Genesis 18:16-33
Then the men set out from there, and they looked toward Sodom, and Abraham went with them to set them on their way. The Lord said, “Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do, seeing that Abraham shall become a great and mighty nation, and all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him? No, for I have chosen him, that he may charge his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing righteousness and justice, so that the Lord may bring about for Abraham what he has promised him.” Then the Lord said, “How great is the outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah and how very grave their sin! I must go down and see whether they have done altogether according to the outcry that has come to me, and if not, I will know.”
So the men turned from there and went toward Sodom, while Abraham remained standing before the Lord. Then Abraham came near and said, “Will you indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked? Suppose there are fifty righteous within the city; will you then sweep away the place and not forgive it for the fifty righteous who are in it? Far be it from you to do such a thing, to slay the righteous with the wicked, so that the righteous fare as the wicked! Far be that from you! Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?” And the Lord said, “If I find at Sodom fifty righteous in the city, I will forgive the whole place for their sake.” Abraham answered, “Let me take it upon myself to speak to my lord, I who am but dust and ashes. Suppose five of the fifty righteous are lacking? Will you destroy the whole city for lack of five?” And he said, “I will not destroy it if I find forty-five there.” Again he spoke to him, “Suppose forty are found there.” He answered, “For the sake of forty I will not do it.” Then he said, “Oh, do not let my lord be angry if I speak. Suppose thirty are found there.” He answered, “I will not do it, if I find thirty there.” He said, “Let me take it upon myself to speak to my lord. Suppose twenty are found there.” He answered, “For the sake of twenty I will not destroy it.” Then he said, “Oh, do not let my lord be angry if I speak just once more. Suppose ten are found there.” He answered, “For the sake of ten I will not destroy it.” And the Lord went his way, when he had finished speaking to Abraham, and Abraham returned to his place.
In the name of the Creator, the Liberator and the Comforter. Thank you, Mira, Joshua, for setting the tone so beautifully there. We heard an incredible story today. I mean, one of the most remarkable stories I find in the whole of scripture where Abraham is talking with God directly, but it's also remarkable because it is at the invitation of God almost. The story begins with God saying, "Shall I hide from Abraham the outcry that I've heard?" And God answers themselves by saying, "No, I have to show Abraham what is going on because Abraham has to know who I am."
This is the beginning of the covenant and Abraham and God are still working out what their relationship is really all about. Abraham, who has been promised offspring more numerous than the stars and land, promised land, and has been promised that all nations, and I can't emphasize the strong enough, all nations will be blessed through him. Who is that God now that we are going to be in covenant with? Better be a God of justice and of righteousness. It could be a bully, after all. Could be somebody like Putin or some of the old ancient gods that we know from Greek mythology who show up capriciously. But no, this is a God who it is worthy to be in covenant with because it's a God, at least God wants us to know God, that way of love, of justice and of righteousness.
Abraham now has to figure out what that means. When God says, "The outcry that I've heard from the city," that word outcry is the same word that we hear later in the book of Exodus when God says, "I heard the cries of my people," the people who were in slavery and bondage in Egypt, and God then sets about setting them free. Throughout the Hebrew Bible, we hear the same word “cry” and every time when we hear it in the prophets, in the psalms in Exodus and in Genesis, every time it is a cry against oppression, against injustice.
So, we know right away that whatever it is that is going on in these cities of Sodom, in Gomorrah, there's a grave injustice happening there. It's not just about sex, as we've been led to believe for many generations. It's about oppression, it's about violation and injustice of all different kinds. God now has a task to figure out, "Is this really what is happening? Are the cries true? And if they are true, what do I do about it?" Abraham asked that question now, challenging God. Well, actually you can read this in various ways. Is Abraham challenging God? Like, "Who are you? What are you really all about?" Or maybe it's more of an inquiry like, "I don't know this about you. I don't know yet God, how you are in the face of injustice. So, let me ask these questions. Are you really going to wipe out the entire city? And what if there's some good people in there?"
The word is righteous. Not right. Not right, as in I am right and you are wrong. Not that. Righteous. Walking morally well in the world. That's the extraordinary part of this story. This is a deeply moral story and the relationship between God and us has to be one of deep morality, challenging both ways, perhaps. Us being challenged as well as God, back and forth, back and forth, in conversation. What if there are 40? What if there are 30 or 20? Of course, we know in the end that there were not even 10 righteous ones in these cities, and it's hard sometimes we don't really like to listen to stories in the Bible where God then ends up destroying these cities. They're difficult to hear.
But I wonder, what if instead of Sodom and Gomorrah, it had said slavery and climate change. Could we imagine that God would say, "I'm going to destroy that"? Would there not be a part of us that says, "Yeah, please do. It's about time." In effect, are there not things in the world right now when we say, "God, can you not destroy that, whatever is going on?" God says, "For the sake of 10, I will not destroy them." It's almost a reverse of what we often do, particularly in our rule-based society.
When one person makes a misstep in an institution, we change the rules and now everybody has to bear the consequences. One idiot puts explosives in his shoes, and now every time we go to the airport, we have to take them off. But it's not just in the airports. Those of you who have worked in schools also know that children will break rules. That's partly what they do. And so then new rules come into place and new rules come into place. And it got to a point where my stepson was like, "Whenever we think of something fun to do at a school, somebody will say there's a rule against it, and they're usually right."
Bless the teachers. I do not know how they do what they do, so I'm not critiquing them at all. But I'm saying that we have a way of establishing rule upon rule, upon rule, for one who is not righteous and all the righteous ones suffer. God reverses this. God reverses this.
I was reading this week a very difficult story. We read those every day, if you are open to reading the news. This one was a lengthy exposé about the Darien Gap. For those of you who don't know the Darien Gap, there is a trans-America highway. You can drive your car all the way from Alaska down to the tip of Argentina throughout the entire American continent, except for one little stretch of 70 miles.
On the border between Panama and Columbia, there is a piece of jungle that is so dense and so difficult to traverse that they did not build the highway through there. Too hard. You try and walk through there, you won't make it out is what people said.
Except if you're desperate enough. Except if you're desperate enough. Some dozens of people 20 years ago would try and make it through. By 2014, about 50,000 people started making their way through this jungle. Now when I say jungle, mudslides, rivers, poisoned snakes, steep climbs, deep drops, extraordinarily dangerous, always wet.
In 2023, 500,000 people traveled through that piece of jungle. And why did they do this? They wanted to come here. They wanted to come here, to the United States. We let in through our southern border about 50,000 people legally each year. 500,000 people through the Darien Gap alone. From there, they have to make it further north through Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico and up. Some have take a boat or a flight. I don't know frankly how they do it, and it's not like that's where the journey began.
I read a story about one woman from Vietnam. She was a school administrator, not a wealthy person. She had flown from Vietnam to Taiwan, from Taiwan to France, from France to Brazil, from Brazil to Peru, from Peru to Ecuador, from Ecuador to Colombia, and then from Colombia through this jungle to the other side in Panama where finally she found a way to join her brother who lives in Boston, and that's where she now is. Extraordinary jungle. People make this trek if they're desperate enough. Most of them are from Venezuela. As we know, when you just even look at the headlines, Venezuela is a mess right now with the dictator trying to absorb all the power and not caring one inch, one bit for what is happening to his citizens.
Many people come from many other places though. Pakistan, Bangladesh, various places in Latin America, Asia, Vietnam. Pakistan, and Bangladesh? Yes. Pakistan has places that are these days so hot that are becoming unlivable. Unlivable. There are now public officers that are being appointed by the government whose entire job it is to find ways for people to stay cool so that they do not die from overheating. Bangladesh has been for a number of decades now, suffering from extraordinary slides, mudslides coming out of the Himalayas when the rain falls more than usual and comes down more rapidly into the delta that is basically Bangladesh, a country that is still mostly dependent on agriculture.
Many people can't make it. Many people get desperate and find a way somehow through the world to come to Colombia, to Panama and then trying to come to the United States. Now, the United States is clamming down on migration, more and more and more. As the despair of the people increases, our measures at the border also sharpen and harden. The result is the despair is not going away. The climate change is not going away. The dictatorships are not going away. So, the despair of people drives them into the hands, not of the government, but in the hands of cartels, paramilitary organizations that are there to make money of the plight of these people.
And that is exactly what is happening at larger and larger scales. The cartels, let us remember, gained power because they were basically being funded by the drug habits of many Americans, despite our so-called war on drugs for many decades. They are now getting more and more larger parts of their income in human trafficking and smuggling of people through these places, having very little concern for the safety of these who are actually traveling through places like the Darien Gap.
I mentioned climate change is one of the big parts, one of the big contributors to worldwide migration right now. Not just to the United States, same is happening in Europe where the travels through the Sahara Desert and up the Mediterranean into Europe are becoming more and more hazardous as well. Climate change. Since 1750, kind of about the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, people have looked at who has contributed most to climate change. And we all know the answer. It's us.
The United States has by far outstripped any other country in its contribution to the emission of climate change gases. Per capita, we still far outstrip any other country, every single one of us. And the people who make their way desperate to come here, there's a deep irony in this. They want the lifestyle that we have. They want the freedom, they want the economic security that is, even when we don't feel economically secure, it is vast improvement over the lives that people leave behind.
And I don't want to diminish the insecurity that happens, that lives in our country at all. Our food room and our clothing room and our layette program are testimony to the needs here as well.
But climate change is a major factor, and we have done this. This leads me to an odd conclusion. When Abraham and God are talking and God is like, "For the sake of 10 righteous people, I will not destroy Sodom and Gomorrah." Perhaps God is also saying, "For the sake of the righteous, I will not end the lives that are causing climate change." This is the justice that God is talking about. When we think of justice, very often we hear words, we evoke words like retribution, maybe even revenge. That's not what is going on here at all.
For God, justice has to do with hope, with redemption. And what we get to take in from this is that even though on a worldwide scale we have with our lives, our honorable, hard-working lives, also contributed to climate change. God is holding out hope and redemption for us that we might see what it is that we are participating in, and we might find better ways to change and act and correct and find solutions that may put an end to the suffering of so many. God is holding out hope for this. God is knowing that we are not beyond redemption at all.
We speak of justice in the church very often, and it is kind of with an understanding that we know what justice is and that we are on the side of justice. But sometimes I believe we have to also reflect on the fact that maybe we have to be recognizing that we are in need of redemption as much as many other people. And fortunately, we serve a God who wants that for us.
I have a good friend in Berkeley, Pastor Mike Smith, who just in the spring wrote a thesis on black earth theology. I'll be telling you more about it in the coming months, but he brings together the work of racial justice and environmental justice in this work of black earth theology. It is very exciting work. In fact, I find it some of the most exciting work.
Once again, God is choosing the side of the people who have been the most overlooked, the most oppressed in society, and is using them to formulate new ways out of the climate crisis and the racial injustice that we still witness in our country today, through beautiful theology called black earth theology.
I want you to take away this. We are here also to be redeemed. God is full of hope for us. And that whatever it is, when we read stories in the news that are sometimes almost unbearable to read, God and Abraham already had that conversation and God was already saying, "For the sake of 10 righteous ones, I will hold out hope of redemption."
Amen.
Amen.
Got to tune in as soon as I receive a notification! Amen