Year C. Eight Sunday after Pentecost July 29, 2001
Genesis 18:20-32
Title: “We grow in intimacy with God by asking Him questions.”
In verses eleven to fifteen we have the scene of Sarah’s laughing at the very idea, God’s questioning her about her doubts and Sarah’s denial she laughed at all. In verse sixteen, Abraham accompanies his three visitors, one of whom is now obviously God himself, from Mamre, near Hebron, to a place where they “looked down toward Sodom.” Sodom and Gomorrah are traditionally believed to be located at the southern end of the Dead Sea. In verses seventeen to twenty, have God debating with himself whether to let Abraham in on his plans to destroy Sodom for its sinfulness. In the ancient Near East a servant of a god or a king was often a friend and confidant. In telling Abraham beforehand what he intends to do God was taking him into his confidence, implying that he wanted or was open to his advice and opinions. While a king, god or God would not exactly be equals with a confidant and friend, they come as close to it as possible without either forgetting who is who.
There are two intersecting themes in this account. One involves the theological question of the boundary between God’s justice, by punishing Sodom for its sin, and his mercy and the other involves the spiritual quest of getting to know God more intimately, by asking probing questions of God in a friendly, open atmosphere.
The underlying context of the theological question is the notion of “corporate personality.” The ancients simply presumed that the individual and his or her group or community, be it nation, tribe, family or even one’s body, are one. What happens to the group affects the individual and what happens to the individual affects the group. “Corporate personality” affected moral questions as well as identity questions. In the context of morality the notion became narrowed to “corporate responsibility.” If an individual or individuals sinned the whole community was responsible for it and suffered the consequences of it, even though the rest of them were not actually guilty of the offense. In this story the notion is turned around. If a relatively few could cause the destruction of the whole group, could a relatively few also cause the salvation or sparing of punishment of the whole group? Ultimately, the answer to this question will be that even one, the Suffering Servant, can cause the group’s salvation. This is foreshadowed in the sparing of Lot, representing his family, the only righteous one in the whole city of Sodom. Although, in the story he is spared, the town is not. The answer given here- if even ten are righteous, God will spare the whole town- paves the way for developing the dialectic between God’s justice and mercy, a question still puzzling humanity today.
There is another dimension to this story involving Abraham’s personal quest. Through his open, friendly dialogue with God, we would say “prayer,” he is developing an intimacy with God, not by challenging his decisions, but by asking about his own limits, boundaries and where he “draws the line.” This is not merely to get information about God, but to get to know what makes God tick. Ironically, in asking about God’s boundaries he is moving the boundaries of his own relationship with God, coming ever closer to God’s center. The spiritual quest is related to the theological question, but is more important than it or any other question. It is the freedom and the act of questioning, not the question itself or the answer to it, that is important to Abraham. He will not question the answer, but he will grow in intimacy by asking it or any other question.
In verse twenty, “the outcry…their sin is so grave,” the sin of Sodom has traditionally been interpreted as a homosexual one. The word “sodomy,” anal or oral copulation with a person of the same sex and, in the law, such copulation forced on one of the opposite sex, comes from the city’s name, Sodom. However, the text does not support this interpretation. First of all, as described in chapter nineteen, especially verse five, it would be more public gang rape than the private act of either “sodomy” or any other specific homosexual act. While it is true that the Hebrew verb used in 19:5, yada`, “to know” is used as a euphemism for sexual intercourse and can be interpreted here as such the parallel text in Judges 19: 22-25 where another term, nebalah, “folly, vile thing,” is also used to describe how Jacob’s sons characterized the rape of their sister, Dinah, at the hands of Shechem, son of Hamor the Hivite, showing this to be a case of rape rather than sex between consenting adults. The context makes the interpretation that a sexual sin is involved here is a reasonable one, though rape and gang-rape at that is the real reference. It is not the only interpretation, however. Ironically the same verb, yada`, “to know” is used to describe God’s closeness to Abraham in 18:19. The Bible itself has interpreted this “sin” differently. The three major prophets did not see the “sin” as a sexual one at all. Isaiah 1:10; 3:9 refers to their sin as injustice; Jeremiah 23:14 as a variety of irresponsible acts so named; and Ezekiel 16:49 as pride, excessive food and indifference to the poor. Perhaps, their inordinate desire to gang rape these strangers came as a result of a broader rejection of God across the board, indicating how far the evil consequences of sin can spread and how low they leave a person or persons.
In verse twenty-two, “will you sweep away the innocent with the guilty?” Abraham knew God well enough by now to suspect that he was not bound by the laws of corporate personality and responsibility, that he could suspend them, perhaps in the name of mercy if not justice. He does not ask the question in anger, after having suffered great injustice himself, or after watching the unrighteous prosper and the righteous suffer ala Wisdom Literature. He simply wants to know God better.
In verse twenty-five, “far be it from you to do such a thing,” this, and the ensuing dialogue, can be interpreted as a typical, and typically Semitic, bargaining session where one party tries to get the other to come down to the minimum position, a sort of Semitic version of the Socratic Method. However, we can see here that Abraham is looking simultaneously with one eye on his experience and knowledge of God and with the other eye on what he has heard about God from others here, regarding his punishing wrath. He concludes that what the prevailing opinion holds is “far from” his experience of God.
In verses twenty-six to thirty-two, through a series of probing questions, gently and respectfully put, Abraham reduces the number of just people needed to save the whole town to ten. The subsequent story will reveal there are not, in fact, ten just persons in Sodom, but only one, Lot and his family who are included in the number “one,” a unit, corporate personality. The point is not to be arithmetic about God’s mercy. Ten is not the magic number. The discussion stops because the point is made: The righteous do have a positive effect on the environment- global, national, communal, familial, natural. Their numbers vis-à-vis the unrighteous matter. There comes a point when there are too few of them to make a difference. Even so, as the story goes on to teach, God will save the individual, if it comes to that. He saves Lot and his family primarily because of his identification with Abraham 19:29, that is, vicariously and secondarily because Lot behaved as Abraham did, especially in offering hospitality and then protection to the strangers and or visitors. No matter the case or numbers, the truly innocent will ultimately be spared. Both God’s justice and mercy demand it. For the sake of the story, an anthropomorphic tale, God is pictured as the potential destroyer. Actually destruction is really the outworking and consequences of sin. If one is not personally guilty of sin one does not ultimately suffer punishment, but in the meantime must suffer the consequences of living in an environment polluted by sin. The fire and brimstone referred to in the subsequent passages are stock images for utter destruction rather than descriptions of historical events. Amidst all the destruction sin causes there is the insinuating power of God’s grace for those who pay attention to it.
Sermon
In the popular mind the gods were indifferent to human plight. They had to be badgered, cajoled, flattered, bribed and tricked into caring for and about human beings. They were indifferent and tyrannical distributors of rewards and punishment based as often as not on caprice and arbitrariness as on compassion and justice. That was not Abraham’s experience of his God, Yahweh. Abraham knew the “party line,” conventional wisdom, accepted truths, of his society and times. But they did not cohere with his experience of Yahweh. Abraham knew about, though neither he nor anyone else would formulate it as such, corporate personality and corporate responsibility. He knew people were punished- or shared in the punishment of their relatives and associates- simply because they belonged to the perpetrator in some way. That was the way it was, is, and always would be, a more or less self-evident, if not specifically verbalized, truth. But such was not his experience with God.
In his conversations with God he pressed the issue. He was not so much interceding for Sodom as trying to get to know God better and test his surmises about God. For instance, would God really destroy the whole town if there were enough righteous people, those in a right relationship with him, to be found? And how much is “enough?” So, he asks God himself instead of arguing with the cultural “theologians.” His approach could be caricaturized as “typical oriental bargaining” or “Jewing down,” but it is much more than that.
Abraham prays according to the process whereby God reveals himself- gradually, one step at a time. His prayer is a model for what Jesus means by persistence in prayer.” He does not nag, pester or ask for anything for himself as such. He wants to know God better and does so by asking God questions about God rather than challenging God or questioning, in an implied critical way, God’s behavior or standards. Abraham talks to and questions God much like a child does with a parent. Implicitly, Abraham is prepared to accept whatever answers come forth. He just wants to know, not facts about God, but God, intimately, much more intimately, incidentally, than the Sodomites wanted to “know” the strangers. Abraham was respectfully, gently, politely pushing back the boundaries that distinguished him from God and all the while, like a lover with his or her sweetheart, asking if it was okay and could he proceed further. This was no oriental dickering. This was like two lovers entering into intimacy. Abraham stops at the number ten not because he has reached the farthest limit he dares to, but because he has gotten the point. It will come as no surprise to him that Lot, the only righteous one, along with his family, in the town was saved. Abraham would say to himself, “That’s my God, all right! Just like him, the God I have come to know.” Abraham’s persistence, his “shamelessness” before God, is born of his familiarity with a friend, not a desire to manipulate a parent. He learns of God’s “new math.” God is no cold calculator, no mathematical technician who would save the town because of ten but not because of nine. Let the cultural “theologians” conclude such nonsense, not Abraham or his descendants.
Abraham knew that what they, those supposedly in the “know,” were saying about the gods did not square with his own knowledge of his God. His God tempered pan-scale justice with mercy. His God was no passive, mindless administrator of deserved consequences. Nor was he a wimp. His God values the righteous more than he craves the destruction of the unrighteous and he intervenes to break the bond of sin and punishment and or consequences. Yes, there is a limit to how much sin God will tolerate, but he will not tell Abraham. It remains between ten and one, somewhere in there. Quite tolerant, but not infinitely so. But there is no limit, no line, no boundary with intimacy. In fact, that is the very definition of intimacy! Just as Jesus tells the story of the one, once lost and now found, sheep to indicate God has a different math book and has given up calculations, and just as Paul translated that truth in Romans 5: 15-17, so did Abraham both learn himself and teach others that one must be careful not to include the one, true God into the same “theology” as one finds the false ones. And it is a great disservice to God to apply such notions to him. He is different, not like the gods we concoct and he must be accepted on his terms, as he is and not as we would like him to be. When we can do that we have half a chance, at least, of applying the same outlook to reality. We can accept what we cannot change and change only what we can.
Within God himself there is no conflict between justice and mercy. Both are the same.
Destruction is the consequence of human behavior, not divine fiat.
Intimacy with the Lord is more important than accuracy about the Lord.
Progress in intimacy happens by asking probing, non-judgmental, questions of another and accepting the answers without objection.
The behavior, good and bad, of each of us affects all of us.
The Sin of Sodom: Good old or bad old. Gomorrah gets forgotten as one of the “Cities of the Plain” and Sodom stands alone when we speak of the “unspeakable” sin the whole city committed that caused its destruction. Although this sin has come down to us as “Sodomy,” referring to either private, consensual homosexual anal and sometimes including oral, intercourse or to forced anal intercourse whether homosexual or heterosexual, the scene in the Bible has little or nothing to do with either. It seems to matter not that the prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel have different descriptions of the “sin of Sodom” and none of them refer to what we now call “sodomy.” Indeed, as the story goes in Genesis nineteen, the “sin” refers to public, non-consensual gang rape of two men by “all the townsmen of Sodom, both young and old- all the people to the last man Genesis 19: 4.” Knowing what we know of the notion of “corporate personality” we do not have to conclude that this notation is numerically accurate. All were responsible for what they intended to do, even if all would not, in fact, do it. Nonetheless, there is a significant difference between private, consensual homosexual activity and gang rape. Referring to this text to justify the wholesale condemnation of both homosexual orientation and homosexual acts is to take as much liberty with this text as the Sodomites wanted to take with Lot’s visitors. Both are “sins of Sodom.” The story as told is quite bizarre and it gets worse. In trying to dissuade the townsmen from raping the men, Lot offered his two virginal, but betrothed, daughters in their stead! Hardly a just or merciful solution! The story gets even more bizarre! Subsequently, the two daughters, each in turn, effectively rape their own father, getting Lot so drunk that he has no memory of having intercourse with them, fathering both the Moabites and the Ammonites! Maybe they were getting even with him for offering them as rape victims? The point is that we can hardly use the details of this whole bizarre tale to explain exactly what sin caused the destruction of either Sodom or Gomorrah. They caused their own destruction by their wholesale and unrelenting disregard for the “laws” God has placed in the human conscience, resulting in going so far as to pollute the minds and behavior of young and old, down to the last man and causing the most inhumane behavior. No doubt sexual behavior was involved, but it was more than just that.
Intimacy: Everyone learns, one way or another, that intimacy and sexual intercourse of whatever kind are not the same. Foolishly, some folks believe that if they are sexually active with another person they are also intimate with that person, know the person intimately and have a mutual bond of fidelity between them. There are two ways we can learn the difference between intimacy and sex. We can learn from the experience of others, like we learn so many other truths, or we can learn by personal experience, like we also learn so many other truths. The first way does not hurt; the second way always does. God reveals himself and his truths to us so that we will not get hurt, but if we insist on learning on our own he will let us get hurt so that we will learn before we destroy our lives and the lives of others. Either way we come to know not only truths about life, love and God, we come to know God. That is intimacy! Being present fully and nakedly before another who is similarly present to us is being intimate. It is not merely knowing facts about a person, although that helps somewhat. It is knowing the person as such, in all his or her uniqueness. It is gentle knowing, non-judgmental and non-violent, unlike much of the sexual intercourse, physical and psychological, that goes on between humans, heterosexual and homosexual. That is the intimacy between Abraham and God and between God and each one of us, if we accept his terms. Amen.
