Pray Like This
I spent this past Friday night out at Hamlin Beach State Park with the Youth of this church for part of their annual Bike Trip. Bike Trip was one of the first things I heard about when I first met with the Staff Parish Relations Committee back in March of this year. It was a great experience overall, and I got to spend some time with a group of incredibly thoughtful, creative, and energetic young people, that I would really encourage you all to get to know, if you haven’t already. I won’t go into too much detail about what goes on at Bike Trip, but I will share one of the mantras that got thrown around a lot: trust and obey. Now, in this case, this phrase “trust and obey” was applied not to God, but to Mary-Beth Rumble, whom the youth had been told they should trust and obey. In my time at Bike Trip, this mantra was repeated several times, usually during meal prep and when there were complex instructions being given. While it is certainly fair to say that, if you are a teenager on a church camping trip in the woods, you ought to trust and obey absolutely, this doesn’t necessarily seem to be the example set in the exchange we witnessed this morning between God and Abraham.
Abraham doesn’t seem to be down with the whole “trust and obey” concept. As soon as God tells Abraham what the plan is for these cities, Abraham seems immediately put off. He jumps in, though much more politely than I might be if I had just been told that two whole cities were about to be carpet-bombed, leveled, and systematically wiped out by a much more powerful force. Abraham, in that moment, failed to reconcile these plans with the God who had been lecturing him about becoming the father of many, and about upholding justice and righteousness, and about how many nations would be blessed through him. Maybe he saw God as being a little hypocritical in that moment. God, this powerful force that claimed to stand for justice and mercy, was now looking out at an entire people ready to erase them from the Earth—every adult, every child, every infant.
It’s probably a good thing for God in this story that the Geneva Convention wasn’t a thing yet. Not that prohibitions against collective punishment or targeting civilians really make a difference today, but still.
Maybe God knew that Abraham would push back against this plan, and maybe that’s why, just a couple verses before the start of this reading, God has this internal debate with Godself about whether or not to tell Abraham about what was going to happen. Maybe God wanted to be challenged, talked down, told off. The Book of Genesis is full of God trying to teach Abraham lessons, to varying degrees of success. But I feel like this particular instance is one in which Abraham maybe starts to get it. Each time he lowers the number of righteous people it would take to keep God from destroying these cities, God seems to be coaxing a little more out of Abraham, leaving the door open for him to ask for more. What if there are fifty? Forty five? Forty? Thirty? Twenty? Ten? And that’s where he stops. Now, I did think about doing something with our faith stopping at ten, ten percent, tithing…but I’ll save that for stewardship season. Why does Abraham stop at ten? If there were only nine righteous people in the cities, would that have been palatable for him? What if there were five? What if there was One righteous person in either city, and because they happened to live in one of those cities, they had to suffer with the rest of their people—even if they were actually on the ground trying to change things.
And before anybody who knows their Bible tries to counter with the example of Lot and his family being saved from Sodom, go back and read their story. If they’re an example of righteousness, then the bar is pretty darn low.
And what about the children? Are they counted the same as the adults? Are women counted the same as men? Are all of these really guilty of the sin of Sodom, which the prophet Ezekiel tells us is trampling on the poor and refusing hospitality to those in need? What are the limits of God’s grace? What are the limits of Abraham’s faith?
I don’t believe that God personally tests us, though there are certainly things that happen that test our faith. Maybe hearing the story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah is one of those things. Something I do believe, though, is that stories like this one can help us understand how people in the past have thought about God, and can help us to evaluate how we think about God today. In this sense, I see a couple of valuable pieces of this story. The first is that God seems to welcome pushback. We often think of obedience to God as submission to God. But I believe that we can be people of faith and still argue with God. God can take it, I promise. And God is the perfect argument partner, because we know that, even as we argue, there is nothing we can do or say or think that will cause God to leave us or stop loving us. In the midst of a polarized world, we often don’t bother arguing, or we don’t argue with one another in constructive, good-faith ways. Because we don’t always trust that our relationships can endure disagreement. This breakdown of our ability to argue, to disagree and have a productive back and forth contributes to apathy, distrust in one another and our institutions, and has left for our young people a poor example of how to exist in community beyond the superficial. So let’s learn how to argue, starting with God.
The other thing that I take away from this passage, is that pushing back when we see injustice is obedience to God. These two passages today, both the Genesis and the Gospel, teach us how to pray. In each prayer, there is a form of advocacy. We’ve already looked at length at Abraham’s advocacy in Genesis, even if his demands don’t go quite as far as we or God might have liked. The gospel reading, though, is a little more subtle. Hopefully this passage sounded familiar, as it is what forms the base of our Lord’s Prayer that we say at least once a week. And it’s full of demands. “Your Kingdom come,” give us our daily bread, forgive us, “do not bring us to the time of trial.” These are all demands—not just for ourselves and our own personal flourishing, but for the community. The pronouns are plural: us, our, we. This prayer, unlike Abraham’s individual lobbying on behalf of Sodom and Gomorrah, is the manifesto of a people crying out to have their basic needs met and to see the good community realized in its midst. When Jesus teaches his followers how to pray, he teaches them not only how to approach God, but that prayer is collective action, it is speaking together, and it is speaking out with those in need. Not only that, when we organize to advocate for justice, our letter, our chants, our songs—these are prayers. Not because those in power are God, but because God hears those cries and stands with those who cry out.
To pray is to protest, to argue, to make demands. To pray is to be heard—by those in power and by the one who truly listens and will never turn us away. When you pray, when we pray together, may we pray ourselves to action, may we pray together in boldness, and may we pray God’s kingdom be revealed in our midst. When you pray, pray like this. Amen.