Holy Trinity & St. Anskar

…on that Day, it will be more tolerable for Sodom than for that town….

+ In the Name of God the holy and Undivided Trinity

Well, we sure don’t want to end up like Sodom! Consumed in a rain of sulfurous fire because of their evil deeds. Anything but the Great Crime of the Sodomites! And what is that, exactly? Well, as I’m sure you know, it’s not what everybody thinks. Abraham’s kinsman, Lot, lived there and he had three guests, Mysterious guests, whom Genesis calls “men,” but who are usually thought to have been at least angels, and maybe God Himself, appearing as He did to Abraham and Sarah as a Threefold Community. In any case, the men of Sodom wanted to nail them! “Bring out your guests, that we may know them!” The Sodomites wanted to sexually abuse Lot’s guests.

The horrifying nature of the crime they proposed was not its same-sex character or the physical details of the carnal knowledge they had in mind. That was not the taboo the Sodomites violated, it was the taboo ~ still very much alive in Southwest Asia ~ regarding hospitality. The Sodomites surrounded Lot’s house and announced their intention to dishonor that sacred duty in the most violent possible way ~ by sexual assault. Their plans were inhospitable in the extreme, to be sure, but their evil intention would have been no less grave had it taken some other form. As it happened, their intended victims were God’s Messengers ~ or even God Himself. The point is, you never know Who the stranger is. It might be Someone Really Important. It might even be Someone capable of causing catastrophic volcanic eruptions and earthquakes and a rain of fire and brimstone causing the complete destruction of your town! THAT is the meaning of this lurid story, which has nothing to do with what later came to be called sodomy.

You may not know Who your guest is. Paul referred to Lot when he observed that “some have entertained angels unawares”. Jesus’ reference to Sodom today is also about hospitality. His messengers, like those angels who visited Lot, are in fact the messengers of God (whoever rejects you rejects me, and whoever rejects me rejects the One Who sent me, and even the Sodomites are better off than anybody who refuses to welcome you!) It wasn’t until long after Jesus’ time that anyone thought the destruction of Sodom was about anything other than the supernaturally serious obligation to shelter and protect the stranger. The Sodomites sinned against the messengers of God. The villages that rejected the Apostles sinned against the messengers of the Godman. This is a matter much weightier than the particular acts the men of Sodom were contemplating, and to reduce it to that is an almost willful disregard of that weightier matter: how we treat the stranger, the OTHER among us.

Many traditions tell similar stories. There is the legend of the Thirty-six Just Ones, for whose sake God does not destroy the world. This strange Hasidic tradition obviously echoes the whole Sodom episode and Abraham’s famous bargaining with the LORD for the town. There is also a Muslim version, according to which the world in every age is held together by a single person ~ a kind of axis mundi ~ around whom the universe revolves, because he or she is the contact point with God. Like the Just, this Q’tub is always completely incognito ~ probably not the Caliph or this or that well-known scholar or poet or sage. It could be anyone, you see, the bag-lady under the bridge, the bureaucrat behind the window, your dentist, or the new guest just arrived in town. And then there is the great tradition of monastic hospitality, expressed nowhere better than in the Rule of St. Benedict: where there are monks, there will be pilgrims; receive every guest as you would receive Christ Himself.

Every three years, we read this passage around the time of our national holiday, and about a week after the worldwide gay holiday. This invites a reflection on welcoming the stranger as sexual minorities. And I have preached that sermon in the past. No doubt, it still needs to be heard in many places. But the point of the Stonewall anniversary is that sexual minorities are not “others”, they are “us”. The point of Gay Pride celebrations is that sexual minorities are NOT guests, any more than African-Americans or Italian-Americans, or Irish-Americans or Chinese-Americans or Mexican-Americans are guests. Each of these minorities is just as American as anybody else.

If there be anything to celebrate on the Fourth of July this year, it is that American value of inclusion and equality. OK, it’s a value we don’t live up to, but it remains a fundamental American value. I know the flaws of our late-19th Century immigration policies favoring Europeans over Asians ~ not to mention the millions of native-born Americans who would have loved to homestead up here and in the West, had they been permitted to leave the South. But their former masters still needed them as sharecroppers. And so the slaves became debt-peons and we got the Scandinavians. Despite all this, Emma Lazarus’ extravagant words on the Statue of Liberty still appeal to the very best of our national traditions, and we ought to remember them, especially this year:

Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door

However self-congratulatory and hypocritical it may be, this is a powerful, stirring sentiment. But let the hard-hearted to whom it sounds like nothing more than sentimentality, let those who care for nothing other than hard-headed self-interest remember Sodom. Among those huddled masses yearning to breathe free on the other side of our new wall may just be hidden the messengers of God.

AMEN

MARANATHA

COME, LORD JESUS!