HATRED AND ITS CURSE
Genesis 4:10-12
July 6, 2008
The curse of Cain was not that he killed his brother, but that he couldn’t kill him. Cain thought by killing his brother Abel his problems would be solved. He found instead that Abel wasn’t the source of his problems; he himself was. So for Cain, killing Abel became just another failure to come to grips with the self-centeredness that was causing his anger. Maybe it began as no more than a character flaw, but nourished well over the years, became life-altering, as often happens when we refuse to master our more pernicious urges. This was Cain, who ends up killing his brother. But it didn’t end his problems; it only intensified them. This murderous act of self-will is a dramatic re-creation of the moment in time when we finally and fully usurp lordship from God. No longer his, we become our own creation. But there are consequences.
So, paradoxically, killing Abel became Cain’s curse, not only because he couldn’t resist the temptation to act out his hatred, what he thought would put an end to his dilemma, but also because Abel’s blood continued to cry out to God, even as it disappeared into the ground. For as his brother’s blood became part of the earth on which Cain had to live, that very earth, now soiled, is no longer hospitable to Cain. Even a dog instinctively knows not to foul its living space! But not Cain, at least not in the throes of the crouching hatred that he allowed to have him! (Remember? “Sin is always crouching at your door”; “It desires to have you.”) So now he must stand before God who says in effect, “Your brother, now gone from your presence, remains in mine. He calls to me from my earth which has reclaimed his body. His cries for justice invoke my very Lordship, and now I must administer justice, somehow without sacrificing mercy?"
Can God do that? For his own purposes God creates us to be strikingly different from each other and exist in vastly different circumstances through no effort or fault of our own. This perfectly describes Cain and Abel. And just as in their story, 1) if we murder our brother, 2) or seal his death by inactivity, 3) or by negligence, 4) or even remove him from our consciousness so we won’t be aware of his plight, we still don’t sever his connection to God, and because of that, to us. Rather, we expand it, by failing, just as did Cain, to come to grips with our self-centeredness, our “me first” attitude. That’s how Cain allowed sin to own him. By giving in to his desire to erase Abel from his presence, Cain not only robbed himself of the opportunity to be a blessing to Abel, but also to receive the blessing of the God he failed to trust. We, no less than Cain, pander to our urges, bringing on major life-changing consequences, not only for the ones who need us, but also for we who are needed, yet choose not to respond.
There is something else interesting here. By his crying out to God, Abel acknowledges him. “There are no atheists in foxholes!” But that’s redundant, for Abel’s sacrifice was ample evidence of his relationship with God. Little wonder he felt free to cry out to him when trouble came; for undoubtedly he and God weren’t strangers. So even in death Abel’s life continued. And though Cain had eliminated him physically, he couldn’t remove Abel from his life emotionally—or spiritually—surely haunting for Cain who so wanted Abel out of his life.
It will be in our final lesson next week before we can determine whether this was truly a curse for Cain. What if it turns out to be a blessing in disguise? But either way, it’s a painful time in his life. Sometimes blessings are like that. Theologian, Luke Timothy Johnson, wrote, “In none of the…gospels is the scandal of the cross removed [and replaced by] divine glory. In each, the path to glory passes through real suffering.” But we, like Cain, can know God’s will only in hindsight. Otherwise, faith has no meaning.
The vagaries of life often call on us to accept by faith things we can’t understand, and which we may find bewildering, even frightening. The very reason my wife and I are in Beaumont today is due to my taking a job in Central Texas that turned out to be a graveyard for coaches. I lasted three years, getting out as soon as viably possible. But I coached a very intelligent and highly motivated boy there who inexplicably was to become my employer, my professional mentor, and, in many ways, my benefactor. Even today, though, he credits me for much more than I ever did for him, and takes credit for so much less than he has given me. Nevertheless, here we are, and the blessings that have ensued, including this class and church, we count often. It took thirteen years before God’s plan began to blossom, but eventually its unfolding enabled us to handle crisis’ that would wound our family in ways we never could have anticipated, or, I suppose, survived. Only by looking back can I now see God’s involvement, how he used others to rescue us, and it helps me to understand and accept his declaration that, “My ways are not your ways.” I can only shake my head in humility and echo, “No they aren’t, not even close!”
So when God in effect said to Cain, “You may no longer inhabit the ground now saturated with the blood of your brother”, meaning God commanded Cain to leave, I see in hindsight, the truth in what Archbishop Oscar Romero once wrote, “Blood soaked fields will never be fertile…” If he obeyed God this time, Cain would leave so the ground could heal; but he also would leave so he could heal. No “eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth” here. God didn’t abandon Cain; he doesn’t abandon us either.
That leads into the last sentence, where God says to Cain, “When you work the ground, it will no longer yield its crops for you. You will be a restless wanderer on the earth.” There is a lot there, but let’s pursue an idea I want to ask in the form of a question. Did God have to go that far; did he have to curse Cain and remove him from his life of luxury to make the story end right? As far as we can tell, Cain’s descendants (Cainites, sometimes known as Kenites), did make some outstanding contributions to civilization including advancements in metallurgy and music. Still, though, Cain’s descendents continued to wrestle with the curse of murder, mostly through his sixth generation later grandson, Lamech. This is why choir members always make me nervous. Anyway, this particular lineage ends with the Flood story and we can follow it no further.
But back to our question, “Did God have to go that far?” let’s tap the wisdom of philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard, who wrote, “[God] had it in His power to remove the possibility of…[sin] by altering Himself a little, [as he could have with] His beloved disciples, by withholding suffering from them—but then He is no longer the object of faith…” We could expect God to adjust himself to us, I guess, to our propensity to sin against him and our neighbor, but if he’ll do that, why do we need faith? It would have no meaning. We could do as we wish knowing God would make it right. Would our faith, then, be focused on God or on us?
And finally, what is God to do about the cries of Abel as they come to him from the blood soaked earth, the place of so many murders? Does he make things right for Abel—or for Cain? If God makes it right for Cain, he shows mercy. But for Abel it is justice that is required. I think this dilemma points to a basic truth; as human beings we, whether Cain or Abel, are unable to choose honestly. Why? Because when choosing is involved, we are prisoners of our own self interest. My guess is, only if we are the victim of an egregious crime can we truly grasp the burning desire for revenge that consumes us. As theologian, Miroslav Volf wrote, “In a scorched land, soaked in the blood of the innocent, [the belief that God is mercy and not justice] will invariably die.” Conversely, if our hands are red with guilt, as were Cain’s, God’s justice pales in comparison to the equally plaintive cries for his mercy. In either case, though, our trust in God must be so complete that as Richard Niebuhr says, “Death (justice) no less than life (mercy) appears to us [an] act of mercy.”
So, as humans we are juxtaposed between two truths. God is mercy and God is justice; only God can achieve both. That leaves us, hopefully with the will we have cultivated to trust him; to know we can cry out to God either request with the confidence that he will honor divinely his promise “to repay”; that “after the dealing’s done”, God will have blessed not only my murderous brother, but also the murderous me. Only such faith keeps me from becoming Cain. Or, as writer, Ben Stein said, “Faith is not believing that God can. It is knowing that God will.”
GOD BLESS AMERICA
July 6, 2008
In the mid 1700’s the great French writer, Voltaire, wrote, “Man was born free, but is everywhere in chains.”
Such was to be our fate—yet we are free. So on this Independence Day, dare we not honor the sacrifice it took to bring us here, the precious sons and daughters who spent their lives and shed their blood so we could know the joy of being independent and free from tyranny?
As Christians, we believe freedom is the inalienable gift of God, yet godless men did often wrest it away, as still they do today. But countless patriots have, for 232 years, stepped up in our stead and with their blood spilled on fields of combat, claimed for us the freedom God intended for his children. Their lives and their deaths are to be treasured, honored by us who, not bearing the scars of the battlefield, so often take for granted the freedoms they bought us and under which we live and worship.
The flag beside me and to your left, is the national symbol of the country we proclaim to be “under God”, so I think it not inconsistent that we, children of that same holy God, should honor the means by which he has allowed us this very day to re-claim and re-state our legacy as his children. By our lives as in our churches we worship only God, but to honor this flag, this symbol of freedom immortalized by the blood of patriots, is but to be grateful for what God has given us through them.
So continuing to work diligently to correct the many mistakes we’ve made along the way, with the faith that one day we will succeed and become fully “one nation under God”, we proudly sing our prayer, “God Bless America!”
Genesis 4:10-12
July 6, 2008
The curse of Cain was not that he killed his brother, but that he couldn’t kill him. Cain thought by killing his brother Abel his problems would be solved. He found instead that Abel wasn’t the source of his problems; he himself was. So for Cain, killing Abel became just another failure to come to grips with the self-centeredness that was causing his anger. Maybe it began as no more than a character flaw, but nourished well over the years, became life-altering, as often happens when we refuse to master our more pernicious urges. This was Cain, who ends up killing his brother. But it didn’t end his problems; it only intensified them. This murderous act of self-will is a dramatic re-creation of the moment in time when we finally and fully usurp lordship from God. No longer his, we become our own creation. But there are consequences.
So, paradoxically, killing Abel became Cain’s curse, not only because he couldn’t resist the temptation to act out his hatred, what he thought would put an end to his dilemma, but also because Abel’s blood continued to cry out to God, even as it disappeared into the ground. For as his brother’s blood became part of the earth on which Cain had to live, that very earth, now soiled, is no longer hospitable to Cain. Even a dog instinctively knows not to foul its living space! But not Cain, at least not in the throes of the crouching hatred that he allowed to have him! (Remember? “Sin is always crouching at your door”; “It desires to have you.”) So now he must stand before God who says in effect, “Your brother, now gone from your presence, remains in mine. He calls to me from my earth which has reclaimed his body. His cries for justice invoke my very Lordship, and now I must administer justice, somehow without sacrificing mercy?"
Can God do that? For his own purposes God creates us to be strikingly different from each other and exist in vastly different circumstances through no effort or fault of our own. This perfectly describes Cain and Abel. And just as in their story, 1) if we murder our brother, 2) or seal his death by inactivity, 3) or by negligence, 4) or even remove him from our consciousness so we won’t be aware of his plight, we still don’t sever his connection to God, and because of that, to us. Rather, we expand it, by failing, just as did Cain, to come to grips with our self-centeredness, our “me first” attitude. That’s how Cain allowed sin to own him. By giving in to his desire to erase Abel from his presence, Cain not only robbed himself of the opportunity to be a blessing to Abel, but also to receive the blessing of the God he failed to trust. We, no less than Cain, pander to our urges, bringing on major life-changing consequences, not only for the ones who need us, but also for we who are needed, yet choose not to respond.
There is something else interesting here. By his crying out to God, Abel acknowledges him. “There are no atheists in foxholes!” But that’s redundant, for Abel’s sacrifice was ample evidence of his relationship with God. Little wonder he felt free to cry out to him when trouble came; for undoubtedly he and God weren’t strangers. So even in death Abel’s life continued. And though Cain had eliminated him physically, he couldn’t remove Abel from his life emotionally—or spiritually—surely haunting for Cain who so wanted Abel out of his life.
It will be in our final lesson next week before we can determine whether this was truly a curse for Cain. What if it turns out to be a blessing in disguise? But either way, it’s a painful time in his life. Sometimes blessings are like that. Theologian, Luke Timothy Johnson, wrote, “In none of the…gospels is the scandal of the cross removed [and replaced by] divine glory. In each, the path to glory passes through real suffering.” But we, like Cain, can know God’s will only in hindsight. Otherwise, faith has no meaning.
The vagaries of life often call on us to accept by faith things we can’t understand, and which we may find bewildering, even frightening. The very reason my wife and I are in Beaumont today is due to my taking a job in Central Texas that turned out to be a graveyard for coaches. I lasted three years, getting out as soon as viably possible. But I coached a very intelligent and highly motivated boy there who inexplicably was to become my employer, my professional mentor, and, in many ways, my benefactor. Even today, though, he credits me for much more than I ever did for him, and takes credit for so much less than he has given me. Nevertheless, here we are, and the blessings that have ensued, including this class and church, we count often. It took thirteen years before God’s plan began to blossom, but eventually its unfolding enabled us to handle crisis’ that would wound our family in ways we never could have anticipated, or, I suppose, survived. Only by looking back can I now see God’s involvement, how he used others to rescue us, and it helps me to understand and accept his declaration that, “My ways are not your ways.” I can only shake my head in humility and echo, “No they aren’t, not even close!”
So when God in effect said to Cain, “You may no longer inhabit the ground now saturated with the blood of your brother”, meaning God commanded Cain to leave, I see in hindsight, the truth in what Archbishop Oscar Romero once wrote, “Blood soaked fields will never be fertile…” If he obeyed God this time, Cain would leave so the ground could heal; but he also would leave so he could heal. No “eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth” here. God didn’t abandon Cain; he doesn’t abandon us either.
That leads into the last sentence, where God says to Cain, “When you work the ground, it will no longer yield its crops for you. You will be a restless wanderer on the earth.” There is a lot there, but let’s pursue an idea I want to ask in the form of a question. Did God have to go that far; did he have to curse Cain and remove him from his life of luxury to make the story end right? As far as we can tell, Cain’s descendants (Cainites, sometimes known as Kenites), did make some outstanding contributions to civilization including advancements in metallurgy and music. Still, though, Cain’s descendents continued to wrestle with the curse of murder, mostly through his sixth generation later grandson, Lamech. This is why choir members always make me nervous. Anyway, this particular lineage ends with the Flood story and we can follow it no further.
But back to our question, “Did God have to go that far?” let’s tap the wisdom of philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard, who wrote, “[God] had it in His power to remove the possibility of…[sin] by altering Himself a little, [as he could have with] His beloved disciples, by withholding suffering from them—but then He is no longer the object of faith…” We could expect God to adjust himself to us, I guess, to our propensity to sin against him and our neighbor, but if he’ll do that, why do we need faith? It would have no meaning. We could do as we wish knowing God would make it right. Would our faith, then, be focused on God or on us?
And finally, what is God to do about the cries of Abel as they come to him from the blood soaked earth, the place of so many murders? Does he make things right for Abel—or for Cain? If God makes it right for Cain, he shows mercy. But for Abel it is justice that is required. I think this dilemma points to a basic truth; as human beings we, whether Cain or Abel, are unable to choose honestly. Why? Because when choosing is involved, we are prisoners of our own self interest. My guess is, only if we are the victim of an egregious crime can we truly grasp the burning desire for revenge that consumes us. As theologian, Miroslav Volf wrote, “In a scorched land, soaked in the blood of the innocent, [the belief that God is mercy and not justice] will invariably die.” Conversely, if our hands are red with guilt, as were Cain’s, God’s justice pales in comparison to the equally plaintive cries for his mercy. In either case, though, our trust in God must be so complete that as Richard Niebuhr says, “Death (justice) no less than life (mercy) appears to us [an] act of mercy.”
So, as humans we are juxtaposed between two truths. God is mercy and God is justice; only God can achieve both. That leaves us, hopefully with the will we have cultivated to trust him; to know we can cry out to God either request with the confidence that he will honor divinely his promise “to repay”; that “after the dealing’s done”, God will have blessed not only my murderous brother, but also the murderous me. Only such faith keeps me from becoming Cain. Or, as writer, Ben Stein said, “Faith is not believing that God can. It is knowing that God will.”
GOD BLESS AMERICA
July 6, 2008
In the mid 1700’s the great French writer, Voltaire, wrote, “Man was born free, but is everywhere in chains.”
Such was to be our fate—yet we are free. So on this Independence Day, dare we not honor the sacrifice it took to bring us here, the precious sons and daughters who spent their lives and shed their blood so we could know the joy of being independent and free from tyranny?
As Christians, we believe freedom is the inalienable gift of God, yet godless men did often wrest it away, as still they do today. But countless patriots have, for 232 years, stepped up in our stead and with their blood spilled on fields of combat, claimed for us the freedom God intended for his children. Their lives and their deaths are to be treasured, honored by us who, not bearing the scars of the battlefield, so often take for granted the freedoms they bought us and under which we live and worship.
The flag beside me and to your left, is the national symbol of the country we proclaim to be “under God”, so I think it not inconsistent that we, children of that same holy God, should honor the means by which he has allowed us this very day to re-claim and re-state our legacy as his children. By our lives as in our churches we worship only God, but to honor this flag, this symbol of freedom immortalized by the blood of patriots, is but to be grateful for what God has given us through them.
So continuing to work diligently to correct the many mistakes we’ve made along the way, with the faith that one day we will succeed and become fully “one nation under God”, we proudly sing our prayer, “God Bless America!”
1 comment:
Reading God Bless America I could not help but think about the American flag at church. Was it not missing this past service?
Post a Comment