Last week I said that the early stories in Genesis were etiological stories, that is stories that explain why things are the way they are, but then we transition to the stories of Abraham which begin the story of the people called the Israelites, which are very different. Well, that’s not really a hard and fast rule, because today’s passage is also an origin story. As we heard in the introduction, we are told that the land occupied by Lot had been extremely fertile, it actually says it was like Egypt, but now it’s a waste land, with high temperatures, where little grows, where there are tar pits, it smells like Sulphur and then there are pillars of salt, so what made it that way. Well the story from chapter 19 would seem to answer that question. It’s uninhabitable, it sounds almost as bad as Phoenix, because God destroyed the area raining it with fire and Sulphur, and of course Lot’s wife looked back and was turned into salt, and so this story explains all of that and so we can move on and be done right? I wish it were that easy, but what I can say is that this story is not about homosexuality, which is the most common interpretation, at least for the last 1000 years, but before we get into that, we do have to take a step back.
Lot and Abraham originally travel together to the Promised Land, but as they accumulate possessions, they eventually go their separate ways because their underlings are fighting. As we heard, Lot goes to the cities of the plain, which were Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, Zoboiim and Bela, sometimes called Baor, and they had been vassals to King Chedorlaomer but then they rebel for some reason. So, King Chedorlaomer gathers some other kings together and they attack and defeat the five cities, taking all their possessions. And while some people fled, we are told that Lot was taken into captivity. When Abraham finds out about this, he goes off and defeats the other kings and returns Lot and his possessions, and the possession of everyone else as well.
Abraham then leaves Lot again, and goes back to his home in the land promised by God, where he has many interchanges with God. He has a son with his concubine Hagar, but we are told that the promises will not be fulfilled through his son Ishmael. Instead, Abraham is told twice that the promise child will come through his wife Sarah, even though she is 90. But, before he is told this the second time, Abraham sees three men a distance from their tent. He runs out to them and tells them, or begs them, to come and spend time with he and Sarah, and he washes their feet and has Sarah makes bread while he slaughters a calf and serves these strangers, practicing a radical hospitality, an expectation that has high importance in the ancient near east, and sets up the story of Lot. What Abraham also hears from the visitors, who it turns out are two angels and God, is the second announcement that Sarah will have a son, and this time it is Sarah, rather than Abraham, who laughs at the announcement.
And then as the visitors start out on their way to Sodom, God decides to tell Abraham that there has been a great outcry against Sodom, and so they are going to see if what people have been crying out is true or not. Now in other places in scripture where God talks about a great outcry being made to God, it’s about social justice issues, about how people are being treated, not because of sexual immortality, and we’ll see that being the case here as well. But, upon hearing what is going to happen, Abraham asks God if the righteous in the city will be destroyed alongside the unrighteous, and he begins bargaining with God, if there are 50 righteous, will you save everyone? And he and God go round and round until Abraham gets God down to 10. If there are ten righteous people, then God will spare everyone.
Now we should compare Abraham here and his act, against that of Noah who makes no arguments with God and decides to let everyone else die. Abraham is making this argument with God because he has been told that God will bless him, and in return he will be a blessing to others. And how does Abraham do that? By being concerned for others, and thus is demonstrating his righteousness, which is the reason that Lot will eventually be saved. And so knowing this blessing he is working to save others, perhaps even some who may not deserve it, but we have to remember that God is the one who gets to make this judgment. And so the two angels go on their way, while God remains talking with Abraham, which is why there are only two people who meet Lot, rather than three.
And so then we get exactly the same set-up as with Lot that we had with Abraham. Lot greets the strangers in much the same way Abraham does, and begs them to stay at his home, even though they say they will just stay in the square. This is probably the first indication that something is wrong. But, Lot gets the men to come into his home, and he feeds them, again the same as Abraham, and then all hell breaks loose. We are told that all the people of the town come to Lot’s door, although it’s not actually all the people; it’s just the men of the town. Presumably there are women and children in the town too, since at least Lot has a wife and daughters, but they don’t count as everyone, or perhaps as anyone, and the women and children will be wiped out, along with the other cities on the plain, even though they are not involved. Perhaps this is another indication something is not quite right in the story. Additionally, it does not appear that Lot’s sons-in-laws are participating, even though it says all men. But the men knock on the door and demand that Lot send the two men/angels out so that they can know them. Which is them saying send them out so we can rape them.
In response to this, Lot offers up his two daughters to be raped instead. Now if this was a story about homosexuality, would Lot even think about offering his daughters? No, because they wouldn’t be interested. But this is not about homosexuality; this is about hospitality and violation of those norms. As Feminist scholars show us, rape is not about sex but instead about power and the assertion of dominance. And I really hope we can all condemn rape in all its forms, as well as violence against women. But, in the ancient world, to rape a man was to demean and dehumanize him because it was to put him in the place of the woman in the sex act, and therefore it shames him and removes his masculinity. It takes away his manhood. It makes him less than a man. And in the ancient world this could be a common act of war. And so based on what we know of the military threats surrounding them, Nancy Bowen, a friend and professor of the Hebrew Bible, says it could be that the men of Sodom believe that these outsiders are spies or are somehow there in opposition to them, and so the way to reassert their power and to shame these men so that they cannot go back to their king, if they’re spies, is to rape them.
As I said in my Friday worship intro, this story is the most referenced Genesis story in the rest of scripture. In those passages we don’t find evidence for interpreting this story as it’s commonly understood today. There are only two passages that make a sexual reference to this story, and that is found in Jude and 2 Peter. But, in neither of those stories is the concern about male on male relations. Instead, the problem is that they are attempting to rape angels, and thus there is a confusion of the flesh. You don’t have sex with angels, and angels can’t have sex with humans. In this there is a harkening back to the Noah story, and there are many similarities between these two stories. Additionally, although there are New Testament passages that contain the word sodomy, that is a terrible mistake in translation because the words sodomy or sodomite was not created until the 11th century by a monk by the name of Peter Damien. He created those words in writing a polemic against the sexual immorality of other priests, including the Pope, and thus was using scripture to make a political point by taking things out of context, imagine such a thing. And the term sodomy and sodomite has encapsulated many different sexual behaviors over time, not just homosexual activities.
But more importantly in looking at other stories as a way to interpret Genesis 19, is that there is an identical parallel story found in Judges 19, which the worship prep materials encouraged you to read for today, and so hopefully some of you did that. In Judges 19, we have the story of a Levite who is traveling back home along with his concubine. And when we hear concubine, we should hear that as a secondary wife, which we will deal with more next week. As it begins getting dark they enter into the city of Gibeah, which was an Israelite city populated by people from the tribe of Benjamin. They go to the city square, where no one welcomes them, but then an old man, who we are told is a foreigner, sees them, tells them not to spend the night in the square, and brings them into his own home. Then all the men of the city surround the home and begin pounding on the door telling the old man to send the men out so that they might rape them, and the old begs the men not to do what they are asking for, and instead offers his own virgin daughter as well as the Levite’s concubine to let the men do whatever they want to do with them. Sound familiar? The men outside refuse this offer.
Now in the Sodom story, at this point the angels pull Lot back inside and strike everyone else blind so they can’t do anything to them. But in this story, since there are no angels to rescue them, the Levite grabs his concubine and pushes her outside, where the men precede to gang rape her for the rest of the night. The woman then crawls back to the house in the morning, and dies with her hands on the threshold of the door. The Levite, finding her dead in the morning, carries her body back to his home and then cuts the body into pieces and sends the pieces to the other tribes in Israel calling them to rise up against Gibeah for what happened, and the rest of the tribes declare war on Gibeah and nearly wipe out the tribe of Benjamin. But why do they declare war? Is this a diatribe about heterosexual behavior, and a warning that this will lead to destruction? Of course not. It’s also not about the rape, either homosexual or heterosexual; the crime was their lack of hospitality.
Now this is not to say that rape isn’t a serious issue in scripture, because it is, but these are not even ultimately rape stories, because the men aren’t actually violated. Even the rape of the concubine is not considered truly rape because the man, who owns her, gives her over to be raped, and the men use her because they can damage the man through her. Notice that none of the women in these stories have control over their own bodies, because they are women. They are under the control of the men in their lives, for good or for ill, again this is why the rape of men was seen as so bad because it took away the control that men are supposed to have and put them in the place of women, which was considered bad. Now I should note that there are three stories of the rape of women in the Bible, and in all three stories that rape is met with violence and the killing of the rapist.
We also have plenty of other evidence that this story is about hospitality in the other references we also have, with just two picked out here to highlight. In Ezekiel chapter 16, Ezekiel is lambasting the Israelites for their unfaithfulness to God, and not following God’s injunctions, and he says “As I live, says the Lord God, your sister Sodom and her daughters have not done as you and your daughters have done. 49This 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 needy.” (Exek 16:48-49) That is they failed to offer themselves in assistance to others. They failed to practice hospitality. They failed to practice justice. They failed to practice hospitality. They failed to be righteous. And one final passage from the gospels. In Matthew, Jesus is sending the twelve out to deliver the good news, and he tells them “Whatever town or village you enter, find out who in it is worthy, and stay there until you leave. As you enter the house, greet it. If the house is worthy, let your peace come upon it; but if it is not worthy, let your peace return to you. If anyone will not welcome you or listen to your words, shake off the dust from your feet as you leave that house or town. Truly I tell you, it will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah on the day of judgement than for that town.” (Matt 10:11-15) On what basis is judgment made? Whether the disciples are welcomed are not, whether the people practice hospitality or not. The Greeks had a word for this, its xenia, which means “guest-friendship." Welcoming the guest, whether you know them or not, as friends. The opposite of that is a word we still use, xenophobia, fear of the stranger or the other.
Let me close with a personal story as another way to see an interpretation of this passage. In grade school, we, and I am included in that, tormented another boy because we considered him too effeminate, or not masculine enough. His name was Paul, although we all called him Pauline. And we bullied and tortured him constantly. Now I have no idea if he was gay or not, although I suspect that he probably was, and how we treated him is one of the biggest regrets of my life. It is one of the things I cannot forgive myself for, because when you look at the hierarchy of popularity in school I was not at the top. I was much closer to Paul on that scale, and I should have known better. From the treatment I received for being a nerd, I should have known better, and I shouldn’t have participated, and yet I did. I did violence to Paul. I was the men at the door pounding on it to do violence to the stranger, to the other, to the outcast. And now knowing the rate at which gay and transgendered youth die by suicide, I wonder whether Paul made it, and I don’t know. And I am responsible for that.
I say that because one of the great ironies of how many in the church deal with the topic of homosexuality is that we have become the men at the door yelling “send out those strangers, those outsiders, so we can do violence to them.” And we do violence. Maybe our violence is simply by words, but there are plenty of people who beat and kill members of the LGBTQ community, and that violence is greatly underreported. And so just like with the Black Lives Movement’s call to say their name, we also need to say the names of these brothers and sisters, people like Dustin Parker, Monika Diamond, Lexi, Tony McDade and Summer Taylor, all LGBTQ persons killed this year. The writers of the scripture knew nothing about gender or sexual identity or any of the other things we are now learning about. We didn’t know about x and y chromosomes until 1956, and what we are discovering now about gender and sexuality, for me, shows even more the greatness and amazingness of God and the creation, and we are just scratching the surface. Hopefully our view of women and their own agency has changed radically as well.
And as we hear this story, the purpose of the story, the moral of the story, is not for us to castigate and call out for the stranger, the other, so that we can do violence to them, but instead to be the ones who welcome and protect those who are vulnerable, those at the margins, those others want to injure and deny. And so if we truly believe in the good news of Jesus Christ that there is nothing in all of creation that can separate us from God’s love; if we truly believe in the good news that we are all made in the image of God; if we truly believe in the good news that we are all beloved children of God, then we have to live like it, we have to be the leaven that changes the whole loaf, we have to be the righteous that justifies the entire city, otherwise, at the least we are those who don’t do anything to help, and at the worst we are the men at the door calling for violence. We have to be the disciples that we are called to be, and learn to live in love, for Jesus says this is how we will be known as his disciples. I pray that it will be so my brothers and sisters. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment