In 2 Corinthians 5, St. Paul tells us that we walk by faith and not by sight, which is to say that faith is trusting in what you don’t see, in a sense. It’s trusting that God is your Father even when it looks like He’s forgotten you. It’s trusting that your sins are forgiven even when everything you see screams that you are still under the power of sin. So faith is seeing what you don’t see.
But there’s also a sense in which faith is seeing what you do see, or perhaps more to the point, faith is refusing to pretend that you don’t see what is right in front of you. We see this in Rahab in our reading from Joshua this morning. When Rahab hears all that God has done to liberate His people from the hands of the Egyptians, when she hears how he’s devoted the Amorites to destruction, she knows there’s no escaping this. Unlike the leaders of her city, she doesn’t pretend she doesn’t know the things that have made her heart melt. And so, when she sees the spies from Israel, she sees what she sees. In their faces she sees the faces of men who belong to the God who cannot be defeated or deterred. When she sees these men, she sees the God she should gladly and quickly make her own.
May God grant us the faith of Rahab. When you see God answer your prayers a thousand times in this life, don’t pretend you couldn’t see this so you can continue thrashing about and living contrary to the will of the God you can’t defeat or escape with your rebellion and sin. And when despair creeps into your heart, when you’re tempted to believe that God has abandoned you or that He doesn’t cherish you, don’t pretend that you can’t see what is right before you. When you see the mercy God has poured out mercy upon you and others through the hands of your fellow Christians,don’t pretend those things are invisible. When you see the waters swirling in the baptismal font, when you see the lips of your pastor opening with the word of absolution, when you see the bread and wine that give you Chirst’s body and blood, don’t pretend that you don’t see what you do. These are His gifts, visible images of the love of Christ that has already claimed you and saved you. See what you see. Believe what you see. And when you do, every time you look in the mirror, you will see the face of God’s precious child, the one clothed and redeemed in the blood of Jesus Christ, the son of Rahab.
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