Sodom and Gomorrah

Sermon prepared for July 14, 2024, at St. Paul's Lutheran Church, Rye Brook, N.Y.

Then the LORD rained on Sodom and Gomorrah sulphur and fire from the LORD out of heaven; and he overthrew those cities, and all the Plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and what grew on the ground. But Lot’s wife, behind him, looked back and she became a pillar of salt. – Genesis 19:24-26.

Last week I advocated the Ignatian approach to bible study, which involves using our imaginations to immerse ourselves in the biblical story, to imagine ourselves in the very midst of the action.

Well, here’s a passage I’d rather stand back from.

Sulfur and fire are raining on the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. People are running and screaming and being reduced to ash heaps. Buildings and city walls collapse on the crowds as the cities are incinerated. The sulfurous rotten egg smell is right out of hell. Only the virtuous Lot and his family are allowed to escape so long as they turn they turn their backs on the cataclysm. But Lot’s wife, for obscure reasons, looks back and is turned into a salt lick.

I don’t wish to let these horrific images into my head.

But, as I think about it, the images are already there.

Perhaps you saw the sizzling carnage so graphically displayed last week on House of the Dragon, a prequel on MAX to the popular Game of Thrones. This is science fiction but the climactic scene last Sunday may even have equaled the pyrotechnics of Sodom and Gomorrah. The exceptional computer-generated images and roaring Surround Sound make you want to cover your ears and eyes. Instead of angels, fire-spouting dragons descend from above, immolating the screaming humans below. In one scene that will live long in my head, a survivor touches the armor of a knight and the armor collapses and spills the ash that was once a man.

Watching this, I began to wonder why Hollywood had never made a movie about Sodom and Gomorrah. Violence and destruction are always popular themes and you’d think such a film would be a box office hit.

And indeed as I scanned through IMDb, the Internet Movie Database, I discovered that this movie had actually been made in 1962, directed by Robert Aldrich and starring Stewart Granger as Lot. If you never saw the movie you haven’t missed anything. The response of critics was  universally negative and the New York Times said it was an “obvious but feeble imitation” of Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments. But the film did have acceptable special effects of buildings collapsing and violent infernos.

And raining sulfur and fire are among the reasons we find the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah so compelling – and so horrifying.

But does it make sense that a loving God would periodically destroy God’s own creation, and with such violence?

We must ask. Did it really happen? Or is it a metaphor? 

In his book, Who is Jesus? Answers to Your Questions About the Historical Jesus, Professor John Dominic Crossan writes, “My point, once again, is not that these ancient people told literal stories and we are now smart enough to take them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we are now dumb enough to take them literally.”

So did it really happen? Or are the ancients writing symbolically about God’s attitude toward sin? And if it did happen, is that why are no traces of Sodom and Gomorrah today?

We are free, of course, to form our own conclusions as God lays the question on our hearts.

But there are some historical suggestions that the cities were really destroyed. But by an earthquake, not angels.

Wikipedia summarizes the views of Jean-Pierre Isbouts, author of The Biblical World: An Illustrated Atlas (National Geographic Press), as follows:

“One such idea is that (the cities were) devastated by an earthquake between 2100 and 1900 B.C.E … (unleashing) showers of steaming tar.”

Maybe it happened, maybe it didn’t. But what is the point of the story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah?

The story has, of course, been used by biblical literalists as evidence that – as the deluded minions of Westboro Baptist Church have proclaimed –  “God hates gays.”

This kind of bizarre inductive reasoning provides one of what Father Jim Martin calls “gotcha passages,” a biblical “proof text” that LGBTQ persons are condemned by God. It’s the same kind of biblical myopia that enables bigots to conclude that the bible denounces it when a man sleeps with a man, but blesses it when a man is owned as a slave. 

Those of us who have been blessed with God’s grace know that God is love, God loves everyone, and God has made each of us the way we are. As Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg told homophobic Mike Pence, “If you got a problem with who I am, your problem is not with me – your quarrel, is with my creator.”

So what was the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah?

The prophet Ezekiel writes (16:49-51):

“This was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the. Poor and the needy. They were haughty and did abominable things before me; therefore I removed them when I saw it.”

Grant Hartley, a freelance writer in St. Louis, notes that our view of Sodom and Gomorrah must be seen through the lens of love as expressed by Jesus: 

“Jesus makes it clear that what is done for ‘the least of these (his) siblings,’ is in a real sense done for him. (Mt 25:40) Our faith demands hospitality, especially toward the poor, the needy, and the stranger.”

Hartley suggests that “if one were trying to relieve oneself of this passage’s radical demands of hospitality, twisting the story to focus on gay people would be a convenient strategy.

“Using the story of Sodom and Gomorrah to suggest God’s wrath against gay people makes it rather easy to avoid its actual demands to open up our wallets, homes, and hearts to people in need. How many times,” Hartley continues, “has misunderstanding, empowered by hatred of the other, led some to use the passage to sanction everything that made Sodom guilty: kicking children out of their homes, refusing to serve certain people, discriminating in housing and jobs, breaking families apart, fighting against civil rights?”

I think it’s tempting to remove ourselves from the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. Rather than immerse ourselves in the passages, we try to look at it objectively. Those nasty people were selfish and inhospitable haters who squandered their resources and got what they deserved.

But a lot of those failings sound uncomfortably familiar. Our media, whether FOX News or MSNBC, are showing us very disturbing images of ourselves. Contrary to God’s command to love and welcome the stranger, so many of our citizens would restrict immigration or even endorse deporting 11 million unregistered immigrants to God knows where. So many of our citizens would be happier living in white-only enclaves. So many of our citizens ignore the poor while the vast gulf between haves and have-nots gets larger and larger.

Are we in the same boat as Sodom and Gomorrah. Are we systematically destroying ourselves without benefit of sulfur and fire?

Rev. Kelty Van Binsbergen, a pastor from Comax, British Columbia puts it starkly:

Our present lifestyle in North America and Europe is not sustainable from an economic justice point of view. We have most of the resources, most of the money. Eventually that's going to crash, one way or another. The planet is running out of resources, we can only grow so much food, poorer countries will rebel. Poorer people within our own rich countries will rebel, are starting to rebel, at the injustice and inequities. We're a lot like Sodom & Gomorrah, bringing about our own destruction. Like Lot's wife, it's hard not to look back, reluctant to embrace a new way of living that will be harder, and when we look back instead of forward, we end up frozen, like a pillar of salt, unable to do much.”

Van Binsbergen would make us feel a little awkward if we disparaged the selfish, bigoted, opulent people of Sodom and Gomorrah because they didn’t have the moral strength to change their ways and avoid destruction.

For us, the only way to reanimate this frozen pillar of salt is to remind ourselves of the grace of our calling. 

To recommit to our ministries: Our motto: God's work. Our hands. Our mission: Together in Jesus Christ we are freed by grace to live faithfully, witness boldly and serve joyfully.

And to do what the citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah would not or could not do for themselves:

Revel in the grace of the great commandment every hour of our waking lives:

To love the Lord our God with all our heart, mind, and souls; and to love our neighbor as ourselves.

For it is in God’s love that we may come together in peace, and it is in God’s love that we may do what Sodom and Gomorrah could not: save ourselves from destruction.