The Rev. Dr. Skip Ferguson
Manassas Presbyterian Church
Manassas, Virginia
August 4, 2013
The Bible Condensed
Genesis 4:1-16
You can find a copy on Amazon.com;
Just nine dollars and four cents,
two hundred twenty pages.
Easy to read, easy to understand.
It will save you time;
it will save you frustration and boredom.
It is the CliffsNotes version of the Bible.
Short, pithy, concise, simple to read,
something to help you understand the word of the Lord
without having to trudge through all those “begats,”
without having to slog through the tedium of Leviticus,
the endless haranguing and finger-wagging of the prophets,
Paul’s lengthy lists and often patronizing tone.
But if two hundred twenty pages still sounds overwhelming to
you,
too much to read, especially in the heat of summer,
there is another option,
the Bible condensed even further,
down to a little more than a handful of Tweets.
It’s the sixteen verses we heard in our lesson,
sixteen verses from the fourth chapter
of the first book of the Bible,
the story of Cain and Abel.
In these 376 words, 1500 characters,
we have as good a distillation of the Bible,
both Old and New Testament,
as we could ever hope to find.
Our sixteen verses give us sin, lies, deceit,
disobedience, violence, punishment;
and they also give us love, kindness, faithfulness,
generosity, mercy, and forgiveness.
In his novel East of
Eden, John Steinbeck wrote,
“in these sixteen verses are a history of mankind
in any age or culture or race.”
It is a story that starts out so simply,
so wonderfully,
on a note of hope grounded in love:
Adam and Eve, having been banished
from the Garden of Eden for their disobedience,
begin life anew,
begin it in the most joyful way,
with the birth of their firstborn, their son Cain.
Cain is soon followed by younger brother Abel.
Two sons, who in time grow up to be men,
Cain becoming a farmer,
and Abel a shepherd.
As the story continues
we find that the two young men
seemed to have understood the importance of worship,
of returning to God a portion of what they had been given,
of bringing their offerings to the Lord:
Cain with his offering of “the fruit of the ground”
and Abel bringing “of
the firstlings of his flock,
their fat portions.”
It’s here the story takes a unexpected turn
when we learn that God was pleased with Abel’s offering,
“but for Cain and his
offering God had no regard.”
Why?
Why did God have no regard for Cain’s offering?
Was God just being difficult? Grumpy?
Could it have been that Cain’s offering
was not the first and best from his harvest?
The book of Exodus provides us with these instructions:
"Bring the best
of the firstfruits of your soil
to the house of the
LORD your God.”
(Exodus 34:26)
And the Book of Proverbs tells us
to “Honor
the LORD from your wealth
And
from the first of all your produce.”
(Proverbs 3:9)
But of course, Cain had no scripture to guide him,
no priest to teach him,
no prophet to help him.
And when God rejected Cain’s offering,
God offered no explanation.
We can speculate, but we will never know
why God had no regard for Cain’s offering.
But God always reserves the right to be inscrutable;
if you have any doubt about that, just read Job.
God does, though challenge Cain
when Cain reacts with rage,
asking him, “Why are you angry?”
God then reassures
Cain:
“If you do well, will you not be accepted?”
God seemed to be
saying to Cain,
“You may not have
done well this time,
but try again.
Try again.
And next time, if
you do well –
if you bring your
gifts with a generous heart,
you will be
accepted.”
God, even in his
inscrutability, offers Cain a second chance,
another opportunity:
try it again.
Implicit in this is
God’s belief in Cain,
God’s faith in Cain.
But Cain was too
angry to hear.
His anger burned
within him,
a fire that would
consume him,
consume him when he
killed his brother,
consume him when he
compounded his crime
with his response to
God – the sarcasm,
the dissembling.
almost sneering, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”
Of course God knew
what had happened,
so in asking Cain, “Where is your brother Abel?”
God was offering
Cain a chance to confess,
a chance to
acknowledge his sin.
“If we say we have no sin, we deceive
ourselves.”
(1 John 1:8)
And oh, how good we
are at deceiving ourselves,
a trait that ties us
with Cain, with Eve, with Adam:
our eagerness to
deny we’ve done wrong;
our ready refusal to
take responsibility for our actions;
our willingness to
set ourselves up as victims,
with someone else,
anyone else,
even God as the one
to blame.
God metes out
punishment,
as God knows he
must,
for what Cain did
was horrific.
Cain is to be
banished,
banished not just
from the land near the Garden
but banished from
very earth itself,
doomed to spend the
rest of his life as a fugitive,
a wanderer,
a man who would
never know peace.
And with the
punishment,
Cain reveals himself
for what he truly was: a coward,
as he reacts with
fear,
fear that he might
face Abel’s fate:
a senseless, violent
death.
We need not stop to
wonder just who Cain
might have been
afraid of;
a literal reading of
Genesis would leave us scratching our heads,
wondering who else was
there,
out in the
newly-created world besides Adam and Eve.
But we read these
stories
not for the accuracy
of their history,
but for the lessons
they teach us
about our
relationship with the Lord our God,
seeing ourselves in
every story.
It is here the story
turns yet again,
from violence,
from willfulness
from anger,
from punishment,
to mercy,
to forgiveness,
to the faint glow of
redemption just over the horizon.
God reassures Cain
that he will be Cain’s keeper,
marking him to let
all the world know that God was with him,
even as he wandered
the earth.
God: the keeper even
of an unrepentant murderer.
Cain would know what
the psalmist would write many years later:
The
Lord is your keeper;
the Lord is your shade at your right hand.
The sun shall not strike you by day,
nor the moon by night.
The
Lord will keep you from all evil;
he will keep your life.
The Lord will keep
your going out and your coming in
from this time on and for evermore.
(Psalm 121)
God kept Cain,
just as God keeps us, you and me,
and all God’s children:
including the angry, the violent,
the cowardly, the disobedient,
those who turn from God,
those who hide from God,
those who run from God;
Those who refuse to live in God’s world on God’s terms,
which means you and me.
These sixteen verses tell us a story
that begins with grace and love,
and fittingly ends with grace and love;
New chances,
new life,
the story mirroring all of human history,
mirroring our own history,
each of us,
reminding us, assuring us
that God is with us,
keeping us,
watching our going out
and our coming in,
now,
and always.
Cain’s story,
your story,
my story,
our story.
This is the Bible - condensed.
AMEN
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