The Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Testament sometimes referred to as the Pentateuch, is traditionally attributed to Moses, with an emphasis on the role of divine revelation. That is to say, for some in the Rabbinic Jewish and Christian traditions, the Torah is God’s Word as directly revealed to the putative founder of the Hebrew religion.
This myth was dismissed long ago by scholars. Instead, the Torah was assembled in stages over a period of several centuries, taking something close to the final form we refer to as the Masoretic Text during the Persian Period, after the Babylonian Exile and at least seven centuries after Moses led a small group of rebellious slaves out of Egypt.
The earliest written sources for the Torah come from the time of the divided kingdoms, the same period that produced the prophet Amos, the voice for economic justice we have engaged for the last two Sundays. But even further back was an oral tradition. This included stories of Abraham and the generations that followed, as well as Hebrew versions of myths shared more widely in the region, stories that were meant to explain what seemed inexplicable, stories like the great flood, Noah instead named Utnapishtim in the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh.
Today’s reading is from one of the written sources behind the Torah, a southern kingdom source known as the J text. The passage is one of three back-to-back episodes related to the sin of Sodom, and wrestles with the eternal problem of collective punishment. If God punishes the many for the sins of the few, often for generation after generation in some theologies, then is God willing to forgive the many through the righteousness of the few? This is the question Abraham puts to God. It is a lovely little moment, this human resistance to divine violence. And in the Christian tradition, the orthodox answer is yes. The One can save the many. Of course, in our progressive theology, we have serious reservations about the construction of God as co-dependent and violent, but we’re definitely cool with the redemptive power of the individual.
Instead of focusing on the miraculous mathematics of redemption, I’d like to focus on the sin of Sodom. Like the myth of the great flood, the myth of Sodom’s sin appears to have been drawn from a deeper regional tradition. Here, it is used to explain the loss of two ancient cities in the region, even ancient to the ancients that were telling the tale. While scientists offer us natural explanations for the loss of the twin cities, and evangelicals blame homosexuality, scripture tells us the sin of Sodom is the sin of inhospitality. The underlying myth, complete with inhospitality to the stranger and resulting destruction, shows up again in the Book of Judges, though instead of cities, it is the tribe of Benjamin that is inhospitable and eventually destroyed, through genocide rather than natural disaster.
But let’s rewind a bit. Immediately before this set of stories related to Sodom comes a formative moment for Hebrew identity. An elderly couple, obeying God, has migrated from the region that is today Iraq to the region that is today Palestine. They are quite old and childless, though the man, Abraham, has fathered a son with the slave girl Hagar. One day, three strangers appear. Christians might imagine this to be a proto-trinity, though such an idea would be heresy in the Hebrew tradition. Often, the three are described as angels, or messengers from God.
Abraham, seeing them, extends extravagant hospitality. This is an almost universal custom in nomadic cultures and in arid and semi-arid regions. You always greet and welcome the stranger, provide food, water, and shelter. In the Torah, this command to hospitality is eventually framed around the Exodus narrative, with a reminder to the Hebrew people to welcome the stranger because they themselves were once strangers in a strange land.
So Abraham and Sarah are extravagant in their hospitality, and the angels, in return, offer a true blessing, God’s promise that Sarah will give birth to a son despite their ages. The son is, of course, Isaac, turning the Abrahamic covenant from a promise into a reality, the descendants as numerous as the stars.
Immediately afterwards comes this set of stories about Sodom, for this is where the three angelic messengers are headed. Abraham accompanies them on at least part of their journey. But in the very next passage, the two men arrive in Sodom.
Two! I can just see the headline now: Extra! Extra! Angel gets lost! But of course, angels don’t get lost, at least not in the high theological construction, though the folksy angels of our fiction might, on occasion.
And again, we have this gruesome outline, in both this Genesis story and the parallel myth in Judges, that the strangers are invited in and shown appropriate hospitality, but then the town’s men show up, seeking sexual relations with them. In order to appease the rapacious men, women are sacrificed. Because, you know, history is pretty much always women being sacrificed.
It is a ridiculous story on its face, but so many of these ancient myths are. They are meant to explain, and they are meant to justify the standards of the powerful, giving arbitrary human rules divine sanction. But there really were ancient cities lost to natural catastrophe that fit the description of Sodom and Gomorrah. And hospitality to the stranger was considered critical in ancient times when the journey was always difficult and often dangerous, both extending hospitality to the stranger and accepting the hospitality that is offered to you.
And I wonder, what does hospitality look like today?
Let’s start with the closest analog to the ancient practice, to bodies in the desert trying to get to the United States, because the lack of hospitality in the Ancient Near East would have led to bodies in the desert.
And honestly, the situation is complicated and neither of the extremes on the issue seems to get it quite right. White ethno-nationalists oppose immigration in the tradition of America’s longtime immigration policies which were explicitly crafted to maintain white supremacy, even if the definition of white was eventually expanded to include southern Europeans, for Italians were not white when they first started arriving in the United States.
Those white ethno-nationalists mostly don’t state that we must keep out brown people, at least not in polite company, though this is their real goal. Instead, they claim that we cannot receive immigrants because we lack the capacity and resources to absorb new residents. Which is simply not true right now, but when did truth ever stop hate?
Some on the other side of the debate really do seem to suggest that there should never be any restriction on the flow of people across borders. Which makes sense philosophically, given that borders and even nation-states are artificial constructions, like race, and humans have always migrated in large numbers.
Immigration advocates seem to believe that international asylum laws cover pretty much any reason a person might want to migrate, from spouse abuse to poverty. That isn’t actually the letter of the law or the spirit of the law as drafted in the years after the Holocaust, and those nation-state borders are functionally a fact, artificially created or not. Countries have the right to control the flow of people. And while there is no problem of capacity now in the United States, or for that matter Europe, there are likely to be regional capacity caps in the future as human-caused climate change makes more and more of the planet uninhabitable. We already cannot provide enough water to meet the needs of the West Coast. It is, in fact, climate change that is driving much of the immigration from Central America, where rural agricultural economies have collapsed.
Ripping babies out of mother’s arms and sticking them in kennels looks a whole lot like Sodom, but then again, cruelty was not a bug in the previous administration, it was a feature. But even now, with white supremacists out of the executive branch, we still have them in control of the Senate, an institution, like our immigration policies, designed to preserve white supremacy.
Immigration, welcome of the immigrant, a just economy, the flow of people across borders, these are all biblical issues. Please tell me how the forced deportation of Ukrainian citizens by Russia is any different than the forced deportation of Judahites by the Babylonians.
But let’s zoom in a little, to things we can control. In fact, let’s zoom in a lot. Let’s think about what extravagant hospitality looks like in the life of the church. And this next part may be a little hard, for while The Park Church does better than most, and extravagant welcome is supposed to be one of the marks of our United Church of Christ tradition, we have a ways to go.
And I start with this. Every single woman in this room learned very early on that being allowed into a space didn’t mean feeling safe in that space. You might be allowed on the police force, but the sexual harassment and Playboy centerfolds in the locker room made clear that you were an object to the men who controlled that space. Life for a woman is an endless series of catcalls and inappropriate comments and decisions about whether or not to enter a space, whether it is worth the effort to occupy space.
Every LGBTQ+ person knows that many spaces are not safe, not even today, and that is especially true of churches. We have spent our lives hearing “love the sinner, hate the sin,” which is the opposite of love. We are told to “pray away the gay.” We are blamed for hurricanes. It is not enough to tell ourselves as a church that we welcome LGBTQ+ folks, because LGBTQ+ folks assume that a religious space is a hostile space, always spiritually and sometimes physically, unless explicitly proven otherwise. When people with heterosexual privilege wonder why we have to be so aggressively pro-LGBTQ+, it is because we are working against centuries of lethal abuse, against the loss of Tchaikovsky and Turing and countless others.
Every person of color in this nation knows about sundown towns, where it is not safe to be black after dark. It does not matter that laws have changed and we no longer have a Green Book. Go into many stores with brown skin and a staff member will surveil you the entire time you are there.
Tolerance is not welcome. Allowing someone into your space is not hospitality.
Churches say they want diversity. But all too often, what they really want is younger versions of themselves. They want some form of cultural time travel that makes it the 1970’s again, when church was primarily a civic and social space.
I mean, what does it say to the diverse new membership we seek to attract, when the stained glass is full of white faces, absurdly in some cases for the biblical figures were not white northern Europeans? When every song is from the cultural tradition of northern Europe? When, in most churches, queer voices are never heard? Where women may lead, but the readings never move beyond the patriarchy of scripture? Where the assumption is that every husband comes with a wife?
If we only do what we like in church, then we are dispensers of goods and services, spiritual anesthesia, not at all the proclaimers of the radical and universal gospel we imagine ourselves to be.
And while I may be gay, and may do my best to integrate different cultures and voices into the readings, I’m as guilty as anyone else, for I come from the white aspirational working class, and I lean into reason and scholarship, and sometimes we need feeling, need emotion, need a spiritual punch in the gut. I do not offer the hospitality I should to people who might not use words like “quotidian,” which really just means “daily,” so maybe sometimes I should just say “daily!”
If we want younger generations, we’ll need to start speaking in the musical and visual idioms of younger people. If we want racial and cultural diversity, we need racial and spiritual diversity in our worship and in our décor. If we want an aging population of educated white middle class folks, we can keep doing what we are doing, what I have been doing in all my years of ministry, focusing more on keeping the job by keeping current congregants happy than on the gospel, than on transformation, than on love.
They say the definition of insanity if doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results. If so, we are certifiably crazy.
Will we be Abraham and Sarah, offering extravagant hospitality to mysterious strangers and receiving an unexpected blessing? Or will we, like Sodom, be a part of history lost forever?
Amen.