Blog 3445 – 04.09.2025
The Kindness of Strangers
There is an old joke that I heard Hee Haw comedian Archie Campbell say playing the role of a General Store owner in a small country town describing the store’s business policy regarding strangers: “He was a stranger and we took him in.” Being “taken in”, “taken advantage of”, “cheated” is never a good feeling if you are on the receiving end and what is a friend anyway, but a stranger that we allowed ourselves to get to know.
The Bible tells us that many have “entertained angels unaware.” The nephew of the patriarch Abraham, Lot, in one of the most remarkable Old Testament stories entertained a couple of angels in his home once. They were there to give him and his family safe passage out of the city of Sodom before they called down fire from heaven to destroy the cites of Sodom and Gamorrah whose terrible atrocities has risen up to heaven as witness against them, requiring God to bring judgment upon them. The angels had first visited Abraham to warn him of the two cities’ impending doom. Abraham had negotiated with God to try to get him to spare the city if even a small portion of innocent people could be found. Old Abe, the father of the Jews, kept lowering and lowering the number hoping to get God to spare the cities and their citizens. In the end God had said that he would for Abraham’s sake see that his nephew and his family were spared.
What was the great sin or evil of those two cities?
I have heard countless preachers and teachers say it was sexual perversion. One particular group of sexual practices long preached against is even named after one of the cities, Sodom. And sodomy does not just to refer to same-sex acts but also oral an anal sex even that practiced by members of the different sexes. Trying to tell people how to have sex and with whom is dicey, nosy, unkind, and often just plain foolish. Even asking young people of opposite sexes to wait till they are adults is most often an unrealistic expectation.
In my opinion forcing anyone to have sex is a crime that ought to be punished especially when it perpetrated by an older or more powerful person on a younger or less powerful individual. And, yes, I remember the old advice that the three subjects that should be always be avoided at all times are, Politics, Sex, and Religion. If you have read this blog you know that I have a habit of for lack of a better term of “Going where angels fear to tread.”
The angel story above also mentions that it was the custom in those days that strangers taken into one’s home were to be treated kindly and protected. When the evil men of that town heard about Lot’s two angelic guests they surrounded his house and demanded that he surrender his guests that they might make sport of them which was a euphemism for “have sex with them.” This is clear from Lot’s reply to the bad guys that he was duty bound to protect his guests and by his offering to give the men his two daughters instead. The bad guys refused Lot’s offer and stormed his home, but the angels struck them blind and took Lot, his wife, and two girls by the hand and lead them safely out of town. The angels warned them not to even look back and when Lot’s wife, refusing to listen to the warning, looked back she was turned into a pillar of salt.
A scared Lot hid with his daughters in a cave up in the hills outside the two doomed cities. While they hid in the cave the girls fearing no man would ever want to marry them concocted a plan to get their dad drunk and get pregnant by him so they could continue his line. There is a lot of sex in the Bible and not all it prim and proper.
It is my opinion that the great evil of Sodom and Gomorrah was not so much sexual sin as it was allowing the milk of human kindness to dry up. And that is the great evil of our time as well. We cannot always be pretty, rich or successful; we cannot always be smart, strong, or wise, but we cannot always be kind.
Jesus made it clear that he thought the true measure of a person is how we treat or fail to treat the stranger, the sick, the prisoner- the “less than.” And he set the example being himself “patient, persistent, but above all kind.”
Your friend, fellow traveler, and follower of the Sun,
David James White
I’ll Follow The Sun (Remastered 2009)
theencouragingword 