord.

The people of Israel did have another problem with this land take over, however. They conquered the land but things were not going swimmingly so they began to investigate why that would be. And if we were to read further in the story we would learn that the problem was that one of the men in the inner circle, Achan, was not as faithful to God as Rahab. The instructions were to slaughter every living thing and to burn the goods. But Achan took for himself some of the booty that was to be destroyed, according to the practice of holy war. He stole, and he lied to the community and to God. Perhaps this is the logical end of a campaign of domination carried out under the motto of conform or die—that over a period of time of thinking in this way, someone will lose the sense of awe and humility Rahab had before God, and instead develop a sense of entitlement about matters that belong to God; a sense of self-righteousness that believes one knows better than God what the rules ought to be; or even a sense that one is called to act as God.

Achan did that. He substituted HIS judgment about what should happen with the booty for God’s. He was instructed to burn it, let it go, and walk away. But he reasoned that he was entitled to keep it for himself. When the community began to suffer because of his unfaithfulness, they tried him, and found him guilty, and stoned him to death. But not just him—his reckless act was carried out in callous disregard for those to whom his life was bound—he was stoned to death, he AND his wife, his children, his entire household.

Achan, a man approved by the community as a true insider, substituted his judgment for God’s and thereby brought death to his entire household.

Rahab, a woman who epitomized what it means to be an outsider, acted with loving kindness toward strangers and kept faith with God, and thereby saved the lives of her entire household. Now which one do you think had family values?

The community was not hurt by including someone who did not conform. The community was hurt by the self-righteous and presumptuous judgment of someone who conformed perfectly to the acceptable profile.

Yesterday Martha (Juillerat) referenced the United Methodist Church conference held recently, and I had the grace to hold that baptismal bowl during our worship. That conference was reported on in our local paper and my friend, Diane Nunnelee who is pastor not far from here at Central UMC told the reporter her perception:

“I do not believe the people in our pews are ready to look at one another and say, ‘we are going to vote to separate ourselves over one issue in the private lives of our members’. The moderate and liberal wings think the church can find a way to move forward in love for God and each other in the midst of diversity. But the right wing seems to have arrived at the point that ‘if you don’t agree with me, we can’t love each other and share our life and faith together.’ And I believe this breaks the heart of God.”

I believe she is right. And I believe if John Connor were to come back to this planet and look at his church, his heart would be broken too, as have been—and continue to be—the hearts of many faithful people—just look around this room at all these stoles.

Some scholars say that the story of Rahab is an etiological story—you know, one that is in the book to explain to later generations why there were always people living in peacefully in Israel, who were not Israelites—people who did not conform to selected historic confessional standards of the community who nonetheless were accepted by the community, lived and loved in the community, contributed to the community and practiced (in the humor of Michael Adee) good manners, good theology and good hygiene.

Maybe it didn’t happen exactly the way the story appears in the book. Probably it didn’t—after all it was written by men who conformed. The scholarly evidence for this is that even though the story mentions Rahab’s window several times, there is never any mention in the story about the window treatment.

But it is a true story in that it tells about how it is possible for people to decide to make space for one another. It is possible to hang the crimson cord, or the rainbow flag, and to have people see it, and say NOT, “There is the house we need to destroy, and the people in it, and their children and cats and dogs”, BUT, “There is the household of the people that we need to collect and have with us because what they know about God’s faithfulness, and what they can teach us about suffering, and what they understand about human loving kindness will save the church, as surely as Rahab saved Israel.”

What Moderator Connor said in 1977 is true now and will be until we cross the threshold of life’s final mystery. We are indeed in a quest for love, peace and justice. These are the things we need in our church. Not conformity. Love, peace and justice. These are the things that the church needs to be offering to a world of conflict and hurt—not adding to the world our own conflict and hurt. We are in a quest for love, peace and justice. May God grant us all wisdom and humility; all courage and gentleness; and above all fulfillment, in the quest.

*G-6.0106 b. Those who are called to office in the church are to lead a life in obedience to Scripture and in conformity to the historic confessional standards of the church. Among these standards is the requirement to live either in fidelity within the covenant of marriage between a man and a woman (W-4.9001), or chastity in singleness. Persons refusing to repent of any self-acknowledged practice which the confessions call sin shall not be ordained and/or installed as deacons, elders, or ministers of the Word and Sacrament.

Significant resource: The Women’s Bible Commentary, 1992, Newsom & Ringe, edts.

Also contemplate: Matthew 1.5