The First Sunday of Lent
Gen. 19:1-29; Matt. 4:1-11
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I.
(The readings for the First Sunday of Lent are taken from the traditional lectionary. I said last week that children belong in church, but this sermon will deal with topics that may not be appropriate for young listeners.)
Today’s Old Testament lesson is taken from Genesis 19. It is the famous story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, an enduring symbol of God’s judgment and wrath.
It used to be that this story was well-known, but with the decline in Bible literacy and Bible reading I am not so sure. As recently as 1962, it was the subject of a Hollywood feature film. But 1962 is no longer that recent. It’s been expunged from some contemporary Sunday lectionaries.
Sodom became a byword in English and other languages: sodomy to label perverse and illegal sex acts and sodomite to label those who practiced them. As recently as 2003, 20 US states, 1 US territory and the Uniform Code of Military Justice had anti-sodomy laws on the books until the Supreme Court struck them down. But, again, culturally-speaking, 2003 seems like a long time ago now.
Given the institutionalization of the sexual revolution, which began in the 1960s, and is now established in law,1 it is not surprising that both the word and the story of the city that lent its name to criminalized sex has faded from common cultural memory.
II.
The text of Genesis 19 is talking about the attempted gang-rape of two angelic visitors to Lot’s house by the male citizens of Sodom. It is saying that this attempted rape is evidence that the “outcry” that has reached God’s ears about the sins committed in Sodom is true, and that therefore the destruction of the city as punishment for its crimes is warranted.
In Genesis 18:21, God says:
“I will go down to see whether they have done altogether according to the outcry which has come to me; and if not, I will know.”
The rest of Genesis 18 details Abraham’s famous attempt to intercede for Sodom, asking the Lord to spare the city for the sake of the good people who surely must still live there, asking in verse 18:23:
“Wilt thou indeed destroy the righteous with the wicked?”
It’s a good question and it something we’ve adopted in our own jurisprudence. We say, “let the punishment fit the crime.” In this case, Abraham is worried about his nephew, Lot, and Lot’s family who live in Sodom, who are innocent and do not deserve to be destroyed.
Abraham successfully bargains with God, reducing the number of godly inhabitants needed to spare the city from 50 down to 10. God replies:
“For the sake of ten I will not destroy it.”
However, as the story goes, presumably, not even ten righteous citizens can be found in Sodom.
It seems that it is only out of God’s steadfast love for Abraham that Lot and his family are spared. That says something about the saving nature of God’s covenant with Abraham. Lot and his family are saved from destruction, not of their own merit or by their own doing, but gratuitously, as a knock-on effect of God’s covenant with Lot’s uncle, Abraham.
Genesis 19:16 says:
“The men seized him and his 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.”
This mirrors how we are saved in Christ, not because of our own merit, but grabbed and pulled to safety by the new covenant God establishes with His Son Jesus Christ.
We are invited to enjoy the benefits of this covenant, provided we keep its terms in our hearts and with our bodies.
(Incidentally, this is why church membership and admission to the sacraments need to be carefully stewarded. The relationship established in baptism between Christ and a believer means something to God, just as Lot’s blood relationship to Abraham meant something to God.)
III.
So, what was the “outcry” that reached God’s ears? What is the sin of Sodom that brought down its fiery destruction from on high?
It was widespread, total, all-inclusive sexual depravity. Specifically, male sexual depravity. It was the attempted gang rape of two men by a large group of men.
After Lot has fed and entertained his two distinguished guests and they are preparing to go to sleep, we read in Genesis 19:4-5 that:
“The men of the city, the men of Sodom, both young and old, all the people to the last man, surrounded the house; and they called to Lot, ‘Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us, that we may know them.’”
Now, when I was in high school, we learned in Scripture class that the word know was Bible-speak for “sexual intercourse.” The Hebrews word yada means to know, and in this verse, as well as in verse 8, when Lot tries to entice the mob to have their way with his virgin daughters instead, yada means to know by personal experience, in this case to know someone personally, intimately, through carnal experience.
In other words, it is very clear to Lot what the mob wants and there is no hiding the meaning from us modern readers either.
It’s important to point out that verse 4 is specific that this crime is being committed by all the men of Sodom: “both young and old, all the people to the last man.”
In other words, Abraham’s deal with God is off. There are not even 10 righteous men to found in the city.
You may wonder about the women, but this seems to be one of those cases where men, which can be inclusive term (as in mankind) is limited just to males.
(I also shudder to think how the women would have been used and abused in a city peopled by such men. Perhaps there were no women left in Sodom.)
I want to stop here and talk about the elephant in the room, homosexuality.
Revisionist theologians argue that this story is not about homosexual or gay men.
Strictly speaking that is true. Homosexual is a clinical term, developed by Sigmund Freud and others in the 19th and 20th centuries. Psychoanalysts used the label homosexual as a clinical description of a disordered sexuality.
Later, the characterization “disordered” was dropped and replaced with identity. Sexual identities are now considered morally neutral, if not positive, descriptors.
Since these are modern concepts, with roots in Freud’s atheism, it would be an example of reading into the text to say the men of Sodom were “homosexual” or “gay.”
Because of this, revisionists will say that the story has nothing to say about contemporary sexual mores. “The Bible does not mention homosexuality” is a commonly heard refrain today. “Jesus never mentioned same-sex marriage” is another.
It is clear what this revisionist method does. It is a sleight-of-hand that silences the Word of God. It tries to prevent that Word from speaking to us.
Regarding the men of Sodom, the revisionists, channeling Obi-Wan, might say, “These are not the sodomites you are looking for.” It is just this sort of Jedi mind-trick that the revisionists have played.
Sex is not the only sphere where this method is used. People will often say that “the Bible is not a science book” to ignore the plain meaning of the creation stories in Genesis 1 and 2.
The plain meaning of Genesis is that evolution cannot possibly be true if God created every species with specific intent and purpose and set the boundaries between them. Genesis 1:24-25 reads:
“And God said, ‘Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds: cattle and creeping things and beasts of the earth according to their kinds.’ And it was so. And God made the beasts of the earth according to their kinds and the cattle according to their kinds, and everything that creeps upon the ground according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.”
The revisionist premise is that because the Bible does not speak using contemporary categories it therefore does not — and cannot — speak to contemporary issues at all.
Silencing the Word of God is the act of a depraved mind. The depraved mind hears the truth and ignores it. Worse, it hates the truth and fights hard to suppress it.
IV.
The Christian doctrine of the depraved mind comes from Paul. It is found in Romans 1:18-32.
Writing over 1900 years after the events of Genesis 19, Paul not only had the biblical story of the depravity of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah in mind but could also see the effects of a reprobate mind at work in the idolatrous pagan culture surrounding him.
One of the effects of idolatry is sexual disorder. Paul writes:
“For this reason [their idolatry] God gave them up to dishonorable passions. Their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural, and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in their own persons the due penalty for their error.”
Confusion, sexual and otherwise, is the effect of idolatry. Why? Because an idol does not tell the truth about God.
Silencing the Word of God is the act of a depraved mind. The depraved mind hears the truth and ignores it. Worse, it hates the truth and fights hard to suppress it.
This is why images are forbidden in Christian worship. They do not tell the truth about God. Even pictures of Jesus, at best, only represent his human nature, and that is only half of who He is.
Idolators exchange, as Paul writes, “the truth about God for a lie.” Is it any wonder than that they will also exchange the truth about sex for what Paul calls “dishonorable passions”?
But, that was then and this is now. Paul wrote 2,000 years ago. The idols of Rome have long since been cast down. Paganism is dead. Even attempts to revive it, no matter how successful, will lack continuity with an order than perished some 1700 years ago.
Here again the revisionist will say that because Paul did not think in the categories of today’s sexual identities, his words cannot be read as a condemnation of them. It’s Obi-Wan again: “These are not the identities you are looking for.”
(I will just add this does not stop revisionists from interrogating Paul using modern critical categories like race, gender, and sexuality. Paul will be examined and cross-examined, but the revisionists will never allow him to speak in his own defense.)
The depraved mind is given to idolatry and captured by it precisely because that mind so identifies itself with the idols of its own making.
The Bible speaks to the captured mind — it is a sustained polemic against the depraved mind — and in its polemic, the Bible develops a category that we use a lot today, identity.
Identity means “sameness, oneness, state of being the same.”
When Paul writes, “they became futile in their thinking and their senseless minds were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools…” he is describing the process by which the human mind debases itself when it identifies with anything other than the truth.
Psalm 115 makes the connection between idol and idolator explicit:
“Those who make them are like them;
so are all who trust in them.”
In other words, those who make idols inevitably, inexorably come to identify with them.
Embracing any likeness, other than the likeness of God, as your identity is idolatry. It is the sign of a depraved mind.
But the sign of the redeemed mind is its likeness to — its identity in — Christ. Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 3:18 that Christians are “being changed into his likeness from one degree of glory to another.”
The depraved mind swims in confusion and disorder, sexual and otherwise, just as a fish swims in water.
The redeemed mind reflects the glory of God.
V.
Now, we turn to today’s gospel lesson, which gives us a lesson in applied glory.
At the beginning of His ministry, Jesus goes into the wilderness and fasts for forty days. At the end of this forty-day fast, He is tempted by Satan.
Every temptation we face is an invitation to sin and to reject the truth. This gospel reading from Matthew is the record of Satan’s attempt to capture the mind of Christ for depravity.
Jesus faces three temptations which He fends off with the Word of God, specifically, with three quotes from Deuteronomy.
Let’s conclude by looking at the first temptation and seeing how it might apply to our own temptations.
In this temptation, Satan tries to get a hungry Jesus to turn stones into bread. Jesus quotes Deuteronomy:
“Man shall not live by bread alone,
but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.”
The Word of God is life. This is clear from the incarnation, described in John’s Gospel at 1:14, “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” It is also what Peter means when he says to Jesus in John 6:68, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.”
We make idols because we think we have to in order to survive. We construct unbiblical, non-Christian identities (sexual and otherwise) because we think we have no other way to live.
We can live by the words that proceed from the mouth of God. We live by them when we identify with them and start becoming like them.
For someone who bases his identity on same-sex attraction, he could do worse, the next time he is tempted to engage in certain behavior, to quote from God’s law, just as Jesus did when He was tempted.
He could do worse than use the words of Leviticus 18:22, saying, It is written:
“You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination.”
He could certainly do much worse than flee temptation and run to these words. He might even find that they give him the strength to resist and overcome.
Much is promised to those who resist and overcome. At the end of His temptations, Matthew tells us that “angels came and ministered to him.” Can we expect no less?
Jesus assures us in Matthew 24:13, “he who endures to the end will be saved.”
I have focused today on an old story that lends its name to an old sin. But each of us has our besetting sins. We must learn to hate them.
I read yesterday about the joint euthanasia of the former Dutch prime minister and his wife. According to reports, they died “hand in hand” — a charming way of saying they died by their own hands. The Washington Post blithely reports:
“They chose to die by what is known as ‘duo euthanasia’ — a growing trend in the Netherlands, where a small number of couples have been granted their wish to die in unison in recent years, usually by a lethal dose of a drug.”3
Friends, this is murder. When Satan tempts us this way, we could do worse than to quote from Exodus 20:13, It is written:
“You shall not murder.”
The former Dutch prime minister and his wife could have done worse than to quote these words to Satan and to themselves. Now, I fear the worst for them.
I am often critical of Roman Catholic practices, but here I will commend them. They are taught to pray often for the grace of a holy death.
In our own prayer-book tradition, the customary words read at the grave while the corpse is made ready to be laid into the earth include this petition to Jesus:
“Suffer us not, at our last hour, for any pains of death, to fall from thee.”
Christ suffered His tri-fold temptations at the end of his forty-day fast. In the same way the Church has always known that temptations of all sorts regain their strength towards the end of our lives as our own strength wanes.
One temptation, the one which, in fact, begat the original sin, is the temptation to become like God. This temptation always leads one to deny that God alone is the author of life.
I fear that this poor Dutchman and his wife, though they died holding hands, will never again feel a human touch. They will call to each other from the depths of eternity and there will be no answer.
Suffer us not, indeed, O Lord, at our last hour, for any pains of death, to fall from you.
Pray indeed, my friends, that you will die well. Defeat the tempter in your last hour with these words from Psalm 17:15 :
“As for me, I shall behold your face in righteousness;
when I awake, I shall be satisfied with your likeness.”
I read the other day of the funeral mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City for the transgender activist Cecilia Gentili.
Her eulogist called her, “St. Cecilia!”
To which the congregation responded, “Mother of all the wh*res!”
The reporter noted that the packed cathedral congregation seemed not to know the words to the liturgical responses, which the priest tried to lead them during the course of service.
At one point, the celebrant, Father Edward Dougherty, said:
“Cecilia died with Christ.”
Whatever this woman’s eternal fate is, this is not what that particular congregation needed to hear.
This priest was tempted to demonstrated what can only be described as misplaced kindness. I know, because I’ve succumbed to the same temptation in my own ministry.
He might have answered his tempter (and edified the congregation) with the words of Paul, in his letter to the Philippians 3:19, It is written:
“Their end is destruction, their god is the belly, and they glory in their shame, with minds set on earthly things.”
They glory in their shame.
Paul wrote those words with tears in his eyes for the enemies of the cross of Christ.
Do we shed any tears for these lost souls, or do we go along with the lie that we are supposed to celebrate them?
The priest might also have responded to temptation with the words of Jesus in Matthew 21:13:
“It is written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer’; but you make it a den of robbers.”
Why robbers? Because robbers steal the truth about God and replace it with a lie. The truth is that man is made in the image of God. God says in Genesis 1:27:
“God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.”
The depraved mind hates the truth and loves the lie.
The mind of Christ is the truth and loves God.
And what does Paul tells us in 2 Cor. 2:16 that we believers have?
He tells us that we “have the mind of Christ.”
Christian, Christ is your identity now and for eternity. Amen.
Questions for reflection and discussion:
1. The story of destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah depicts God’s ____________ and ____________.
2. What revolution, beginning in the 1960s, has since been established in law?
3. God agreed to spare Sodom after ____________ interceded for the city.
4. Explain how Abraham’s nephew, Lot, benefited from God’s covenant with Abraham.
5. Describe the “outcry” that has reached God’s ears from Sodom and Gomorrah.
6. How many righteous men were found in Sodom and did God break His previous promise to Abraham to spare the city?
7. What is the plain meaning of Genesis 1:16? (“God made the beasts of the earth according to their kinds…”)
8. Explain the revisionist premise.
9. The effect of idolatry is ____________, sexual and otherwise.
10. The depraved mind ____________ with the idols of its own making.
11. We make idols and embrace non-Christian identities because we think we have to in order to ____________.
12. The opposite of the depraved mind is ____________.
Parents and Grandparents, you are responsible to apply God’s Word to your children’s lives. Here is some help. Young Children – draw a picture about something you hear during the sermon. Explain your picture(s) to your parents or the minister after church. Older Children – Do one or both of the following: 1) Count how many times the word idol/idolatry is mentioned. 2) Discuss with your parents your favorite character in a book. In what ways do you identify with this character? Do you want to be like this character?
(1) judgment/wrath; (2) the sexual revolution; (3) Abraham; (4) the men pull Lot and his family to safety; (5) widespread, total, all-inclusive sexual depravity; (6) none/no; (7) God created every species with specific intent and purpose and set the boundaries between them; (8) the Bible does not speak using contemporary categories, it therefore does not — and cannot — speak to contemporary issues at all; (9) confusion; (10) identifies; (11) survive; (12) the mind of Christ
Rusty Reno calls this establishment the “Rainbow Reich.” See: “Greetings from the Rainbow Reich | R. R. Reno.” 2022. First Things. June 21, 2022. https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2022/06/greetings-from-the-rainbow-reich. Christopher Caldwell, in his book The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties, describes this as a rival constitution.
See: “5 Lies Our Culture Is Telling Us.” 2023. Crossway. September 11, 2023. https://www.crossway.org/articles/5-lies-our-culture-is-telling-us/.
Cho, Kelly Kasulis. 2024. “‘Duo Euthanasia’: In the Netherlands, a Famous Couple Chooses to Die Together.” Washington Post, February 13, 2024. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/02/13/netherlands-duo-euthanasia-dutch-prime-minister/.
The Depraved Mind