Sometimes, I wish I had a mentor, someone to school me. I worry about my tendency to get committed to ideas I like, notwithstanding whether they are actually in the text I am reading.
That said, I'm getting really excited about how to oriented the God-love I read all over Genesis with the gospel story. I think the thing that is so interesting about this chapter, and, in particular, Lot and his family's experience in Sodom, is the contrast between that experience and the experience of Christians in the Gospel and in Acts.
Things are totally dangerous here: you can see that in how the story is set up. Lot is on the edge of the city, looking out. He could be thinking about any number of things: wishing he hadn't insisted on this land, maybe, or wondering how to avoid anal rape. But when he sees these foreign guys show up, he's not wasting any time wanting to usher them out of sight, into his house. It's like a zombie movie, but with rapists.
Reading this, I understand how destruction can be an act of compassion. After all, what is motivating God to destroy Sodom here? It's the outcry of the people. Since Cain and Abel, God has been showing Himself to be wholly attuned to the voices of His people -- even the voices of those who have been silenced. And while I believe He grieved for the people of Sodom -- after all, if any of them had been righteous, He would have spared the entire city -- I think He was outraged by the pain and disaster they were causing everyone else.
People compare the world, now, to Sodom and Gomorrah. But I don't know; I think that's an excuse. To me, I think Christ really reworked the terms of how we can engage the world, because you don't see the disciples or the early church or even the martyrs rushing each other inside to get away from the cities they live in. They are going to them, because ultimately Christ offers a way of dealing with the sin and evil in the world -- the things we cry out over -- that is so much bigger. We're not called to flee this world, but to bring God here. We're not in the business of hiding away or offering up peace offerings to try and hold off the world. We don't need to do that any more.
That, I think, is how the Gospels changed things, how Christ changed things. And it is so critical -- because the feelings in Genesis 19 are terrible. Lot is skulking outside, desperately offering up his children to hold off this mob out the door. Escaping the world he knows with the clothes on his back, gutted because he doesn't yet know what God knows: that this, Sodom, is not the world. Is not His kingdom. That the point of the world is the establishment of a kingdom that the inhabitants of Sodom, Lot included, probably couldn't understand -- a kingdom in which you can respond to threats with courage and love, and where things can be fixed without fire and brimstone. That world exists -- only no one in Sodom would believe it.
Lot and his family cannot even imagine a life that is not terrible, a life where they are not afraid. They know so little of the world that they would stay in Sodom if they could. So God, in the middle of fixing things for the people who are suffering in Sodom, has His angels lead Lot out of the city by hand.
The most awesome thing about God that I'm thinking about today is the way that the story, since Lot, has become more nuanced, more elaborate, and our role in it more significant than just fleeing. I really believe -- my Second Coming schooling aside -- that God's fixing the world in a more power and less destructive way, preparing us, and has a role for me in that. And the fact that He has planned a place for me in that world and that vision is more than good management: it's the best kind of love. It's love that sees the possibilities in the most flawed people. It's love that sees where we can be and will take our hands and pull us there if it needs to.
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