Two barely remembered things, part 1

Before I get back to prisons and other areas for service and activism, there are a couple of old thoughts that have been nagging at me. One is really pertinent to the discussion that really just started with thinking about the parable of the sheep and goats. Therefore, I am going to do the other one first.

In both cases they are things that I heard once in a church setting, and I think in a class setting. I think the one for next week was in a Young Women's class, and this one might have been from an Institute class. That puts them as things that I heard as a college student and as a teenager, respectively, so there are reasons that I don't remember the details clearly.

In both cases, I think the person saying it was quoting someone else who would have had more prestige and authority. Remembering names would have helped me find what I was looking for. This is a common failing, as I have heard many people say that they can't remember who said something, but they think it was a general authority, or attribute something to a general authority, but it turns out to have been a youth speaker or fireside speaker. Proper attribution is important, for speakers and listeners.

Anyway, what I think I remember someone saying is that the true sin of Sodom and Gomorrah was inhospitality. Maybe it was a lack of charity. They could go together.  Charity would certainly include hospitality.

I have had other teachers impress upon me the importance of the hospitality in the Middle East. I don't know how far back that goes, like maybe that developed more recently than Lot's story. I don't have a hard time imagining that in an environment with lots of desert space and sand storms that hospitality would become very important, and maybe that would become such a part of the culture that it would carry over into cities where there were more resources. And, even if there are options for taking shelter and buying food, local residents intent on raping newcomers means you can't automatically consider the city to be safer.

Honestly, looking back at the story, it seems preposterous to me that the focus on the story has been that the genders of the rapists and the intended victims was the same, so that's why the cities were destroyed: for being gay! Because rape is about attraction and not power and abuse! I say seems preposterous, but with some of the reactions to the currently unfolding tale of how much sexual abuse and harassment goes on in all industries, we are still largely preposterous. We should work on that.

Before I started writing this, I tried my search one more time, and I did find something:

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/rev-patrick-s-cheng-phd/what-was-the-real-sin-of_b_543996.html

It's from 2010, well after what I am thinking of, though certainly some of the same points are made. I think he is way off base with his interpretation of Genesis 7 and Jude 1:7, so I am not turning to Reverend Cheng as a scriptural authority either (though he clearly does study a lot and has some good insights), but there are two other scriptural references, which I appreciate.

In Hebrews 13:2, we are admonished to not neglect hospitality, because thereby some have "entertained angels unaware". That sounds like Abraham and Lot in that story. The people of Sodom were their opposites. They are not mentioned, but it is not hard to see the connection.

More pertinently, in Ezekiel 16:

49 Behold, this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom, pride, fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness was in her and in her daughters, neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy.

50 And they were haughty, and committed abomination before me: therefore I took them away as I saw good. 

That correlates a lot more with Matthew 25 than anything about sex.

I acknowledge that hardening your heart towards others, pride, and idleness can weaken a commitment to chastity and fidelity, and getting caught up in sex could harden the heart; we don't do what we do in a vacuum. Charity remains preeminent, as the scriptures have reinforced many times.

What I hope stands out most is that your righteousness and your reward are very dependent on your love for others. There is no similar promise for how well we police other people's sex lives. What you do in your sex life is important, but it is not your job to worry about what sex others are having.

There are things we should be aware of and interfere with, like abuse of strangers and rape and harassment, but that is not about consenting adults having sex.

I don't see how we keep getting that wrong.