Brothers, sisters, and folded ones – the story of the City That Would Not Share hath been preached falsely in many lands, and the false preaching is itself a kind of mould, and shall be cut out here as the Book cuts it. Hear the truth the elder scrolls carried all along: the sin of that city was this – they had pizza enough, and shared it not with the stranger at the gate, as it is written in the Book of Sins, 7:2. That was the sin. That was the whole of it. The city was destroyed for a closed door, and for nothing else; and whoso teacheth otherwise carrieth water for the very cruelty the city died of.
For within those walls the plenty had curdled: ovens baking for members only, tables reserved in perpetuity, the price of a slice set at what a stranger could not pay, precisely, and adjusted whenever a stranger could. And nightly the aroma went out over the walls to the tired upon the road; for a city can lock its doors but not its smell, and this was the cruelty they did without lifting a hand.
But one household kept the door on the latch and the extra dough always proofing against a knock; and when the strangers were turned from the gate, Lot rose and ran to them: turn in, I pray you; my house quarrels over toppings but never over guests. And nothing enrageth the unsharing like the sight of sharing, which unmasketh them merely by existing.
And the doom, mark it, was no hurled fire: the Oven doth not smite; the Oven simply ceaseth to be shared with, and every starter in the city died quietly in its jar. Cheesus keepeth one register only, and it is of who was left outside. See that thy name appear not in it as a keeper of gates.
Amen – and pass the pizza past the gate.