Pleading for Sodom (Chester UMC)

I'm glad to be back. I hope you're glad we're back.

It's good to be back with your worshiping with you.

We've missed you all the past couple of weeks and very, very

glad to be here. I'm picking up just where we

left off before I went on vacation.

And and I tell you what, I did a lot of resting and relaxing

these past two weeks. So my brain might be a little

off today. Just going to say that right up

front, you probably noticed that when I used the term

photoelectric cell with the four year olds that perhaps Blevins

is not thinking straight. Today we're picking up back with

the story of Sodom, Sodom and Gomorrah.

But but short, just referencing Sodom to refer to that whole

region. We looked a couple weeks ago and

and we saw. Well, before I get into that,

I'm getting out of order. See my brains off.

Told you my brain is off. Does anyone mind?

I've done math today? Poorly, but I've done math.

Anyone mind if we do a little science today?

Science. OK with everybody.

Where is that? All right and all right.

OK. All right.

We'll wait and see. I understand the attitude there.

Just give it a shot, Blevins. We'll let you know how it goes.

Has anyone ever heard of the Tunguska event?

Anyone ever heard of that? Yes, yes. 50 points for Steven

upfront. You can redeem those later at

the tree trail that allows you to clean up two extra tents at

the end. Absolutely, absolutely.

The Teguska event, for those of you who have not heard of that

before, in 19 O 8, to be precise, at 7:17 AM local time

on June 30th, 19 O 8, near the Tunguska River in Siberia, a

meteor exploded 3 to 6 miles above the earth and it

devastated an area roughly 770 square miles, wiped it out.

By way of reference, Meigs County is about 350 square

miles. So it's maybe.

No, actually, I think Meigs County is about 450 square miles

Because it was. Yeah.

So anyway, bigger than Meigs County, just flattened.

Flattened. Scientists speculate that the

meteor was 100 to 200 feet wide. So big, but not like, you know,

earth shatteringly big. Yeah, we've had some of those

hit in the past, literally that did mass.

And this one didn't even hit the earth.

It exploded 3 to 600 miles above.

It released the destructive force roughly to 500 to 1000

times greater than the atomic bomb dropped on Nagas or on

Hiroshima. People hundreds of miles away

felt the ground shake. People 500 miles away saw the

light flash in the sky. That's like an explosion

happening above Atlanta. That's big enough for us to see

here. Hundreds of miles away, people.

The earth shook so badly, people were knocked off their feet.

Now, because of the remoteness of the area then we don't know

for sure. It wasn't for about another 20

years before scientists actually went to investigate.

There were other things happening in Russia at the time

that people were giving more attention to.

But when they finally did go investigate, what they found was

that the trees in a circular area was all forested, very

remote. They don't think any human lives

were lost because it was so remote.

However, reindeer were killed. So probably a bad year for

Christmas that year. Just saying I thought that was

funnier than that. But you know, been on vacation

for a while. Trees were blown out in straight

lines, like spokes from a wheel. Except for the area right above

the explosion where the trees were still standing but they've

been stripped of their bark and scorched.

There's a massive explosion that wiped out a massive area of land

only by the grace of God that no one was killed as far as we

know. Now here's an interesting thing,

and I've talked several times as we've been doing our walk

through the Bible, starting with very back the creation story in

Genesis one and two, that that sometimes in the Bible, it's OK.

We don't know for sure what's what's history, what's what's

story, what's parable and, and, and, and it's, we don't, it's

not necessary to fight over those things.

You know, if you want to believe things are literal, historical,

if you want to see them more as a parable to teach us lessons

about life, that's great. This story of Sodom and

Gomorrah, interestingly or or maybe terrifyingly, as we think

about the possibility of it being a historical reality and

not simply a story, that there are some scientists, some

archaeologists that believe a similar event may have been what

God used to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah and that whole region.

And there's some evidence for that.

It's by no means conclusive and it's by no means true that all

or even most biblical scholars believe it, that this is how it

happened. But the Tal Al Haman air burst

there was a region we should. I should also say that nobody

knows for sure where Sodom and Gomorrah were.

There is no conclusive evidence as to exactly where they were.

But there is a place in the Jordan Valley near the Dead Sea

called Tal Al Haman and around 16150 BC there was apparently a

high temperature air burst from a meteor that exploded above

that area. Some of the evidence that exists

is shocked quartz and melted pottery that were indicate

extreme heat. High levels of platinum and

Iridium elements commonly found in meteorites.

A sudden layer of destruction across the wide area.

Mud brick walls blown outward, buildings leveled, high salinity

and chemical changes in the soil, possibly explaining the

barren area near the Dead Sea. An explosion which may have

reached temperatures over 2000°C.

For those of you who are like me, and that doesn't mean

anything, 3600°F. That's a lot of heat.

A city sized firestorm. A region sized firestorm that

people observing from afterwards might legitimately describe as

fire and brimstone raining from heaven.

Massive death, massive destruction, all in an instant.

And whether you know, God did that as some sort of miraculous

thing in terms of just creating fire and brimstone out of thin

air like Jesus turned water into wine, or or or multiplied loaves

and fishes. Or whether God directed a meteor

of just the right size to that time and place.

Massive destruction, changing the landscape, obliterating life

so thoroughly that no one even knows for sure where the city of

Sodom and Gomorrah was. This is what was coming.

And this is what God told Abraham was coming to Sodom.

He said, I'm going to tell Abraham.

Abraham's descendants are going to be a great nation, and

through them all the earth will be blessed.

But God wanted Abraham to know and God was, was pretty clear in

that statement that that Abraham and his descendants will be a

great nation through whom all the world is blessed to the

extent that they are following God's way.

And God was giving them a picture of what can happen when

we don't follow God's way. Now, let's be clear.

And I got to say this again, said this three weeks ago.

I'm just going to say it today. I'm not going to spend the whole

sermon on it like I did then. What exactly the sin of Sodom

was how they got off track to such a degree that God LED them

to be destroyed. The Bible says very clearly and

very explicitly in the book of Ezekiel, this was the guilt of

your sister Sodom. She and her daughters had pride,

excessive food and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor

and the needy. They were haughty and did

abominable things before me. Therefore I removed them when I

saw it. The real sin of Sodom was that

they were prosperous and arrogantly cold hearted.

They had drifted out of God's way of love and compassion and

justice and concern for the poor and the vulnerable in the world

around them so thoroughly that God wiped them out.

What was Abraham's response to this?

God told Abraham in advance, this is what going down, going

to look for my for myself, going to check things out on the

ground before before issuing the final judgment and the final

punishment. And and Abraham's response I

find fascinating. It it is perfect.

We don't know for sure, but it's perfectly reasonable to assume

that Abraham knew what life was like in Sodom and in that region

down there. If you remember, his nephew Lot

had moved down there and and Sodom and a few other kingdoms

in the area had rebelled against a larger king that ruled over

them. And the larger king crushed the

rebellion and took a lot and all of the other people and the

wealth of Sodom and Gomorrah away.

And Abram went and defeated that other king and brought back the

people and the wealth. And when the king of Sodom tried

to give that wealth to Abraham, or a portion of it, Abraham

said, no one's ever going to say that you made me rich.

Abraham knew what they were. Abraham knew what was happening

down there. And Abraham did not want to be

in debt to Sodom. It's reasonable to know, a

reasonable to believe that Abraham knew what life was like

down there, of how bad things were and how bad things had

gotten. Almost certainly he had ongoing

contact with his nephew, Lot and their family.

He knew, he knew what was going on.

But his response to what was happening, his response was not

to gloat, was not to celebrate, was not to sit all those dirty,

rotten, awful people. They're finally going to get

their comeuppance. His response was to plead for

the people of Sodom not to celebrate their destruction, but

to plead for them. I have heard it said, and it was

said not unkindly. I think it was said to me by a

Jewish rabbi. It's been a long time since I

heard it, so I could be misremembering it, but this

whole passage of Abraham bargaining with God is, is the

the, the cultural seed from which the, the reputation of

Jewish folks being hard bargainers comes.

That if you're going to bargain with God this hard, then you're

going to bargain with other people this hard as well.

And here's Abraham bargaining with God, bargaining with God

for the lives of a city that he knows is far from God, pleading

for God to have mercy on them. And the strategy that he takes

is to say, well, there's got to be a few righteous people there.

And he starts with 50, and he works it all the way down to 10.

And finally God says, all right, we're done having this

conversation. We'll leave it at 10.

And God leaves and Abraham goes home.

But Abraham, I mean, and again, not just asking once polite over

and over again, God, Abraham, God, you know, if it's, if it's

fifty, Well, if it's what if it's only 45?

I mean, it's five people really make it.

What if it's only 40? What if it's only, what if it's

only 10? God spare these people, spare

these people. Why Abraham stopped at 10, we

don't know for sure, but that's where Abraham stopped.

And we know it was so bad. We talked about that last week

or 2-3 weeks ago. It was so bad that visitors,

given the shelter and protection of an authority figure in the

city, could not escape violent assault from every man who lived

in the city. The city had become an awful

place to live, an awful place to visit, and Abraham was not

celebrating their destruction. Abraham was pleading with God to

have mercy on them, and he got it down to 10.

Are 10 righteous people really enough not to destroy a corrupt

civilization? I mean, when you think about it

from that side, if it's as bad as that, if so much evil is

being done, if so much corruption is there, if it's so

pervasive, covering every man, every woman, every child in the

city, even if you can find 10 righteous people and that entire

civilization, is that really enough reason to spare an entire

civilization? I hope so, and I believe so for

this reason. For this reason, it came a time

when God looked down upon the earth and said there's no one,

no one righteous, not even 1, not even 1.

But for the sake of a single righteous man, and we know is

Jesus, God, spare the world, not just a city, not just a

civilization, but an entire world for the sake of 1

righteous man. Paul says it this way in Romans.

What shall we conclude then? Do we have any advantage?

Not at all, if we have already made the charge that Jews and

Gentiles alike are all under the power of sin.

As it is written, there is no one righteous, not even one.

For the sake of 1 righteous person, God spared a world.

Listen to that whole passage, though that that single verse.

There's none righteous. No, not one gets quoted a lot.

You've probably heard it before, maybe maybe not.

Let me read it's it's the passage itself is a little

longer and it goes on like this. As it is written.

There is no one righteous, not even one.

There is no one who understands. There is no one who seeks God.

All have turned away. They have together become

worthless. There is no one who does good,

not even one. Their throats are open graves.

Their tongues practice deceit. The poison of Vipers is on their

lips. Their mouths are full of cursing

and bitterness. Their feet are swift to shed

blood. Ruin and misery mark their ways.

The way of peace they do not know.

There is No Fear of God before their eyes.

Now we know that whatever the law says, it says to those who

are under the law, so that every mouth may be silenced and the

whole world held accountable to God.

Therefore, no one will be declared righteous in God's

sight by works of the law. Rather, through the law we

become conscious of sin. This was Paul's indictment on

the entire world. Paul, inspired by the Holy

Spirit indictment on the entire world.

Nobody, nobody. They can stand before God and

claim I'm good enough, I'm righteous enough, I'm holy

enough. God destroy the wet rest of the

world. But you owe it to me to save me.

Not a single person. The only person who could do

that was Jesus. And yet Jesus said, God, take my

life and spare them. As Abraham pleaded for the

people of Sodom, Jesus, even hanging on the cross, pleaded

for the people of this world. Forgive them, Father, Jesus

said. They don't know what they're

doing. And God listened to that prayer,

and God has shown his mercy, and God has spared and made for us a

way of salvation. God looked upon us from His

Kingdom, the messes that we had made, and said what he said of

Sodom and Gomorrah. There is no one righteous, not

even one. But instead of destroying us, He

came himself as one of us to save us.

And for the sake of that one righteous person, God has spared

the world. Our hope is not in our own

righteousness. Our hope is in Jesus.

None of us can ever be good enough.

None of us on our own can ever be good enough to avoid the fate

of Sodom and Gomorrah. Not a single one of us.

Our hope is entirely in Jesus Himself and His pleading with

God to have mercy on us. I left a slide in here.

I'm just now realizing that was old, so I'm going to have to

skip over it. Our lives are fragile.

Our righteousness is not our own.

So we have this choice in front of us.

We have this choice in front of us to strive, to choose, to

strive, to follow Jesus faithfully and to plead for

God's mercy for the world because that's what Jesus did

and that's what Abraham did. So our first response as the

church, when we encounter evil in the world, should not be to

call upon God's destruction, not to be to plead with God to bring

fire and brimstone down upon our enemies like his disciples did

when they asked Jesus, hey, you know that city over there

rejected you, wouldn't even let you in.

Should we call down fire and brimstone and Jesus?

Jesus was so ticked he didn't even respond to him, other than

we know that he rebuked them. We don't know what he said.

Maybe it was unprintable. The response of God's people

when we encounter sin in the world is not to call for

judgment, not to call for condemnation, not to call for

God's righteous, angry vengeance, but to plead for

God's mercy. This was the call that God put

out through his prophet Jeremiah as well, when God's own people

had to descended to the point of being as bad as Sodom.

And so God sent destruction into Jerusalem, sent destruction into

Israel. And before he did that, God

through his prophet Jeremiah, he said, he said, is there anyone

who will stand in the gap? The walls of your city are

broken. Evil comes and goes at its

pleasure, but now God is outside your walls and ready to bring in

righteous wrath. Is there anyone who will stand

in the gap and plead for God's people before God himself?

Well, is there anyone who will be like Abraham?

Is there anyone who will be like Jesus himself hanging on the

cross? We can't be as good as Jesus.

We, you know, we can't. We can't.

But we can pray like Jesus. Pray.

We can do that. We can plead for God's mercy.

We can plead for God's salvation.

We can plead for God's compassion upon not just our

family, not just our friends, not just our allies, but even

those who are our enemies. Plead for God's mercy, plead for

God's compassion on our enemies around the world and our enemies

close to home. And by definition, these are

people, these are cultures, these are civilizations that are

at odds with and even at times at war with our own.

But will we plead like Jesus pleads?

Will we plead like Abraham pled for the people of Sodom?

Our lives are fragile. One rock hurtling through space,

exploding in the right place, could wipe out gallium eggs.

Athens, Mason County, we could all be gone.

It happened so fast we wouldn't even know.

People in Atlanta would see the flash.

People in Charleston will go. What would made the ground shake

like that? Columbus, too.

Our lives are so fragile and our hope is not in our strength,

whether it's the strength of arms or the strength of legs and

backs, the strength of our mind to the strength of our will.

Our hope is not in the strength of our righteousness, the

strength of our morality, the strength of our political

philosophies and ideologies. Our only hope is in Jesus, the

one who pled for us as He died on the cross, and the One who

calls for us to plead for others that God would be merciful for

them as well. Pleading for Sodom.

I have heard too much. I'm not saying it about this

church, but in the course of my 50 plus years of life and 30

plus years of pastoring, I have had heard too much of churches

calling for God's wrath and celebrating God's destruction,

and not nearly enough of the people of God calling for God's

mercy for their enemies as well as their friends.

Let's choose to follow Abraham's example.

Let's especially choose to follow Jesus's lead and plead

for Sodom wherever we may find it.

In Jesus name, Amen. Amen.