It's Not About What You Think It's About

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was Genesis 19:1-26. Trigger warning for victims of sexual assault and/or sexual abuse.

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.

James: The Royal Law

Here is my sermon from Sunday.  The text was James 2:1-13:\

On January 11, 2007, Joshua Bell, who is world renowned and Grammy award winning violinist, performed to a sold out crowd in Boston’s Symphony Hall.  The lowest priced tickets started at $100 apiece.  But just two days later Bell performed a concert for free, but in an unexpected place.  In a situation arranged by the Washington Post as a social experiment, Bell stationed himself in the L’Enfant Metro Station in Washington, DC during the morning rush hour, and began playing one of Bach’s most difficult and stirring violin concertos.  Bell played for 45 minutes using the same violin he always plays, a Stradivarius, constructed in 1713 during the master’s golden period and valued at more than 3.5 million dollars.  Of the 1,097 people who passed by during his concert, 27 games him some money, but only 7 stopped to listen.  He ended his concert without any applause, collecting a grand total of $32.17 in tips, which included $20 from the one person who seemed to recognize who he actually was. 

So more than 1000 people witnessed one of the world’s greatest musicians playing one of the world’s greatest masterpieces on one of the world’s greatest instruments and had no idea what they were actually seeing, and so because of that they didn’t stop.  They made a quick decision about the type of musicians who play in subway stations and so just completely ignored it; he wasn’t worth their time, they had more important things to do.  How often do we make the same sorts of decisions, the same sorts of judgements that in the end turn out to be so very, very wrong, if we ever even know at all?

Today we continue in our sermon series on the book of James, who is concerned not with deep theologically statements about who Jesus and God are, but instead about how it is that we live our lives out, that’s why this series is entitled “where the rubber hits the road.”  This is about where we stop talking about our faith, or claiming what we believe and instead start living it out, how it applies to our lives.  Which led my wife say to me after last week’s introduction, “so James is the reason why we can eat bacon?”  Yes, James is the reason we can eat bacon, because he is the one who ruled that gentile converts, that is non-Jews, did not have to follow Jewish dietary laws or become circumcised to become a Christian.  So James is the one who made the Baconnator possible.