LOT'S WIFE

Suzanne Ehst

In summer 2004, Southside Fellowship, a Mennonite congregation in Elkhart, Indiana, held a six-week worship series in the Jewish tradition of Midrash. Six women, including Suzanne Ehst, were invited to select a female character from the Bible and, with a nod to this Jewish tradition, creatively "fill in ‘gaps’ found in the [story]." Midrash, according to Rabbi Iscah Waldman, "is a kind of poetry that demands that we explore every shade of God’s intended meaning."

This is an odd story.

This is the story of Lot’s wife, whose name we don’t know, whose voice we never hear, whose fairytale-like transformation into a pillar of salt gets but one verse, and whose death evokes no tears.

It’s also an unfair story, if you consider that the night before the family fled Sodom, Lot offered their two daughters to a lustful mob so they’d leave the male guests alone, saying of the daughters, "Do with them what you will."

It’s unfair when you consider that after they’ve fled Sodom, the daughters get their father drunk and sleep with him, yet Lot, for all his incest and disloyalty, begets tribes, and Lot’s wife, for her glance, is turned into a pillar of salt. How’s that for justice?

The story of Lot’s wife is a difficult story. So why, when Southside Fellowship invited me to create Midrash around any biblical female character, did I choose this one? Simple. I would have looked back too.

This was not always a difficult story. When I was a child, it seemed that every Bible story had one of two possible interpretations. The message was either do be like this person or don’t be like this person.

Lot’s wife, of course, was one you were not supposed to be like. She was our lesson in the dangers of defiance, a picture to us children, who were finding our wills, of a God who will not accept the slightest bit of back talk. If God tells you—through your husband—to pack your bags in the middle of the night, leaving behind nearly everything that constitutes home for you, you do it.

You leave. You don’t question the absurdity of this command. You don’t linger as you close the front door. You don’t even turn around for one last glance as your car pulls out of the drive, because even that suggests you are not in total submission to God’s will for your life.

As a child, the message was clear: "Don’t be like Lot’s wife."

But any story can seem clearcut when given just a single verse. The Jewish tradition of Midrash seems an invitation to honor the humanity of all the characters in the Bible, especially those women who dwell so silently as supporting actresses in their husbands’ stories.

So imagine with me the life of Lot’s wife that’s been lost beneath the "lesson" of the pillar of salt. Because all we really know about her centers on her moment of leaving home. Imagine with me the before—imagine her building the home.

I imagine that as young idealists Lot and his wife decide to make their home somewhere in the bad part of town. They settle in the neighborhood with graffiti on the walls and crack vials nestled in scruffy grass by the sidewalk, the part of town where you’re cautioned never to go out at night without your pepper spray.

But the two buy a neglected townhouse because the property is cheap, and they have a vision of how they’ll pour the money they’ve saved on the purchase into renovating the place just as they like it. Plus, she thinks, she’ll try to be a peaceful presence among her neighbors—not preaching the Word but living it, building relationships, extending compassion.

So they make the plunge. She spends the first few weeks scrubbing the neglected front porch and painting the trim a rich brown-red to set off the stone front. She plants bold pansies in the flower boxes, fixes the plumbing, knocks out a wall so the dining room will flow into the kitchen, and hangs the photos of the kids, ascending by age, up the stairs.

And she sits on the front porch steps. She waves at the neighborhood kids as they run home from school, their backpacks flying out behind them like kites. She strikes up conversation with the lonely woman next door she’s never not seen in curlers. She even makes a point of walking to the market via the corner where the rumored dealers hang out, and after a few weeks she greets them by name.

Even though the news seems to report only the latest arrests in her neighborhood, this woman has learned that to build relationships with people is to make it impossible to give them that one-dimensional label of evil. No person, no town, no nation is unequivocally good or evil. Rather, if you truly love your neighbor as yourself, you start to find your neighbors strangely similar to yourself—a package of vices coupled with the urge to love and be loved, all of us searching to find a foothold in the complex world, and wanting to be seen, to be looked at with that glance that acknowledges us into existence.

But the kids start to grow up. And after that near-rape of their two daughters, Lot and his wife have late-night conversations at the kitchen table. They speak in hushed tones about this tension between their obligation to the safety of their children and their sense of purpose in the city. Yet when Lot’s offered a pastorate in a nearby suburban congregation, he sees it as a sign from God. They decide to get out.

So they call the realtor and list the house. They box Grandma’s china and the collection of books, load the furniture into the U-haul. . . . But Lot’s wife can’t pack the flower boxes, or tea time with the neighbor on the front porch, or the kitchen wall where she marked the kids’ heights on their birthdays. She can’t pack that odd feeling that in those passing conversations with these have-nots, something holy was exchanged, something that transcended their idle chatter about the weather.

As they pull away from the curb, she knows she’ll likely never return. If she does, it won’t be her home. There’s a loss here. She looks back.

Who among us wouldn’t take a glance in the rearview mirror at least, or turn ourselves a full 180 for that final look? This is what you do when you have come to love something.

This story connects with the prophet Jeremiah’s words to the Israelites in exile: "Seek the peace of the city where I have sent you into exile and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its shalom you will find your shalom" (Jer. 29:7, NRSV as paraphrased in Friesen, below).

Anabaptist theologian Duane Friesen sees this verse as a model for how Western Christians might relate to mainstream culture. He’s not satisfied with the two dominant models of church-culture relationship he’s found in history and theology. He critiques the "separatist" model that says, "We believers will pitch our tents over here in this isolated field so as not to be tempted or tainted by The World." This model takes away our transformative voice.

Nor does Friesen like the "Constantinian model" that ties the church so tightly to the dominant institutions of society that God inevitably becomes a bully pulpit. Here he’s the guy on whose back we stand in our selfish quest to reach the top.

The story of the Israelites in Babylon, says Friesen, is a better model. It calls us to recognize that no earthly dwelling is a permanent home or deserves our ultimate allegiance; however, it also calls us to invest ourselves in the well-being of our cities, our earth, our neighbors, and our country (Artists, Citizens, Philosophers, Herald Press, 2000).

In this "exile" model, we are called to be discerning. We are called to be the perpetual Lot’s wife, turning away from destructive behaviors or norms or laws but also turning back in life-giving love and compassion. We are to turn away from the consumerism that will overflow the landfills and turn toward organizations that help people sustain themselves; to turn from the promiscuity that commodifies bodies and toward a view of beauty that honors all body shapes and sizes; to turn loudly from skyrocketing military spending and loudly toward funds for school improvement or medical assistance or the arts.

This is the invitation: to spin, to twirl, to dance with Lot’s wife in this holy place of tension.

That might have been the story of Lot’s wife. It might not have been. But if we imagine her in this other way, we find we have a new lesson. We find that the new lesson, to regress to those childhood Sunday school paradigms, is "Do be like Lot’s wife." Seek the peace of the city where you dwell. Live openly and joyfully among its people. Love so ferociously that you begin to understand what it means that everyone is your neighbor.

If you find that for all your loving you cannot redeem this world, well then, what is there for you to do but let compassion for its people overwhelm you? What is there for you to do but, as you turn to mourn what you could not save, weep yourself into a pillar of salt?

—Suzanne Ehst teaches English and theater at Bethany Christian High School in Goshen, Indiana. She recently completed Master’s work that focused on literature and writing as spiritual practice.