I have to confess that I dread the Sunday this first reading comes up. It’s often proclaimed that the towns of Sodom and Gomorra were destroyed by God because they were practicing homosexuality. Those who proclaim this hint darkly that modern day occurrences like the recent Supreme Court decisions on gay marriage put our nation at risk for a similar fate. It’s completely untrue and and is an unfortunate use of Scripture. Simply put, there is no way to draw a line between this reading and homosexual orientation.
OK, so now what? Yes, on another level I think this Scripture is misinterpreted. I think most people look at the conversation between God and Abraham and think this is some time of a negotiation. On its face that’s what it looks like, but that interpretation assumes a few things that I think most of us find troubling.
As the scene opens Abraham asks God if He will really destroy all of Sodom, the just and the sinners, if there are fifty just men in the city. We’ve come a long way in the last 4,000 years in our understanding of God, but I am troubled that God would destroy everyone because some are sinners. Doesn’t an all powerful God have the ability to pick and choose? That’s what he does in Exodus when he kills the firstborn of the Egyptians. In the course of the dialogue God promises not to destroy Sodom if there are 45, then 40, then 30, then 20, then 10 just men. Was there such a low threshold only because of Abraham’s intervention?
On some level the dialogue is moot as we see in Genesis 19 that God does indeed destroy Sodom, so we can infer there weren’t 10 just men in the city. Does that mean there were 0, or that there were perhaps 9? Could Abraham have kept negotiating the number down to 1? If so, why didn’t he? Did the city die because Abraham was too timid?
Is this reading not about negotiation, but about prayer? Is Abraham’s intent here not to negotiate down, but to understand God? I suspect that Abraham has no illusions that he can convince God of his own desire (to save Sodom) as to understand better this God that he has chosen to follow. Is this a God who is vengeful, or a God who is merciful? Have I uprooted my family to worship a God who someday decide that I am sinful and destroy me? Or decide that some of my family are sinners and destroy all of us? Indeed, perhaps this dialogue is not for God to decide what to do, but for Abraham to decide what to do.
Prayer, in its purest form, is exactly that. It is our attempt to understand God, God’s desire for us, and our response. Prayer is also at the heart of the gospel reading, and if the first reading is complicated, this reading is refreshing in its simplicity.
Whenever I meet a patient for the first time I ask him if he wants me to say a prayer at the end of the visit. Most say yes, but some say no. For some, prayer is a deeply private and intimate time with God, and will all due respect, I don’t belong there. I had a patient decline my prayer once and he said this: “Prayer is not just words; it needs to go beyond words. When I hear someone pray for me, after about 5 or 6 words, he’s just showing off.” There’s something to be said for this. I think there is always the temptation not so much to pray, but to be seen praying, and to be seen praying cleverly. When someone compliments one of my prayers I’m always a little nervous; I hope the compliment means I touched something in his heart, and not that it was particularly poetic and eloquent. A few chapters later in Luke, Jesus criticizes a Pharisee for a self congratulatory prayer (“thank you for making me better than anyone else”).
When Jesus instructs us to pray he is setting the same tone: recognizing God’s power and asking for what we need, and then stopping. But if God knows what we need, why do we need to ask for it? And, later in the reading, why does Jesus promise that if we ask, it will be given to us? I can’t tell you how many things I’ve prayed for that I haven’t gotten.
Perhaps this is where prayer comes full circle in the readings. Our prayer brings us closer to the mind of God, gives us a better understanding of God and His relationship to us. Only when we’ve started down that road do we really understand what we need. As children we were told to thank God before we started on our list of needs, and it was presented (at least to me) to make prayer more than our annual list to Santa. But I think the wisdom of that prayer form goes beyond the wish list. The prayer that has become so familiar that we call it “The Lord’s Prayer” completes the work that our father Abraham started all the way back in Genesis.