Genesis 19

Somehow the thought of reading this chapter again depresses me. Instead of eagerly encountering the words on the page, I imagine all the arguments the text engenders, all the ways in which the story has been put to use.
The mere mention of the city’s name, “Sodom,” sends blood pressures soaring. It makes me tired. This is not a story about the evil of homosexuality. It is a cultural assumption that homosexuality is outside the norm, and that fact has its effect in the story, but the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah are not coming under judgment because too many gay people live there. The one glimpse we have of them speaks of violence and brutality far more than of sexuality.
And even when I understand the cultural thrust of the events of the story -- the deep-seated, essential-for-survival ethic of hospitality is not only stepped on here but ground into the dust and vomited upon – emotionally and “soulfully”, I cannot move past Lot offering his daughters up for rape. I understand, I think, how we are supposed to understand the act as one of sacrifice for another, but I have three daughters, and you have got to be kidding me. And I have a hard time reading this as Lot offering up what matters most to him (even though he does put his own person in danger) because of how little standing women often have in the world.
Leave it to say that this text unsettles me in a thousand ways. And, actually, I suppose therein lies much of its value. When we make judgments it is often within the messy, roiling, complexities of passions and conflicting ethics and pushed buttons. This sort of situation, with more emotion and twists and horror than I want to allow into my consciousness, is what all our crime dramas and exposes on tv thrive upon. I just don’t want to go here today. I’d love to be able to go to verse 26, decide this is a story made up to describe some awesome land formations in the region (check out the DVD of Bruce Feidler’s Walking the Bible to see these; they’re cool), and move on.
The judgment of the LORD is a theme that will recur though. I’m not going to be able to skip it every time. In chapter 18 the will-be-great patriarch Abraham is invited into contemplating the judgment of a group’s behavior. When we look back on history and think about mass horrors like the Holocaust and Rwanda and US slavery and the extermination of Native Americans and the stealing of Aboriginie children and of a college student being beaten to death for being gay – don’t all these beg for God’s judgment, and don’t “we” try to get in on that. What’s enough goodness within a culture or group of people to make it worth saving? Think for a moment about the way that question is threaded throughout the entire collection of scripture: God floods the world and then regrets it; the nations of Israel and Judah fall; God incarnate takes death on the cross. What do we deserve? How good to we have to be not to get what we deserve? Who will suffer for what? What is God going to do about all the evil in the world? Do we – me and the people I love – have to be punished too?
What I have come to believe is that I dare not read this story and identify only with Lot. If I am going to read it I think I also have to be willing to see myself as a citizen of Sodom. What then?
Then, I need God. Then, only the seemingly untenable love and transforming power of God can do anything at all.
What do you do with this story?