Tears and Salt

Sermon

Genesis 19, selected verses

Imagine two strangers show up at your door, and the rules about hospitality command you to let them in. In the course of their stay, they are threatened by xenophobic townsmen, and then they tell you to flee or else you will die. You don’t really know if you should listen to them. Eventually they drag you out of town, you and your spouse and your children.

So you set out, and hear one more warning. “Don’t look back.” What do you do? What do you do?

Of course you look back; it’s the most human thing you can do. So what on earth are we to make of this scripture lesson?

It is a mess of a story. Scholars aren’t entirely sure why this narrative about Sodom and Gomorroh, and Lot and his wife and daughters, is stuck a bit haphazardly into the big arc of the Abraham and Sarah saga.
Some think it’s an older, free-standing story that explains the bias against the tribes of Moab and Ammon.
Some think it’s an explanation of why the land around the Dead Sea is so barren.
Others say it’s a morality play, a narrative whose message is that disobedient people get punished and a disobedient humanity will be destroyed.

The Bible paints a clear picture: the people of Sodom are no good. The prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel and Jeremiah describe Sodom as a place with a high standard of living because of its lush setting, but the motto of the people is “what’s mine is mine and what’s yours is yours.” The poor are not cared for, and helping someone who is destitute is a crime punished with a death sentence. Strangers are not welcome but threatened with extreme violence.

So God tells Abraham, Lot’s uncle, that since not even ten righteous people can be found there, the city will be destroyed in a barrage of brimstone – sulfurous fire that will burn everyone and everything to the ground. In biblical times, that was the most horrible judgment on humanity that could be imagined.

Because of their wickedness, the people must be punished. Abraham bargains and negotiates, and finally, is able to offer salvation to his nephew and family.

Now if you read the story with even the slightest attention to the details, you will notice that Lot is not a particularly good person. When the townsmen threaten his visitors, Lot offers them his daughters instead. That right there should qualify him for a shower of brimstone. But because his Uncle Abraham is a big deal, Lot is spared.

But not his wife. She turns around, for reasons unknown and totally understandable, and for that one act, she is killed.

Oh, the grief in this story! Humanity’s sin knows no bounds, it appears; in Sodom, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, strangers and daughters are sacrificed in the name of violence; a mother dies and her desperate daughters do the unspeakable – lie with their own drunken father so that they will conceive. The sins of the father are indeed visited on later generations.

Does any of this sound familiar at all?

I wonder sometimes whose voices are warning us to change, or to flee, or to obey God – and I wonder what the consequences will be if we do not listen to them?

Is it too late to change the course of climate change? I fear we will endure another summer of fire and smoke, while our neighbors in other parts of the country experience flood and hurricane and drought. For decades, climate activists have warned us, and now the science has proven them right.

Four hundred years ago a few abolitionists began the word that slavery was not merely wrong but an evil sin. In some parts of the world, their voices were heeded, but not in our own nation, not until too late. And now we see the aftermath of not listening for what is good and just; racial tensions burst, the laws themselves support racist outcomes, and our black and brown neighbors demand more, demand better, demand to be treated as the beautiful human beings that they are.

Dare I mention COVID-19? I remember in February of 2020, coming back from a heart-filling and heart-wrenching trip to Guatemala, joking about this virus, carelessly flying with nary a concern for a mask. For the rest of the month we all kept an eye on things, assuming it wouldn’t reach us, assuming, like so many other pandemics, we Americans would be immune.

And now wearing mask and having hand sanitizer at the ready has become our norm. We’ve let caring for ourselves and others become a divisive and politicized issue, rather than one of community health. We hoarded toilet paper and flour and yeast, some of us. We have needed to stop singing and hugging. It has been awful – maybe not as awful as fire and brimstone, but just as life-defying.

And some of us want to look back.
Some of us want to look way back, when skies were still blue and we happily drove our big gas guzzlers everywhere.
Some want to look way back, before the suffering of racism was presented to us every day, everywhere.
Some want to look way back, when pandemics were something that happened somewhere else. Ignorance really is bliss.

And now we are at a turning point, it seems, at least with the pandemic. Slowly, slowly, we are turtles coming out of our shells, coming to the sanctuary, hugging, traveling. I wonder if there is a word for us in the ending of the story of Lot, and the beginning of a new life for Abraham and Sarah.

Biblical scholar Phyllis Trible has said, “Sad stories do not have happy endings. [But] sad stories may yield new beginnings.” (Texts of Terror) We cannot rewrite the end of Lot’s story, make the villagers suddenly hospitable, reconstitute Lot’s wife, give his daughters better choices. The story is there, in all its shame and unhappiness. But in the continued story of Abraham and Sarah, there is a new beginning.

No longer will God hear the cries for justice coming from the poor and oppressed in Sodom. No more will Lot escape his due. His family exits the scene, and we return to the leads in the story: Abraham and Sarah, and their promise of a son. The men sent as messengers to the old couple are the same who warned Lot and his family. To Abraham they tell a future with life, to the Lot, they tell a future of death and exile.

Walter Brueggemann, writing about this story, says, “Times of beginning and ending are times when the mystery of life becomes most urgent and when the hardest theological questions must be asked.”
So we ask why God spared the life of Lot, a man who was willing to offer up his own daughters to a gang of violent men.
We ask why Lot’s wife was punished for the simple act of turning around to see her home and her friends and her family destroyed.
We ask if the fire and brimstone also killed the poor of Sodom, or if in some other narrative lost to us, God spared them too.

Do you sense this is a time of beginning and ending, one that demands theological questions? Do you wonder what God has been up to in all of this?

My good friend Eileen suggested that we might think of this story of Lot and his wife and daughters as a parable for us in this time as we end our pandemic isolation and begin new ways of life. If we think of it as a parable – a story with layered meaning – what might we glean?

The parable might teach us about looking back. We must look back to understand the story and the stories that form our life. Call it Monday morning quarterbacking, call it 20-20 hindsight, we learn about ourselves and each other when we look back at what we’ve been through and seek meaning.

But we can’t stay there. When we drive, we check the rear view mirror now and then, but if we keep our eyes on that mirror, we will soon crash. We look back for a bit, and then we look forward so that we don’t get stuck in the past, in past memories, in past hurts, in a past we might remember as golden, whether it was or not.

The parable might teach us about heeding the messengers in our lives.
I think that Dr. Fauci has been a messenger for us, trying to communicate clearly what was at stake with the COVID-19 virus. I’m sorry more people did not heed his words.
I think all those folks who shout and march and make signs that read Black Lives Matter are messengers for us today, too.
I know a group of young people who regularly have a sit in at the ODOT headquarters, protesting the expansion of highways that leads to increase carbon emissions that lead to poor air quality and poor health and more damage to Mother Earth. They are messengers too.

And there’s grace. I don’t know why God spared the very flawed Lot. I don’t know why Lot’s daughters were so desperate. But life continued because of God’s grace. And life continues for us, too. Collectively, we have lost so much. Dotted around the sanctuary are silk lilies to remind us of our members who died since we last gathered. That’s a loss, and there have been so many others – people have lost their jobs, their homes, their health, their trust, their relationships.

We have lost much, but the grace is that we are not lost. We are claimed and loved by God, and you are claimed and loved in and by this congregation. That matters a lot.

So in this tremulous time of endings and beginnings, take heart.
Let us be here for each other,
and let us offer each other as much grace as we can muster. Let us heed the messengers.

A last word from one of my favorites messengers, the U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo, from her poem “For Calling the Spirit Back from Wandering the Earth in its Human Feet”.

Let go the pain you are holding in your mind, your shoulders, your heart, all the way to your feet. Let go the pain of your ancestors to make way for those who are heading in our direction.
Call your spirit back. It may be caught in corners and creases of shame, judgment, and human abuse.
You must call in a way that your spirit will want to return. Speak to it as you would to a beloved child.
Welcome your spirit back from its wandering. It may return in pieces, in tatters. Gather them together. They will be happy to be found after being lost for so long.
Then, you must do this: help the next person find their way through the dark.

The Reverend Beth Neel
Westminster Presbyterian Church
Trinity Sunday
May 30, 2021