Roger Ray, pastor
Proper July 28, 2013
Genesis 18:20-23, 31-32
20Then the Lord said, "How great is the outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah and how very grave their sin! 21I must go down and see whether they have done altogether according to the outcry that has come to me; and if not, I will know." 22So the men turned from there, and went toward Sodom, while Abraham remained standing before the Lord.
23Then Abraham came near and said, "Will you indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked? .....31He said, "Let me take it upon myself to speak to the Lord. Suppose twenty are found there." He answered, "For the sake of twenty I will not destroy it." 32Then he said, "Oh do not let the Lord be angry if I speak just once more. Suppose ten are found there." He answered, "For the sake of ten I will not destroy it."
No one, including Osama Bin Laden, thought that the World Trade Towers in New York would completely collapse when struck by airplanes, until, of course, they did. That does not diminish the courage of the firemen who rushed into the burning towers to help evacuate people who consequently lost their lives in the line of duty. A decade later there was a crisis in Japan.
An earthquake and the tsunami crashed into Japan's Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant, making a crisis of nature combined with a human mistake of putting a power plant on a coast, resulting in one of the most dangerous situations faced in Asia since World War II. The potential of deaths from radiation was almost impossible to calculate but the radiation leaking inside the plant made it virtually impossible for anyone to go inside to take action to contain the danger.
The 800 employees who worked at the Fukushima plant were immediately evacuated while robots were sent in with cameras and detectors only to confirm their fears that a major radiation leak was unavoidable. At that point, 50 specialists and firemen volunteered to go in. The Asian media called them the Fukushima 50. Prime Minister Naoto Kan said, frankly, the workers were "prepared for death." Which was a good thing because many of them did and you have to assume that all of them have dramatically shortened their life expectancy. I doubt that anyone volunteering for military service or any other form of public service could have been as certain of stepping into personal sacrifice as did these workers. Their number started out at 50 and grew.
It wasn't like a super hero movie or a Die Hard, Red or G I Joe movie in which people heroically save the world and the heroes all live. The Fukushima 50 didn't even fix the broken reactor.... It is still leaking radioactive waste into the ocean. They just make a horrible situation better and saved a lot of people in the process of shortening their own lives.
Two years have past.... Do you remember hearing about the Fukushima 50? There was some media coverage of their heroism and personal sacrifices at the time but not one percent as much as we have heard about the British royal baby or even Anthony Weiner's junk shots.
We read portions of the Old Testament story about the destruction of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. Please, let me say clearly, this is not history. This is a story. A lot of the myths of the Old Testament are built around an oral accounting of why something in their region of the world is the way that it is. There may have been some villages burned up in volcanic activity or some natural disaster that was then interpreted as being the activity of God but let's be very very very clear about the fact that God doesn't go around burning up cities because of the sinfulness of the city.
If you don't believe me, just go to Washington, D.C. and see that it is still there which is proof enough that God doesn't destroy cities because of the sin of the people who work on Capitol Hill.
The charred remains of an ancient village may have given Jews a reason to create a narrative but the point of the narrative is what gives the account gravity in scripture. What we look at today is a case of pleading between Abraham and the Almighty, which is not unlike other prophetic pleadings with God in Hebrew scripture.
God has told Abraham to get his family out of harm's way while he burns up a sinful city and Abraham tries to bargain with God.... "But what if there are 50 good people still in town?" "What if there are 20?" Finally, "What about 10, if there are 10 good people, could you really burn up 10 good people because there are ten thousand others who really deserve to be fried?"
God relents and gives Abraham the opportunity to name 10 good people in his village and he couldn't do it. Could you? Seriously, could you?
What I find interesting about the martyrs of our memory is that they are almost all dead. When I took a course in religious biography at Harvard, we studied the lives of some of modern history's most remarkable people: Gandhi, King, Day, Romero, Niebuhr, and even though my professor, Dr. Harvey Cox, had known most of them as personal friends, they were all, to we students, dead people.
When we bought this building, I put up framed images of some of faith's great modern examples which included the people I just mentioned along with Black Elk and many others but the only one on display here who is still alive, and I'm not even sure about that, is Wang Weilin, who may have been the unknown protester who stood in front of a tank in Tiananmen Square in 1989.
So, if we were to personalize this text..... if you were standing in Abraham's shoes and God had told you to go to the lake for the weekend because Springfield had pushed God just a little too far..... could you name 10 people from among your peers to save Springfield from having fire rained down on it from heaven?
Could you name the mayor? The superintendant of schools? The city manager? What about the director of the United Way? What about the Catholic Bishop? Or the President of the Assemblies of God? How about the people who are sitting around you here in church? Are you up to 10 yet?
At everyone's funeral, you are always talking about a good person but the sobering fact is that you may not have ever thought of them as having been a good person until shortly after they had died. Abraham was asked to quickly come up with the names of 10 good people who were alive, who were his neighbors and he couldn't do it and I suspect that for the most part, we couldn't either.
I can't name a single one of the Fukushima 50, you may not know the names of more than one or two of the community leaders I just mentioned and I bet you couldn't repeat the name of the guy standing in front of that tank in Tiananmen Square and I just told you what it was...... I'm pretty sure it was Wang Weilin.
But if I asked you to name the New York governor who resigned because of his relationship with prostitutes, or which New York mayor candidate sends naked pictures of himself to young women, or which governor got his house keeper pregnant or which governor disappeared while visiting his mistress in Argentina..... you can name all of them.
Some of that is because we are trained to think about people's failings and whenever someone sticks their head up above the crowd, the majority instinct is to try to find some plausible reason to cut their head off.
Our government is starved for leadership but no one wants to lead because as soon as you step out in front of the line, a hundred people want to stab you in the back. The progressive church is simply not making much progress in the world because progressives do not champion one another.... We are much more likely to cut one another down than to build one another up.
We are afraid to praise anyone these days because we are afraid that we'll find out something about them that will disappoint us. John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi, no one that we now confidently name as great leaders would have withstood the scrutiny of the current media's neo-puritan witch hunts.
The only reason we can name anyone from the past century as a hero is because the 24 hour news media didn't come into existence until the end of the 20th century.
So, I have two things to say about this. The first is that we all need to decide, right now, right here, that we are going to stop be lead around by the nose by gossip. We need to be much more concerned about what a person has done right, what they have accomplished, what they can do than by how many black marks we can put on their moral score sheet. Capable, wonderful, intelligent, talented people make mistakes. Now, Anthony Weiner is just crazy.... That's different..... but I'm saying, get your head out of the sheets and look at the world in a more balanced way.
Besides, you know, lions don't spend much time worrying about the opinions of sheep. Don't think like you were just a part of the herd of sheep.
The second thing is that I want to suggest to you is that try your best to live in a way that earns you a place on that list of good people. Sure, if you try to stick your neck out, someone will try to cut your throat. But as that famous poem that was mistakenly attributed to Mother Theresa goes:
People are often unreasonable, illogical and self centered;
Forgive them anyway.
If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives;
Be kind anyway.
If you are successful, you will win some false friends and some true enemies; Succeed anyway.
If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you;
Be honest and frank anyway.
What you spend years building, someone could destroy overnight;
Build anyway.
If you find serenity and happiness, they may be jealous;
Be happy anyway.
The good you do today, people will often forget tomorrow;
Do good anyway.
Give the world the best you have, and it may never be enough;
Give the world the best you've got anyway.
The only proverb that I can claim as my own comes from years of experience in ministry. My proverb says: If you light a candle in a dark place, you will draw bugs. I realized this after years of trying to do really good things in ministry and always being confronted by irrational, jealous, hyper-critical and sometimes plain old stupid opposition. No good deed goes unpunished but that doesn't mean that you shouldn't be the one who is ready to be inconvenienced, or have to sacrifice for doing some good things.
You may not ever be called upon to run into a nuclear reactor filling with radiation but aren't you glad that there are some people who have that kind of character? And really, wouldn't you like to have that kind of character whether you were ever called upon to do it or not?
Leon Bloy said that anyone who is a Christian who is not a hero is a pig. Now, I know you don't want to be pigs so, if Bloy is right then you know what you need to do. Don't be shy, don't be timid, don't be swayed by gossip or fear of judgment.... Be a hero.
