June 9, 2009

Texts:
Genesis 18 and 19
Matthew 7

Genesis:
Chapter 18 is the story to which I referred on Sunday with the 3 visitors to Abraham at the Oaks of Mamre. Hospitality is a major tradition in the Bible and remains a hallmark of Middle Eastern culture to this day. When I traveled in the Middle East in 2006, people were unfailingly hospitable. While there are many occurrences of hospitality in our culture, it does not seem to be as embedded in our way of life, as far as I can tell. Do you agree?
In any case, these visitors were not just strangers on the road, but somehow included the Lord. The text is unclear, but beginning in verse 13, the Lord begins speaking. Did the Lord just show up? Is the Lord one of the 3 visitors? Hard to say. But this encounter is not chance.

Then Abraham bargains with God to save Sodom. And God allows Abraham to bargain for Sodom.

Chapter 19
Hospitality takes a dark turn here. Two angels show up at the city gates and Lot, Abraham's cousin, meets them and urges them to stay safely in his house and not in the city square. People come to the house with nefarious plans for the guests (turning what I just said above about hospitality on its head). Lot, offers them his virgin daughters, proving again that "family values" are tricky in the scriptures. The angels, at least, come to the defense of the family and urge them to leave before the city is destroyed.
The area of Sodom and Gomorrah is thought to be in the Dead Sea Valley. There are many salt formations in this area. One could imagine how the pillar of salt story came out of such an area.

Furthering the "family values" crisis, Lot's daughters sleep with their father and create the Moabites and the Ammonites. Remember, these stories in Genesis are prototypical. The individual characters stand for more than just their own experience. These "creation of a people" stories are throughout Genesis, explaining from where the neighboring peoples came. The Ammonites lived in what is today Syria. The Moabites were in modern day Jordan. Notice that their story is perhaps not as flattering as they would like it to be, were they writing in the Bible.
The Hebrew people, like all people, recall history to their own advantage.

Matthew 7
Sermon on the Mount, still continued

Jesus is like the energizer bunny here, he just keeps on teaching, and teaching, and teaching. But this chapter has some beautiful and very familiar sayings in it.

"Do not judge, so you may not be judged".

"Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find...."

People will often cite a particular Bible verse (perhaps one of the ones above). But was your experience of those verses different when you read them in the context of the entire chapter?

7:23 The word the NRSV translates as "evil doers" might be better translated as "lawless ones". It is a person with no regard for the law. Remember that Jesus has just said that he came to fulfill the Law, not to abolish the Law. And the Law, to this audience, would have been the law handed by God to Moses (as well as the laws that came after). So notice Matthew's high regard for the Law and see how that compares with the other gospels.