Rahab’s willingness to sacrifice her city for the sake of her family and her expressed faith in the God of Israel are two of the striking features of her tragic, yet still triumphant story. Click below for the complete text of her story from the Book of Joshua, as well as the references to her from Letter of James and Letter to the Hebrews.

God the Son: The Foreign Fore-Mothers of Jesus
Part 2: Rahab

Joshua, chap. 2

Then Joshua son of Nun sent two men secretly from Shittim as spies, saying, ‘Go, view the land, especially Jericho.’ So they went, and entered the house of a prostitute whose name was Rahab, and spent the night there. The king of Jericho was told, ‘Some Israelites have come here tonight to search out the land.’ Then the king of Jericho sent orders to Rahab, ‘Bring out the men who have come to you, who entered your house, for they have come only to search out the whole land.’

But the woman took the two men and hid them. Then she said, ‘True, the men came to me, but I did not know where they came from. And when it was time to close the gate at dark, the men went out. Where the men went I do not know. Pursue them quickly, for you can overtake them.’ She had, however, brought them up to the roof and hidden them with the stalks of flax that she had laid out on the roof. So the men pursued them on the way to the Jordan as far as the fords. As soon as the pursuers had gone out, the gate was shut.

Before they went to sleep, she came up to them on the roof and said to the men: ‘I know that the Lord has given you the land, and that dread of you has fallen on us, and that all the inhabitants of the land melt in fear before you. For we have heard how the Lord dried up the water of the Red Sea before you when you came out of Egypt, and what you did to the two kings of the Amorites that were beyond the Jordan, to Sihon and Og, whom you utterly destroyed.As soon as we heard it, our hearts failed, and there was no courage left in any of us because of you.The Lord your God is indeed God in heaven above and on earth below.

‘Now then, since I have dealt kindly with you, swear to me by the Lord that you in turn will deal kindly with my family. Give me a sign of good faith that you will spare my father and mother, my brothers and sisters, and all who belong to them, and deliver our lives from death.’ The men said to her, ‘Our life for yours! If you do not tell this business of ours, then we will deal kindly and faithfully with you when the Lord gives us the land.’

Then she let them down by a rope through the window, for her house was on the outer side of the city wall and she resided within the wall itself. She said to them, ‘Go towards the hill country, so that the pursuers may not come upon you. Hide yourselves there for three days, until the pursuers have returned; then afterwards you may go on your way.’

The men said to her, ‘We will be released from this oath that you have made us swear to you if we invade the land and you do not tie this crimson cord in the window through which you let us down, and you do not gather into your house your father and mother, your brothers, and all your family.

‘If any of you go out of the doors of your house into the street, they shall be responsible for their own death, and we shall be innocent; but if a hand is laid upon any who are with you in the house, we shall bear the responsibility for their death. But if you tell this business of ours, then we shall be released from this oath that you made us swear to you.’ She said, ‘According to your words, so be it.’ She sent them away and they departed. Then she tied the crimson cord in the window.

They departed and went into the hill country and stayed there for three days, until the pursuers returned. The pursuers had searched all along the way and found nothing. Then the two men came down again from the hill country. They crossed over, came to Joshua son of Nun, and told him all that had happened to them. They said to Joshua, ‘Truly the Lord has given all the land into our hands; moreover, all the inhabitants of the land melt in fear before us.’

Joshua, chap. 6

Now Jericho was shut up inside and out because of the Israelites; no one came out and no one went in. The Lord said to Joshua, ‘See, I have handed Jericho over to you, along with its king and soldiers. You shall march around the city, all the warriors circling the city once. Thus you shall do for six days, with seven priests bearing seven trumpets of rams’ horns before the ark.

‘On the seventh day you shall march around the city seven times, the priests blowing the trumpets. When they make a long blast with the ram’s horn, as soon as you hear the sound of the trumpet, then all the people shall shout with a great shout; and the wall of the city will fall down flat, and all the people shall charge straight ahead.’

…On the seventh day they rose early, at dawn, and marched around the city in the same manner seven times. It was only on that day that they marched around the city seven times. And at the seventh time, when the priests had blown the trumpets, Joshua said to the people, ‘Shout! For the Lord has given you the city. The city and all that is in it shall be devoted to the Lord for destruction.

‘Only Rahab the prostitute and all who are with her in her house shall live, because she hid the messengers we sent. As for you, keep away from the things devoted to destruction, so as not to covet and take any of the devoted things and make the camp of Israel an object for destruction, bringing trouble upon it. But all silver and gold, and vessels of bronze and iron, are sacred to the Lord; they shall go into the treasury of the Lord.’

So the people shouted, and the trumpets were blown. As soon as the people heard the sound of the trumpets, they raised a great shout, and the wall fell down flat; so the people charged straight ahead into the city and captured it. 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.

Joshua said to the two men who had spied out the land, ‘Go into the prostitute’s house, and bring the woman out of it and all who belong to her, as you swore to her.’ So the young men who had been spies went in and brought Rahab out, along with her father, her mother, her brothers, and all who belonged to her—they brought all her kindred out—and set them outside the camp of Israel.

They burned down the city, and everything in it; only the silver and gold, and the vessels of bronze and iron, they put into the treasury of the house of the Lord. But Rahab the prostitute, with her family and all who belonged to her, Joshua spared. Her family has lived in Israel ever since. For she hid the messengers whom Joshua sent to spy out Jericho.

Joshua then pronounced this oath, saying,
‘Cursed before the Lord be anyone who tries
to build this city—this Jericho!
At the cost of his firstborn he shall lay its foundation,
and at the cost of his youngest he shall set up its gates!’
So the Lord was with Joshua; and his fame was in all the land.

Hebrews 11: 29-31

By faith the people passed through the Red Sea as if it were dry land, but when the Egyptians attempted to do so they were drowned. By faith the walls of Jericho fell after they had been encircled for seven days. By faith Rahab the prostitute did not perish with those who were disobedient, because she had received the spies in peace.

James 2: 20-26

Do you want to be shown, you senseless person, that faith without works is barren? Was not our ancestor Abraham justified by works when he offered his son Isaac on the altar? You see that faith was active along with his works, and faith was brought to completion by the works. Thus the scripture was fulfilled that says, ‘Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness’, and he was called the friend of God. You see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone. Likewise, was not Rahab the prostitute also justified by works when she welcomed the messengers and sent them out by another road? For just as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is also dead.

Well, all that said, today I have a confession to make. I have something for which I may always need to make amends:

I love Will Ferrell. You all know Will Ferrell—the comic genius who got his start on Saturday Night Live and now stars in movies?

Well, I love him. I think he’s great. And as I thought about today’s readings, I couldn’t stop thinking about him. It was the passage from Isaiah that did it, with its famous line, “and a little child shall lead them…”

In our Christian tradition, this passage has long been viewed as a prophecy of the coming of Jesus into the world, as a baby “born of a woman.”

“and a little child shall lead them..”

This got me thinking about a scene from the Will Ferrell movie, “Talledega Nights.” Have any of you seen that one? It’s a send-up of Nascar stock-car racing culture and Ferrell plays a champion racer named Ricky Bobby. There’s a scene in which Ricky, Ferrell’s character, tries to say grace with his family before a meal.

He closes his eyes, clasps his hands and says, “Dear Lord Baby Jesus,” but then his wife interrupts him.

“Um, sweetie, Jesus did grow up. You don’t always have to call him baby. It’s a bit odd and off-puttin’ to pray to a baby.”

Ricky says: “Look, I like the Christmas Jesus best, and I’m sayin’ grace. When you say grace, you can say it to Grownup Jesus or Teenage Jesus or Bearded Jesus or whoever you want.”

That prompts someone at the table to say, “I like to think of Jesus as wearin’ a Tuxedo T-shirt, ‘cause it says, like, ‘I want to be formal, but I’m here to party too.’ I like to party, so I like my Jesus to party.”

That gets Ricky mad. “Look. I like the baby version best, do you hear me?! I win the races and I get the money.”

Ricky begins his prayer again. But now he’s annoyed. He’s going to grind his axe, as only a Will Ferrell character can.

“Dear eight-pound, six-ounce, newborn baby Jesus, don’t even know a word yet, just a little infant, so cuddly, but still omnipotent, in your golden fleece diapers, with your curled-up, balled-up little fists pawin’ at the air, lying there in your manger, lookin’ at your Baby Einstein developmental videos, learnin’ ‘bout shapes and colors…  Thank you for all your power and your grace, Dear Baby God. Amen.”

Now, I know this is just one goofy scene in a completely ridiculous movie, but I actually think Will Ferrell has something to teach us about Jesus and God, something to reveal to us about how we will be led to the Kingdom of God.

As Isaiah puts it, “A little child will lead them.”

And in our Gospel reading today, John the Baptist takes aim at the religious authorities of his day, calling them a “brood of vipers” and mocking their sense of self-importance as leaders of God’s people, the children of Abraham.

These scripture passages make me wonder: Who are the authorities of the people of God? Who will lead us to the Kingdom of Heaven? Who should we look to as representatives of God on earth? As God incarnate?

Will it be those of us with collars around our necks and stoles draped over our shoulders? Or will it be those of us who know the prayer book by heart and the Bible backwards and forwards? Or perhaps it will be those who work so diligently to serve the poor and comfort the afflicted?

Perhaps those sorts of leaders will get us there… But perhaps those of us in the traditional roles of churchly authority need to be careful not to become too full of ourselves, lest we become a “brood of vipers,” ramming our vision of the Kingdom down everyone’s throat.

Perhaps the true authority figures to whom we should look to guidance are, in fact, the least of these.

As Isaiah says, “a little child will lead them.”

In Jesus’ teaching, as related all the Gospels, little children are to be “foremost” in the age to come. In the Gospel of Mark, when Jesus is asked by the disciples who is the greatest among them, he says “The last shall be first and the first last,” and he then illustrates his point by taking into his arms an abandoned, street child and telling the disciples that unless they imitate a child such as this, they will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

And, of course, in both Matthew and Luke, the culmination of the Advent story is the first appearance of Jesus as a child.

What if children are to be the great leaders of the people of God into the kingdom of heaven?  What if we were to uphold children, in their weakness and guilelessness as exemplars to imitate and learn from?

Perhaps, children are, or should be, for us as Christians, our foremost authority figures.

Perhaps we, as adults, are called to let little children lead us. We are called to recognize our savior in children, to see in every little child that mythical child Isaiah eventually names Emmanuel. Emmanuel, which means, “God is with us.”

In short, perhaps we are called to do as Ricky Bobby does—to worship the Christmas Jesus, not the grown-up Jesus, not the teenage Jesus, not the bearded Jesus, not even the tuxedo t-shirt Jesus.

As adults, I think we can sometimes talk ourselves into the idea that success in this life depends upon how tough we are, how strong we can be in the face of life’s slings and arrows. And therefore, we see children—who are anything but tough, anything but strong—as inherently lesser than adults. We see children as beings to be formed and molded into tough, strong adults—like us! Childhood, therefore, can become defined in negative terms—by all the ways in which children are not like adults.

But the Gospels and today’s passage from Isaiah push us to see something else, something deeper in the children all around us.

Judith Gundry-Volf, a New Testament Professor at Yale University has written eloquently on this topic. Summarizing all of the passages from the Gospels in which Jesus exhorts his disciples to follow children, to imitate children, as well as all the passages in which Jesus equates himself, God incarnate, with children, she writes:

“The most significant challenge before us [as Christians] is to recapture in our own particular contexts the radicalness of Jesus’ teaching on children. Children are not only subordinate but sharers with adults in the life of faith; they are not only to be formed but to be imitated; they are not only ignorant but capable of receiving spiritual insight; they are not “just” children but representatives of Christ. What makes that challenge so difficult is that it would entail changing not only how adults relate to children but how we conceive of our social world. Jesus did not just teach how to make an adult world kinder and more just for children; he taught the arrival of a social world in part defined by and organized around children. He cast judgment on the adult world because it is not the child’s world. He made being a disciple dependent on inhabiting this “small world.” He invited the children to come to him not so that he might initiate them into the adult realm but so that they might receive what is properly theirs—the reign of God.”

To be honest, when I first came upon that passage in seminary, it took my breath away. Listen to what Professor Gundry-Volf says. She calls the work Jesus calls us adults to do with children, “the most significant challenge before us [as Christians].” That we must recognize and fully integrate into the our Christian communities the belief that children are not only subordinate but sharers, that are not only to be formed, but to be imitated, that they are not only ignorant, but capable fo receiving spiritual insight, that they are not “just children, but representatives of Christ.

And she points out that if are to fully live into what she calls “the radicalness” of Jesus’ teaching on children, we will have not only have to change how we adults relate to children, but, as she puts it, “how we conceive of our social world.”

In this season of Advent, therefore, if we are to fulfill Isaiah’s prophecy that “a little child will lead them,” we must look forward and work for the arrival of a community that is, in the words of Gundry-Volf, “in part defined by and organized around children.”

Not quite three weeks from now, on Christmas Eve, our Cathedral kids will present a Christmas Pageant. You might think that the pageant, as well as the various Kids Lead and Youth Lead services we’ve offered this fall, are meant to benefit the kids who participate in them.

And you’d be partly right. Partly. But the pageant and our Kids Lead and Youth Lead services also present opportunities for us adults to grow in the knowledge and love of God that might not otherwise arise during a typical service. The pageant and Kids Lead services give us a chance to let a little child lead us. They provide us with the opportunity to reimagine and recreate our Cathedral community by placing children at the center of it, by recognizing children as authority figures.

And so I want to quote Will Ferrell’s Ricky Bobby character one last time as he prays to Jesus—but now with a little more sincerity:

“Thank you for your power and your grace, Dear Baby God. Amen.”

Every morning, we are to wake up, as Paul calls us to do, and we put on the armor of light and step out into the world and embrace the day, proclaiming that today is the day that Jesus will come again and establish his benevolent reign over all God’s creation. And the whole world will rejoice!

Every morning we are called to wake up and anticipate, as Isaiah puts it, that the Word of God “shall go forth” as “instruction” and God will “judge between nations” and “arbitrate for many peoples” and “they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation will not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”

On most days, of course, none of that will happen, but we are still called to wake up the next day looking forward to it happening on that day. And the next day and the next day and the day after that.

Perhaps today is the day! Perhaps today is the day, when, as our choir sung from the 122nd Psalm: “Now our feet are standing within your gates, O Jerusalem… a city that is at unity with itself; to which the tribes go up… to praise the Name of the Lord… peace be within your walls and quietness within your towers!”

So often, Advent is viewed as a time of dreary “waiting.” Some even see it as similar to Lent—that Advent is, in a sense, a penitential season when we must repent in dust and ashes before we’re allowed to finally rejoice on Christmas Day.

Sometimes, I think our Episcopal Church, in particular, struggles to recognize the joy that the anticipation of Advent is all about.

[Click below for the complete sermon from the beginning.]

Today, we begin the church’s season of Advent. We’ve got our “blue” on. We’ve got our wreath out. And so today, we are given four readings from the Bible that are meant to get us into the Advent mood.

From Isaiah: “the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills; all the nations shall stream to it.”

From Psalm 122: “Let us go to the house of the Lord. Now our feet are standing within your gates, O Jerusalem… Peace be within your walls and quietness within your towers.”

From Paul’s Letter to the Romans: “You know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers; the night is far gone, the day is near. Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light.”

And from the Gospel of Matthew: “As in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day Noah entered the ark, and they knew nothing until the flood came and swept them all away, so too will be the coming of the Son of Man.”

As I said, I think these passages of scripture are meant to get us in the Advent mood—a mood of expectation, a mood of awareness of the imminence of the Kingdom of Heaven, that the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand—that we can reach out and grab it. But I do not put much stock in the literal meaning of the words here. For me, the mood and the feelings those words express are what’s most important.

I simply cannot buy into any of the literal readings of these texts. I cannot read them as presaging some sort of historical second coming of Christ. I cannot read them as predicting a time when the spiritually sufficient will suddenly disappear—poof!—as in that terrible bestselling “Left Behind” series. Have you heard of those books? They’re like a pulpy spy novels combined with a super-natural thriller and a horror movie. I cannot go along with the idea of Jesus actually appearing in mid-air descending from the clouds to wreak judgment on our sinful world.

But of course, many, many people do believe that the Bible is, in fact, selling that kind of thing.

On the one hand, there are all the thoughtful scholars who argue that early Christians living at the time our New Testament texts were written really did believe that such an outlandish event was imminent, that such a bizzarre supernatural happening was coming soon. These scholars then argue that the early Christians must have been rather disappointed when no such thing happened. But the scholars never explain how Christianity managed to grow and spread despite such a bizarre thing never coming to pass.

Then, on the other hand, there are all those modern Christians, Americans mostly, who in the past 100 or so years have expected this kind of nutty event to come about in their lifetime—some, of course, imagined it would be in the year 2000—remember Y2K?—others saw portents of it when the Trade Center towers fell; others see the tensions in the modern state of Israel as connected to it.

But nope, sorry, it doesn’t make sense to me.

In my reading of these texts, I see our scripture trying to communicate a mood, a feeling—a feeling of unlimited expectation, an awareness of the transcendence of time, not a prediction of an actual, mark-down-the-date, time.

Let me try to read today’s scripture againk and this time, with feeling.

“The mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established as the highest of the mountains! and shall be raised above the hills; all the nations shall stream to it.”

“It is now the moment for you to wake from sleep! For salvation is nearer to us now… the night is far gone, the day is near!”

“They were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day Noah entered the ark, and they knew nothing until the flood came and swept them all away! So too will be the coming of the Son of Man!”

This time, Advent, right now, is a season of joyful expectation. And for us, as Christians, we are, in a sense, always in the season Advent. For we are called by God to live perpetually in a marvelously hopeful “not yet,” a transcendently joyful “almost there.”

Every morning, we are to wake up, as Paul calls us to do, and we put on the armor of light and step out into the world and embrace the day, proclaiming that today is the day that Jesus will come again and establish his benevolent reign over all God’s creation. And the whole world will rejoice!

Every morning we are called to wake up and anticipate, as Isaiah puts it, that the Word of God “shall go forth” as “instruction” and God will “judge between nations” and “arbitrate for many peoples” and “they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation will not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”

On most days, of course, none of that will happen, but we are still called to wake up the next day looking forward to it happening on that day. And the next day and the next day and the day after that.

Perhaps today is the day! Perhaps today is the day, when, as our choir sung from the 122nd Psalm: “Now our feet are standing within your gates, O Jerusalem… a city that is at unity with itself; to which the tribes go up… to praise the Name of the Lord… peace be within your walls and quietness within your towers!”

So often, Advent is viewed as a time of dreary “waiting.” Some even see it as similar to Lent—that Advent is, in a sense, a penitential season when we must repent in dust and ashes before we’re allowed to finally rejoice on Christmas Day.

Sometimes, I think our Episcopal Church, in particular, struggles to recognize the joy that the anticipation of Advent is all about.

There’s an Episcopalian priest I know who buys his Christmas tree the same time as most, shortly after Thanksgiving, and then keeps it in his garage wrapped in burlap, and doesn’t put it up until Christmas morning and then, bang! the lights come on, the tinsel is draped, the ornaments are hung, and so on. And he looks down his nose at me and those many others who enjoy our trees in our living rooms throughout the month of December.

And, of course, many pious Christians complain about how the secular world starts celebrating Christmas during Advent. “It’s not Christmas,” they say. “It’s Advent. So stop having so much fun. You must wait! Wait!”

Our own Episcopal Church’s publishing outfit puts out Advent calendars every year with devotions one can engage in each day from today through Christmas, and every year these churchie Episcopalian calendars wag a disapproving finger at those of us actually enjoying ourselves as we await the coming of Christ.

I remember one year, emblazoned atop the calendar it read, “Sshhh! It’s Advent!” When I saw that, I felt like a kid in school being scolded by a teacher. This year’s version of the calendar says, “Slow down. Quiet. It’s Advent.” Makes me think I’ve been caught running in the halls.

Slow down? Quiet? Does that fit with our Advent scripture for today?

“It is now the moment for you to wake from sleep,” says Paul. “The night is far gone, the day is near. Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light.”

“I was glad when they said to me, ‘Let us go to the house of the Lord,” sings the psalmist.

“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,” says Isaiah. “Come, let us walk in the light of the Lord!”

So often, our church seems to say, “shhhh, slow down, quiet, assume a prayerful position and wait piously for God.”

But our scripture says, “Wake up! Put on the armor of light! Let’s go to the house of the Lord! Let’s go up to the mountain of the Lord! Come! Let’s walk in the light of the Lord!”

So no, I don’t think Advent is a gloomy, dark season of “waiting.” I don’t think Advent is about waiting at all. Advent is about expectation. Joyful, celebratory, expectation.

That’s why I think it is appropriate that we are baptizing today. Today, on this first day of this season of joyful expectation, we will baptize one month old Benjamin Lopez. What better way for us to get ready for the imminent arrival of the Kingdom of Heaven than to celebrate new life here among us? And to welcome this new little person into our community through the waters of baptism?

Because we all know the primary image of expectation that is at the heart of this Advent season, right?

Pregnancy, of course, pregnancy. I think Advent is meant to be a spiritual “What To Expect When You Are Expecting”–a time when we joyfully anticipate the coming of new life in every sense. Because if we get into that Advent mood, that Advent feeling that our scripture is going for today, I think all we have to do is to ponder what it’s like to expect the imminent arrival of a baby into our midst.

With a baby, comes hope. So much hope, so much wonderful possibility. When we see a newborn, we are filled with an imminent awareness of all the good in the world, filled with an immediate awareness of God’s presence. I got to visit Benjamin and his parents, David and Sarah, in the hospital a day or so after he was born. And I remember the feelings I had seeing him then, wondering to myself. Who will this little boy become? What will he discover and grow to love?

Those are Advent feelings. That’s an Advent mood.

So:

“Let us go to the house of the Lord.”
“Come! Let us go up to the mountain of the Lord”
“You know what time it is. It is now the moment for you to wake from sleep…
Let’s put on the armor of light.”

Well, at the very beginning of the Gospel of Matthew, there is a litany of “begats” showing Jesus’ lineage going all the way back, back, back to super-ancient times. Included in that lineage are four women (besides Mary), all of whom were foreigners who became Israelites through side entrances, so to speak: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth and Bathsheba. Over the four weeks of Advent, as we wait for the coming of Christ into the world, we will revisit in chronological order the stories of these four smart, resourceful and very unusual women, as they are recorded in our Hebrew Scriptures, and we will ponder why Matthew made such a point of including them in Jesus’ bloodline.

This Sunday, Nov. 28, we will begin with Tamar, a fascinating character who stars in Chapter 38 of the Book of Genesis (and is depicted here with her father-in-law Judah–the son of Jacob–in a painting by the Renaissance painter, Arent De Gelder). Click below for her story, as recorded in the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible:

It happened at that time that Judah went down from his brothers and settled near a certain Adullamite whose name was Hirah. There Judah saw the daughter of a certain Canaanite whose name was Shua; he married her and went in to her. She conceived and bore a son; and he named him Er. Again she conceived and bore a son whom she named Onan. Yet again she bore a son, and she named him Shelah. She was in Chezib when she bore him. Judah took a wife for Er his firstborn; her name was Tamar. But Er, Judah’s firstborn, was wicked in the sight of the Lord, and the Lord put him to death. Then Judah said to Onan, ‘Go in to your brother’s wife and perform the duty of a brother-in-law to her; raise up offspring for your brother.’ But since Onan knew that the offspring would not be his, he spilled his semen on the ground whenever he went in to his brother’s wife, so that he would not give offspring to his brother. What he did was displeasing in the sight of theLord, and he put him to death also. Then Judah said to his daughter-in-law Tamar, ‘Remain a widow in your father’s house until my son Shelah grows up’—for he feared that he too would die, like his brothers. So Tamar went to live in her father’s house.

In course of time the wife of Judah, Shua’s daughter, died; when Judah’s time of mourning was over, he went up to Timnah to his sheep-shearers, he and his friend Hirah the Adullamite. When Tamar was told, ‘Your father-in-law is going up to Timnah to shear his sheep’, she put off her widow’s garments, put on a veil, wrapped herself up, and sat down at the entrance to Enaim, which is on the road to Timnah. She saw that Shelah was grown up, yet she had not been given to him in marriage. When Judah saw her, he thought her to be a prostitute, for she had covered her face. He went over to her at the roadside, and said, ‘Come, let me come in to you’, for he did not know that she was his daughter-in-law. She said, ‘What will you give me, that you may come in to me?’ He answered, ‘I will send you a kid from the flock.’ And she said, ‘Only if you give me a pledge, until you send it.’ He said, ‘What pledge shall I give you?’ She replied, ‘Your signet and your cord, and the staff that is in your hand.’ So he gave them to her, and went in to her, and she conceived by him. Then she got up and went away, and taking off her veil she put on the garments of her widowhood.

When Judah sent the kid by his friend the Adullamite, to recover the pledge from the woman, he could not find her. He asked the townspeople, ‘Where is the temple prostitute who was at Enaim by the wayside?’ But they said, ‘No prostitute has been here.’ So he returned to Judah, and said, ‘I have not found her; moreover, the townspeople said, “No prostitute has been here.” ’ Judah replied, ‘Let her keep the things as her own, otherwise we will be laughed at; you see, I sent this kid, and you could not find her.’

About three months later Judah was told, ‘Your daughter-in-law Tamar has played the whore; moreover she is pregnant as a result of whoredom.’ And Judah said, ‘Bring her out, and let her be burned.’ As she was being brought out, she sent word to her father-in-law, ‘It was the owner of these who made me pregnant.’ And she said, ‘Take note, please, whose these are, the signet and the cord and the staff.’ Then Judah acknowledged them and said, ‘She is more in the right than I, since I did not give her to my son Shelah.’ And he did not lie with her again.

When the time of her delivery came, there were twins in her womb.While she was in labour, one put out a hand; and the midwife took and bound on his hand a crimson thread, saying, ‘This one came out first.’But just then he drew back his hand, and out came his brother; and she said, ‘What a breach you have made for yourself!’ Therefore he was named Perez. Afterwards his brother came out with the crimson thread on his hand; and he was named Zerah.

There is a distinction between temptation in its theological significance and temptation in its mundane and moralistic meaning… I have in mind pietism, which still flourishes in so many quarters in American Christendom: the “Bible belt” Baptists who regards dancing as consorting with the devil, the Methodist who condemns smoking categorically as a sin, some Presbyterians who regard abstinence in the use of liquor as a virtue, and a host of others from most any of the sects and denominations who think that something that human beings find pleasurable is lust and must be shunned lest the faithful be contaminated…

Some other forms of pietism have been cited here before. There is the all too familiar and peculiar pietism of which Norman Vincent Peale is the prosperous merchant. Here individualistic ambitions are besought and secured by hypnotic incantation, regardless of the costs or consequences to other human beings. There are the dogmatic pietists—seminary professors as well as “Sunday School” teachers are notorious among them—whose pietism consists of threatening damnation to those who conform not to what they say. There are many Anglicans, as well, no doubt, as Roman Catholics, Lutherans and Orthodox… who suppose that God’s relationship with God’s people is somehow jeopardized if the words are not invoked, or incense flung, or the candles not lit, or the gongs not rung at the prescribed times and in the ordained way…

“For Paul, the bondage to pietism is equivocation toward God’s grace. For him, all pietism is “indulgence in the flesh”… Indulgence in the flesh means the aggrandizement of human wants, ideas, pursuits, and enterprises despite the incapacity of any of them to substitute for the work of Christ for all people, including all people who vainly strive in these ways.

I also love this bit on Jesus’ and the Devil:

“Contrary to many ‘Sunday School’ recitations, the wilderness is not a period in which Jesus withdraws from the hurry and hurly-burly of the cares and affairs of the world in order to escape for awhile, practice asceticism, or meditate about the universe. Jesus Christ in the wilderness, so to speak, is not like Ronald Coleman in Shangri-La serenely pondering the ultimate. Nor is it… an occasion in which Jesus finally stops procrastinating about his own office and vocation. Jesus—in the wilderness any more than Gethsemane—doesn’t resemble, as it were, Adlai Stevenson agonizing about whether to accept a nomination…

“The wilderness interlude sums up the aggressiveness with which death pursues Jesus from his conception and anticipates death’s relentlessness toward him during his entire earthly ministry—in his exercise of authority over the demonic in healing, in his transcendence of time by renouncing the political ambitions that his disciples covet for him, in his rejection at the hands of his own people, in his confounding of the ecclesiastical and imperial rulers when they seize him and scourge him, in his submission to the last vengeance of death on the cross and in his victory over that humiliation. It is in that context—not as some yoga or mystic or magician, not as a novice about the character of temptation—that Jesus is visited and tempted by the power of death in the wilderness…

“Consider, for [another] example, the intercession of Christ for humanity in the first utterance of the Lord’s Prayer… The summation of the prayer is “lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil,” that is “from the evil one,” which is the power of death. Evil does not, in the context of the Lord’s Prayer, mean moral evil in its conventional definition and usage but refers to that which is evil for every person and for the whole of creation and that which is in fact secreted in every thought or deed or wish or word called evil: the power of death or, if one renders the proper name, the Devil.

“I am aware how medieval it sounds to some contemporaries to speak of the Devil, though it is Biblical to do so… At the same time I am not, in using the term, thinking of some grotesque, supernatural, anthropomorphic being as such. I do not apprehend the Devil after the manner of those who conceive of God as a Santa Claus figure enthroned in the sky. Yet it does not offend my intellect or other sensibilities to invoke the name of the Devil to designate that power—distinguished only from God—which is present and militant in this world in all relationships, and to which all other powers are subjected. In a word it is the presumption of sovereignty over all of life that marks the power of death, and it is the notorious vindication of that presumption… that makes the employment of the name of the Devil… wholly apt and, so to speak, respectful of such an exceeding great power…

Temptation is, thus, nothing so mundane or transient or simplistic as choosing “wrong” instead of “right,” or surrendering to pleasure or pride, or being enticed by the ethics of self-interest: temptation refers rather to the incitement people suffer to repudiate the gift of life by succumbing to the idolatry of death.

And sin, hence, does not mean that people are bad, or that people have proclivity for wickedness, or that they are proud or selfish, but, instead, sin is the possession of people by the power of death, the bondage and servitude of people to death, the usurpation of God’s office by the arrogance of death. Saying that people sin does not mean that people are pernicious, it means that they are nihilists.

How Can We Gain Knowledge of God, Part 3: Avoiding the Temptation to Worship Death
All excerpts from Count It All Joy, by William Stringfellow

On Wisdom as Knowledge of God, Given by God—Not Acquired by Humanity

“If any of you lacks wisdom, ask God, who gives to all generously…” – James 1:5

“All forms of religion [including those under the heading, ‘Christianity’] hold a common methodology… All consider religion as the human quest for God… It is exactly at this point… that the Gospel is radically distinguished from all religions. The theme of the Gospel from the first moment of the Fall is God in search of humanity… What people may know of God is only that which God discloses for people to know… What is audacious in the Gospel is the enjoyment of God’s presence here and now, whatever the circumstances; what is radical about the Gospel is the news that religion [the human quest for God] can be now discarded, by virtue of God’s grace.” (25-30)

On Doubt, and the Gift of Faith as God’s Transcendence of the Power of Death

“But let him ask in faith…” – James 1:6

“To ask God in faith for the knowledge of God… is to enter upon an estate of utter helplessness. Utter helplessness… It is a condition in which, as it were, a person stands totally alone in the world—naked, bereft, transparent, immobile, absolutely vulnerable in each and every facet of one’s person… It is the existential realization of fallenness. It is the time in the wilderness. It is the crisis of that unqualified helplessness which is death.

“In the Gospel, faith is about the evident reign of the power of death in this world and the possibility of the transcendence of death in this life… Death, both biblically and empirically, denominates the moral reality in this world that is greater than any other reality to which people attach significance for their existence, leaving God aside. Death not only outlasts money, virtue, fame, sex, religion or the other idols but death is the idol of the other idols. Death is the obvious meaning of existence, if God is ignored… Death is so great, so aggressive, so pervasive and so militant a power that the only fitting way to speak of death is similar to the way one speaks of God. Death is the living power and presence in this world which feigns to be God…

Faith is a charismatic gift. Faith is that most peculiar gift of God acting in this world which is offered to every human being and is the synonym of life itself. No person may receive that gift who supposes it is, in any sense, deserved, and who, therefore, doubts that it is a gift in the first instance… No person is established in faith (and thus renewed in life) who has not descended into that utter helplessness in which only God can render help… (47-52)

On Temptation

“Blessed is the one who endures trial, for when he has stood the test he will receive the crown of life which God has promised to those who love God. Let no one say, when tempted, ‘I am tempted by God,’ for God cannot be tempted with evil and God tempts no one; but each person is tempted when lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire, when it is conceived, gives birth to sin; and sin when it is full-grown brings forth death.” – James 1:12-15

On What Temptation Is Not: “Pietism”

“In the context of James, there is a distinction between temptation in its theological significance and temptation in its mundane and moralistic meaning… I have in mind pietism, which still flourishes in so many quarters in American Christendom: the “Bible belt” Baptists who regards dancing as consorting with the devil, the Methodist who condemns smoking categorically as a sin, some Presbyterians who regard abstinence in the use of liquor as a virtue, and a host of others from most any of the sects and denominations who think that something that human beings find pleasurable is lust and must be shunned lest the faithful be contaminated…

Some other forms of pietism have been cited here before. There is the all too familiar and peculiar pietism of which Norman Vincent Peale is the prosperous merchant. Here individualistic ambitions are besought and secured by hypnotic incantation, regardless of the costs or consequences to other human beings. There are the dogmatic pietists—seminary professors as well as “Sunday School” teachers are notorious among them—whose pietism consists of threatening damnation to those who conform not to what they say. There are many Anglicans, as well, no doubt, as Roman Catholics, Lutherans and Orthodox… who suppose that God’s relationship with God’s people is somehow jeopardized if the words are not invoked, or incense flung, or the candles not lit, or the gongs not rung at the prescribed times and in the ordained way…

“For Paul, the bondage to pietism is equivocation toward God’s grace. For him, all pietism is “indulgence in the flesh”… Indulgence in the flesh means the aggrandizement of human wants, ideas, pursuits, and enterprises despite the incapacity of any of them to substitute for the work of Christ for all people, including all people who vainly strive in these ways.

On What Temptation Is: “The Idolatry of Death”

“That the only temptation at all, for any person, at any time, is to succumb to the idolatry of death is disclosed and enacted decisively in the episode of Jesus in the wilderness. Contrary to many ‘Sunday School’ recitations, the wilderness is not a period in which Jesus withdraws from the hurry and hurly-burly of the cares and affairs of the world in order to escape for awhile, practice asceticism, or meditate about the universe. Jesus Christ in the wilderness, so to speak, is not like Ronald Coleman in Shangri-La serenely pondering the ultimate. Nor is it… an occasion in which Jesus finally stops procrastinating about his own office and vocation. Jesus—in the wilderness any more than Gethsemane—doesn’t resemble, as it were, Adlai Stevenson agonizing about whether to accept a nomination…

“The wilderness interlude sums up the aggressiveness with which death pursues Jesus from his conception and anticipates death’s relentlessness toward him during his entire earthly ministry—in his exercise of authority over the demonic in healing, in his transcendence of time by renouncing the political ambitions that his disciples covet for him, in his rejection at the hands of his own people, in his confounding of the ecclesiastical and imperial rulers when they seize him and scourge him, in his submission to the last vengeance of death on the cross and in his victory over that humiliation. It is in that context—not as some yoga or mystic or magician, not as a novice about the character of temptation—that Jesus is visited and tempted by the power of death in the wilderness…

“In every instance in the wilderness episode, the confrontation is between the Devil and Jesus; in each it is exposed that the issue lies between the power of death and the Word of God—which means life in the sense of people and God reconciled and, hence, the reconciliation of people within themselves, among one another, and to all things…

“Consider, for [another] example, the intercession of Christ for humanity in the first utterance of the Lord’s Prayer… The summation of the prayer is “lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil,” that is “from the evil one,” which is the power of death. Evil does not, in the context of the Lord’s Prayer, mean moral evil in its conventional definition and usage but refers to that which is evil for every person and for the whole of creation and that which is in fact secreted in every thought or deed or wish or word called evil: the power of death or, if one renders the proper name, the Devil.

“I am aware how medieval it sounds to some contemporaries to speak of the Devil, though it is Biblical to do so… At the same time I am not, in using the term, thinking of some grotesque, supernatural, anthropomorphic being as such. I do not apprehend the Devil after the manner of those who conceive of God as a Santa Claus figure enthroned in the sky. Yet it does not offend my intellect or other sensibilities to invoke the name of the Devil to designate that power—distinguished only from God—which is present and militant in this world in all relationships, and to which all other powers are subjected. In a word it is the presumption of sovereignty over all of life that marks the power of death, and it is the notorious vindication of that presumption… that makes the employment of the name of the Devil… wholly apt and, so to speak, respectful of such an exceeding great power…

Temptation is, thus, nothing so mundane or transient or simplistic as choosing “wrong” instead of “right,” or surrendering to pleasure or pride, or being enticed by the ethics of self-interest: temptation refers rather to the incitement people suffer to repudiate the gift of life by succumbing to the idolatry of death.

And sin, hence, does not mean that people are bad, or that people have proclivity for wickedness, or that they are proud or selfish, but, instead, sin is the possession of people by the power of death, the bondage and servitude of people to death, the usurpation of God’s office by the arrogance of death. Saying that people sin does not mean that people are pernicious, it means that they are nihilists.

“It is upon such a scene that God’s faithfulness to humanity is manifested as not only the gift which it is in itself… but also as a gift that is justifying, a gift that surpasses and preempts each and all of death’s temptations… The work of Christ, exemplified in the very prayers of which he is author, and for which he is authority, and as it is embodied in the cross and the emancipation of Christ from the tomb, is an intervention by God for every person in her or his particular suffering of the feigned, but ruthless sovereignty of death over life.

On What Humanity Is To Do: “Count It All Joy”

“The absolution from pietism is that there is no way at all to please God, no way to strike a bargain with God, no necessity to meet God half-way, no way to detract from God’s sole office as Judge of all, no way in which God’s godliness can be diluted in dependency upon human enterprise… All that is given to humanity to do is to live now in God’s triumph over death. What is given to humanity to do is to become and be, in the midst of the wiles and temptations of the Devil, the immediate beneficiary of the Resurrection. What God has bestowed upon humanity is, indeed, as James puts it, ‘the crown of life.’ That crown of life—that maturity of personhood in Christ—that fulfillment of life which is accredited exclusively to God’s virtue—is not some far off destination, not some remote prize, not a reward for good talk or good works or good thoughts, but is a goal already reached, a victory long since won, a gift freely offered.

“The vocation of humanity is to enjoy their emancipation from the power of death wrought by God’s vitality in this world. The crown of life is the freedom to live now, for all the strife and ambiguity and travail, in the imminent transcendence of death, and all of death’s threats and temptations. That is the gift of God to humanity in Christ’s Resurrection. People of this vocation count all trails as joys (to use James’ formulation), for, though every trial be an assault of the power of death, in every trail is God’s defeat of death verified and manifested.” (81-93)

Here’s Sullivan’s reader:

The non-fundamentalist Christian experiences doubt within the framework of faith, and above all hope.

We see through a glass darkly; but one day we will see Him face to face. Our unknowing is intrinsically related to eschatology — we experience doubt but dwell within it hopefully, waiting humbly and patiently for the day when all things will be made new. In other words, the uncertainty and humility of the Christian is not a mere admission that we “just don’t know,” but instead is given intelligibility by our hope. It might be better to put it this way: the Christian acknowledges that we don’t know right now. I also suspect — or at least this holds for me — that humility is related to original sin, our flawed and fallible post-lapsarian natures. It is not that our questions are unanswerable, or meaningless, it is that we can’t answer them as finite, fallible beings with minds that still bear the imprint of our aboriginal catastrophe. So we hold our beliefs with some critical distance, knowing that a belief in any God that does not slip into utter anthropomorphism will be aware of the limits of language, of marking with mortal words immortal things.

I’m not sure a simple agnosticism ever can really be sustained. I’m not sure why, apart from a kind of existential self-positing, and thereby probably delusional willfulness, it does not turn to cynical despair. I’m not sure it is ever non-parasitic on more robust forms of faith (including non-fundamentalist religious faith). I’m not sure why you would continue to attend to questions that you think are not open to some kind of provisional answer, even the answer of humble faith. The Christian who doubts has reasons for both believing and struggling, and the two are held together and given intelligibility by sustaining hope.

As Aslan puts it:

Pity the poor agnostic these days, caught in the middle of an ever-widening gap between an increasingly assertive religious fundamentalism on one side, and on the other a new brand of atheism whose dogmatic certitude and zealous proselytizing make it appear more fundamentalist by the day. Where in the conflict between these two competing claims of absolute certainty—religious and scientific—is there room for the person willing to throw his hands in the air and say simply, “I don’t know?”

I, for one, have long insisted (echoing a rabbi I had as a professor in seminary) that if we are honest with ourselves–much like our youth group preachers this past Sunday), then we are all agnostics. We do not know with certainty anything about God. We have all sorts of tantalizing clues and evidence in the Bible, in our various religious traditions, in the testimonies and lives of saints and prophets, and in the way our individual human hearts respond to those special moments in our lives when we can deeply feel God’s presence, the undergirding presence of the almighty good.

But certainty? The absence of doubt? As the Letter to the Hebrews says, “faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” Notice the paradox in each of those two phrases as they pit “assurance” versus “hoped for” and “conviction” versus “not seen.” And as Paul writes in first Corinthians, describing his great hope for God and the Kingdom of Heaven: “For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end… For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.”

To have faith, in my opinion, is not to know, but to hope.

Paul Krugman laments that we have been “mugged by the moralizers” and admonishes us that “economics is not a morality play“.

But the thing is, human affairs are a morality play, and economics, if it is to be useful at all, must be an account of human affairs… It should be no surprise that human collectives do not choose policies that grow GDP and employment when they deem those policies to be wrong or unjust… Political choice combines diffuse personal costs with powerful moral signifiers. We should expect politics, including the politics that determines economic policy, to be dripping with moralism. And sure enough, it is! This doesn’t mean that policy outcomes are actually moral. …But exhortations to policy that cannot survive in terms of moral framing are nullities…

The market itself is a famously amoral creature, yet the outcomes it imposes have become widely regarded as legitimate. That’s all true! …Our deference both to market outcomes and central bank management did not derive from some overwhelming scientific consensus to which the common man wisely deferred. They were the result of an immensely successful ideological campaign that conflated markets with liberty and democracy, and claimed central banks would deliver fair outcomes by virtue of predictably valued money. There is a reason why people are asking What Would Milton Friedman Do? in the same way a Christian might ask what Jesus would do. The technocratic interlude… was built upon scripture that Milton Friedman both penned and evangelized.

We are in a period of Reformation now, with all the turmoil that suggests, and the outcome is not predetermined. Simply assuming the parishioners will remain faithful, or lamenting that they ought to remain faithful, is no way to win the argument…

Krugman is the oddest technocrat, because he is also one of America’s great moralists. On so many subjects, his voice booms like thunder from astride the New York Times. When Krugman is at his best, and he is often at his best, no one mixes authority, moral outrage, and smart argument as effectively. But on the core economic questions of the moment — fiscal and monetary policy, national investment policy, employment — Krugman explicitly cedes recognizable morality to the other side, and in doing so, he cedes the argument. To be fair, moralizing Krugman’s positions might not be easy. Krugman’s views are inconsistent with some common moral frames. It is easy, in the context of prevailing norms, to argue that governments should be prudent in the same way as households, or that debtors have a sacred duty to repay creditors, or that good times must be paid for with bad. The most obvious moral counterplays, appeals to altruism in the face of misery, are vulnerable to vilification of the “undeserving poor” — people whose lack of diligence left them without “skills”, deadbeats who partied on debt they cannot now repay. These accusations are often inaccurate, hypocritical. and self-serving. But they are effective. The landscape of morality plays is challenging for someone with Krugman’s views.