The Bible Condensed

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