Before I begin my sermon I want to thank the women who did the new wall hangings.  Aren’t they beautiful?

I want to explain the meaning of each of these crosses decorating the hangings. The first one on the right is the Celtic cross.  The circle found in this cross is a symbol of eternity.   The second cross also has a circle representing Christ’s redemption that gives us eternal life.  The one after that is a Jerusalem Cross. It is more square and equal in size.  And there are little crosses on each end and it fits in with the anthem that the choir sang.   Remember, Jesus said go to the entire world and preach the gospel.  In New Testament times people thought the world was square, and the symbol suggests going to the four corners of the earth.  I usually refer to the next cross as a Russian Cross, though I’m not sure that that is the technically correct name. That one is used frequently in Orthodox churches, primarily in the Russian Orthodox Church.  The reason you see the two bars is that the upper bar is for the sign that read “King of the Jews”. The next big cross is a fancy version of the Latin cross, the one we recognize because the Latin cross is the one we most use. The next one is a variation of the Latin cross. The design on the tips of this cross signifies the Trinity.

A lot of trouble

Genesis 19:12-28

I want to begin my sermon today by trying to define people who are older and people who are younger.  Does anyone remember Flip Wilson’s famous phrase?  If you know the answer to that question you are at least middle aged.  Can someone tell me what that phrase was? “The devil made me do it!” He always said those words with a great deal of humor.  Most humor hits at a truth that is easier to take if we laugh about it. How many of us, though we may not use that phrase, want to blame someone else for our bad behavior? And the devil is a good scapegoat, right?  One of the issues for me after 21 years as a pastor is noticing that when things happen to people or when we have made some mistakes, often we want to blame those mistakes on someone else.  When the consequences come to us, we sometimes want to blame God. One of my mentors back in West Virginia had been a pastor of a prominent church close to where I grew up.  He was a very dignified man. I saw him literally shake a woman who was angry with God over something bad that had happened and who was cursing God.  I saw him shake her and say, “Stop it!”  Now I’ve never had the nerve to do that.  I was shocked to see a dignified southern gentleman do such a thing, but maybe what he was trying to do was pull her back into reality. Very often we want to blame God those things that we don’t want to take responsibility for ourselves.

Now I want to kind of back off that and I want to talk about something else.  My Disciple’s class has been studying Romans and we were supposed to have done it in one night.  We spent two nights and were going into a third night.  We might get done in the three nights, but I won’t guarantee it. The reason is that Romans is a primary doctrine for defining the Christian faith.  I’ve had fun teaching how Luther used Romans, and how Calvin used Romans, and how Wesley used Romans.  This week we are talking about something that directly relates to the story of Sodom and Gomorrah.  Paul was a very subtle writer. When Paul spoke about the law in Romans, he was not referring to the law as the Torah, the Jewish Torah.  If you watch his language very closely, he was referring to what I would call natural law. What is natural law? It’s a fancy word theologian’s use. It refers to the fact that if we look across cultures, it is very clear that there are some things that are right and some things that are wrong. We can look across cultures and see those patterns that tell us there is something natural in how the universe is set up.  Stealing, at least within your own community, is always wrong in our culture. The Apaches who live in the eastern part of Arizona made their living by possessing other people’s things. But they never stole from each other. I recently went to see the new Disney pirate movie.  The story of the pirates of the 1700’s is fascinating. What we see as thievery, they saw as taking from the rich and giving to the poor. On board their own ship pirates had a very democratic process.  They worked out who got part of the stolen items.  And guess what happened to people who violated the rules and stole from the people on their own ship?  There has to be honor among thieves.  If you’ve ever seen another Disney movie called Peter Pan, they made Wendy walk the plank. That’s what happened to you if they caught a person stealing. Pirates didn’t steal from each other. It’s part of natural law; there are certain basic things that keep life preserved and growing. And the Apostle Paul, when he writes in Romans, subtly explains that there are some basic things that make life keep going. When we violate those things, there can be problems.

 The third thing I want to point out to you is that the Biblical faith is a revealed religion.  A revealed religion assumes that God has not changed from the time you start out in Genesis and end with the book of Revelation.  But people’s understanding of who God is and who God has been does change over that period. Often we are turned literally off when we read some of those primitive stories in Genesis.  The story of Sodom and Gomorrah happens to be one of them.  It seems like God is sitting up there throwing lightening bolts when people do wrong, doesn’t it?  One of the stories I’ve struggled with most is the idea that God hardens Pharaoh’s heart. I don’t want to think that God would ever do that, and I have to struggle with the text. But what is interesting to notice is that, over a period of time, as the Hebrew people lived out their faith journey as a community, their sense of who God was and what He was calling them to do became sharper and more focused. The ancient Greeks admired the Old Testament prophets like Amos and Jeremiah and Isaiah because there was a heightened awareness in them of God’s sense of right and how to live life and of the consequences of not doing that. The prophets also preach against social injustice. One of the prophet’s talks about the cows of Bashan, sitting in luxury while the poor starved. Another speaks of God’s justice flowing like an ever-flowing stream. There is equal attention paid to how we are living out our social justice in those prophets and how we are living with integrity in the personal things that we are doing. And we finally get to Jesus and the New Testament and what we see is that Jesus is a radicalization of what the prophets were saying.  Jesus says it does not matter what you are doing on the outside, it’s what’s inside that counts.   That’s the third point that I want to make.  When we look at our faith and when we look at the Bible, it’s important to see how people’s impression of God progresses. It helps us understand some of those more primitive stories a little better. Now I want to get back to the story of Sodom and Gomorrah.

I read a book recently about a man who walked near the Dead Sea where Sodom and Gomorrah were thought to have been. What we know about the Dead Sea is that it’s a desolate place.  There is no life there; there is an abundance of salt. You can walk around and see pillars of salt everywhere. If you were looking for Lot’s wife, you would have a hard time figuring out which one she was.  A wonderful thing about these ancient people is that the geography of the land and the stories of their faith are so intertwined, you couldn’t pull them apart. For example, when the children of Israel were getting ready to go over into the Promise Land, they sent out some spies.  A little farther up the Jordan River from the Dead Sea, the spies talked about a land that flowed with milk and honey. There can be no greater contrast between that area and Sodom and Gomorrah which was lifeless and dead; one of the deadest places on earth.  When the children of Israel would tell that story and people would see those pillars of salt and think of that story, they would think that there was a connection between how people live and whether there was life. And they drew that direct connection. What do we know about Sodom and Gomorrah? We know that somehow those natural laws that Paul spoke about had somehow got out of whack.  Even to the point that when the visitors came to see Lot and his wife, a major violation of one of those natural laws was threatened when the men of the city threaten to literally molest those guests. Very often the more erotic side of the story is emphasized, but the truth is that probably the greatest violation in the story is the violation of what it means to have a guest come among you, and to take advantage and do harm to them. Whichever way you read the story, it is clear Sodom and Gomorrah had lost any sense of what natural law was. We hear about the fire and the brimstone as the city was destroyed and we see that tension as Lot’s wife, who looks back, symbolically desiring to go back to that place where one doesn’t need to be.

 This is the time in ancient Israel when we begin to understand that God demands that we live right.  In the beginning it is clear that God is going to get you if you don’t do what is right. But as a Christian who has to read the rest of the Bible, I want to caution us not to focus so much on the God who will get you if you don’t do what is right. By the way, that is the beginning of moral development. A three year old doesn’t misbehave because he knows you’re going to smack his hand.  I have a counselor friend who has done a lot of work with prisoners.  He believes that people in jail have not got past the first moral level of development. They don’t do things because they are afraid they will get punished. The higher level of moral development is when we do something because it is right in our hearts. Not because we are going to get punished if we don’t do it. When we read some of those ancient stories, particularly Sodom and Gomorrah, the fundamental thing that we should get is the sense of right and wrong. That is what Paul says in Romans.  He says we need to be aware. We need to do that which is righteous and which is life giving.   Let me tell you where I think a lot of modern Christians are. We want to believe in God’s love, partly because we don’t want to take responsibility for our own lives. We know that God loves us and it will be okay. That is true. Every one of us is going to mess up, and we will need God’s love. But I want to remind you of something. God has given us the gift of free will, if we do that which is hurtful or painful, there will be consequences of that, not only for us, but for other people too. It’s not so much God’s wrath that I am worried about as I am concerned about the natural consequences of our own bad behavior.

If I could condense my sermon into one statement, I would say that we get into a lot of trouble in this life because of what we do.  We need to learn to take responsibility and to live as a righteous people knowing that from time to time, when we muck it up, God’s redeeming love is there to patch us up and send us on our way.  Amen.