OCCUPATIONS, OFFERINGS and GOD
Genesis 4:2b-7
June 22, 2008
Last Sunday I told you that “most theologians, by carefully vetting the story of Cain and Abel believe it implies Cain to have become a successful, wealthy land owner while Abel was probably a lowly sheepherder…” I confess that there is little hard evidence to support these assumptions, for all the narrative tells us directly is, “Now Abel kept flocks, and Cain worked the soil.” So before we proceed into this lesson we need to establish, at least within reasonable probability, that Cain was indeed wealthy and Abel much less so. The easiest method of doing this is by understanding the inherent advantages at that time of being the firstborn son. Not only were Adam and Eve 1) more joyous when Cain was born (as the narrative leads us to believe), but 2) customarily, such, a difference in stature would have remained intact throughout their lives. 3) Hence, Cain would have had more opportunities, 4) been granted more responsibility and 5) been the main benefactor of all that belonged to his parents. This, then, would have been the source of Cain’s dominance over Abel “in all things measurable”. But faith isn’t measurable.
For Cain, God fearing and religious to a fault, dutifully brings his sacrifice; only the word “sacrifice” may be too generous in this case, for the narrative describes Cain’s gift reductively as “some of the fruits of the soil”. In light of his assumed wealth this smacks suspiciously of being merely a token sacrifice given only to satisfy his obligation to God. On the other hand, we are subtly led to believe that Abel offers a better sacrifice, described more expansively as, “BUT Abel brought fat portions from some of the firstborn of his flock.” I can’t help but wonder if this ancient story came to Jesus’ mind in Luke 21 where we read, 1) "As he looked up, Jesus saw the rich putting their gifts into the temple treasury. 2) He also saw a poor widow put in two very small copper coins …4) All these people gave their gifts out of their wealth [he said]; but she out of her poverty put in all she had to live on."
So maybe God was perfectly justified in being incensed at Cain; but what did God expect? Cain was the offspring of Adam and Eve who had long since proved they were takers, not givers. In fact, the garden story, which tells us of God’s prohibition against eating “fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden”, and Adam and Eve’s eating it anyway, is our initial indication of the fallen-ness of humankind. So was Cain culpable, not because he inherited the family fortune, but because he inherited the family weakness? Evidently God thought so. But let’s look at the possibility that Cain wasn’t responsible for his decision to cheat God.
I preached last Wednesday night at the Refresh Service, (a thirty minute service here at Trinity most of you apparently aren’t aware of); and during my sermonette I elaborated on something I had read recently by theologian, Miroslav Volf: “Moral responsibility cannot be transferred.” It’s a hard principle, that we can’t transfer responsibility, and transferring it to his parents could have vindicated Cain; for doing so is especially tempting to those who are able to trace their destructive lifestyles 1) to inherited traits, 2) or social tendencies, 3) or even environment. We must deal with this repeatedly in prison ministry and when Cain was placed in his own prison, far away from his family, I’m sure his moral failure before God was an issue he had to confront—alone. And dare we say there were other issues? For who is not tempted to blame others when we fail; Cain was no exception. After all, in cheating God he was only protecting what he thought to be rightfully his; and it helps to remember that Cain had a lot to lose. So is it possible for you, like me, to see a little glimmer of yourself in Cain? Or maybe more than a glimmer? Put another way, would you, with this story as a backdrop, risk giving back to God’s only a pittance if you knew that in so doing he would banish you from your family and friends? And let’s not fool ourselves by being overly literal; banishment can take many different paths.
“Then the LORD said to Cain, ‘Why are you angry? Why is your face downcast? If you do what is right, will you not be accepted [by me]?” “If you do what is right…!” I know that! Everyone knows that! But doing what is right is not that easy, is it? It often goes against our nature to do what’s right, especially if what we see as ours is on the line. There is a story of a woman who went to observe Mother Teresa in the teeming slums of Calcutta. Observing Teresa reaching out to those wretched, forgotten people in selfless love, the woman became convicted by her own moral barrenness. So she asked, “What can I do to be like you?” To which Teresa replied, “Find your own Calcutta.” Implicit in the answer by this saint of a woman is this: there is a personalized Calcutta for everyone; all we have to do to find it is look. So failure to find our Calcutta is a function of not looking for it. What made Mother Teresa so special was that she answered God’s call.
Let me give you another example from my ministry in prisons; not because my ministry there is any more important than any other ministry, but only because that’s the one I know best. On days I go to Stiles Prison, 1) I must get up earlier than usual, 2) restrict the time I normally allot for reading something challenging, 3) then quickly scan the newspaper, 4) put on long pants, shoes and socks instead of shorts and flip flops, 5) drive fifteen miles at $4.00 per gallon of gasoline, 6) walk a sweaty quarter of a mile in the heat and humidity, presenting my ID twice, 7) remove all metal from my person, including my belt, 8) pass through a metal detector and 9) then replace what I removed before finally proceeding to the Chapel of Hope. When finished there I must reverse the process.
The other option I have on those mornings is 1) to sleep as late as I want, 2) read as long as I want, 3) digest the newspaper, 4) flop down on my nice easy chair, in my nice comfortable den, dressed in my stay-at-home clothes, 5) and turn on the television set. Now which do you think I would like to do if I were the only consideration? But I’m not! Neither are you! So we search for our own Calcutta’s, where we are needed, and in finding them receive God’s blessings, one of which turns out to be the will to “do what is right”. To shortchange God is to violate someone who depends on us, and ultimately, we violate ourselves. So while the short term investment may sometimes be energy intensive, the long term return is even more energy infusive.
Continuing with the narrative: “But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must master it.” Let’s take that first part, “sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you…” This is apparently life’s longest continuous stumbling block, the sin of Cain no more than us. It is so difficult to believe that “sin is crouching at our door”; that it desires to have us. It sounds so, well, old fashioned. But old fashioned or not, sin is a basic element of our faith. The Bible not only tells us about the fact of sin, but it also gives us stories about those who have fallen prey to it, proving that sin is sin whether one believes in it or not. And there are consequences.
And let’s acknowledge that it is possible that Cain may have believed his sacrifice to be good enough. Duke Professor of Theology, Stanley Hauerwas, writes this: “…sin is not something we do, but rather it is a power that holds us captive.” Despite Cain’s belief, which was rooted in the captivity he apparently had never overcome, we see that his sacrifice was insufficient. So to deny the fact, or the power of sin, especially after reading these ancient Bible stories, is ostrich-like at best, or a flat out statement of disbelief at worst. To quote writer, Alister McGrath, “This act of denial may save your face, but it won’t save your life.” Sin is our conscious decision to do what we will, as we please, God’s will notwithstanding! And like Cain, God allows us to make those decisions. But there are consequences—just ask Cain!
And I can’t help but notice that God didn’t force Cain to give back to him appropriately. Rather, God addresses Cain’s corrupted will, his inclination to think only, or primarily, of himself. Of this, God said, “but YOU must master it.” “What? How about some divine healing here, Lord?” That would be much easier, wouldn’t it—just let God heal us. I’ll bet everyone would believe in God then, wouldn’t they. But not nearly everyone believes, because this, unfortunately, is about the hard stuff; 1) it’s about taking responsibility for our own woeful shortcomings, 2) for our deliberate failures to act, 3) and not sloughing responsibility for our sins onto someone else.
The great pastor, William Sloan Coffin, once said, “Beware of ministers (and I would add, of teachers too) who offer you the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.” By that, he meant 1) that despite comfortable words to the contrary, “sin is (uncomfortably) crouching at our door…”, 2) that the power of sin is ever present, 3) that we are always susceptible to it. Those who don’t teach or preach that aren’t doing you any favors. For life is not “just a bowl of cherries”, a journey toward some humanistic destination requiring no more than a warm hug a kind word and a pat on the back from time to time. Life, at least godly life, is more complicated than that, and it demands far more than submission to the pew for an hour each Sunday followed by six days of carefree nihilism. In fact, life, godly life, demands a lot more from us, for we begin it in negative territory. The epic sagas we are studying tell us about that, God almost begging us to listen and think. Quoting Miroslav Volf again: “Adam and Eve (and Cain and Abel) are not prehistoric forebears. We have met them, and they are us. Their story is our story, projected back into mythic time.”
Genesis 4:2b-7
June 22, 2008
Last Sunday I told you that “most theologians, by carefully vetting the story of Cain and Abel believe it implies Cain to have become a successful, wealthy land owner while Abel was probably a lowly sheepherder…” I confess that there is little hard evidence to support these assumptions, for all the narrative tells us directly is, “Now Abel kept flocks, and Cain worked the soil.” So before we proceed into this lesson we need to establish, at least within reasonable probability, that Cain was indeed wealthy and Abel much less so. The easiest method of doing this is by understanding the inherent advantages at that time of being the firstborn son. Not only were Adam and Eve 1) more joyous when Cain was born (as the narrative leads us to believe), but 2) customarily, such, a difference in stature would have remained intact throughout their lives. 3) Hence, Cain would have had more opportunities, 4) been granted more responsibility and 5) been the main benefactor of all that belonged to his parents. This, then, would have been the source of Cain’s dominance over Abel “in all things measurable”. But faith isn’t measurable.
For Cain, God fearing and religious to a fault, dutifully brings his sacrifice; only the word “sacrifice” may be too generous in this case, for the narrative describes Cain’s gift reductively as “some of the fruits of the soil”. In light of his assumed wealth this smacks suspiciously of being merely a token sacrifice given only to satisfy his obligation to God. On the other hand, we are subtly led to believe that Abel offers a better sacrifice, described more expansively as, “BUT Abel brought fat portions from some of the firstborn of his flock.” I can’t help but wonder if this ancient story came to Jesus’ mind in Luke 21 where we read, 1) "As he looked up, Jesus saw the rich putting their gifts into the temple treasury. 2) He also saw a poor widow put in two very small copper coins …4) All these people gave their gifts out of their wealth [he said]; but she out of her poverty put in all she had to live on."
So maybe God was perfectly justified in being incensed at Cain; but what did God expect? Cain was the offspring of Adam and Eve who had long since proved they were takers, not givers. In fact, the garden story, which tells us of God’s prohibition against eating “fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden”, and Adam and Eve’s eating it anyway, is our initial indication of the fallen-ness of humankind. So was Cain culpable, not because he inherited the family fortune, but because he inherited the family weakness? Evidently God thought so. But let’s look at the possibility that Cain wasn’t responsible for his decision to cheat God.
I preached last Wednesday night at the Refresh Service, (a thirty minute service here at Trinity most of you apparently aren’t aware of); and during my sermonette I elaborated on something I had read recently by theologian, Miroslav Volf: “Moral responsibility cannot be transferred.” It’s a hard principle, that we can’t transfer responsibility, and transferring it to his parents could have vindicated Cain; for doing so is especially tempting to those who are able to trace their destructive lifestyles 1) to inherited traits, 2) or social tendencies, 3) or even environment. We must deal with this repeatedly in prison ministry and when Cain was placed in his own prison, far away from his family, I’m sure his moral failure before God was an issue he had to confront—alone. And dare we say there were other issues? For who is not tempted to blame others when we fail; Cain was no exception. After all, in cheating God he was only protecting what he thought to be rightfully his; and it helps to remember that Cain had a lot to lose. So is it possible for you, like me, to see a little glimmer of yourself in Cain? Or maybe more than a glimmer? Put another way, would you, with this story as a backdrop, risk giving back to God’s only a pittance if you knew that in so doing he would banish you from your family and friends? And let’s not fool ourselves by being overly literal; banishment can take many different paths.
“Then the LORD said to Cain, ‘Why are you angry? Why is your face downcast? If you do what is right, will you not be accepted [by me]?” “If you do what is right…!” I know that! Everyone knows that! But doing what is right is not that easy, is it? It often goes against our nature to do what’s right, especially if what we see as ours is on the line. There is a story of a woman who went to observe Mother Teresa in the teeming slums of Calcutta. Observing Teresa reaching out to those wretched, forgotten people in selfless love, the woman became convicted by her own moral barrenness. So she asked, “What can I do to be like you?” To which Teresa replied, “Find your own Calcutta.” Implicit in the answer by this saint of a woman is this: there is a personalized Calcutta for everyone; all we have to do to find it is look. So failure to find our Calcutta is a function of not looking for it. What made Mother Teresa so special was that she answered God’s call.
Let me give you another example from my ministry in prisons; not because my ministry there is any more important than any other ministry, but only because that’s the one I know best. On days I go to Stiles Prison, 1) I must get up earlier than usual, 2) restrict the time I normally allot for reading something challenging, 3) then quickly scan the newspaper, 4) put on long pants, shoes and socks instead of shorts and flip flops, 5) drive fifteen miles at $4.00 per gallon of gasoline, 6) walk a sweaty quarter of a mile in the heat and humidity, presenting my ID twice, 7) remove all metal from my person, including my belt, 8) pass through a metal detector and 9) then replace what I removed before finally proceeding to the Chapel of Hope. When finished there I must reverse the process.
The other option I have on those mornings is 1) to sleep as late as I want, 2) read as long as I want, 3) digest the newspaper, 4) flop down on my nice easy chair, in my nice comfortable den, dressed in my stay-at-home clothes, 5) and turn on the television set. Now which do you think I would like to do if I were the only consideration? But I’m not! Neither are you! So we search for our own Calcutta’s, where we are needed, and in finding them receive God’s blessings, one of which turns out to be the will to “do what is right”. To shortchange God is to violate someone who depends on us, and ultimately, we violate ourselves. So while the short term investment may sometimes be energy intensive, the long term return is even more energy infusive.
Continuing with the narrative: “But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must master it.” Let’s take that first part, “sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you…” This is apparently life’s longest continuous stumbling block, the sin of Cain no more than us. It is so difficult to believe that “sin is crouching at our door”; that it desires to have us. It sounds so, well, old fashioned. But old fashioned or not, sin is a basic element of our faith. The Bible not only tells us about the fact of sin, but it also gives us stories about those who have fallen prey to it, proving that sin is sin whether one believes in it or not. And there are consequences.
And let’s acknowledge that it is possible that Cain may have believed his sacrifice to be good enough. Duke Professor of Theology, Stanley Hauerwas, writes this: “…sin is not something we do, but rather it is a power that holds us captive.” Despite Cain’s belief, which was rooted in the captivity he apparently had never overcome, we see that his sacrifice was insufficient. So to deny the fact, or the power of sin, especially after reading these ancient Bible stories, is ostrich-like at best, or a flat out statement of disbelief at worst. To quote writer, Alister McGrath, “This act of denial may save your face, but it won’t save your life.” Sin is our conscious decision to do what we will, as we please, God’s will notwithstanding! And like Cain, God allows us to make those decisions. But there are consequences—just ask Cain!
And I can’t help but notice that God didn’t force Cain to give back to him appropriately. Rather, God addresses Cain’s corrupted will, his inclination to think only, or primarily, of himself. Of this, God said, “but YOU must master it.” “What? How about some divine healing here, Lord?” That would be much easier, wouldn’t it—just let God heal us. I’ll bet everyone would believe in God then, wouldn’t they. But not nearly everyone believes, because this, unfortunately, is about the hard stuff; 1) it’s about taking responsibility for our own woeful shortcomings, 2) for our deliberate failures to act, 3) and not sloughing responsibility for our sins onto someone else.
The great pastor, William Sloan Coffin, once said, “Beware of ministers (and I would add, of teachers too) who offer you the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.” By that, he meant 1) that despite comfortable words to the contrary, “sin is (uncomfortably) crouching at our door…”, 2) that the power of sin is ever present, 3) that we are always susceptible to it. Those who don’t teach or preach that aren’t doing you any favors. For life is not “just a bowl of cherries”, a journey toward some humanistic destination requiring no more than a warm hug a kind word and a pat on the back from time to time. Life, at least godly life, is more complicated than that, and it demands far more than submission to the pew for an hour each Sunday followed by six days of carefree nihilism. In fact, life, godly life, demands a lot more from us, for we begin it in negative territory. The epic sagas we are studying tell us about that, God almost begging us to listen and think. Quoting Miroslav Volf again: “Adam and Eve (and Cain and Abel) are not prehistoric forebears. We have met them, and they are us. Their story is our story, projected back into mythic time.”
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