We talk a lot in the scriptures about “call stories,” and we praise those who follow God into the wilds of the unknown. We marvel at Abraham and his move to the western “frontier” of the Negev. We gasp at Moses leading people through the waters of the Red Sea and into a 40-year desert-dwelling stint. We can barely comprehend prophets like Isaiah or Samuel or Elijah, who take their lives into their hands to speak the word of the Lord.
We love to praise those we see as biblical “superheroes.” But we don’t often talk about those whose humanness most mimics our own, whose circumstances and problems feel all too real to us still today. And yet the Bible is filled with them. The sad thing is, we often demonize them, wag our finger at them, denounce them as sinful or weak, or just plain ignore them.
This month, as we enter into Lent, I want to call your attention to a woman who doesn’t even have a name in scripture, and yet we all know her. She is the wife of Lot. The early rabbis call her Edith, so for the sake of giving her a name, let’s hear Edith’s story. The real story.
Let’s be truthful. We diss this poor woman at the drop of a hat. We call her sinful, one of the “bad” women of the Bible, the one who did the “wrong” thing, the one we don‘t pay attention to, cause she doesn’t fit our bill as heroine of the story. But I think we give Edith a bad rap. And I suspect that Edith’s story is a lot more like our stories than we’d like to admit. In fact, I’d say, she needs a bit of our sympathy. Let’s think about her for a moment.
Abraham and Lot are pals. But there’s not enough room for them to keep shepherding the same land, so they split up. Abraham goes one direction; Lot goes another and sets up household in a place we learn later is called Sodom.
Lot’s a good guy, and so is his family, it seems. But one day, God calls out both Abraham and Lot. Abraham has a call story. Lot has a call story. As Abraham is being called to move out into new territory, so is Lot. But where Abraham gets to move forward out of choice, Lot is given no choice. Edith is given less. In that time and place, she as a woman has no real decision-making power of her own. That’s why she’s “Lot’s wife” and not “Edith.”
Look at this way. Abraham receives a promotion and moves onto a new position as “Father of Nations.” Granted, he needs to move, relocate, change his life around some, venture into some new duties, territory, get to know new people, grow the “business” of worshiping God, here, there, and everywhere God tells him. Lot on the other hand –he’s fired.
Lot just had the experience of learning that morning from the Big Boss that he’s being escorted without choice “out of the building” and into the street. Time to move on. Okay, so he’s received a severance package. He’ll be set up in a new town, learn to start again. But his “unknowns” are accompanied by a lot more unsavories. He may be a “good guy” in the story. But he still has to leave everything behind, and get moving. Immediately. His former place of “employment” is about to be blown to smithereens. It’s coming down big time, going bottoms up, bankrupt (we know it was spiritually bankrupt!). He needs to get out while he still can. Whether his fault or not, he’s going to go down with the ship if he doesn’t evacuate.
Edith, Lot’s wife, has even less choice in the matter! Anyone ever been the spouse of someone who’s just been transferred to a job in another state? By proxy, while your husband or wife gets a bigger salary and nicer office, what do you get? You get to lose your home that you loved, your kids get to start over in a new school, and you’re the one probably going to deal with all of those details. You’re going to lose your friends, your relatives, your job, your home, and your community. You know what I’m talking about.
Some of us, we’re not going to want to go. Or if we do, we’re going to go through a period of mourning. Whether you have to move away, or whether your house burns down or is leveled by flooding and you have to evacuate, you mourn your losses. Whether a hurricane sweeps in and destroys everything you loved or your marriage just collapsed, one way or another, we can find ourselves forced to move on and away from the life we had and into the unknown….in a mere instant.
At one time or another, we will experience that kind of mourning, that kind of anguish, when all we want to do is go back. And when we can’t go back, and we don’t know how to go forward, we freeze. We get stuck.
Edith, she got stuck. She had to be terrified. Most of her extended family probably died in that fire that was Sodom. The life she knew was gone. Her home. Gone. Her daily routines. Gone. Her friends. Gone. The few things she could call her own. Gone. She’s mourning. She’s grieving. She’s traumatized. She’s upset. And so…she falters. She wavers. She stands frozen, rooted to the spot. She can’t bear to go forward. She can’t go back. She falls further and further behind. She looks back. Back at what was, back at what she had, back at what she lost. Back at her life as she knew it.
And for this, we label her the “bad one”?
Edith is not the bad one. In fact, scripture doesn’t label her the “bad” one. We did that. Scripture simply says, that when she turned around and looked back, she turned into a pillar of salt. It doesn’t say, she was punished. On the contrary, when Lot and his family don’t want to leave, the angels of the Lord literally grab them by the hands, including Edith and her daughters, and pull them out! Burning sulfur was about to rain down on the city spreading lava, ash, and fire, for miles around. God said, run for your lives! Don’t tarry, or you’ll get caught in the firestorm. Go quickly. Don’t look back.
Lot’s wife wasn’t disobeying God. She wasn’t evil. She wasn’t sinful. It was just really hard for her not to look back, at her life, her loss, her left behind friends and the only place she had called her home. So while others hurried forward for their lives, Edith got stuck.
She got stuck in her grief and in her mourning. She got stuck in her memories, and in her feelings of loss that consumed her. She got stuck in her tears, in her experience of trauma and shock. She got stuck in the love of her past. Edith froze. And in doing so, was “memorialized” by the fire that was Sodom. Her past literally consumed her.
We all grieve. We all mourn what and whom we lose. It’s normal, and it’s human to grieve our losses.
But when our past becomes a stone that drags us down into the waters of our own tears, and we no longer feel the courage, the energy, the life in us to keep swimming, our past can threaten to consume us.
For some people, grief has frozen their ability to create new relationships, or to renew ones lost. For some people, grief has hardened their hearts against new love and new beginnings. For some people, grief has rooted them in place, so that their memories consume them, and they have no energy to forge new paths and foster new relationships.
Grief can get you stuck.
Remember that hand of God that took the hand of Edith and her daughters, the hand of God that led Lot and his family out of Sodom? That hand of God is the same hand guiding you through whatever time of grief and loss you are experiencing in your own life.
Sometimes the call of God sends you where you haven’t been. Sometimes the hand of God pulls you out of bad situations and sends you into places you do not want to go or are afraid to seek.
God expects us to cry. God expects us to mourn. The river of life is not always smooth. But your faith in Jesus can keep you holding on and going forward, even when your heart most wants to falter. Just take the hand of Jesus when you are sad, and when you’re lonely. He has the strength to pull you through when you get stuck, to lift you out when you get scared, to carry you over the waves that feel too high.
Jesus is our Way forward. Out of situations of addiction, out of relationships of abuse, out of times of mourning and loss of homes and loved ones, out of places that freeze us and tease us.
Take the hand of Jesus. And move forward. God is calling you into a new life, an abundant life today.