Sermon For Ordinary Time 5 – Genesis 4:1-17, 25-26

Genesis 4:1-17, 25-26

“Midway on our life’s journey, I found myself in dark woods, the right road lost. To tell about those woods is hard–so tangled and rough and savage that thinking of it now, I feel the old fear stirring: death is hardly more bitter.” Thus begins Dante Alighieri’s tremendous Divine Comedy, the first lines in the Inferno. Dark woods, the right road lost, savage and frightful…such is how I imagine the first days of Adam and Eve as they leave the garden-temple God had made for them and step out into a world, harsh and unforgiving. Then they are given a small flicker of joy, in the birth of their first child.

Yet we cannot forget the curses. For Adam, the ground he works is resistant. For Eve, what at first is a blessing very quickly becomes the ongoing pain she was cursed with, that the children she brings into the world will carry on their heritage of sin. “I have produced a man with the help of the Lord,” Eve says. “Cain” means “catch,” and she says here that this child was not just the Lord’s doing, but hers also. Human self-importance, earned with the eating of the Tree of the K&G, has not left them. God has not done it; I have. He helped. The irony then is that Abel’s name means “breath” or “breeze,” a more honest estimation of the ephemeral nature of human life.

These children grow and continue the practices of their parents, assumably. God seems to still be present with this family, even if they are not in the Garden, and they bring him offerings, representative of themselves, sacrifices of thanks for his provision and mercy. Cain, who learned to till the ground, brings an offering of grain, whole Abel, who herds livestock, brings the firstborn and best to offer to God. This is the key to why God rejects Cain’s, and accepts Abel’s. Cain brought an offering, Abel his best offering, and this distinction is the seedbed for the horror to follow. Cain reveals even further his true interior disposition to God when he grows angry as a response. 

Cain reflects the belief of most ancient religions. They were concerned with sacrificing to the gods in a precise and specific way, just like the Hebrews did, but the goal was different. For them, it was because they wanted what they believed the gods could provide, and to acquire that, they needed to give the gods what they needed. In other words, it was a transaction, we do our part, the gods do theirs. But the God who speaks to Adam and Eve and Abraham and Moses and to us as Jesus Christ cares that we do what is right and avoid what is wrong. It is moral at its core, as God says elsewhere, “I desire mercy and not sacrifice.” Sacrifice and offering to God is good, and a necessary expression of faithful gratitude. But if it is done with expectation, God’s favor being earned simply because we checked the box, then we have missed the heart of God’s relationship with us in the first place. Doing what is right, truly, is faith: Abel offered up the firstfruits, the best, without knowing whether more would come. It is the offering up of ourselves, the surrendering of our pretension of control to receive grace, that is the true sacrifice; it is in believing God that he loves us that we are saved.

Cain’s warning is a warning to us as well. He comes to this burdened with the first generational sin, carrying that of his parents. I know what that looks like, having seen it in my own family (great grandpa, grandpa, me…). That sin is not Cain’s fault, just like our parents sins are not ours; we did not choose to be raised the way we were. It is not our fault, but it is our responsibility. When Cain grows dark, God confronts him and warns him. He may not have had a choice in being raised in this sinful world, but he did have a choice in whether, when confronted with who he was, to either offer himself up wholly to God who loved him, or to turn away. We, too, have this choice, every day. We can simply carry on the worst of our heritage, repeating the same patterns of abuse and sorrow and rage, or when confronted with ourselves by the God who knows us, we can let go of the control we so desperately want to maintain, and offer to God ourselves.

Cain’s choice is what leads to what happens next. He seems filled with rage, angry at God but impotent to do anything to God. So he turns instead to deal death to his brother. I think that could be one of the deepest roots of our sinful behavior: we are angry at God, believing he owes us, believing we are entitled to an easy life, the jobs we want, the partners we desire, the comfort we deserve. But no one has ever said it would be easy, and God has given us the world that Adam and Eve chose, and we, generation after generation, continue to choose. In our anger, then, at God, we are impotent to hurt him, so we turn on each other, or on ourselves, because our rage and resentment has to go somewhere. We, like Cain, are all given a choice: do well, offer up all that we are to God, recognize the truth that we are loved; or, take matters into our own hands, blame God for the lives we have, and descend into darkness.

The original fall is then played out again, while also intensifying, becoming worse. God inquires what has happened; Cain lies; God states what he did and curses him; Cain is exiled. Cain seems to feel no shame, but actually complains about the punishment, his entire response being self-centered, with no remorse given for Abel. And yet, God is gracious, and will preserve Cain in his exile, and he will not die now though Adam and Eve would be within their rights to demand his life. God says he will “keep” Cain, the way Cain denied being one to “keep” his brother. Cain will be allowed to leave, though his flourishing will be hindered, for not only the ground but Cain himself is cursed. Even then, Cain does not repent, does not yield to God’s direction. Cain rejects God’s declaration that he will wander and founds a city, and though many of the good inventions of human society are said to come from him like metalworking and tools, their goodness is also tainted by the hands that bear them. In the years to come, the violence only grows, Cain’s descendant Lamech saying he would seek even more vengeance.

And yet…the way of Cain is not inevitable. With a flashback to Eve, we see that as the serpent’s seed strikes and brings death, life will out. This time Eve has lost her pretension, and when Seth is born, she says “God has appointed for me another child,” recognizing that it is God alone who gives. Another son given, and while Cain’s progeny perpetuate violence and deeper and deeper division within the human race, always there is another line, the seed of the woman, the line that looks to God, for as we are told at the very end of the chapter, “At that time people began to invoke the name of the Lord.” This is not the firstborn line, not the heroes who use violence to conquer. This is the line that culminates in Jesus Christ, the one who decisively crushes Death with Life.

Life is full of sorrow, and so much of it is of our own making. War rages all over the world, and schools have shootings, and over and over nations are built on blood. We look at others who have been fortunate with resentment, thinking ourselves more deserving; we grow angry at the slights, real or perceived, that are leveled at us; we scrabble and fight for whatever crumbs life can give us because we are terrified that if we don’t “succeed”, we won’t have any value. We hate, because we don’t believe we are our brother and sister’s keepers. Meanwhile, God’s promise stands. He is our keeper, even when we fail, and calls us to come to him not with expectation that he owes us anything, but gratitude for what he has given us, life itself, in Jesus Christ. We then are to “keep” one another, looking at one another with proper love, caring for each other as we weather the waves of life together. We are to preserve in our family, the Church, the peace that cannot be found elsewhere, and make known to the people of the world that not only do they not need to rage with violence, but can choose not to. We do not have to walk the dark and tangled path, but the way of light stands open, beckoning us to follow our Savior, knowing he will keep us, even through death. Amen.