Remember Lot`s Wife

Remember Lot`s Wife
By Sally Baehni Burges

[Sally Baehni Burgess is the Associate Pastor of the Broadway Baptist Church in Kansas City.]

What images come to mind when you hear the word compassion? Do you think of righteousness, strength, power, and justice? Or do you think of sentimentality, softness, maybe flabby convictions? Does the word compassion stir up the image of a winner, someone who comes out on top in the end? Or does the word conjure up the image of a loser, someone who feels too much, isn’t rational enough, wears her bleeding heart on her sleeve?

The image that usually comes to mind for me is Jesus weeping over Jerusalem, and I hear the words God said to Moses, “I AM Yahweh, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness….”1 And just as I’m about to settle down into this image of compassion, I hear this little voice coming from somewhere deep down in that “bad neighborhood” 2 part of my mind saying, “Oh yeah? Well, what about Lot’s wife? And what about Job’s wife? And Miriam? And Eve?

Seems like I’m always running smack dab into these Old Testament women who are getting kicked out of paradise, contracting serious skin disorders, or turning into salt licks. Now some might view this as an obstacle. But I see it as good sermon fodder. How come compassion and grace don’t seem to abound for these women? What would we hear if we listened with compassion to their stories? Last fall when I was on my old Seminary campus to hear Phyllis Trible’s lecture series, I mentioned to Dr. Graves, my former preaching professor, that I was thinking about preaching a sermon on Lot’s wife.

“Oh,” he said. “That’s an easy 3 point sermon. You don’t even need a poem at the end because it rhymes.” I waited.

Dr. Graves cleared his throat: “Lot’s wife in three points. She halted; she faulted; she salted.”

The crowd that had gathered around us in the lunch room laughed. “Good one, Dr. Graves,” I said. “Only, I’m not sure she faulted, at least not any more or less than Lot did.”

“I’m not either,” he said. “But that’s about what her story has been reduced to.”

And he’s right, because Lot’s wife is one of the losers in the Bible. But Phyllis Trible said: If we want to hear the loser’s stories we just have to listen; we have to look and listen with compassion for the voices in scripture that have been silenced.

So I want to focus on the story of Lot’s wife because I want to invite you to begin listening with compassion for the losers’ voices in Scripture. It’s a discipline I’ve been practicing, and Iwant you to practice it with me now because listening for “the view from below”f3 in Scripture helps tune our ears to the voiceless ones in our communities, in our churches, in our city, our country, in the world.

In our story from Genesis, Chapter 19, Lot’s wife is one of the losers along with the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. Verse 19 says: “But Lot’s wife looked back, and she became a pillar of salt.” The comment at the bottom of my NIV Study Bible says:

“Her disobedient hesitation became proverbial in later generations. Even today grotesque salt formations near the southern end of the Dead Sea are reminders of her folly.”4

Poor Mrs. Lot. She never says a word through the entire story. And yet, she is defined as foolish, disobedient, doubleminded — even greedy — generation after generation after generation. It makes me curious. How do they know so much about her, about her motives when she never says a word. As the story begins, her husband brings home these alien travelers (who actually are angels; the Lots don’t know it but we do because the narrator lets us in on that little secret). Lot didn’t call before he came home with guests. He didn’t give Mrs. Lot any warning that he was bringing two rough looking strangers home to spend the night. She didn’t have a chance to pick up the toys, do up the dishes, make up the guest room. No, he just appeared at the door at the end of the day and said, “Honey, I’m home. And, uh, I brought a couple of aliens home with me for dinner. Uh, they’ll be spending the night, too.”

What does she say, what does she feel? We don’t know. She is silent. Verse 3 says “He prepared a meal for them, baking bread without yeast….” Yeah, right! He’s been hanging out at the city gate all day. When did he have time to cook a meal? My guess is that unless Lot was the first liberated man in the Bible, he instructed his wife to prepare a meal and she did so — silently. Well, then this horrible scene erupts outside of their house. A gang of men surround the house and taunt Lot and his family, “Send out those aliens, those foreigners. Send them out so that we can have a little fun with them, show them where they stand, run them out of town, or kill them.” The verse says “send them out so that we can know them,” and it is translated “so that we can have sex with them.”

Because of that some want to stop listening here. It’s too uncomfortable so they quickly and easily dismiss the “sin of Sodom” as homosexuality.

Something we wouldn’t do. But there are at least two very serious problems with that interpretation. One is it assumes that having a same sex orientation automatically means someone will engage in a violent gang rape. That tells me we haven’t been listening — we haven’t been listening to the reports of the war crimes, the gang rapes, that have been perpetrated in Bosnia by soldiers against women and men; we haven’t been listening, we don’t want to hear the reports about these same kinds of crimes being committed against inmates by other inmates in our own American prison systems. Rape isn’t about

homosexuality or heterosexuality. It’s not about a sexual relationship at all. It’s about power and humiliation and abuse. But we haven’t been listening; we haven’t wanted to hear.

The second problem is this interpretation doesn’t take seriously what the Bible says the sin was in Sodom and Gomorrah. It lets those of us who are heterosexual off the hook; but we are not off the hook. Isaiah names the sins of Sodom and Gomorrah as mistreatment of the alien, abuse of the outcast, and lack of justice for the powerless, for those with no voice. We must allow the scripture to confront us about those parts of ourselves that commit the same sin as the people of Sodom and Gomorrah: We lack hospitality; and we lack compassion for the “aliens” in our midst, for the ones who are different from us.

There is an inherent fear of the foreigner that we humans feel. You can see the evidence of our fear if you listen to the things we humans say. Remember how we were so sure, at first, that an Arab terrorist had bombed the federal building in Oklahoma? Remember the disbelief expressed in Israel recently when they learned that Prime Minister Rabin was assassinated by a Jew? “Jews don’t do this to Jews,” they said. “We would expect this from a foreigner but not from a Jew.”

We’re not that different from the people of Sodom and Gomorrah. This hospitality thing, this welcoming the stranger in our midst, hearing the voice of the voiceless is hard stuff for us, too. We don’t do it very well either. Last May my husband and I visited his sister, Mary, in Ohio. While we were there, one of my husband’s nieces came through with some of her friends. Anna is an art major at Kansas University. She and her friends had been traveling around the country visiting some of the nations art museums.

I’ve known Anna since she was little and I’ve always liked her. She’s very creative, very intelligent. And so when she turned sixteen and dyed half of her hair orange and the other half purple, I didn’t think too much about it. That was just Anna. I knew her. She was all right. But when she arrived at Mary’s and her friends got out of the van with their hair sticking up in these spiked things, and their leather jackets and chains, I said to Mary, “They look really scary. Do you think they’re trying to make a statement? Do you think they’ll hurt us?”

Mary said, “I don’t know. Why don’t we go in and make a pot of coffee? We’ll sit and talk, find out who they are.”

Ah, Mary! Hospitality — the compassionate way!5 Holding a cup of boiling hot coffee in my hand I felt a little more secure. We talked; we asked questions about their travels, about their plans for the future. We listened to their dreams about the places they wanted to go, the art businesses they wanted to open. They really loosened up, and so did we.

And then I noticed that their “chains” were actually pieces of jewelry they had designed and made themselves. Now it’s not like any jewelry I would wear; but then I’m 40.

The scene at the van saying goodbye was a whole lot more fun than saying hello had been. There were hugs all around.

After they left, Mary kidded me about my fears: “Sally, when you were in high school didn’t you have really long hair and hang out with kids who wore a lot of beads and macrame and bell bottoms?”

I didn’t say a word. I was silent.

Hospitality, that’s what Lot offered the strangers. He was so earnestly hospitable he was even willing to sacrifice his daughters for the strangers’ safety. “Here are my daughters,” he says to the angry mob in verse 6. “Do what you like with them.”

Thank heaven the angels were more liberated than Lot. Thank heaven that daughters, women, were not aliens to the messengers of God. And Lot’s wife? What did she feel when she saw her husband’s lack of compassion for his own daughters? What must she have felt when she saw the messengers of God value her daughters, save them from their own father? There is only silence.

When the angels finally tell Lot and his family to flee, Lot hesitates a couple of times, bargains some with the angels, even changes the arrangements. His wife hesitates one time and yet “her disobedient hesitation becomes proverbial”; she turns into a pillar of salt. And we assume this means she was punished for her disobedience; that the God who had been so patient with Lot, lost patience with her.

Well, there’s another interpretation. It’s called a midrash. A midrash is a story (sometimes a very old story passed down to us by our Hebrew ancestors) told by those who study the Old Testament stories and wonder about what has been left out, about the silent parts. So they add an explanation, a midrash to help us listen.

Why did Lot’s wife turn around and look? Was it disobedient hesitation? Maybe. Was it greed? Was she foolishly longing after all the material things she had to leave behind in order to flee? Maybe. And why did she turn into a pillar of salt? Was it punishment?

Well, the midrash says “she turned around out of compassion for those who had been left behind, and the pillar of salt was from her tears.”f6 Compassion can be costly; compassion can seem like folly. The cross seems like foolishness to some. And yet, the Apostle Paul writes: “…the foolishness of God is wiser than [human] wisdom….”7

Let me close with a story about an ordinary, foolish — somewhat costly — compassionate act that Anne Lamott writes about in her book, Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year. Lamott is the single parent of a newborn baby. The baby’s father has chosen to be out of the picture so she’s on her own with a few good friends. Well, the baby is colicky and has been ever since he came home from the hospital six weeks ago. No one — not the baby; not the mom — is getting any sleep, and Lamott has finally reached that “zombie point” where you’re so exhausted you’re not sure if you’re going to cry or kill something.

Then something truly amazing happened.

A man from church showed up at our front door, smiling and waving to me and Sam, and I went to let him in. He is a white man named Gordon, fiftyish, married to our associate pastor, and after exchanging pleasantries he said, “Margaret and I wanted to do something for you and the baby. So what I want to ask is, what if a fairy appeared on your doorstep and said that he or she would do any favor for you at all, anything you wanted around the house that you felt too exhausted to do by yourself and too ashamed to ask anyone else to help you with?”

“I can’t even say,” I said. “It’s too horrible.”

But he finally convinced me to tell him, and I said it would be to clean the bathroom, and he ended up spending an hour scrubbing the bathtub and toilet and sink with Ajax and lots of hot water. I sat on the couch while he worked, watching TV, feeling vaguely guilty and nursing Sam to sleep. But it made me feel sure of Christ again, of that kind of love. This, a man scrubbing a new mother’s bathtub, is what Jesus means to me. As Bill Rankin, my priest friend, once said, spare me the earnest Christians.8

Spare me the earnest Christians; give me the compassionate ones. May God grant each one of us the grace and the strength to follow the compassionate way, to see the view from below, to listen to the voices of the voiceless, and in doing so to experience new life, new joy, healing and the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Endnotes
 1 From Exo. 34: 6.
 2 In her book, Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year, Anne
Lamott writes: “My mind is a bad neighborhood that I try not to go into
alone.” It’s a metaphor I connect with not only because I, too, have a
family of Greek “furies” living in my head ready to pounce and beat the
stuffing out of me at the least little mistake. But also because the questions
I ask lead me into unconventional thoughts that have gotten me in trouble
more than once with conventional thinkers.
 3 I first heard this expression in Fr. Richard Rohr’s articles and tapes. I have
since heard it in various forms from other feminist and liberationist
theologians.
 4 From The NIV Study Bible, page 34
 5 For a marvelous description of “the compassionate way” read Compassion:
A Reflection o the Christian Life by Henri J. Nouwen, Donald P. McNeill,
and Douglas A. Morrison.
 6 I read this midrash in the introduction to a book titled But God Remembered:
Stories of Women from Creation to the Promised Land by Sandy Sasso.
 7 1Co. 1:25.
 8 Lamott, Anne. Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year,
page 70.
 

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