Leo Tolstoy was right when he said, “All happy families are alike. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” In other words, there are some basic principles that are always present in happy families. No matter what their circumstances and differences there are a few things that mark them and allow them to be happy. A friend of mine told me those two principles are trust and communication. People talk with each other and there is a basic trust in their relationship even when it is strained or the family is in conflict. On the other hand, unhappy families are those that seem to find any number of reasons to be unhappy together – jealousy, resentment, scarcity of affection, pride, anger, or abuse. People can find a multitude of ways to be unhappy but those who discover and live by a few principles manage to find happiness as well. 

So much of the Old Testament is about unhappy families. From the very beginning with Cain and Abel there is strife, separation and tragedy. Brothers against brothers, sisters against sisters, parents against children and every other combination of unhappiness you can imagine. You could say the Bible is not so much a book about being happy as it is about how to live in the midst of turmoil and unhappiness.  Continuous conflict is a way of life through each generation and it is the rare family with a record of lasting happiness. Instead, it is sometimes about redemption after years of separation and conflict. It is families resolving issues that have fractured them – but not always. Look at Jacob and Esau or Joseph and his brothers. There is redemption. Moses and his family live at odds with each other for years before resolving the issues. However, Ham, Japheth and Seth are doomed to everlasting conflict and servitude. Isaac and Ishmael through no fault of their own are pitted against each other for generations. David’s family and the nation itself is torn up by the conflict between them and within the family of almost every king there are wives, sons, aunts and uncles who will stop at nothing to seize the power of the throne or destroy their siblings.  

While not as colorful or violent as these it was true in the early family of Abraham as well – long before the jealousy between Sarah and Hagar or the rift between Isaac and Ishmael.

This morning we are looking at the relationship between Abraham and Lot.

Sometimes a movie, like Band of Brothers, begins at the end of the story. It begins at a funeral or in a cemetery. We know how it ends but the movie is about how we got there. In this case we might begin in a mountain cave on the edge of a wilderness after the destruction of two cities. Here is Lot and his two remaining children – unmarried daughters. He is drunk and has just slept with those daughters who each become pregnant and give birth to two boys whose descendants eventually become bitter enemies of Israel – the Moabites and the Ammonites. What is ironic, of course, is just another clue to the unhappiness of the family.  After the destruction of Sodom and the loss of their husbands, the daughters panic thinking that there are no men left in the world and the only way their line will survive is through incest with their father. Many years later one of the terrible marks of their descendants – the Moabites and Ammonites – is they each worship a god (Molech and Cheboth) requiring human sacrifice and always the sacrifice of an infant or young child. The very problem they took into their own hands to solve ends, as it often does, in a perversion and horrible twist of their solution. What they solved short term is a long term disaster. It’s the perfect illustration of Proverbs 14:12. “There is a way that appears to be right, but in the end it leads to death.”

How did this story begin? It begins with Abraham taking Lot, his fatherless nephew with him when Abraham was called to leave Haran. Lot travels with him to Canaan and then to Egypt. It’s clear that Lot’s good fortune is tied up with Abraham’s as both of them come out of Egypt with great wealth. We all know that wealth can be both a blessing and an obstacle and so it was with Lot and Abraham. Both had large flocks and “their possessions were so great that they were not able to stay together.” It was not a dispute between the two of them but between their herders and families who could not get along with each other. Some wealth is better than others. Gold and silver do not need to eat and they do not require space or other resources. Flocks and herds do and the tension was inevitable. They could not both be wealthy when the source of their wealth needed more and more of a limited supply. They could only expand so far because the Canaanites and Perizzites were also living in the land and were not interested in Abraham and Lot taking their grazing land. Of course, we’ve all seen the same in families where there is only so much attention, love or respect and not enough to go around for each to be treated equally. For some reason, love does not expand to meet the need. There is a limited amount and some get more than others. One child is always seen by others as the favorite – like Joseph and his brothers. Someone always gets more. 

Abraham recognized that conflict and made Lot the generous proposition that he could take whatever land he wanted and Abraham would take what was left. So, “Lot looked up and saw that the whole plain of the Jordan was well watered, like the garden of the Lord..” and he chose the best. He chose the whole plain of the Jordan and set out with his family. This was not a heated divorce – just a practical separation to avoid further conflict.

But instead of settling in the part that was well-watered and like the garden of the Lord, Lot somehow ends up in the opposite direction. He settles in an area lower than the Dead Sea. It is actually the lowest place on earth. As well, instead of settling where his flocks can expand without limits he pitches his tents among the cities of the plain and then near Sodom. This is the beginning of the sad life of Lot. From this point on he is forever needing to be rescued by Abraham and others. He is captured by the four kings, his home is destroyed and he ends up, as we have seen, drunk in a dark cave in the mountains. There are some people who seem to have the hand of God on their lives protecting them. They are covered by God and shielded by their guardian angels. Then there are some who are in constant need of someone to rescue them from their own foolish choices and pluck them out of the fire they have started. We call them the black sheep or the bad seed or the family fool but it is not uncommon to find them in the most successful families. Some families have harder cases of these than others and often the most difficult people to help are family. Norman Maclean wrote in “A River Runs Through It”:

Each one of us here today will at one time in our lives look upon a loved one who is in need and ask the same question: We are willing to help, Lord, but what, if anything, is needed? For it is true we can seldom help those closest to us. Either we don’t know what part of ourselves to give or, more often than not, the part we have to give is not wanted. And so it is those we live with and should know who elude us. But we can still love them – we can love completely without complete understanding.

So it was with Abraham. With a few exceptions of deceiving to protect his life at the expense of his wife and impatience waiting for the promised son he made good decisions based on faith in God. Not so with Lot. He was forever getting into scrapes, being in the wrong place at the wrong time, leaving himself vulnerable to the bad choices of others, being pressured into making terrible decisions and his final surrender to alcohol and incest. His name, Lot, actually means “a covering” and that is what he needed his whole life. He needed everyone around him to cover for him because while he had riches he did not have substance. You can see in the text how he moved gradually over time from living in tents outside the city to being one of the men sitting at the gate of the city. He had joined himself to the city. That was the place reserved for the elders and the ones who made decisions for the city. It was a mark of finally fitting in.

What C.S. Lewis said about young men is true of Lot. “Prosperity knits a man to the world. He feels that he is finding his place in it, while really it is finding its place in him.” Lot has found his place in Sodom and has moved from outside to inside. As well, Sodom has found its place in him. I don’t believe he ran with his family toward Sodom like a rebellious adolescent. It’s more likely he simply drifted toward what he thought was safety and the covering he needed. Maybe, unlike Abraham, he needed a place to fit in and look to for security.

In “The Weight of Glory” Lewis wrote:

I believe that in all men’s lives at certain periods, and in many men’s lives at all periods between infancy and extreme old age, one of the most dominant elements is the desire to be inside the local Ring and the terror of being left outside. This desire, in one of its forms, has indeed had ample justice done to it in literature. I mean, in the form of snobbery. Victorian fiction is full of characters who are hag-ridden by the desire to get inside that particular Ring which is, or was, called Society. But it must be clearly understood that “Society,” in that sense of the word, is merely one of a hundred Rings, and snobbery therefore only one form of the longing to be inside..My main purpose in this address is simply to convince you that this desire is one of the great permanent mainsprings of human action. It is one of the factors which go to make up the world as we know it—this whole pell-mell of struggle, competition, confusion, graft, disappointment and advertisement, and if it is one of the permanent mainsprings then you may be quite sure of this. Unless you take measures to prevent it, this desire is going to be one of the chief motives of your life, from the first day on which you enter your profession until the day when you are too old to care. That will be the natural thing—the life that will come to you of its own accord. Any other kind of life, if you lead it, will be the result of conscious and continuous effort. If you do nothing about it, if you drift with the stream, you will in fact be an “inner ringer.” I don’t say you’ll be a successful one; that’s as may be. But whether by pining and moping outside Rings that you can never enter, or by passing triumphantly further and further in—one way or the other you will be that kind of man.

And, sadly, that is the kind of man Lot became. He chose for himself the best and the obvious. He selected the easy way and a place to settle with the apparent security of a city nearby.

On the other hand, Abraham chose to keep moving. He chose the security of faith in God. He chose what did not appear at first to be the best or the easiest but when he settled his first act was to build an altar. He was not interested in being one of the men sitting in the gate. So often, like it was for Lot, the price of belonging is too high. 

That describes both their lives. One living with the covering of God and the other always needing to be covered for his mistakes. One building an altar and the other putting his trust in wicked men. One pleading with God for a wicked city and the other pleading with wicked men for a bargain at the expense of his own children. One giving a tenth of everything he owns to the Lord and the other offering his daughters to save face. One finding a place of rest in the open beneath the great trees of Mamre and the other lying in a squalid cave having lost everything.

But is that how the story ends? No, for God can redeem our family history of separation, waste, hostility, betrayal and shame. 

Hundreds of years after Lot and his drunken shame, a woman descended from Lot’s incest, Ruth the Moabite meets a descendant of Abraham named Boaz. They marry and have children. Those children do the same and over the course of generations those two lines of enemies eventually give birth to David, the king of Israel and much later to the savior of the world – Jesus. It may not be right away but God can redeem the failures, tragedies and separations of our lives for His purposes. He can take the worst parts of who we are and reconcile them in time. Nothing is beyond the reach of the goodness of God.