BibleWorm

This week we are reading one of the Bible’s most famous disputes with God – Abraham's insistence that God should have mercy on Sodom for the sake of its righteous, found in Genesis 18:16-33. Now, we love mercy as much as the next guy, but this time around we wrestled with the profound entanglement of the righteous and the wicked in this story. There is no discussion here about simply stopping the wickedness in one way or another, or even just eliminating the people perpetrating wickedness while leaving the righteous alone – they are all in it together. But if mercy in this case basically means ignoring the land’s outcry and letting the wickedness stand ... what does THAT mean for the innocent who continue to live there? In a modern society that so values individual autonomy, how do we think about the ways in which our fates are inextricably tied?