Sturgis and Gomorrah

I recently returned from a week in Sturgis, South Dakota, where I was working during the town’s annual motorcycle rally. I was there with twelve other members of my church, The Anchor Fellowship; we were donating our time to work there, and our wages would then be given to the church as a fundraiser. We manned entrances at the Buffalo Chip Campground, which is the epicenter of Sturgis Bike Week’s festivities, and where a massive amphitheatre was built to accommodate performances by the likes of Toby Keith, CCR, Aerosmith, and other artists popular in motorcycle culture. Following the shows, we would clean up the grounds within the amphitheatre area.

This was easily the spiritually darkest experience of my life. Sturgis is in southwestern South Dakota, near the Badlands and the Black Hills, and it is an incredibly beautiful area. But as the bikers began to roll in, and as the events got underway, I could feel a great heaviness settle over the campgrounds and town. I’m not one who tends to be very sensitive to the spirit realms, but even I could sense the Darkness building. It was even tangible, in the same way August humidity in Florida is tangible. It clung to my skin, and pressed in heavily.

The Buffalo Chip Campground was private property, and therefore it became a place of complete lawlessness. Literally the only rules there were that each person had to have a wristband, and that they could not bring weapons or their own alcohol into the amphitheatre area (so as to protect beer sales by vendors inside). Here the baser instincts of mankind were on full display; drugs and drunkenness were rampant, strippers performed at several different locations around the stage, and there was enough public sex and nudity to make Bonnaroo seem like an Amish community. Constantly men would offer to have their wives/girlfriends flash us (at the very least) if we would look the other way while they brought in alcohol. And this wasn’t Woodstock-ish hippie lawlessness, with that free-love-and-marijuana sense of camaraderie; this was violent lawlessness, fueled by Budweiser, testosterone, and gasoline. Weapons were everywhere, and as the entire campground was accessible to bikes and four-wheelers and golf carts, there were drunk drivers everywhere. The environment was not only spiritually Dark, but it was flat-out dangerous.

I will not take the time to go into great detail, but midway through our time there, we found out that four or five individuals independently had gotten word from God that we were to leave Sturgis immediately for home. These were people back in Nashville, people within our group, and even a member of a biker ministry there on the campgrounds. So we fled. The place had been nicknamed “Sturgis and Gomorrah,” and we were Lot and his daughters in flight. On the road home, we found out that that night’s performance by Aerosmith had been cancelled due to Steven Tyler falling off the stage and being airlifted to the hospital. News articles said little about the crowd response except that although concertgoers were disappointed, they were just glad he was going to be okay. Ha. We knew better. Imagine having to be security in a place where tens of thousands of drunken bikers had just had their Aerosmith show cancelled. That would have been an extremely dangerous situation. And suddenly the call for an abrupt departure made sense, as well as the comparisons to Lot and family.

This all got me thinking about the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. We all know it well. God had determined to destroy the cities for their unabashed wickedness, and had sent two angels to extract Lot and his family before the fire fell. A crowd gathered around Lot’s house as he hosted the visitors, and they demanded that he release the visitors to them. Scripture seems to indicate that the crowd intended to rape the angels, and Lot even offered up his virgin daughters to them, but the crowd refused. The angels then struck the crowd with blindness, and the family escaped just before the brimstone and sulfur rained down.

Many Christians like to twist this story into a condemnation of the LGBT community (that is, the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered community). Since the crowd was made up of men, and the angels were male, the great evil for which God wanted to destroy the city was homosexuality. But anyone with half an open mind can see that this is a ridiculous association; since when do all the men of a city suddenly “go gay” when two visitors enter town? Knowing that only a small percentage of people (2% to 10%, depending on who you ask) are homosexual, why would all the men of the city reject the offer of two beautiful virgin girls in favor of two male visitors?

Writings outside of Scripture (whether they be legends, historical accounts, or books associated with sects of Judaism) seem to indicate that Sodom and Gomorrah had developed a huge reputation for being extremely inhospitable to outsiders. Accounts exist of visitors being regularly robbed, tortured, humiliated, or even murdered in increasingly imaginative ways by the people of the cities. And any townsperson who helped the visitor would find himself in the same predicament. (Lot seems to be an exception—a tolerated alien—most likely due to his wealth, power, and relation to Abraham, of whom the cities were wary.) If this is true, then a re-read of the Genesis account of Sodom and Gomorrah brings a whole new perspective. The men of the city were not a horde of “homosexual perverts” just trying to get a piece of the “hunky new guys” in town, as popular Christian teaching would like us to think. Rather, they were setting about their usual hobby of torturing and humiliating outsiders. Lot indicates full awareness of this custom in Genesis 19:8, when he says, “But don’t do anything to these men, for they have come under the protection of my roof” (NIV). The crowd then replies in the next verse, “This fellow came here as an alien, and now he wants to play the judge! We’ll treat [him] worse than them.” This makes incredible sense when understanding the great wickedness of Sodom and Gomorrah to be that of inhospitality.

But surely inhospitality isn’t a legitimate evil, one which would cause God to destroy entire cities! This would seem anticlimactic to Christians who have been raised to believe that homosexuality is a great wickedness that God would wish to exterminate from the earth. After all, wasn’t the city Sodom named after a form of homosexual intercourse? (I’m being facetious with that last statement; unfortunately and incomprehensibly, to some that clear fallacy is a cogent argument.)

We all know James 1:12—“Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress…” (NIV). The second law that Jesus taught was to “love thy neighbor as thyself.” He also taught that we must love our enemies. And throughout Scripture we see innumerable stories in which hospitality is promoted or rewarded. A widow provides food and lodging for Elijah even though she has nothing. David brings into his home Mephibosheth, the last remaining descendent of his nemesis Saul. Ananias and the Christians of Damascus welcomed Paul into their community following his conversion, even though he’d been responsible for killing so many of their brethren. And let’s not forget the Good Samaritan.

We are not called simply to show love and kindness to those of our own community. The Bible is unarguably clear in making the point that we are called to love EVERYONE. We are to show hospitality and kindness to those who are in need of it, even if they are outsiders to us, and even if they are our enemy. The wickedness of Sodom and Gomorrah was so great that they didn’t just settle for ignoring or shutting out strangers and people in need—they outright exploited and tortured them. It was a sport, a pastime to them. And to God this was an inexcusable wickedness.

And the parallels between Sodom and Sturgis become even clearer. Never have I seen such blatant racism, misogyny, and homophobia (often accompanied by a figurative wave of the American flag). As visitors clearly not a part of biker culture, I genuinely felt like we could easily have had a giant target painted on the front of us. The only black individuals I saw the entire week (with the exception of one extremely brave biker) were the people hired to clean the bathrooms, and it must have taken great courage or desperation to have caused them to take the job in that kind of explicitly racist environment. Even some of our fellow co-workers, people hired in from Rapid City and who were (in theory) completely sober, were fully unashamed of their own hatred; one guy went on a tirade about how he hated Canadians because gay marriage was legal there. Twice I heard him voice a desire to inflict serious physical harm upon guys who rode on the same motorcycle as another male. I have never experienced a place more inhospitable to those not a part of the majority culture. Well, outside the church, that is.

Unfortunately, the followers of Christ, those who should be most loving of others, have gained a reputation as being extremely inhospitable. It has been said that Sunday morning is the most segregated time of the week, as the majority of churches are predominantly composed of people of the same race. So many churches actively promote the idea that one must become like the rest of the congregation before they are welcome. Even in the twenty-first century, churches abound that look down on visitors with tattoos, visitors dressed as a part of a counterculture, visitors who aren’t familiar with the “proper decorum” expected in that church. The massive divide between the church and the LGBT community exists in part because few gays have met a Christian who actually loves them like Jesus would, and few Christians have bothered to get to know a gay person for who they really are. And women are still considered inferior to men in so many churches. They won’t admit it, but many churches have allowed the real spirit of Sodom and Gomorrah to sit amongst them in the pews every Sunday.

What it comes down to, is that we the church must return to those two commandments given by Jesus, to love God and to love others. This impossible for any person to do, however, on his own. He must instead cry out to God, and ask Him for the grace to love those he is incapable of loving. It involves pushing himself outside his comfort zone. It involves putting the opinion of God over the opinion of fellow churchgoers.

I’ll be the first to admit that I suck at loving. I really do. I found myself most of the week at Sturgis laughing at the absurdities of biker culture. I found myself complaining as I raked up countless piles of “patriotic” confetti and smashed, disgusting beer cans after Toby Keith’s show. I could not find it within myself to truly look upon these people with love—pity was the most I could muster.

And it was in the van, as we waited for the last of our group to arrive so we could make our escape, that I broke down. I watched as a young man suffered through a very powerful drug trip—whether it was heroin or crack or something else, we don’t know. But he was stumbling everywhere, collapsing on top of his tent and exposing himself and falling over fences. And there was this girl with him. She was maybe nineteen, and she’d worked with me at the front gate one night; you could see a radiant personality in her, and incredible potential and talent. But here she was doing her best to coerce him into lying down to sleep it off. She tugged on his arms, trying to calm him down. You could see the incredible frustration mixed with love she felt, but ultimately she could do nothing more than just roll up in her sleeping bag in front of the tent, and just wait it out there next to him. It was the most heart-breaking thing I’ve ever seen. Two young people with so much potential, and this is where their lives had led. All I could do was weep, as for just that moment God allowed me to see them at least in small part the way He saw them. And there were so many broken people in that campground…. I was convicted for the way I’d thought of the bikers there, and I saw for a moment just how sorrowful God was for the self-destruction and brokenness around. It was devastating, and I doubt I shall ever forget it.

I was struck by the weight of that prayer, that God would break our hearts with the things that break His. That’s such a dangerous prayer to pray. And I felt—and still feel—such overwhelming gratitude for all the things God has done in my life. Yeah, I’m broken and screwed up, and I am no better than anyone out there at Sturgis. But I’ve given God room to work, and it is to His glory that I am not in that same place of destruction. Now that’s amazing grace.

P.S. For the record, and to try to head off any arguments, I am not making any kind of judgment call on the rightness or wrongness of homosexuality. I am fully aware that it is a hot-button issue for many Christians, and in this context I wish to set my personal beliefs/opinions aside. I am merely addressing the subject as objectively as I can. There is a time and place for one to state and defend his position on the subject. This is not it.