Ok, Sodom’s history now. How can we `everyday Christians` be fed from these events?
Genesis 18: The Lord in human form (presumably Jesus) and two angels visit Abraham on the way to Sodom. (It’s a little like God coming walking in the Garden to enjoy being with Adam and Eve.) Abraham is delighted – but he also realizes that if God is paying attention to Sodom, there can only be serious judgment.
And Sodom is bad. One key lesson from this story, I guess, is that in some situations, however much faith we have, there are limits to the transformations we can hope to see, and some situations we simply have to keep out of. Lot was `righteous` (2 Peter 2); but in his time in Sodom he hadn’t even made the 10 conversions that would (along with just one prayer warrior!) have been enough to preserve the city (18:32). Instead, the result of his settling in Sodom is he loses everything; indeed we learn from the weird, post-apocalyptic cave scene with which ch19 ends that his daughters have been shaped sufficiently by Sodom’s sexual culture to rape their father. There are parts of a culture like ours where we can only prophesy, pray, and get out, situations when we have to listen out for when God says Revelation 18:4: `Come out of her, my people, lest you take part in her sins, lest you share in her plagues.`
But the main lesson on faith here is Abraham. It is Abraham outside, not Lot inside, whose prayerful, faith-full actions shape what happens in Sodom (19:29). How do you pray in a situation like this? What marks Abraham’s prayer is indeed the sense that he is just `dust and ashes` before God, but still with something so major at stake he perseveres, he keeps on praying. And actually it’s like fasting: God really wants our partnership, our friendship, and so creates situations where we will spend time with Him. And Jesus teaches that it’s precisely because – tiny though we are – we have this astounding relationship of being God’s friend, that our persistent prayers will be answered (Luke 11:5-10).
But look too how Abraham builds his prayer on God’s character, not his own: `Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?` (True, we’re not at the end of the story yet: I imagine that question came back to challenge – and train – his faith when God told him to sacrifice Isaac.) And what Abraham’s doing builds above all on the astounding awareness that God actually wants to share His plans with us (Gen 18:17); and wants indeed to enable us to affect (by how we pray – or by how we don’t) the way they work out.
Wow. If we can put all that together we will understand prayer…
PS The Sodom chapter isn’t the key text on homosexual practice. It’s true that Jude 7 speaks clearly of `perversion` in the context of Sodom. But there are other things going on that lead to its judgment; we see the wickedness of Sodom surfacing also in its cruelty, the way the whole community turns out to enjoy watching a gang-rape; and Ezekiel 16 tells us that the `sin of Sodom` was that they were `overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy` (materialism which fatally infected Lot’s wife too, Luke 17:28-32). On homosexual practice the key passages are Romans 1, 1 Corinthians 6:9, 1 Timothy 1:10, and especially Leviticus 18 and 20 – where the death penalty for various sexual sins could only have been for a theocratic society and may never have been implemented at all, but it certainly shows how God feels about each of them. (But, we read that about God in combination with John 3:16!)
