This morning’s sermon from First Presbyterian, Boonville.

The text is Genesis 4:1-16.

Click here if you’d rather listen to this sermon at fpcboonville.org!

Imagine with me, if you will, that you’ve got three kids.  (Maybe you really do have three kids, but if not, then just imagine with me.)  Two of your three hypothetical kids are doing just fine: they get good grades, make lots of friends, and generally enjoy life.  But then there’s your third.  This one comes home with cuts and bruises on a regular basis.  Nobody ever comes over to play with this kid.  Then you get a phone call from the teacher, letting you know that your child’s grades are slipping so badly that she might not be able to advance next year with the rest of the class.

What do you think a good parent should do in a situation like this?  What would you do?  Let’s look at some options.

First of all, you could cut your losses.  This kid had just as much opportunity to succeed as the other two.  If she can’t compete on a level playing field, it’s no one’s fault but her own.  You could take the time, energy, and resources that you would otherwise spend on that child and use them instead to improve the lives of the other two, who seem to be doing a better job of managing their own affairs.  Besides, raising kids is labor-intensive!  When you look at the situation statistically, two out of three ain’t bad!  So that’s one option.

The next option is to look at the playing field itself.  You can carefully divvy up your parenting effort between the three kids.  Make sure that each one has an equal share of your time and energy.  Why not create a schedule?  How about a menu of parental services offered?  This way, you can be sure that everything gets done in a way that is totally fair.  Everybody gets something from you.  We’ll call it “Equal-Opportunity Parenting”.  That’s another option.

There is a third option, but it’s completely ridiculous and totally unfair.  You could meet your kid with a hug at the door as she gets off the school bus.  You could bandage cuts and nurse bruises while you ask what happened at school.  You could give hugs while you get tears and snot all over your good work clothes.  You could take time out of your busy day for conferences with teachers and guidance counselors.  You could make phone calls to other parents.  You could help with homework, even if it means missing NCIS.  Like I said, this option is totally ridiculous.

Who in their right mind would sign up for something like that?  Who?  Wait, you would?  Seriously?

But what if it’s a waste of time?  It doesn’t make sense to waste that effort on someone who’s not going to be a neurosurgeon or movie star!

“It doesn’t matter when it’s your kid,” you say?  Well then, that certainly says something about you all as parents!  You would go out on a limb for this kid, just because she is your own.  While you love all your children, you would give this one special attention simply because she needs it more at the moment.  Her potential productivity does matter to you, does it?  She’s precious to you, just for being alive!

Well, did you know that God loves God’s kids in the same way?  God loves us all, but some of us need God more than others.  God has a special place in God’s heart for those who are poor, oppressed, or discriminated against in this world.  God cares most about those who matter least.

We can see this truth depicted beautifully (but also brutally) in today’s scripture reading from Genesis 4.

It’s the famous story of Cain and Abel.  We learn a lot about these two brothers by looking carefully at the first few verses of the text.  Cain is the firstborn son of Adam and Eve.  A lot of celebration surrounds the story of his birth.  Eve announces to the world, “I’ve gotten a man, with Yahweh’s help!”  She doesn’t even call him a “baby”, he’s her “man”.  Likewise, the name “Cain” comes from the Hebrew word for “gotten”.  Her statement about Yahweh helping comes almost as an afterthought.  In addition to being the firstborn, we also learn that Cain was a farmer, which was considered to be a more “civilized” and “powerful” profession in the ancient world.

Abel, on the other hand, doesn’t receive much attention at all.  He’s just “another baby”.  In the original text, Abel is referred to as “Cain’s brother” before we even learn his name!  The name “Abel” means “vapor” or “breath”.  It signifies something that is fleeting or meaningless.  We get the idea early on that Abel doesn’t seem to matter much as a person.  He’s kind of an underdog who probably grew up in the shadow of his big brother, Cain.  As an adult, we learn that he became a shepherd.  As wanderers, shepherds were treated like despised, working-class people in ancient Middle Eastern cultures.  They were considered to be “backward rednecks” who wandered from place to place with the sheep.  They depended on the kindness of farmers (like Cain) for the sustenance of their flocks.  Most of the time, people spread all kinds of nasty rumors about nomadic shepherds.

Cain was the star of this family while Abel was little more than an afterthought.  Cain got all the attention.  Cain won his parents’ favor.  Cain did well for himself, while Abel seemed to struggle in his brother’s shadow.

All of a sudden, it seems significant that Yahweh deliberately chose to favor Abel’s offering over Cain’s.  Many theologians have offered potential explanations of why it is that the God Yahweh showed such favoritism.  Some say that Abel’s offering was better of quality, being from the “choice cuts of meat”.  Others suggest that Cain was somehow morally inferior to Abel.  Personally, I like the idea that God was showing affirmation to Abel the underdog.

Reading the story this way helps to shed some light on Cain himself.  If he’s used to being the top dog, then it makes sense that he would be upset about having to take second place to such a “loser” as Abel.  It would have felt insulting to him, as God’s amazing grace often does to those who seem to “have their act together”.

Even so, Yahweh does not abandon Cain in this critical moment.  We can see God acting as Cain’s pastoral counselor, warning him about the impending danger of uncontrolled rage and telling him, in effect, “Cain, you’re better than that.”

Unfortunately, we know how the story goes.  Cain doesn’t listen.  We get to see this “favorite son” at his worst.  Even after the ghastly deed is done, Cain’s lingering bitterness shows through in his sarcasm: “How should I know [where my brother is]?  Am I his babysitter?”

Cain has been thoroughly (and permanently) knocked off his pedestal as the family hero.  How the mighty have fallen!  He loses his status as a “civilized farmer” and is forced to become a “homeless wanderer on Earth” (much like his brother Abel once was).  He settles in the land of Nod, which means “wandering” in Hebrew.  Eugene Peterson calls it “No-Man’s-Land”.  Through his murderous actions, Cain has become what he once despised.

But, even in “No-Man’s-Land”, Yahweh is not absent.  In fact, Cain’s newfound status as an exiled and struggling underdog puts him in an ideal position for a divine encounter.  In Cain’s moment of deepest helplessness and hopelessness, God intervenes with a word of grace.  It is here that Yahweh imposes the famous “Mark of Cain”.

We often associate Cain’s mark as a sign of shame or punishment, much like Nathaniel Hawthorne’s famous “Scarlet Letter”.  However, if we look at what’s actually happening in this story, God puts the mark on Cain “to protect him”.  It’s an act of loving care and grace!

For the first time in his life, Cain is in the uncomfortable position of having to rely on someone other than himself.  God graciously steps in to fill that void.  Cain has now become the troubled child and God will continue to reach out in tender compassion, even for this murderer.

God cares most about those who matter least.

That’s what this passage is all about.  It doesn’t matter that Cain shows promise and Abel doesn’t.  It doesn’t matter that Abel deserves it and Cain doesn’t.  God is Love and Love loves because that’s just who God is.  It has nothing to do with the worthiness of the object.

The same is true for each one of you in relation to God.  You are loved no matter who you are or what you’ve done.  You can’t earn God’s love.  You can’t stop it.  You can’t sin it away.  It just is.

Maybe, like Abel, you’ve been an underdog all your life.  Maybe, like Cain, your own bad decisions have earned you a place in “No-Man’s-Land”.  Either way, God is with you.  God loves you.  Nothing can change that.  Ever.

This week’s sermon from First Presbyterian, Boonville.

The text is Genesis 3.

If you have ten minutes, I highly recommend listening rather than reading, since the story is much funnier when heard.

Click here to listen to the sermon recording.

As I was preparing this week’s sermon, I called my mother in North Carolina to see if she could help me.

“Mom,” I said, “I’m looking for a story about my teenage years for this week’s sermon.  I’m looking for some amusing incident when I made a bad decision and had to face the consequences.”

Well, let me tell you something: I learned a valuable lesson from this exercise.  I learned that parents have a supernatural ability to reach into the deep, dark shadows of the past and pull out your single most embarrassing moment.  Furthermore, I learned that if you ask them to exercise this ability, they will.

Let’s just say that, in the future, I’m going to think twice before I ask for my mother’s input on a sermon!

However, I can’t complain too much because I got exactly what I asked for: a somewhat amusing story about a time when I made a bad decision.  Over the phone, my mother laughed as hard as I’ve heard her laugh in a long time.  So, without further ado, I give you my most embarrassing moment:

I almost got arrested once.  It happened late one night in the years after I had finished high school.  I met some pals at “an establishment of merriment” and got caught up on our high school days.  After they left, I went to go settle my tab and discovered that I was a little short on cash.

My next move was to find an ATM inside a nearby mall.  The door was locked.  What next?  Well, there was this outdoor fountain beside the mall entrance.  You know, the kind of fountain that people toss their spare change into for good luck.  I was only a little short on my bill.  I could probably get what I needed from there.  So I rolled up my sleeves and you can guess what I tried next.

Thanks to the magic of closed-circuit surveillance television, Mall Security was on me in a flash.  They escorted me into their office, let me off easy, and banished me from the mall for a year.  I wish I could say that I learned some kind of redemptive and philosophical lesson from this encounter.  I can’t say that.  But I can tell you I learned that the money in those fountains goes to local charities and is taken quite seriously by Mall Security!

It was a growing-up moment and a stupid decision on my part.  Like I said, there’s not really any redeeming quality to this story.  It simply stands out as moment in my life when I was not at my best.

So it is with this morning’s story from Genesis 3.  There’s no moral to this story.  There’s no last-minute rescue or redemption.

Over the millennia, theologians of all stripes have tried to impose additional layers of meaning onto this text.  In the Christian tradition, many have read this story as an historical account of how “original sin” came into the world.  The talking serpent is understood to be Satan himself, tempting humanity to sin.  Paying special attention to Eve’s role in these events and the curse imposed upon her by God in the end, many have also used this story to justify the subjugation and mistreatment of women in the western world.

However, the text does not lend itself so easily to such black and white interpretation.  The serpent is never explicitly named as “Satan” in this passage.  Likewise, there is no mention of “original sin” whatsoever.

This story is often referred to as the story of “the Fall”, but I don’t see it as such.  For me, this is not a story about humankind “falling down”.  Instead, I see it as a story about humankind “growing up”.

In my understanding, humanity was not created perfect, but innocent.  The human race was in its infancy in the Garden of Eden.  Everything was provided for them as a free gift from God.  This is not at all unlike what human beings do with their own children.  They are born into our lives and we provide for them in any way that we can.  Parents feed, clothe, shelter, and love their kids.  It’s the natural thing to do.

However, there comes a time when kids grow up.  They start taking for themselves the things that we used to give them.  It starts in the terrible twos and continues through the teenage years.  As they grow older, they take on more and more knowledge.  With that knowledge comes increased responsibility.  It can be a very difficult process.  But eventually, most teenagers break through into adult life and (hopefully) a more mature relationship with their parents.

This is exactly what happened with Adam and Eve in this story.  They begin as children.  They were placed in a lovely garden where everything was given to them.  Then, they begin to exercise their free will.  They tested the boundaries set for them.  They took upon themselves the “knowledge of good and evil” and become responsible for it.  They had to leave their happy home.  That which was previously given to them had to be worked for.  This is the way of the world.  It’s the way life goes.

It’s the same journey that all of us must undertake at some point.

It begins with a decision that cannot be undone.  We must face reality and go out into the world.  The end results are mixed.  Sometimes we learn from their mistakes and sometimes we don’t.  Sometimes we use our power responsibly and sometimes we don’t.

I don’t believe this particular story is historical at all.  To quote the author Rob Bell, I see this as a story that “happens”, not one that “happened”.  It’s a very human story that expresses truth but not fact.  There is no airtight theological system at work here, nor is there a redemptive resolution at the end.  Adam and Eve walk off into an uncertain future that will be of their own making.  What it becomes is up to them.

However, I do see a glimmer of hope:

God is present.  At no point in this difficult “growing up” process does God ever reject Adam and Eve as children.  They must be made to face reality, but they will not do so alone.  God provides them with new clothes on their way out the door and, as we know from the rest of the book of Genesis, God never gives up on them or their family.

God keeps on showing up unexpectedly in the darkest of situations.  God is constantly working to guide, provide, and console.  I used to tell folks in my street ministry, “I like the book of Genesis.  It’s one of the few books I can read and find people more dysfunctional than I am.  And God never gives up on them!”  God doesn’t give up on Adam and Eve either.

Don’t parents do this with their grown-up kids as well?  They never give up.  They never stop hoping.  They never stop loving.  In the best of circumstances, a new relationship begins to develop.  This relationship is more mature and more mutual than the one-sided provider role that falls to the parents of little kids.

I believe this is God’s hope for us.  As we learn to use our power, God’s hope is that we will someday return home as adult believers who have become mature in our faith.  We can explore new and undreamed of territory that was completely foreign to us before.  We come back to God with a gift to offer and not just a need to fill.  This kind of relationship is more mutual and fulfilling for parties on both sides.  Having known the fruit of labor and redemption, we appreciate what we have so much more.

That is the kind of relationship that God wants with each one of us.  Are we prepared to accept that offer?

Here is the link to this week’s sermon.

I didn’t preach from a text and a I forgot my voice recorder, so the recording was made in my office at home.  A link to the outline is available if you want to follow along.

http://fpcboonville.org/2011/07/03/fourteenth-sunday-in-ordinary-time/

This week’s sermon from First Presbyterian, Boonville.

The text is Genesis 22:1-14.

Rev. John Buehrens, former president of the Unitarian Universalist Association, has an interesting response to folks who tell him, “I don’t believe in God.”

“Tell me about the God you don’t believe in,” he says, “Chances are that I don’t believe in ‘Him’ either.”

I’ve got to say that I love Buehrens’ response for the way it insightfully cuts through the veil of cultural assumptions and seeks to help both speaker and listener come to a deeper understanding of the words they use.

There are several good reasons for not believing in God.  Many of these reasons depend on which conception of “God” is being rejected.  In our society, there are several popular conceptions of God that manage to float around in our collective unconscious mind.

First, some have the idea of God as an old man with a long, white beard who lives in the sky.  Cartoonist Gary Larson often depicted God like this in his famous comic strip, The Far Side.  This God is the product of medieval superstition, not the ancient wisdom given through the scriptures and traditions of the church.  This is a God made in our own image: complete with physical form, location, and gender.  I am inclined to agree with my atheist friends that such a deity is not worth believing in.

Next, some think of God as a distant judge who stands aside like the referee at a ball game, just waiting for someone to break a rule.  Whenever that happens, this God makes sure to write it down for all eternity.  This God is kind of like Santa Claus, who is “making a list and checking it twice” with the assumption that someday, God is “coming to town” in order to dole out rewards and punishments.  This God is more interested in following the rules than growing in relationship.  I don’t blame my atheist friends.  I wouldn’t want to believe in that kind of God either!  As a matter of fact, I don’t.

Next, some have the idea of God an almighty being who controls everything that happens in the universe.  This God causes earthquakes and hurricanes as well as cancer and car accidents.  All tragedy can be attributed to “God’s will” according to this understanding.  Furthermore, this God predestines certain people for eternal salvation and others for eternal damnation.  Human beings have no free will, but are mere pawns in this God’s cosmic chess game.  I can understand why someone would not want to believe in this kind of God.

Next, some think of God as a kind of tribal deity or mascot, who is associated only with certain people in a certain place and time.  This God loves some people more than others, depending on some predetermined characteristic.  They say that God only loves Americans, or straight people, or Christians.  Anyone who doesn’t fit into the right category is excluded from God’s favor.  This kind of God is also not worth believing in.

These concepts of “old man in the sky”, “distant judge”, “almighty chess player”, and “tribal totem” arise from our culture’s assumptions about what God is like.  When people think of “God”, they are usually thinking of something (or someone) similar to one or more of these categories.

In the ancient Middle East, people had their own socially accepted ideas about what God must be like.  Most folks in those days believed that gods lived in stone or wooden sculptures.  The early Jews and Christians had no such idols, so they were referred to as “atheists” by the culture of their day.  People in that culture also believed that their gods needed to be fed by humans in order to thrive and survive.  Offerings and sacrifices were made so that the gods could “eat”.  No one in that society would have thought it strange that a deity would ask for some kind of sacrifice from people.  Occasionally, these gods would demand a human sacrifice in order to guarantee peace and prosperity during the coming year.  This was an accepted practice.

So, it would have come as no big surprise in their society that God would ask Abraham to sacrifice his firstborn son.  It fit with their cultural conception of spirituality.  It’s the kind of thing any god would have done in the ancient Middle East.  So, that’s why Abraham hardly batted an eye when God told him to go sacrifice his son Isaac on a mountain.  “It’s just what gods do!”

When we read this story in the modern world, we’re horrified by it.  We can’t imagine the God we worship asking someone to kill their own child as a test of faith.  We take people who do that sort of thing and lock them up in jail.  Jews and Christians alike have tried to understand this passage by interpreting it allegorically or symbolically.  Jews call this passage the “Akedah” and see it as a story about themselves as Isaac on the altar with his survival and God’s promise hanging in the balance.  A lot of Jewish theology written since the Holocaust has paid special attention to the Akedah as a lens for understanding what happened to the Jews in Nazi Germany.  The Jewish people were brought to the brink of destruction, but were spared at the last minute.  Many Christians, for their part, interpret this text as an allegorical symbol for what happened to Christ: the beloved son ascended a hill carrying wood on his back, and faced a sacrificial death.  Philosophers like Soren Kierkegaard have analyzed this passage as a metaphor for individual choice and personal faith.  The list goes on…

What all of these renderings have in common is that they are trying to either sidestep or understand the sheer horror of a God who would call someone to kill his or her own child.  But we miss something as we project our modern values on this ancient text.  In that culture, a deity calling for human sacrifice was considered normal.  In fact, it was so normal that Abraham hardly thinks twice when his God seems to be asking for it.

If there’s anything strange and shocking about this text from an ancient standpoint, it’s the fact that Abraham’s God stops the sacrifice at the last possible second.  This must have been mind-boggling to Abraham!  His whole idea of who God is and how the world works must have been turned upside down in that moment!

By stopping the human sacrifice, God was challenging popular cultural notions about religion.  God was changing the way religion worked in that society.  God was saying to Abraham, in effect, “I’m not like that.  I’m different.”

God isn’t like that.  God is different.

I wonder what this idea would look like if we applied it to some of our own cultural conceptions about God?

Remember the conception of God as the “old man in the sky”?  We already identified this kind of God as “not worth believing in”.  How might God say, “I’m not like that” about the “old man in the sky”?  Let’s look at the first part: Is God really male?  Well, did you know that there are several places in the Bible where God is actually described as a mother?  Sure enough in Deuteronomy 32, Job 38, Isaiah 46, and Jeremiah 31, God is a woman giving birth.  Likewise, the name “El Shaddai”, usually rendered as “God Almighty” by English translators, probably comes from the word that is used to describe nursing mothers.  What about the second part?  Does God really live “up there” in the sky?  Well, our annual Christmas celebrations would seem to deliver a resounding “No” to that question.  At Christmas time, we Christians celebrate our belief that God “took on flesh and dwelt among us”, as it says in John 1.  Later on Jesus said repeatedly that if we want to look for God, we should look among the people in this world who suffer most.  “Whatever you have done for the least of these who are members of my family,” Jesus said in Matthew 25, “you have done for me.”  If you want to go looking for God, don’t look on some cloud floating up in the sky.  Look around you, down here on earth!  That’s where God is!  God lives in the people around us who need help the most.  So, when it comes to our culture’s idea of God as “old man in the sky”, I think we can safely say that God isn’t like that.  God is complex, diverse, and intimately present in our lives.  That’s what God is like.

How about the idea of God as the “distant judge” who is “making a list and checking it twice” in order to find out who is “naughty or nice”?  We’ve already said that it’s not worth believing in a God who is more interested in rules than relationships.  Is our God really that kind of “distant judge”?  Well, let’s look at the kinds of things that Jesus said and did.  He went out of his way to welcome outcast sinners who had been kicked out of their synagogues for failing to live up to “old fashioned family values”.  Jesus went so far as to break time-honored religious laws in order to express God’s radical welcome to those who were least deserving of it.  Again and again, Jesus showed us that forgiveness, rather than judgment, is the way that God operates in this world.  When it comes to harsh judgment, Jesus tells us, “God isn’t like that.”  God is more interested in loving sinners than upholding the self-righteousness of judgmental hypocrites.  That’s what God is like.

What about God as the “almighty chess player” who causes everything that happens in the world, including tragedy and disaster?  This one is a bit trickier (especially for us Presbyterians, who have historically emphasized God’s sovereignty).  Philosophers have been wrestling with this question for centuries.  There’s no way we can sum up their arguments in a single paragraph.  But we can point to passages in the Bible that refer to God’s character.  I’m thinking of passages like Jeremiah 29:11: “I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope.”  In James 1:17, we learn that “Every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from above, coming down from the Father of lights”.  When it comes to predestined salvation and damnation, we read in 2 Peter 3:9 that God is patient with us, “not wanting any to perish”.  As we piece together these snippets, we begin to get the idea that “God isn’t like that” when it comes to the “almighty chess player”.  God is a generous giver who works for the good of everyone.  There are no dispensable or “extra” people in God’s eyes.  That’s what God is like.

What about the conception of God as “mascot” or “tribal totem”?  Does God belong to only one group of people?  Passages like Psalm 87 describes the community of God’s people as an extremely diverse group, made up of all the nations of the world, even those who were regarded as Israel’s enemies at that time.  The Jewish prophet Isaiah spends a lot of time describing this reality in detail.  We see it spelled out in Isaiah 2, 55, and 60.  Jesus and the early Christians began to fulfill Isaiah’s vision as they opened the doors of the church to include Greeks, Romans, Africans, and Samaritans as well as Jews.  God does not belong to one group of people as their mascot.  God isn’t like that.  God loves all people and wants to gather us together into one human family.  Jesus himself said it best in John 12:32, “I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.”  Notice that he said “all people”, not just “some”.  Not just Americans, straight people, or Christians, but “all”.  That’s what God is like.

There are some ideas about God that just aren’t worth believing in.  Abraham learned that in his experience on Mount Moriah.  I think we can have a similar experience when we compare our cultural notions about “who God is” with what we actually read about in the Bible.  With Abraham, I think we will discover a God who is bigger, better, more loving, and more amazing than we can possibly imagine!