Sermons

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Am I My Brother's Keeper?
October 13 , 2002
Pastor Dan Baumgartner
Sixth in a sermon series,
"Back to the Beginning," on Genesis 1-11
Genesis 4:1-16

Well…90 women are away, up on the retreat. That means, guys, we’re actually going to back up in the book of Genesis, and pick up a line from chapter 3 that we skipped last week, where God is telling Adam the consequences of his sin, and in verse 17 God says, “Because you have listened to your wife…!” Just kidding.

We’re moving into chapter 4 of Genesis this morning, the first 16 verses.

In 1998, one of my favorite authors, Frederick Buechner, wrote a little novel, about 200 pages, called The Storm. The main character is a writer named Kenzie, who published a best-selling book. The book was a book of “saints.” And honestly, sort of kookie saints. Saints who did outlandish things for God, some of whom were martyred or died a strange and wonderful death. The interesting thing is that as Kenzie wrote the book…he changed dramatically. He became intrigued with their obsessive passion for God, and his writing became a form of his “watching” these funny people.

“Watching them became for him like looking out the window at a swarm of zanies running around the street below in a frenzy of excitement over something that they were all pointing at in the sky, but that, because of the overhang of the roof, he himself was unable to see. So what he eventually did, in effect, was to come down into the street to find out for himself what all the excitement was about. Or, as [his wife] put it years later, he went off the deep end.”

Genesis is the book of firsts. The first world. The first animals. The first men, the first women. The first sin, the first family…the first violence. The first brothers.

Cain was born first, Abel second. Cain the oldest, Abel the youngest. Cain the farmer, Abel the shepherd. Cain means “acquire, create”; Abel means “nothing, mist.” They were brothers. They grew up in the same place, with the same parents. They went to the same church, used the same altar. They both brought the work of their hands as an offering to God. One was accepted by God, one wasn’t.

Surprisingly, perhaps, it was the oldest brother, Cain, the inheritor of the family farm…whose gift was not accepted. His little brother had bested him. God was most pleased with the younger.

The story tells us enough to be interesting, but not enough to be easy. What was wrong with Cain’s offering? Or was it something with Cain himself? Why didn’t he get God’s approval?

The most traditional explanation lies in one detail in the story: “Cain… brought to the Lord AN offering of the fruit of the ground,” while Abel brought “the firstlings of his flock.” Perhaps another way of putting it is this: Cain brought the Lord something out of his abundance, Abel brought the first that he had.

Each time I meet with a young couple for premarital counseling, we talk for a while about finances. One of the financial things I always want to talk about is the idea of establishing their system of “giving” at the beginning of their marriage. Not just giving money to the church, but giving in general. The easiest thing in the world is to just live life, and if you happen to have money left over, you give some away. That’s not God’s kind of giving. With God, you give the first fruits, the best piece, the surest portion, the one that will cost you but you just do it…then you live on what is left over. I encourage couples to build this in from the very beginning of their marriage: Give what the Lord leads you to…right away, then figure out how to live on the rest.

This was not Cain’s mode. We know only that Abel brought the first fruits. Was this why God was not pleased? It doesn’t specifically say. All we know is that Cain was bitterly disappointed in God’s reaction to him. So disappointed. God didn’t act the way Cain thought he would, didn’t give Cain what he expected or thought he deserved. So Cain went out on his own.

We do that sometimes too. We think God is obligated to act a certain way, that He owes us. And if he doesn’t, we sometimes go out on our own. We become bitter. Maybe we even quit believing. We can’t handle a God who doesn’t do what we want or expect. Like Cain. And Cain goes off. Things were not right with Cain and God.

And when you are not right with God, they will not be right with your brother or sister either. When the vertical relationship (you and God) is messed up, the horizontal ones (you and others) will not be healthy either. And so it is in this story. Now violence comes into the world.

The great German preacher Helmut Thielicke says that when things are wrong between us and God…it makes us see another person differently. We look at him or her as merely a function, or as a particular characteristic that they possess. And in doing so, we quit seeing them as people created in God’s image…perhaps because we have quit believing in God’s image. And if the person standing in front of you is not the image of God but only a function or characteristic to be utilized or not, to be tossed out as desired…you can join Cain, and choose to toss. You see, Cain simply carried things to their next logical level: a level where human life is no longer valued.

In Buechner’s book, interestingly enough, the main character doesn’t get along with his biological brother. In fact, early in the book it says, “As for himself…he hoped never to look on his brother’s face again.”

This is when we are at our worst. When human life is no longer valued, what happens? We get slavery and racism. We have ethnic cleansings and holocausts and suicide bombers. We see abortion as just another means of birth control. We have snipers and mass-murderers. If human life is no longer valued, we see people only as things or characteristics.

The guy asking for money outside Dick’s Drive-In is not a person, he is a transient. People are mentally ill or they are rich or poor or dysfunctional or white or black or talented or boring only insofar as they relate to us or what we want…they are not people themselves. They have no value themselves. We are at our worst when the people around us are not seen as someone made in God’s image, not valuable solely because of that.

You may have heard of the nursing professor who gave her class a tough exam. The last question on the exam was: “What is the name of the woman who cleans this building?” When her students objected to the unfairness of the question, she responded by saying, “If you can’t look at the people around you and show interest and compassion, you are in the wrong field.”

God gives Cain a warning. God gives the warning, but Cain no longer believes in the Warn-er…so he can’t hear it. Murder happens for the first time. Cain murders his brother Abel. The first appearance of envy, the first struggle for power, the first oppression, the first violence, the first murder. Life has been made shorter by the entrance of death into the world, and now it is clear that life has less value than it ever has. It can be taken out of anger. The blood of Abel pollutes the ground of the creation.

God’s question to Adam had been, “Where are you?” His question now to Cain is “Where is your brother?” Now the first bold-faced lie: “I do not know.” Did his voice quiver as he said it? Did the awful memory fill his mind? “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

It’s a play on words. Abel WAS a keeper, a keeper of sheep. “Am I the keeper’s keeper? Am I the shepherd’s shepherd?” The question can echo in your ears for weeks. “Am I my brother’s keeper?” I asked it about 50 times this week. I went to a two-day consultation on the needs of the city that featured pastors, parachurch organizations and politicians. We talked about the needs of immigrants, the homeless, the appalling high school graduation rates of African American students, the gap between the very rich and the poor in this city, in our city. I was overwhelmed. These are not issues. They are people. Every time someone said “the issue” of homelessness, all I could think of were some individual people I have met who FOR A VARIETY OF REASONS sleep outside pretty much year around. Am I my brother’s keeper?

Maybe there’s a question we need to ask first. Who IS my brother…or my sister?

If we say our immediate family, we might be comfortable saying, “Yes, I have responsibility for my brother, my sister, my parents.” There’s a problem, though. Because God, the same God who wasn’t so predictable for Cain…has enlarged our family. Here…at Bethany, just like we talked with the kids earlier. It’s 500-600 people…it’s a large family. Am I my brother’s keeper? But it’s not just this church family. God has expanded our Church family out into the world. Millions of people, the Body of Christ in the whole world.

It’s one of the reasons I’m excited to go to China. I don’t know my brothers and sisters. I don’t know about them, I don’t know how to connect with them. I need to find out. But God has also expanded our family far beyond the church. The “family” is the person who stands in front of you, who is made in the image of God.

On Wednesday night at this church, we have a “family” meal called the Wednesday Night Dinner. This Wednesday, at 6 pm, 150-200 people will walk through the doors of the Fellowship Hall. Some will be senior citizens who live in the neighborhood. Some will be people who stop by to use the Queen Anne Foodbank that sits underneath my office. Some will be folks coming early to choir practice, or to the Wednesday Night Bible Study group. Some will be alcoholics. Some will be mentally ill. Some will be deaf. Some will be hungry, some will be overweight. Some come to church here on Sunday, others would never want to darken the doorway of a church. Some talk pretty much to themselves, others are eloquent on many subjects. Many are homeless, and the question which is often the most awkward is “So…where do you live?”

Some will come because they are desperately hungry, and others will come to be greeters, or prayers, or to just sit at tables and strike up conversations with people. It is the most intriguing, amazing overlap of people, health, lifestyles that you could ever imagine. I wonder if you need to come and be a part of it, regularly or occasionally. I’m not saying that as a recruiting pitch for helpers, though I could go down that road as well. But I wonder if you need to come for you. You and I know we don’t have to try very hard to insulate ourselves from people who are different. We don’t have to try very hard to just walk by the people who walk up and down this avenue in pain…without noticing them. When Jesus talked about murder in the passage Steve read, he surely broadened the definition beyond physically taking a life. Anger, insults, feuding…I suppose he might also add “ignoring” as a form of murder.

Am I my brother’s keeper?

Jesus was once asked a very good question…by a lawyer, as a matter of fact. (Why is it that the two people groups who get blasted the most in scripture…are the lawyers and the pastors?!) When Jesus affirmed that the way to eternal life lay in loving God, and loving one’s neighbor, this unsatisfied lawyer said, “Well, WHO is my neighbor?” And instead of answering, Jesus just told his famous story: A man going down to Jericho is robbed, beaten and left for dead. Two men walk by the wounded one, too concerned with their religious practice to save a life. The third man was a social outcast in the area, and had every reason to walk by and didn’t…in fact, did far more than even generous care would have done for a stranger. The neighbor…was the person who was in front of him at that moment.

WHAT does it mean to be my brother’s keeper? Jesus told another story that we need to hear also. This one is in Matthew. It’s a picture of the end of time, and the Son of Man separating out His sheep…(same as Abel!) There’s people in that story, too, who are, like Cain, mad, upset, disappointed with God. Upset because the way to eternal life has been barred. Their own lack of care for their God is used as evidence against them, and when they indignantly ask when they ever neglected care of Jesus, Jesus says, “Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of these (brothers and sisters)…you did not do it to me.” Hungry, thirsty, stranger, naked, sick, in prison.

The question has rung out across eternity, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Cain answered, “No.” Wrong answer! 180 degrees wrong. Cain has missed it. The vertical relationship is polluted, the horizontal one broken. Death is in the world, and his family has now tasted it. The door to Eden is slammed shut, and Cain will wander, homeless. In despair, he thinks he will be killed.

But…No. The same God Cain said “no” to is unwilling to close the door on him. I told you last week…one of the great themes of Genesis is that when God shuts the door…he opens a window. Cain resigns himself to wander until someone kills him.

But Psalm 139 refutes him: Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence? There is nowhere. Despite the broken relationship, despite Cain’s sin, despite the fact that he is going far away…God puts a mark, his own mark of some kind, on Cain…that will save him from death. It will say, “Despite all, you cannot touch him…he belongs to me.” Thousands of years later, God will use another mark to save people: people who have broken relationship with Him, who are far off. The crucified Christ’s hands and feet bore the testimony of nails, the marks of one who has given himself to save others. The marks on Jesus say, “Despite all, you cannot touch this one, or that one. They belong to me.”

Am I my brother’s keeper? I’ve asked the question eight or nine times now. If we’re serious about answering the question, we may have to join Frederick Buechner’s character, and get up and go down in the street to find out what everybody’s looking up at. Even if it feels like going off the deep end. And once we’re there, it might be easier to see…that the right answer to the question…is YES.