Saving Sodom

Propers: The Seventh Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 17), AD 2022 C

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

My old Confessions professor from back in Philadelphia used to muse that somewhere, way out in the Midwest, on some little rural farm, there sits an anonymous old lady, who prays every day for the ELCA. And she’s the only reason, he said, why God has held this little Lutheran church together for as long as He has.

Now, my professor was kidding, of course. He would often use humor and hyperbole to get his point across—much as Jesus does. But many a truth hath been told in jest. And I often wonder about that little old lady, and how her health is these days. “Lord,” she says, “please forgive, preserve, and guide my church.” And God says to her, “Okay, Ethel. I’ll do that just or you.”

Consciously or not, this anecdote of his reflects an old Jewish tradition, a Jewish legend, that in every generation there are 36 “Hidden Righteous Ones,” who welcome for us the presence of God and who justify humanity’s purpose on this earth. In other words, at any given time, the world is upheld by the prayers of just 36 righteous souls, and not even they know who they are; they are known only to God. Maybe you’ve met one. Or maybe you are one, and all of us depend upon your prayers.

Our reading from Genesis this morning takes us back to Sodom and Gomorrah, those infamous ancient cities wiped out by a cataclysm from above. And if our sources agree on anything, it’s that they had it coming. Sodom and Gomorrah were evil. In a time and a place where hospitality literally meant life or death, Sodom and Gomorrah were known for preying upon the weak, for rapine and pillage and murder. Here the vulnerable found only violence and violation. These were wicked, nasty cities.

And so God has informed Abraham that after hearing so many prayers, so many cries for justice against the evils of Sodom and Gomorrah, that God is going to go down and experience for Himself their so-called hospitality; which in this case means sending a pair of angels in the guise of weary travelers, sojourners in the land. How the Sodomites treat these angels will determine how these angels will in turn treat them. And Abraham knows that it ain’t gonna be pretty. This will not end well.

Someone’s going to get fresh with an angel, and that angel is then going to airstrike them right off the map. So Abraham immediately says, “Hold up, hold up, hold up. I can see where this is going. But they can’t all be bad, right? There have to be some good people down there. And far be it from You, O Lord, to slay the righteous with the wicked. Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?”

And this is a remarkable sentiment coming from thousands of years ago. Ancient peoples generally believed in collective guilt. They did not substantially distinguish soldiers from civilians, nor separate the sins of the father from the sins of the son. As an old Marine buddy of mine used to say, ancient armies had no stun setting; it’s all or nothing. You wiped out your enemy as completely as you could. Even enslaving the defeated was back then seen as mercy. Collateral damage was not a concern.

So what Abraham is saying is, “O Lord, don’t be like us. Don’t do what humans do, wiping out the righteous with the wicked, the innocent with the guilty. Remember who You are, O God. What if there are but 50 righteous people in those cities?” And God replies, with astonishing clemency, “For the sake of 50 people, I will spare them all. I will not kill the innocent.”

Ah-ha! So we’ve established that Abraham’s proposal is sound in principle. Now, we’re just haggling over price. “I am but dust and ashes,” Abraham presses, “but—what if five of those 50 are lacking? What if there are only 45 innocents down there? Surely the Lord of All won’t slay 45 innocent people just for the difference of five?” And God says, “I will not destroy the cities for the sake of the 45.”

But Abraham won’t let it go. “What if there are only 40 innocent there?” he asks. What then? “For the sake of 40, I will not do it,” sayeth the Lord. But then what about 30? “I won’t do it for 30?” How about 20? “I won’t do it for 20?” Ah, geeze, I don’t want to push my luck, Lord. Please don’t be angry. But what about 10? Will you kill 10 innocent people along with all the guilty? “For the sake of 10,” sayeth the Lord, “I will not destroy it.” Thus Abraham ends his negotiations.

Perhaps he thinks he’s done it. Perhaps he thinks surely there must be 10 innocent people amongst the population of these places. But if so, he’s mistaken. According to this story, there are found in Sodom a grand total of four innocent people: Lot and his family. And honestly, even these set a pretty low bar. If you know the Bible, then you know that Lot isn’t exactly going to win Father of the Year. But at least he isn’t willing to murder strangers in the street, which is something, I guess.

And for that the angels save him. They save him and his family. They do better than Abraham wanted. They will not kill even four innocents in the name of justice. They will not kill even one. For shall not the Judge of the earth do what is just? This is what sets divine justice apart. God will not accept collateral damage. His ways are not our ways; His thoughts are not our thoughts. And God will not sacrifice the good in order to punish the guilty. Wheat and tares together grow.

We will, of course. We will punish the innocent. For our security. For our rights. For our vengeance. But God will not. And woe to any who would pretend that He does.

But now I want us to think of this story in a different way. Imagine that this is not about two types of people: one sort all guilty and deserving of death; another sort all innocent and recipients of grace. Goats to the left, sheep to the right. How easy that would be! Yet the line of good and evil runs through every human heart. Imagine instead that this story is about you; that you are Sodom and Gomorrah, a microcosm, a personification, of those cities. And you, like them, have sinned.

And what was that sin of Sodom and Gomorrah? On this Ezekiel is very clear: “This was the guilt of your sister Sodom: that she had pride, and excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy.” Sound familiar? How would we each fare—let alone our society as a whole—if the person whom we treated the worst were an avenging angel in disguise? Kiss my butt goodbye.

Yet here’s the thing. No matter how far we fall, how corrupt we are, God will never abandon us, never abandon the children He loves. Ah, but what if only half of you is good? Or 45%? Or 30? What if only 10% of you is worth saving? What if only four? Indeed, what if only one? Will He save you for the one, for that spark of Christ within you? Dang right He will. For the sake of the One—for the sake of Jesus Christ—God will save us all: all of us, and all of each of us.

He will rain down the white-hot fires of His truth upon your entire city and burn up everything within you that is evil or fear or pain or sin; incinerating everything that shackles you, tortures you, enslaves you; everything that keeps Him from His child. He will burn it all away. And all that will be left is you: the real you. The Image of God, the Image of Christ—the person you were always meant to be.

The flames will not hurt you; I only design /
Your dross to consume and your gold to refine.

In the eyes of God, you are Jesus! You are His only Child, and the heir to all of His love. He will burn and save the whole damn world just for love of you.

I want to leave you today with another sort of story about righteousness and wickedness, about God saving the good from the midst of the bad. It comes to us from the Christian Desert Fathers of the fourth century, and it goes something like this:*

There was an old man living in the desert who served God for so many years. And he said, “Lord, let me know if I have pleased you.” He then saw an angel who said to him, “You have not yet become like the gardener in such-and-such a place.” The old man marvelled at this and said, “I will go then off to the city to see both this man and what it is that he does that surpasses all my work and toil of all these years.”

So he went to the city and asked the gardener about his way of life. When they were getting ready to eat in the evening, the old man heard people singing raucous songs in the streets, for the cell of the gardener was in a public place. Therefore the old man said to him, “Brother, wanting as you do to live according to the will of God, how do you remain in the midst of this place and not be troubled when you hear them singing these immoral songs?”

The man said, “I tell you, Abba, I have never been troubled or scandalized.” When he heard this the old man said, “What, then, do you think in your heart when you hear these horrible things?' And he replied, “That they are all going into the Kingdom.” When he heard this, the old man marvelled and said, “This, at last, is the practice which surpasses my labour of all these years.”

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

 

*Adapted from a translation by Benedicta Ward.