In the Times this week, David Brooks invited us to consider whether life is a story or a game.* This strikes me as a question with religious implications. If life is a story, then it unfolds in a way that we can “learn from our misfortunes to grow in wisdom, kindness and grace. [And] at the end, hopefully, we can look back and see how we have nurtured deep relationships and served a higher good.” But if life is a game, then life is “about being better than others, getting more,” and “the hunger for status is never satisfied.” After all, the point of a game is to win. And if life is a game, maybe there are only two kinds of people in the world: winners and losers.
If you read the early chapters of Genesis as a kind of a game, I suppose the players would be God on one team, and humankind on the other team. Consider how the major events play out:
After the wonder of creation, God realizes that Adam and Eve are avoiding him and are ashamed of themselves because they are naked - which is how God made them to be. They have broken the only rule of the game, and so they are penalized, and evicted from the Garden of Eden.
Next come Cain and Abel, the sons of Adam and Eve. And you know what happened there: just one generation removed from paradise, Cain kills his brother Abel out of jealousy. This has become a dangerous game.
Next is the flood, and Noah’s ark: an event that unfolds because “the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth, and… every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually.” The flood is God’s way of picking up all the marbles and storming away.
Next is the Tower of Babel, in which human beings try to beat God at his own game; to acquire access to God’s domain, and to do whatever we want. God sees this as a kind of cheating. And so God scatters the people across the face of the earth to prevent us from winning this game.
But then comes Abraham. And when God takes up his relationship with Abraham, it becomes hard to read Genesis as a game. As God speaks to Abraham about establishing a covenant, it’s as though maybe he is discussing a new way of thinking about life. These events feel very much like a story as God settles down to eat with Abraham and Sarah beneath the Oaks of Mamre.
But before you know it, we are on the road to Sodom and Gomorrah, and the game is on again, and it doesn’t look good for these two cities. Abraham is all-in for our team when he tries to negotiate the terms of the game with God. It seems pretty clear that Abraham is trying to win this for the sake of humanity. And by the end of the passage we heard today, you could think that maybe Abraham did win the contest. But sadly, we know that this was not the case. In the last period, Sodom and Gomorrah will be destroyed by God with fire and brimstone.
How is it that on a very hot day, we are expected to find some value in any encounter with the scriptures that asks us to consider Sodom and Gomorrah? Why even bring up the names of these two cities? How can they be anything but a trigger for angst in the life of the church or of people of faith?
The lectionary editors left out a small detail about Abraham’s negotiation with the Lord, a detail contained in verses omitted from our public reading. The detail is this: that all four of them - the three men (who are the Lord) and Abraham - all departed Abraham’s camp by the Oaks of Mamre, together. Genesis 18:16 tells us that “Abraham went with them to set them on their way.” It’s while Abraham is walking with God that he negotiates justice for Sodom and Gomorrah. When the discussion was over, “Abraham returned to his place.”
Abraham’s entire encounter with the living God is unusually intimate, and very unlike most other encounters with the divine that we hear about in the Hebrew Scriptures. Think of Moses going up the mountain, surrounded by smoke and mist. Even though the negotiation itself may sound like a game, the conversation took place in the context of a story in which God walks with Abraham, and allows Abraham to walk with him. In fact, in the verses we did not read, the Lord asks himself, “Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do?” And he answers himself, “No, for I have chosen him.”
God shows Abraham something that it would be easy for us to miss: that God is willing to let Abraham walk with him, and to let him in on the inner workings of his mind. If you ask me, this is a strong signal that God is willing and able to see life not as a game to be won, but as a story to be told as we walk together.
It’s hot, so I’ll let David Brooks do some of my work for me. If life is a game; if it’s “about being better than others, getting more;” and if “the hunger for status is never satisfied;” if the only point is to win, then things will not work out well between us and God, since God is always going to be more powerful than we are.
There is no doubt in my mind that we often choose to treat life like a game that has to be either won or lost, which is why the men of Sodom were so insistent that they get what they want (whatever that was). They wanted to win! But I am not so sure that that’s how God sees it. And I take encouragement from those verses that were left out of our reading: the verses that remind us that God allowed Abraham to walk with him, and that remind us that God did not hide his intentions from Abraham, harsh though they were, because God had chosen Abraham.
I’ll let David Brooks keep doing the heavy lifting, since I think he is absolutely right about what it means if we approach life as a story. It means we have the chance to “learn from our misfortunes to grow in wisdom, kindness and grace. [And] at the end, hopefully, we can look back and see how we have nurtured deep relationships and served a higher good.”
Playing the game of life, we will be forever thwarted by the One who is greater than we are, and by our own sinfulness, which sometimes makes it feel as though we can’t even find ten decent people in town. The game of life results in losses, like the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah that sears itself in our memory (whether it happened or not) with fire and brimstone, and leaves us feeling forever damaged, as that complicated story has left so many of us.
But the story of life that I know is a story that leads from Eden, through floodwaters, past a tower at Babel, and eventually past the Oaks of Mamre. That story leaves Sodom and Gomorrah behind without looking back, since looking back at Sodom and Gomorrah never did anyone any good. That story takes us out of slavery, across the Red Sea, through the wilderness, across a river into a promised land. It’s a story that leads to Bethlehem, and to the shores of Galilee, and then to a Cross on Calvary. God’s visit with Abraham on his way to Sodom and Gomorrah is a part of that larger story.
Oh, I know it’s hot. It’s so hot that when Jason came in this morning the candles were bent and falling over. Some day we’ll tell that part of the story, as we remind one another to walk with God and let the story unfold.
If life is a game, then we’ll forever bear the scars from wounds like those seared into our flesh at Sodom and Gomorrah, no matter how good a job Abraham did trying to win that match. But if life is a story, then the God who walked with Abraham, also walks with us. And walking together is just what Jesus asks us all to do when he calls us to follow him.
Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
24 July 2022
Saint Mark’s, Locust Street, Philadelphia
* David Brooks, “Is Life A Story or A Game?” In the NY Times, 21 July 2022
