The bible story of Lot’s wife is one of the best known in the western world. In our Convent School, Bibles were kept well away from us – I think the Bible was regarded as being a bit dangerous. We had a book containing the more interesting of the Bible stories, abridged, very well censored and sanitized. The story of Lot’s wife as told in our book was very basic; the cities of Sodom and Gommorah were wicked, and God destroyed them. However, being a just God, he saved the righteous citizens of Sodom – Lot, his wife and two daughters. When the cities were to be destroyed, Lot and his family were instructed to leave and not to look back. As they left, God rained down fire and brimstone destroying the cities and the surrounding plains. However, Lot’s wife looked back and was turned into a pillar of salt. I always believed that Mrs. Lot received a very harsh punishment. All her life she was a good living person - this was why God saved her – and she was unceremoniously rushed from her home; as her family made their escape fire and brimstone rained down on the city. In these circumstances it is human instinct to look back; remember how we all sat glued to the T.V. on 9/11? I felt that allowances should have been made for this very human action. But she was punished by being turned into a pillar of salt, which in itself seemed to be a very strange form of punishment.
My feelings that Mrs Lot had been treated harshly have stayed with me and I decided to re-examine the story to see if I could make more sense of it. In my childish imagination I saw Mrs Lot rushing from an inferno, taking a quick look backwards, and, like magic, she was a rectangular white pillar; salt right the way through! Well when you’re young and lets face it in the Bible – events like that were ten a penny!
Now, on mature reflection, I think that this story is about someone who could not adapt to change. We have all experienced turmoil in our lives, times when our whole world is turned upside down. We are left disorientated and rudderless, and our instinct is to seek the security of the familiar – ‘Please God let me return to my comfortable rut’. However, sometimes is not possible to return to our old familiar life when this happens. If we do not accept our new situation we become paralysed, unable to move on and live the new life that has been presented to us. Looked at in this light, I think the symbol of a pillar of salt is a very apt description of what happened to Mrs Lot. Salt is very valuable; we use it in cooking, as a preservative and it has medicinal purposes, but it must be properly stored. When salt is left exposed it becomes tasteless; it takes the moisture from its surroundings and it no longer flows freely - it clogs up everything that it comes in contact with, and drains the very life from its surroundings.
Buddha tells us that change is the only constant in life; sooner or later we all encounter change, loss or bereavement. It takes courage to recover from the traumatic events of life; we will need recovery time, but sooner or later we must look forward again. While we continue to look to the past we are not really living.
I know that many of you here knew Beatrice Reid. Beatrice was blind, widowed, diabetic. She had three children, all of whom died in childhood. She was the most positive and inspiring person I ever met; in a radio interview she said, with total honesty, that she had had ‘the most wonderful life’. She said that ‘God never closed one door but she opened at least a dozen others’. But that we had to go through the doors. Beatrice embraced every new situation that she encountered and looked for what she could learn from it; she lived every moment of her life. In her old age she visited her beloved Kefalonia; on the way from the airport they stopped to have a coffee. There was an earthquake and everyone ran outside; Beatrice was forgotten and left to fend for herself indoors. She said that she really learned from that experience that you cannot hold on to anything- even the earth moves.
When I look at Mrs Lot from this perspective I see someone who looked so much to the past that she was unable to really live, and her negative attitude would most likely have drained the life from those around her. She was someone who could not go through the doors that God opened.
At either side of the story of Mrs Lot and her family we are given some more information. First, we are told that the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah was the widespread practice of homosexuality. This part of the Bible is well known because fundamentalists of many denominations and creeds use it as proof that homosexuality is sinful and condemned by God. Inevitably they close their argument with the words ‘it says so in the Bible’, and it certainly does. These verses from the Book of Genesis have been used to cause harm and damage to countless same-sex couples. They forget to mention that the Jewish Scriptures also state that adulterers should be publicly stoned to death, and that we should sacrifice sheep as an offering to God, burning them in the back garden having liberally sprinkled the door posts with blood. Then there is the Jewish rule about not wearing clothes having a mixture of fabrics. I hope that none of you are wearing wool and cotton mixtures! On a positive note, nowadays people are looking at these verses as being a product of the time that they written; and are willing to use their reason to re interpret this part of the Jewish Scriptures.
The other part of the story is much less familiar. It tells us that after the destruction of Sodom & Gomorrah, when Mrs. Lot had been turned into a pillar of Salt, Lot and his daughters settled for a while in the city of Zoar, but feeling that this was not a safe place for them, they moved to live in a cave in the wilderness. While living here, having plied their father with drink, both daughters had an incestuous relationship with him. I must admit that this does not sit easy with me, but there is nothing in the narrative that condemns what they did. They each had a son and each of these sons became the father of a tribe – one of the Moabites and the other of the Ammonites. At our Bible class Bill tells us that when something offends us that this is often when there is an important message for us. Perhaps the message here is that life must always move forward - Lot’s daughters chose to have children and reaffirm life rather than settling for the misery of dying alone in a cave in the wilderness.
Religious fundamentalists would not approve of my interpretation of the story of Mrs. Lot; for them the Bible is the Word of God and not subject to change. I believe that those who take a literal interpretation of any sacred text are acting like Lot’s wife - looking back to the past and becoming fossilized.
I Googled ‘Lot’s Wife’ and this one gem I downloaded. This remarkable happening is stated matter-of-factly, with no suggestion that it was a special miracle or divine judgment.
There are many great deposits of rock salt in the region, probably formed by massive precipitation from thermal brines upwelling from the earth’s deep mantle during the great Flood. Possibly the overthrow buried her in a shower of these salt deposits blown skyward by the explosions. There is also the possibility that she was buried in a shower of volcanic ash, with her body gradually being converted into ‘salt’ over the years following through the process of petrifaction, in a manner similar to that experienced by the inhabitants of Pompeii and Herculaneum in the famous eruption of Mount Vesuvius.
- Henry Morris (taken from: The Defenders Study Bible)
While you are free to disagree with my interpretation of Mrs. Lot’s fate I think that it at the very least it has some value as a suggestion of how we might live our life.
Most traditional religions have a problem with religion being re-interpreted and particularly being interpreted by just anyone: they would see this as the preserve of a select few. Leaders of religion exhort their followers to return to tradition. ‘If only we return to the traditional teachings everything will be better’ the suggest.
But I take the opposite view: I believe that as in our reading this morning, it is the duty of each one of us to find for ourselves our own truth. In the Christian tradition this is a recurring message of Jesus. In the Sermon on the Mount it is his constant refrain “It is said of old” or “You have heard it said to those of ancient times” (Matthew 5:43:) ‘You have heard that it was said “ You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy” But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you’. Jesus took the old teachings and put his own interpretation on them.
Next month the General Assembly of the Unitarian and Free Christian Churches will meet and I have no doubt that again this year there will be much talk of the falling numbers in Unitarian Congregations. Unitarians in the U. K. at least seem unable to find a way forward. At my ordination in February 2007, Jennifer gave a really wonderful summary of our history in Dublin going back for 350 years. Listening to her, I was very proud of our dissenting tradition. Amid the squabbles about Trinity and dogma, I feel that Unitarians must have been a breath of fresh air and a beacon of freedom for liberals in the early days of the foundation of this state, when, in effect, Ireland had a theocracy. Our foundations are strong; we can be proud of them. However, foundations are not there just to be admired; they exist to be built on. Not very many people care whether God exists as Unity or Trinity and to a large extent we have separation of Church and State, so where does our future lie? Are we here just to disagree with everyone? Irish people have moved away from traditional forms of religion; but they have not abandoned the need for a spiritual dimension to their lives. I believe that Unitarians are uniquely placed to provide a spiritual home for people without the baggage of theology, dogma and creeds. Our message must be one of hope. We must remember that we are not here to change the world; all that we can hope to do is to change ourselves. If we can change ourselves the world will be changed. On our journey we will make use of spiritual teachings from all traditions, reserving the right to interpret them in the light of our present knowledge. We will recognize that these interpretations are not set in stone, but will change as time passes - as it says in the old hymnbook ‘the Lord has yet more light and truth to break forth from his word’. We will not restrict our search to religious texts but will keep ourselves open to every breath from heaven – our physical world and our human existence provide us with endless miracles. We will remember the words of Emerson that ‘God speaks’ not that ‘God has spoken’. We will provide one another with a loving, supportive community as we set ourselves forward to our task of fully living our lives, happen what may.

Rev. Bridget Spain
Dublin Unitarian Church