25 July 2010: 17^th Sunday in ordinary time

Lectionary readings: Genesis 18 v20 – 32 and St Luke’s Gospel 11 v1 – 13

Do you ever bite off more than you can chew – metaphorically speaking, that is? I may have done so today in choosing the Genesis passage to comment on. After all, the Luke passage would have been the easier option, dealing with Christ’s teaching on prayer. The fact is that I’ve heard lots of sermons on the Lord’s Prayer, but none on the story of Abraham interceding with God on behalf of the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah. So here goes………

At first impression Abraham’s intercession isn’t very worshipful. It reads more like a judicial enquiry and that’s what the editors of Genesis intended. The first book in the Bible was written relatively late, when the nation had suffered several setbacks. The kingdom, divided in two after the death of Solomon, endured the fall of Samaria, the northern capital, to the Assyrians in 721 BC, then in 586 BC the southern capital of Jerusalem fell to Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon. Exile ‘by the rivers of Babylon’ for most of the people followed for the next fifty years. The editors grappled with the issue of whether a whole nation could be swept away, or whether God would save a nation for the sake of a few righteous people. The key question was [verse 25] ‘Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?’

So the encounter between Abraham and God is like a courtroom drama. [see attached script] Abraham is confrontational, blunt and persistent. He pulls no punches. He asks direct questions, and God, far from expressing disapproval, responds positively. Just how shocking this argument was is indicated by a scribal alteration to verse 22. In the oldest Hebrew manuscripts it reads ‘The Lord remained standing before Abraham’. Later scribes felt it was unseemly for God to be presented as standing waiting before a mere human being, so the verse was altered to its present translation of ‘Abraham remained standing before the Lord’. Isn’t that a lovely scribal reversal?!

God said he would investigate the sins of Sodom and Gomorrah. The two cities have become bywords for wickedness. We hurry over their malpractices, because sodomy has become an unmentionable word in our vocabulary, and homophobes delight to stereotype homosexuals as ‘Sodomites’. However, look more closely at the Old Testament evidence. The many sins of the two cities include: lies, greed, luxurious living, social injustice, inhospitality to strangers, violent conduct and heterosexual abuse. Jesus, commenting on the reception given to his disciples on mission, picked out the villages which refused to welcome them as strangers bearing the word of God. He said that such villages merited a fate like Sodom’s. No mention here of homosexual practice. The credit crunch crisis has reminded us that we should focus more on the sins of the banks and the boardrooms than on the sins of the bedroom!

Abraham bargains with God as to how many good people there have to be to save the cities. The required number is reduced from 50 to 10, but why stop there? Various answers are suggested. Perhaps it dawned on Abraham that God’s love and grace could not be reduced to a quota system, a numbers game. He could stop bargaining and trust to God. He has made his point. Another view is that less than ten good people can’t be expected to turn a bad situation round. It takes a critical mass of at least ten to turn round the effects of wickedness. Others suggest that less than ten is coming down to a basis of individuals who can be rescued from forthcoming disaster.

It’s certainly a fascinating story, with implications for how we intercede in prayer.

Abraham’s intercessions counted. So can ours. If God’s decision had been fixed and final, there would have been no point in interceding. It was not all predestined from the beginning. Such a belief leads to a grim fatalism, that nothing can be done about our major concerns or society’s problems. Instead we can countenance a God who takes seriously what human beings think and say, and gives us the opportunity of working with Him to shape the future. God is not playing with us. It is not just a charade.

The story reminds us that the focus of our intercessory prayers should not only be those we love and approve of, or the causes we especially espouse. They are not to be neglected, of course. We pray in the name of Jesus who urged us to love our enemies, and to pray for those who persecute us. What are the equivalents for us of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah? Perhaps people we very much disapprove of like suicide bombers, serial killers, paedophiles, bankers or politicians? When we pray for the victims of crime, shouldn’t we also pray for prisoners and all who try to rehabilitate them back into society? When we pray for Afghanistan we pray for the coalition’s armed forces and the innocent people caught up in the violence, but do we pray for the insurgents, the Taliban? Is anyone beyond the scope of God’s love in Christ?

We must be careful not to take away the wrong message from our readings. Abraham persisted in pressing his case with God. He bartered and bartered. In the parable of the friend asking for bread from a neighbour when a visitor arrived unexpectedly in the middle of the night, he persisted until he got what he asked for. We are not to read into these stories that those who pray loudest and longest will receive attention!!. The focus in both stories is on the need to persist in both prayer and action on behalf of the weak and the vulnerable.

Jesus’ parable ends with the famous three fold command about asking, seeking and knocking. Notice there is no promise of immediate results! We often presume that what we are given or find will be a consolation or comfort, but it may also be a challenge! We knock and the door will be opened, but it may lead us to where our feet have feared to tread!

Two final points. There will need to be a consistency between our intercessions and our life-style and actions. P.T. Forsyth in the early twentieth century pointedly reminded us that ‘There is no value in praying for the poor if the rest of our time is given to making ourselves rich’.

Interceding with God isn’t easy. When we’re feeling overwhelmed, let us remember the assurance of the writer of the letter to the Hebrews. In Jesus wee have a great high priest, tempted in every respect as we are, and living continually to intercede for and with us. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen

Ian Wragg