Then the men said to Lot, ‘Have you anyone else here? Sons-in-law, sons, daughters, or anyone you have in the city—bring them out of the place. For we are about to destroy this place, because the outcry against its people has become great before the Lord, and the Lord has sent us to destroy it.’ So Lot went out and said to his sons-in-law, who were to marry his daughters, ‘Up, get out of this place; for the Lord is about to destroy the city.’ But he seemed to his sons-in-law to be jesting.

When morning dawned, the angels urged Lot, saying, ‘Get up, take your wife and your two daughters who are here, or else you will be consumed in the punishment of the city.’ But he lingered; so the men seized him and his wife and his two daughters by the hand, the Lord being merciful to him, and they brought him out and left him outside the city. When they had brought them outside, they said, ‘Flee for your life; do not look back or stop anywhere in the Plain; flee to the hills, or else you will be consumed.’ And Lot said to them, ‘Oh, no, my lords; your servant has found favour with you, and you have shown me great kindness in saving my life; but I cannot flee to the hills, for fear the disaster will overtake me and I die. Look, that city is near enough to flee to, and it is a little one. Let me escape there—is it not a little one?—and my life will be saved!’ He said to him, ‘Very well, I grant you this favour too, and will not overthrow the city of which you have spoken. Hurry, escape there, for I can do nothing until you arrive there.’ Therefore the city was called Zoar. The sun had risen on the earth when Lot came to Zoar.

Then the Lord rained on Sodom and Gomorrah sulphur and fire from the Lord out of heaven; and he overthrew those cities, and all the Plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and what grew on the ground. But Lot’s wife, behind him, looked back, and she became a pillar of salt.

Abraham went early in the morning to the place where he had stood before the Lord; and he looked down towards Sodom and Gomorrah and towards all the land of the Plain, and saw the smoke of the land going up like the smoke of a furnace.

So it was that, when God destroyed the cities of the Plain, God remembered Abraham, and sent Lot out of the midst of the overthrow, when he overthrew the cities in which Lot had settled.

The interesting part of this story, for me, comes right at the end in verse 29, “God remembered Abraham and sent Lot out of the midst of the overthrow…” This is from the Priestly source in the Torah and is a Priestly summary of the story echoing 8:1 and attributing Lot’s rescue to his relationship with Abraham, “But God remembered Noah and all the wild animals and domestic animals with him on the ark.”

This is important to keep in mind because while this story is set closer to the beginning of Genesis and therefore is in the recesses of time, the Priestly source in the Torah comes to us from the 6th century during the exile in Babylon. This redaction clearly is meant to remind the Israelites in captivity that God remembers those in relationship with Abraham through the covenant.

While this redaction is from years after the original oral transmission of this story and the first codified writing of this story, it does add something very important. God always remembers his people and will hear their cry. This theme has always been a part of the people of Israel’s story and it was also picked up by Liberation Theologians.

Liberation Theology came to prominence in the 1960’s and 1970’s in Latin America. It proposed that not only does God hear the cry of His people, but that God has a preference for the poor. This lead to clergy and people moving to be with the poor and to advocate on behalf of the poor and marginalized. In the political climate of the day, Liberation Theology was seen as leftist and communist as the United States was still embroiled in the cold war with the USSR.

I would tend to agree that Liberation Theology offered no roadmap out of a capitalistic structure, although it was essential in bringing democracy, while imperfect, to countries like El Salvador. The struggle is where to go from Liberation Theology.

And while these questions hang over the legacy of Liberation Theology, the core premise that God goes to be with His people has a long and storied history back to some of the earliest chapters in Genesis, as we see from our passage today. How that looks is different in each time and each place. In the passage, Angels of the Lord are the ones that bring God’s message and rescue Lot. For El Salvador, the messenger was none other than Oscar Romero. And in many ways, as Romero predicted the night before his assassination, that if he were killed he would go on living in the people of El Salvador.

His face and the many murals become an ever-present reminder that while the church and liberation theology may have failed the people of El Salvador in many ways, God is still with His people. And it is for that reason on October 14, 2018, Oscar Romero became San Romero de America.