Boice on the Cries of the City

In preparing for this week's sermon I came across James Boice's memorable comments on Genesis 18:20-21, in which the Lord says, "Because the outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is great and their sin is very grave, I will go down to see whether they have done altogether according to the outcry that has come to me."  Boice's comments are notable both for their high sense of sermonic drama and for their obvious concern with the spiritual needs of the lost city where God called him to serve:

“I think I hear the cry of a child—wretched, hurt, and terrified—being beaten by a drunken father. There is another cry. It is the cry of an old man being assaulted by a gang of tough street youths. I hear his painful cry as they beat him around the face and shoulders. There is the cry of a teenage girl being raped in an abandoned car. And there . . . the cry of a wife abandoned by her husband. I hear the cry of a broken man so trapped by our dehumanizing welfare system that he has given up. I hear the cry of sinful pleasures: the raucous cries in the thousands of bars that scar the faces of our cities, the cries of prostitutes and those who patronize them, the soft cries of drug addicts, the arrogant cries of those who have been able to defeat their enemies or ruin their competitors. But wait! These cries are only a fraction of those millions of cries that are rising every minute of every day from every street in every city—cries that are all heard by God, felt by God. Must God’s judgment not fall on us too, and quickly? How shall we escape? How shall we excuse ourselves when the only righteous God comes down to see if what we have done is as bad as the accusation that has reached him?”