Reading: Genesis 19-21, Psalm 6

We pick up the story today with the angels sent by God yesterday to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah. Sodom is cast in an extremely unfavorable light in this story. No one offers the visitors shelter- look back at Abraham’s quick offer of rest and a feast to these same travelers in chapter 18- Sodom is being shown as a dangerous and uncivil place from the get go. Lot insists they stay with him, but the entire city turns out that night to demand they be turned over to them for the express purpose of abusing them sexually.

Let’s pause and add up what we have been told about Sodom and Gomorrah so far: there are less than ten righteous persons in the city, it is an inhospitable place, it is violent and bent on demeaning those from outside. The place is being painted similarly to the pre-flood world: awash in violence and evil.

So God sends angels to destroy the city. This isn’t quite the reset button that the flood was, but it clearly comes from the same place: God is grieved by the behavior of these people to the point where he cannot allow it to continue.

In the midst of this story we find Lot, a relative of Abraham, who alone of the inhabitants of Sodom is spared. Why? Certainly not on his merits. This is no new Noah. When the people of Sodom come and demand he turn over the visitors to them, he offers them his own daughters instead. He lived among these people for some time, and it tore down his and his families understanding of right living. As the story goes on this becomes more and more clear. First, Lot lingers in the city despite a clear warning to leave, only going when he is physically taken hold of and pulled out of the city. Then, when he it told to flee to the hills, he balks and asks to be allowed to stay in the valley. His wife disobeys the direct instructions of the visiting angels and is turned to salt- one of the more horrifying and strange instances of instant judgment in the Biblical story. Finally, in yet another of the somehow-Sunday-school-skips-this-part series, his daughters manipulate events to get themselves pregnant by their father, and have children whose descendants will pop up later in the story in less than ideal ways.

No, Lot wasn’t saved because he deserved it. In fact, the story tells us exactly why he was saved: The Lord remembered Abraham and he sent Lot out of the overthrow. It was for the sake of Abraham that Lot was saved.

So what is going on? Is this just another story of God hitting a (smaller) reset button? In a way, yes. Sodom was so violently evil that God chose to eliminate it. But it also says something about how God’s dealings with Abraham were fundamentally different from his dealings with the rest of the humans. There were no righteous persons in Sodom, but God saved Lot anyway, because of Abraham. God is dealing with Abraham and his family in a different way than he is dealing with everyone else.

Lest we get carried away and start thinking that this is because Abraham is so great, we are immediately given another story of Abraham giving his wife away. In a story so similar it’s bizarre, Abraham repeats his fearful denial that Sarah is his wife to the local king Abimelech. God’s direct intervention salvages the situation.

Finally, we get the story of the birth of Isaac. Abraham and Sarah finally have the child they complained to God about and were promised. The supernatural birth of their child in old age, their extraordinary treatment by God in ways he deals with no one else, these will surely be the wrap up of the story, right? Oh no. As soon as Sarah has her own son, she insists that Hagar and Ishmael be sent away. And not just sent to live with relatives, but banished to wander in the wilderness, clearly expected to die. And Hagar sits down prepared to die of thirst when God appears and, for the second time, expands his promise to Abraham to include the Egyptian slave woman and her son. Is it because she deserves it more than someone else? No, again, it is for the sake of Abraham.

Abraham (and Sarah) are once again painted in a rather poor light, which when you consider this book is the origin story for the nation that claims to be their descendants, brings up questions about who would preserve such stories about their ancestor and why. But that is a digression from the story. The story continues to outline God’s work to make the story better even as the humans make it worse. God’s judgment removes the worst offences of humanity to forestall pre-flood levels of violent evil while he continues his Abraham project that looks to be headed to undoing the ubiquitous human problem. And next up, God will be putting his chosen instrument Abraham to the test.