10-18-26_The Scarlet Cord in the Window

Joshua 2:8-21; 6:22-25, Romans 5:1-5, John 6:35-44/ Pr. John Kim, LLC

I was always someone who stood at the edge. Wherever I was, I couldn’t find my way into the center. Even among people, I never quite mixed in, like oil and water. I couldn’t open my heart deeply, even with friends. I was always the one hovering one step outside.

But God came to me. As someone alive and real. He called me, and he connected me to a community. It was a church I attended back in Korea. There, I heard the Word of God. It came into my heart, and I opened my heart to it. I came to know God more deeply, and to love him more. And in that community, for the first time, I shared friendship, love, and joy freely. The one who had hovered outside grew up right in the center.

The cord of love and life between God and me, and the people tied together by that cord. That is my hope.

The Bible tells of another person who lived her whole life at the edge.

At the Edge of a Wall About to Fall

Her name is Rahab. The Bible doesn’t hide it. It calls her a prostitute, a woman who sold her body. Just thinking about her breaks my heart.

Her house was built into the city wall. Not in the center of the city, where the king lived, but at the very outer edge. The first place to fall when an enemy attacks. She seems to have lived there alone, with no husband, no one to protect her. She dried flax on her roof, opened her house to travelers, and sold her body.

That house was a place of shame. We have places like that too, places we drifted into by our own wrongdoing, or places an evil world pushed us into. Places where it feels like everything is over.

But God’s mercy reaches even there. Even in the place of our deepest shame, God is present. And that mercy came to Rahab, at the edge of the wall.

The Scarlet Cord in the Window

People came and went through her house on the wall. It was where news arrived first. Rahab heard. How forty years earlier, the sea had parted. How the kings east of the Jordan had fallen. The story of God reached her through strangers passing through her house.

And she was afraid. “As soon as we heard it, our hearts melted.” Of course Jericho shut its gates. An army was coming. In their eyes, what Rahab did next was betrayal.

But this is not really a story about a city. It is a story about a heart.

Sometimes God comes to us in a way that frightens us. He shows us what is right, the very thing we don’t want to do. We sense judgment, even death, at the door. And the easiest thing is to shut the gate.

Rahab didn’t. Afraid as she was, she opened her heart, and ran toward the God she feared.

Why? Because what she heard was true. And because, even inside that fear, there was hope.

And she confessed: “The LORD your God is indeed God in heaven above and on earth below.” These are almost the same words Moses taught Israel as their confession of faith. The confession Israel was meant to learn, a foreign woman spoke first. And the one who opened her heart was God.

She asks the spies to show kindness to her family, and to give her a sure sign.

The spies answer: Tie this scarlet cord in your window. Gather your whole family into this house. Anyone who goes out the door, we cannot protect.

Doesn’t that sound familiar? Forty years earlier, that night in Egypt. God said: Put the blood of the lamb on your doorposts. No one go out the door until morning. “The blood shall be a sign for you on the houses where you live: when I see the blood, I will pass over you.” The “sign” Rahab asked for, and the “sign” of that blood, are the same word in Hebrew.

That scarlet cord was a Passover sign. It was God’s covenant. And the Hebrew word for that cord is tiqvah. Almost everywhere else in the Old Testament, that word is translated differently. As “HOPE.” “To give you a future with hope.” That hope.

What hung in Rahab’s window was not just a scarlet cord.

It was a covenant. It was hope.

And she waited. For six days, Israel marched around her wall, once a day. Every time they passed beneath her window, she must have looked at that cord swaying in the wind, and held on to the promise. The wall was still standing. Nothing had changed. But the cord was already hanging there.

Anyone on the wall could see it. If the promise had been false, she would have become a laughingstock, the foolish woman who trusted the enemy.

Hope is not a vague feeling. It is a cord tied to a covenant. And it was hung not where nothing would fall, but on a wall that was about to fall.

We don’t always hold that cord tightly. We are weak. Sometimes we forget. Sometimes we are so tired our hands lose their grip. But remember: the cord is not something we made. It was given to us. And God is holding the other end.

God does not blame the hand that grows weak from weariness. And he never lets go. In today’s Gospel, Jesus says, “Anyone who comes to me I will never drive away. I should lose nothing of all that he has given me.” The cord does not break, not because we hold on well, but because the One who made heaven and earth holds on to the end.

From the Fallen Wall into the Center

On the seventh day, the wall fell.

The spies went into the house with the scarlet cord, and brought out Rahab. And not Rahab alone. Her father, her mother, her brothers and sisters, everyone who had gathered inside that house. Just as death passed over the houses marked with blood on that Passover night. One woman’s hope became a whole family’s salvation. “Rahab the prostitute, with her family and all who belonged to her, Joshua spared. Her family has lived in Israel ever since.”

That hope did not let her down. Just as today’s reading from Romans says: “Hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts.” Hope placed in God never ends in nothing. Joshua kept that promise. But in the end, the one who kept the promise was God.

And she lived “in Israel.” She was moved from the edge of the wall into the center of God’s people. That was Rahab’s rest. No longer having to live on the dangerous edge. Becoming part of a family. Belonging.

I know what that rest is.

And the story did not end there. Rahab became the mother of Boaz, and the great-great-grandmother of King David. When Matthew begins the story of Jesus with a list of names, her name is there.

The woman at the edge of the wall became part of the line of the Messiah.

From the Edge to the Center, and Back to the Edge

But there is one more thing to see. Who was Israel to begin with?

In Egypt, they were outsiders. Slaves making bricks in the land of Goshen, at the edge of an empire. And the day they left Egypt, the Bible says, “A mixed crowd also went up with them.” From the very beginning, Israel was a company of people from the edges.

Now those people are entering the land God promised, a new center. And at that very moment, they take in another person from the edge. Rahab, at the edge of the wall.

God commanded Israel: “You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

This is what God’s people look like. People from the edge are brought into the center. And from that center, they embrace the edge again. A movement that never stops.

That is the church.

I was embraced that way. But it was more than a warm welcome. In that church, I heard the Word of God, and God opened my heart. That is how I came to know him, and to love him. Many of you probably have a story like that too. Someone opened the door, and someone told you the story of God.

Think of the strangers who passed through Rahab’s house. They probably never knew what they were carrying. But the story they told opened a woman’s heart, and changed her whole family’s future.

Now it’s our turn. Our church must be that kind of house. A house with a scarlet cord in the window. A house where the story of God is told, and someone at the edge hears it, opens their heart, and comes into the center. And a house where that person opens the door, and tells the story again, to the next one.

In a few moments, we will come to this table. At that very Passover table, Jesus took the cup and said, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood.” Just as Rahab asked for a sure sign, God has given us a promise we can see. This cup is the scarlet cord God has hung in our window.

It is covenant. It is hope.

God calls us, who once hovered one step outside, into the center of this table. And from that center, he sends us to open the door to those outside.

That is salvation. That is rest. And that is our hope.

Prayer

Almighty God, Creator of heaven and earth, we thank you for drawing us into your embrace.

Your love has no end, and your grace endures forever. Your glory and your love are our hope, and the direction of our lives.

Help our church to grow well in you. Evil is still around us, and within us. Protect us from it, so that we may do justice, share your love, and follow your truth. And so may we always be found in your embrace.

Holy Spirit, we thank you. Through you, the love of God has been poured into our hearts. You dwell within us, at the very center of who we are. And because your love fills us, our hope will never disappoint us. It shines ever more clearly and brightly.

In the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.