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Let us continue now in worship with the reading of scripture. The book of Genesis, the 19th chapter. I begin the reading at the verse which is numbered 15. "When morning dawned, the angels urged Lot, saying, 'Arise, take your wife and your two daughters who are here, lest you be consumed in the punishment of the city.' But he lingered. So the men seized him and his

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wife and his two daughters by the hand, the Lord being merciful to him, and they brought him forth and set him outside the city. And when they had brought them forth, they said, 'Flee for your life. Do not look back or stop anywhere in the city. Flee to the hills, lest you be consumed.' And Lot said to them, 'O no, my lords, behold, your servant has found favor in your sight,

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and you have shown me great kindness in saving my life. But I cannot flee to the hills, lest the disaster overtake me and I die. Behold, yonder city is near enough to flee to, and it is a little one. Let me escape there. Is it not a little one, and my life will be saved?' He said to him, 'Behold, I grant you this favor also, that I will not overthrow the city of which you have

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spoken. Make haste, escape there, for I can do nothing till you arrive there.' Therefore the name of the city was called Zoar. The sun had risen on the earth when Lot came to Zoar. Then the Lord rained on Sodom and Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven. And he overthrew those cities and all the valley and all the inhabitants of the cities and what grew on

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the ground. But Lot's wife behind him looked back, and she became a pillar of salt. And Abraham went early in the morning to the place where he had stood before the Lord, and he looked down toward Sodom and Gomorrah and toward all the land of the valley, and beheld, and lo, the smoke of the land went up like the smoke of a furnace." And may God bless to us and to our understanding this reading

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from his word. Pray with me. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen. Once upon a time in a land far away there was a small town called Sodom. There were other towns gathered about it, and these towns together sat on the shore of a very strange sea. This sea was the lowest point on the face of the earth and still is until this day. There is no life in it,

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no plant life, no animal life, no aquatic life. It is a dead sea. The ground surrounding this sea is barren and desolate. That is because it is principally made up of bitumen and sulfur. It does not yield itself in most places to fertility. Now this city of Sodom was a place of great evil. There are five different times in Scripture where the sin of Sodom is discussed. First,

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it is pointed out that Sodom was a place of greed and selfishness, where profit was put ahead of the truth, where corruption had entered in to all the relationships of humankind. If there had been a motto for Sodom, it would have been "Kaviat emptor" - let the buyer beware. I saw a little item on television this last week of a national committee of dermatologists who had gotten

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together to study the face creams that are sold to make wrinkles go away. They discovered that none of them did anything of the sort. They are advertised as doing that and some do keep the skin more supple, but there is no way, at least as yet discovered, by which the process of aging might be reversed. In spite of what all of these creams say about themselves, they do not match up

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to their promises. That's the way they did business in Sodom. Now at another place in Scripture we read about Sodom that orphans and widows and poor and homeless people were oppressed there. The courts were corrupt. Politics was profaned by dishonesty. Those who had little were pushed to the garbage heaps outside of town. Notice I say outside of town. It was important, you see, to

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keep these suffering ones out of sight. In this way, Sodom lied to itself. Lying or deceit, you know, is often called the utility sin. That's because no one lies simply for the purpose of lying. One lies in order to accomplish some goal, some strategy beyond. So the Sodomites lied to themselves about the presence of those whom they oppressed and kept down by keeping them out of

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sight where no one could see. Now in another place in the Scriptures we are told that in Sodom religion was mere ritual and not reality. The people in fact had rebelled against God. Their prayers were very much like the prayers we hear before our political conventions. Now they thought that their devotion and their theology was quite real even though it was not. In chapter 7 of

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Plato's Republic, he tells about a group of people who live in a world in which all they can see is shadows on a wall. And because this is all that they have ever seen, they come to believe that those shadows on the wall are reality, are what is real and true. And then these people are taken out of this environment and they're shown the real world. They're shown the sun. They're shown

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trees. They're shown all of the things which are in fact real and true. But they do not accept these real things as being genuine. They have been so long in love with their shadows that they insist on believing that the shadow is the reality and the truth. Well there are some individuals who have practiced a watered-down discipleship for so long, who have gone through the same pious

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rituals for so many decades, who have practiced a weak stewardship across so many years, and who have made of their religion a kind of collection of old prejudices. They have done this for so long that they believe that this is what faith is intended to be, when in fact it is a shadowy thing and far from reality. Now in another place in the scriptures we are told that Sodom was a very

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inhospitable place. Now that may sound insignificant to you, but remember in the day of which we're speaking there were no inns or hotels. If you came to a place and you had nowhere to stay, you are liable to attack, to robbery, and perhaps to death. It's interesting that the only place where Jesus ever refers to Sodom is when he's talking about hospitality. You remember when he says to his

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disciples, "When you go to some towns, they will not receive you there." That is, they will be inhospitable. "For those towns," he says, "it will be just like it was for Sodom, for Sodom too was a place without hospitality." We only have one story in the Bible that's actually set in Sodom, and this story is a rather curious one. It's about two people who come to Sodom. They're actually

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angels, but they appear to the occupants of Sodom as people. They come to rescue others who are there, and the citizens, the male citizens of Sodom, demand to know these visitors. Now as you're aware, sometimes in the Bible the word "know" is used to refer to sexual relationships. When it says that a man knew his wife, that can mean that they had such relationships. Now that's not what

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the word "know" usually means in the Bible. For example, in the Old Testament, the word "know" appears 943 times, but only 10 times does it refer to sexual cohabitation, and never does it refer to any sexual perversion, to homosexuality, for example. But interestingly enough, there are some people who take this reference about Sodom and these men wanting to know those who were visiting

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there, and from this they make a leap and decide that all of Sodom was made up of nothing but homosexuals. There is, in fact, no evidence or testimony to that in all of the scriptures. The earliest commentator on the book of Genesis, in which this story about Sodom occurs, was a man named Origen. He's one of the greatest biblical scholars who ever lived. He had only one weakness,

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and his weakness was that he saw sex in just about everything. That was the temptation which to him was most besetting, so severe in fact that he castrated himself in order that he might not be sexually tempted. When Origen came to the interpretation of this event that happened in Sodom, he interpreted it purely as an act of inhospitality, and never suggested any sexual

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perversion there at all. In fact, it wasn't until 400 years after the Bible was written, and 2,000 years after this episode happened in Sodom, that anyone ever suggested that homosexuals lived there. It's ironic, isn't it, that this town of Sodom, where there is no testimony of sexual perversion, has given its name to those who enter in to homosexual acts. Sodomites, sodomy we speak

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of. I sometimes think to myself that those who are quick to condemn Sodom for being a place of sexual perversion do that because then they're able to say, "Well, the sins of Sodom were not mine," when in fact that sin did not belong to Sodom at all, but a lot of other grievous sins did. But by focusing on the one that wasn't, they can ignore all the ones that in fact were. Our

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supreme authority, of course, is Jesus, and when Jesus speaks of Sodom, he says it's a place of no protection, it's a place where there was no care and no kindness, it's a place where there was greed and oppression, and the downtrodden were horribly oppressed, and where a false religion was practiced. That was Sodom. Sounds familiar, doesn't it? Now, living in Sodom was a man named Lot and

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his wife. We don't know her name, so we'll call her Mrs. Lot. They were not native to the place, they had moved in from out of town, but they'd become prosperous and had some prestige there. Now, it may have been that one of the reasons they went to Sodom was to try to make the place better, but that's not what happened. They did not change Sodom. Sodom changed them. That's an inevitable

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law of life, you know. If you do not make the world around you better, then the world around you will make you worse. So Lot and Mrs. Lot drifted away from God. They might have fooled themselves about this, they might have fooled the other citizens of the city, but they never fooled God. Whenever I think of them, I remember those words of Abraham Lincoln, which are so often

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quoted in part. You've heard this quotation from Lincoln, "We may fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time, but we can never fool all of the people all of the time." Now, that's quite correct as far as it goes, but Lincoln actually added one other phrase to that quotation. He added the words, "And you cannot fool God at any time." God is not mocked,

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and it is stupid and asinine. It is arrogant and ignorant to believe that any single individual, any city, any society, or any nation can fool God. One cannot deny God's knowledge, and in like manner, one cannot deny God's love. Because the amazing thing about this story of Sodom is, that God sends two angels to try to save Mr. and Mrs. Lott out of that place. They say to the couple,

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"Come away, because the soul that sins will surely die. So separate yourself from this place." Now, when we notice this, we're at the very core and the heart and the essence of this story. Because what this story is really about is God's love. You see, he doesn't come to blast them. He comes to bless them. He comes to say to them, "Look, you have been my children in the past. You were part

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of my faithful people, but now your lives have become corroded and corrupted. So please come away from there." He sends angels to do this, just like he often sends angels to us. Those things that remind us that we're not living with him as we are to be living, but instead have drifted into the dark and shadowy places of life. Sometimes he speaks to us through the witness of a friend.

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Sometimes the angel's voice comes through scripture. Maybe it's a letter from your dad. Maybe it's a film or a novel that you encounter, which speaks to your own circumstance. Maybe it's the advice that one receives from a counselor, or the teachings of a teacher. Maybe it's an old photograph that you see, a newspaper story that you encounter. Perhaps it's a song that is sung,

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or a sermon that is preached. Anything that calls us out of the soddoms of our lives to obedience to God, that's the angel of God. And so he comes into the midst of sodom to save his people. Back in December of 1982, Alex Coffin, who is the son of William Sloan Coffin, the well-known minister of Yale University, and then later the Riverside Church in New York City. Alex Coffin, this young

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man, was killed in an automobile accident. And a woman, seeking to comfort the boy's father, said to him, "I just cannot understand why God's will would cause such a thing to come to pass." And William Sloan Coffin responded to her, "Madam, you surely do not understand the will of God. Do you think it was the will of God that led Alex not to fix that broken windshield wiper blade on his car?

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Do you think it was the will of God for him to have been driving too fast that night? Do you believe it was God's will that he should have been drunk when he was driving? Do you believe it was God's will that there were no streetlights on that part of the road and no guardrail which separated it from the waters of Boston Harbor? Do you really believe that God runs around with

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his finger on triggers and his fist wrapped around knives and his hands grasping steering wheels to bring about violent and careless and avoidable death? That is never God's will. When the dark waters of that harbor closed over the head of my son, the heart of God was the first heart to break." And he was right. Because God never wills death. God wills life. That's the reason he sends his

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angels. My friends, we are not punished for our sins. We are punished by our sins. God sobs over the things which we inflict upon ourselves, how we cling to Sodom instead of following the angels. I mentioned earlier how the ground there was made of a mixture of bitumen and sulfur. Geologists tell us that about 2,000 years before Christ, at the very time of this story of which we're now speaking,

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there was an earthquake or some other seismic irregularity there. And the gases captured under the earth caught fire and exploded. And the explosion was so great that the ground actually sank. And that lifeless sea, the Dead Sea, flowed into that cavity. So that today where Sodom was, is now covered by its still waters. But even that horrendous seismic cataclysm, that was not God's

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will. It was not God's will that people perish in that. That was the inevitable result of people who insisted upon living there. And God used the coming of that circumstance to say to Lot and to his wife, to everyone who would hear, "Come away from that place." And interestingly enough, the Lots offered all kinds of excuses. "Well, your advice is no doubt quite good, angels, but let us

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stay just a little while longer. It hasn't happened yet, so perhaps we can enjoy it for a few more days." The scriptures say the angels had to drag them out of town. And they also say that Lot left first and that his wife came after. She couldn't forget the good old days, you see. She wanted just one more moment. And so she stopped and she looked back. And just when she did that, the gaseous ash

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from that horrendous explosion reached her. The volcanic vomit of that furious fire felled her. And when she fell beneath that settling ash and debris, she was embalmed, encased, petrified. Her face was frozen. And very quickly, the heavy salt air that's all about that Dead Sea settled upon her so that she began to glisten as if she were made of salt. And there she was, looking back

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towards Sodom, with her back turned toward life. I've seen that kind of frozen face more than once. I've climbed through the ruins, the excavations of Pompeii in Italy. And one of the most interesting displays that they have there is of the body of a woman killed in the eruption of Vesuvius. Her feet are moving toward the gate of the city. But she has stopped and turned and is reaching back.

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She's reaching back for a small bag of pearls. It's still there for the tourists to see. Maybe it was her bag that she had dropped. Maybe it was a bag that belonged to someone else. The point is that instead of opting for life, she went back. And when she went back, she fell. And she lies there still, covered over with ash which has solidified. A frozen figure, testimony to the

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peril of a divided heart. I suppose like Mrs. Lauchie, we're just going to pause for a moment. I mean, no one that I know really plans to sin forever. They all plan to quit someday. She just picked the wrong day. The Bible's full, you know, of stories of people with divided hearts. Just think of Jesus' encounters with them. They came to him one day and said, "Should we worship God

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or gold?" Jesus said, "You cannot serve two masters." That's a divided heart. A young ruler came to him one day, "What must I do to inherit eternal life?" Jesus said to him, "It's either going to be the material or me." No divided heart. Another came and said, "I'd like to follow you and be your disciple after all of my family concerns are taken care of." And Jesus said, "I'm sorry, that's not good enough."

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No divided allegiance. They came one day to talk to him about judgment and Jesus said, "Don't look back to those things. Remember Lot's wife. Once you have put your hand to the plow, keep your eyes forward." Now Jesus isn't being hard-hearted when he's saying that. He's announcing what is a literal fact. Divided attention, divided loyalty, divided zeal, divided effort, inevitably leads to failure.

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I don't care what you're talking about. If you bring divided effort to your business, if you bring divided loyalty to your educational experience, if you bring divided faithfulness to your marriage or to your family life, if you bring divided concern and commitment to your sports activities, if you bring a divided heart to the matters of faith, you will fail. You see, a divided heart in the first

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place promotes unhappiness. In philosophy, there's a famous story, the story of Buridan's Ass, and it's a story of an ass that stands between two equally attractive piles of straw and he can't decide which one to eat from. And as he thinks about this, he dies of hunger between the both of them. Well, that's what happens to a lot of people. The Bible says, "Do not halt between two opinions.

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Indecision will bring death. Instead, decide and act. Let there be purposefulness." A divided heart also robs someone of strength. A weak person who is totally concentrated on her goal will most likely accomplish that goal. A strong person whose efforts are divided into a number of different channels is unlikely to achieve her goal. You know, it was Vince Lombardi, the famous coach of the

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Green Bay Packers, he's often misquoted. People say that he said, "Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing." Vince Lombardi never said that. What he actually said was, "Winning isn't everything, wanting to win is." In other words, if victory is to be accomplished, you have to really want it, you have to concentrate on it, you have to focus on it. A divided heart robs you of that. And a

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divided heart leads to disaster. That frozen face is the photograph of a soul. Weak character has led to weak choice, and that's the ultimate tragedy of a divided mind, for almost to do a thing is not to do it at all. Almost to be a disciple is not to be a disciple. Almost to be an obedient child of God is not to be an obedient child of God. Almost to be saved is to be lost. Almost to live

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is to die, not because God is hard, but because divided loyalties destroy. We are not punished for our indecision, we are punished by it. So I stood one day in a tree nursery, and I saw a sign on a tree, and it said, "The best time to plant a tree was 25 years ago. The second best time is now." If you would have decided once and for all 25 years ago, you would have known a much more

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blessed and powerful and wonderful 25 years. If you didn't decide then, you can still decide today. Jesus says, "Do not endure the peril of an indecisive heart. Remember," he says, "Remember Lot's wife." Those who do, and do act accordingly, live happily ever after. Let us pray. Our Father, at this moment, we pray very specifically for that person hearing these

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words who has never decided. Our hearts go up to Thee for them. Send Thy angels to bring them home. Help them to decide, and in their decision, to know what it is to be part of your forever family, and to live by the present reigning power of the Holy Spirit, happily forever after. Amen. [END]