This is a service I did in collaboration with my internship supervisor, Rev. Eric Banner.
My sermon begins at 54:45.
Genesis 19 was the first chapter of the Bible I ever read. You may have heard of it. It may have hurt you. Infamously, it tells of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Our queer and trans siblings know it painfully well as a “clobber text,” used by bigots to argue that gay sex is sin. That is the reputation which drew me in. As a young person coming to understand how my faith and queerness intersected, it filled me with dread and morbid curiosity.
But, that part of this chapter is not what I want to explore with you today. As a queer adult, I am despite myself interested in what happens after the climax. So, we begin the following morning, meeting Lot and his family before the destruction of their home. Lot is an unlikely character for our focus. He’s hardly a hero. Instead, this far from prophetic nephew of Abraham is bumbling, opportunistic, and socially inept. A foil for the virtues of his uncle1. This morning, he is dragging his feet. He knows his neighbors have acted immorally. Liberatory readings of this story understand that the sin of Sodom is not just a lack of hospitality, but also greed and sexual violence–a whole gamut of unprincipled actions2. Lot wasn’t the most moral person himself, but he was still nothing compared to his neighbors. So we might wonder: why the clay feet, Lot? Why not get out and watch it all burn?
You may have asked someone in your life that question. Maybe someone’s ask you that question. Why not leave this situation we both know is bad? Sometimes I have felt like the angels trying to drag Lot’s family out of harm’s way3. I have not understood someone else’s hesitation–at first. If ministry has taught me anything though, it is that I need to pull back the curtain and ask, “What’s this really about?”
That answer isn’t often clear at first. But the pastoral imagination, the empathetic imagination, is a muscle we strengthen with practice. Let’s return to Lot for some practice. In our story, he looks out on the plain before him with the angels. He says, “Look, that town there is near enough to flee to; it is such a little place! Let me flee there—it is such a little place—and let my life be saved4.” I hear grief in these words. It’s as if he’s saying, Please don't take everything from us.
When we read farther back in Genesis, we know that Sodom isn’t the only place Lot has lived. We know he came from somewhere else. He came from farther east with his uncle Abraham and their family, from the city of Ur5 in modern Iraq. Lot knew some place else, and yet he still called Sodom home. We imagine he met his wife and raised his children there. So he bargains with the angels to lessen the destruction of this place. He held some grief for the city where he and his family probably made friends and families of their own. All people he must now leave behind if he wants to survive. We can imagine then, that no matter the sin, no matter the pain, there was something redeeming that Lot’s family found there.
Our story ends with Lot’s wife looking back and famously turning into a pillar of salt. Despite the editors of Genesis giving her no name and no more than three sentences, I find her compelling. Unlike her husband, we have no context for her or her life. What is she doing in this story? Scholars suggest that her fate in this story explains peculiar salt deposits found around the Dead Sea6, which are hauntingly human-shaped. But that doesn’t tell us why we remember her for looking backward. Why did she care that such a wicked city burned?
In her last collection of poetry, Ursula K. Le Guin considered how to answer this question. She included a poem imagining the last moments and thoughts of this woman deprived of name and dignity. Remember me, she says, as “the laughing child who seldom did \ as she was told or came when she was called...the happy woman who loved her wicked city.” She tells the reader,
“Do not remember me with pity.
I saw you plodding on ahead
into the desert of your pitiless faith…
I looked back, not forward, into death7.”
If Lot hesitated for a place where he raised a family, but not the only place he ever loved, how did his wife feel? Imagine the grief of leaving the only home you knew. The place where your mothers and grandmothers were buried. Where soon, everyone you knew would die. Imagine being a woman who chose the defiance of memory and longing, even if it meant the punishment of death.
Few of us may feel this woman’s fatal defiance. Few may meet a woman like this ourselves. But I met women like her a few times when I worked with refugees many years ago. I know I will meet women like her again. There are immigrants and refugees in our communities who have left the pain of all they knew in another country. And there are people fleeing other parts of our own country. If you’ve paid attention to the news or heard from loved ones, you know this. There are many people leaving their homes. Leaving cities and states which strip them of their rights to make decisions about their own bodies, or the guarantee of any kind of safety. Local organizations like the Trans Continental Pipeline are helping many trans people relocate to safer states, like this one. It is dire and holy work to welcome Lot’s wife and her family today.
This hard and holy work takes housing, and food, and transportation, and the money for all three. It also takes love. The love of pastoral imagination. The love to meet and hold grief we don’t understand. I feel like Lot’s wife sometimes. I look back at the only home I have known before this one, which stripped trans people, my people, of our civil rights earlier this year. The home that continues to erode in many other ways. And still, I am not Lot’s wife, not yet. So I remember the gift of love. I remember that love is not pity. Love is not demanding that grief twist into something we can personally understand. Love is food, and shelter, and the compassion to keep our hearts open wide enough for someone else’s pain. May we all be so loving.
1. Jon D. Levenson, “Genesis,” in The Jewish Study Bible, Second Edition, ed. Adele Berlin and Marc Zvi Butler, 7-94 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 94.
2. Ibid. See also, Cameron Partridge, “The Episcopal Church,” in Struggling in Good Faith: LGBTQI Inclusion from 13 American Relgious Perspectives, ed. Mychal Copeland and D’vorah Rose, 38-50 (Woodstock, VT: Skylight Paths Publishing, 2016), 40.
3. Gen. 19:16-17, NJPS.
4. Gen. 19:20, NJPS.
5. Gen. 11:31, NJPS.
6. Levenson, 94.
3. Ursula K. Le Guin, “Looking Back,” in So Far So Good: The Final Poems: 2014-2018, 42 (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2018).