110522 Sodom and Gomorrah

To begin, some givens…

·         The Bible wasn’t dictated by God.  Inspired, sure.  But dictated means that every single word was from God’s mouth, even the stuff that’s not accurate.  There are some who want to make a big deal about the Bible being inerrant – without error in its original state – but this is a meaningless statement since we don’t have that document.  In addition, one needs to wonder why Judaism has never taken this position, even though the entire Old Testament was from the Jewish tradition, and most, if not all of the New Testament writers would have shared the same Jewish perspective.  Why would we adopt a position they would have rejected?

·         The Bible as inspired means that God worked with people as they sought to remember and record their personal and national relationship with God.  This means that the writers’ worldview is laden within the text, adding really helpful color and context if we’ll allow it.

·         Because the Bible includes the worldview of the writers’ when we study a text, we must do our best to understand their perspective.  If we do not, we may end up believing something they didn’t, and didn’t intend for us to believe.  Or, we may believe something that we shouldn’t because we see the world differently than they did because we have more information.

·         Working with a biblical text becomes very engaging as we try to come alongside our ancestors, hear from them, consider their conclusions, and ultimately deciding how we need to apply ancient passages to our contemporary lives.

On to Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 19)…

First, some backstory.  If you read the chapters preceding the one we’re looking at here, you’ll discover that there’s more going on than simply God getting ticked off at a small town.  Lot chose to live in the region where Sodom was located with his family and flocks because it was so lush when Abraham gave him first dibs on which land to graze.  That’s how Lot got there in the first place.  Maybe the grass isn’t always greener.  Or maybe it is, but only because the fertilizer is knee high.  Wear boots.

                Like the Noah story, Abraham gets a visit from God and along with it an announcement that God has heard of the wickedness in Sodom, and has come to see it for himself before he destroys it.  Abraham, showing great hospitality and respect, dialogues with God and negotiates some hopeful terms for the doomed village: if just ten righteous people can be found in the community, God will spare them all.  This is reminiscent of God telling Noah that he is the only righteous man in the whole world worth saving.  The story is going to come back to this beginning encounter after all hell breaks loose on Sodom.  This is a helpful thing to keep in mind because it’s how early communities preserved their history in the oral tradition.  It’s called a chiastic structure, or a palistrophe, where the story ends from where it began, making it easy to remember and pass along.

A personal visit from the King.  We learn that the two men who enter Sodom were angels. A couple of strange things happen as they enter the town.  In our present day, if we are on a trip and enter a town we knew nothing about, we would get a bite to eat, pay the tab, and then find a motel and stay the night.  The next morning we would pay our bill, and within two miles down the road we would have forgotten every person we encountered – the restaurant hostess, the wait staff, the motel manager, the housekeeping staff – all deleted from our RAM.

            But the ancient world was not so impersonal.  If two visitors came to the city gate – where the community leaders gathered to discuss the day’s business – it would be a black mark against the city if nobody offered hospitality to them.  Interestingly, the only one who did, according to the story, was Lot, himself an immigrant.  When our ancestors heard that detail, they would have gasped – they have been given an early clue that Sodom was inhospitable.

            When Lot offers hospitality, however, the men refuse.  If no hospitality is offered, people gasp.  If hospitality is offered and rejected, people gasp again.  You don’t do that in that part of the world, especially at that time.  My wife and I have accidently “stepped in it” along these lines.  The culture in which we were raised never wanted to impose on anybody.  If somebody offered hospitality, it wasn’t to be taken seriously – they were simply being polite, wanting to let us know the gesture was there.  When acquaintances have offered a form of hospitality, we deemed it as a non-literal gesture, thanked them and politely refused.  If the people were raised like us, all was well.  But there have been a few times where the cultures clashed, and we realized that we may have unintentionally offended the one offering a meal.  I think more of the world is like these friends who really, genuinely offer the invitation – not just a gesture – and are a little put out when they get rejected.  If Lot was like most people, he could have walked away greatly offended.  But two things were true of Lot.  He was a genuinely kind person (even if he had faults that led to problems down the road), and he knew how awful the streets of Sodom were at night, and insisted that they stay in the safety of his house.

Rough town.  Lot was right.  The story tells us that all the men of the town – young and old – came to Lot’s house, banged on the door, demanded that the two visitors be released to them so that they might have sex with them.  Worst pick up line in history. 

What is happening here?  Were their wives at Women of Faith for the weekend or something?  Some have stopped here, knowing what’s coming, and have concluded that this is the ultimate proof-text for God’s hatred of all things homosexual.  That would make sense if we didn’t do some research.  Why research, though?  Isn’t the truth obvious?  How can you mistake it – the men of the town wanted to have sex with the visiting men within Lot’s home – how much more black and white can you get?  But what if it’s not that clear?  What if our presupposition is wrong?  What are we potentially wrongly attributing to the character of God?  What hatred are we allowing ourselves to perpetuate if this is where we stop?

            The issue in Sodom had nothing to do with sexual orientation.  It had everything to do with violence.

            If a woman is raped, nobody calls it making love or even sex, because we know that even though what took place may have been forcible intercourse, we see it first and foremost as violence.

            This is why Lot acts so passionately – what they were demanding was unthinkable in every culture in the Ancient Near East (ANE).  He even offers his virgin daughters to them instead – horrific choice in our estimation – a sign of how wretched the situation must have been.  He placed himself outside and shut his front door – willing to die to save the men inside.  What the townsmen were doing warranted the death penalty universally in the ANE.  The rape they were intending was a form of torture used on prisoners of war.  Absolutely inhumane.  The outcries heard by God were correct.

Lot leaves, finally.  Lot didn’t like change, even when there was nothing worth staying for in Sodom.  But he and the fam only left when the angelic men literally took them by the hand and escorted him, his wife and daughters out of town.  His daughters’ fiancés, by the way, didn’t heed the warning – they were true-to-form Sodomites, I guess.

Fire from heaven.  After some negotiating with the angels (interesting and odd), Sodom and the neighboring city of Gomorrah were destroyed.  Lot’s wife, looking back (apparently) longingly turned into a pillar of salt.  Stephen Spielberg may have written that part in…

            An important thing to keep in mind is that the people of the ANE assumed that bad stuff was due to the wrath of the gods – the gods are angry.  Even though our faith heritage made a unique advance with monotheism, they still engaged God from their polytheistic, mythologically-based perspective.  All weather disasters, birth defects, military defeats, skin diseases, poor crop harvest, drought, infertility – all the bad stuff – came as judgment from their angry God.  Because we have access to information they did not, we appropriately need to ask ourselves if we need to see the world and God through the same lens as our ancient ancestors.  There are parts we definitely need to respectfully sequester because of what we know, and there are parts to which we hold fast.  That's not easy, is it?

So, if it’s not a story about the wrath of God, what were our ancestors trying to communicate?

Back to Abraham.  Once safe, the word came down that the reason God spared Lot and his daughters was because of Abraham’s righteous request more than Lot’s so-so faith.  Like the story of Noah, and like many additional stories throughout Genesis, the intended take-away for the ancients as well as us is one word: redemption.

            Sending an angelic delegation to Sodom is an act of redemption.  Blinding the mob at Lot’s front door – maybe that will get them thinking, since blindness was seen as an act of God's judgment – is an act of redemption.  Telling Lot about the forthcoming fate of Sodom, insisting on his leaving town, personally escorting him out of town, negotiating where he stays – all are acts of redemption.

My take away.  To spend a lot of time wondering about the literalness of certain aspects of this incredible story is to miss the much greater lesson our ancestors were trying to communicate.  In a time when it seemed people were just pawns being moved around by local, geographically-based deities, ancient Jews were experiencing something profoundly different.  God was not impersonal, but rather showed up on our respective doorsteps.  He was not callous and indifferent to the desires of humanity, but responded to their pleas.  And even though bad stuff happened, God paved a way of redemption for any who would take it.

            This has not changed.  God still shows up personally.  God still hears our prayers.  God still offers redemption as we move through our journey.  Life is not a waste of time.  God is not indifferent.  God is with us on the journey – even the tough parts – always offering a hand in the direction of our complete wholeness and peace – shalom and salvation in a nutshell.

            In light of this then, may you treat with great respect the story we’ve been given by letting it be what it was for its first audience.  And may you treat the story and our ancestors with great respect by seeking the primary message of the story they were trying to convey and apply it to your life, that you might truly live and help others do the same.

BONUS!  I recently got a link to this essay from a CrossWalker who  has discovered great dialogue in this particular site.  If you'd like to get great, documented understanding of the Ancient Near East - the landscape and worldview of much of our Old Testament - grab a cup of coffee and dig into the essay.  You won't be sorry!


http://biologos.org/uploads/projects/godawa_scholarly_paper_2.pdf