Message: July 23, 2017 Given by: Geoff Kohler Series: AND Cain & Abel Scripture: Genesis 2:18-25; Ecclesiastes 4:9-12 Title: Cain & Abel Let s start by talking about the sovereignty of God, the way we did last week. The sovereignty of God is not like a big ruler in the sky. The sovereignty of God is more like a river, a powerful river that flows through a countryside bringing life to everything. There is nowhere else to go for life because this is the source of life for everything. It s always the same and never changes. But, if we decide to engage with the sovereignty of God, like a river, when we step into it, it s always a new experience. If we get into it and begin to move with it we find there are currents, actions and movements we can be part of that we haven t known before. We don t have to engage with it. We can walk along beside it, we can stand and look at it, we can build bridges over it. We can try to live without touching it. Why would someone live like that? The story of the Bible is that humanity had the chance to move with the flowing power of life in God and we tried to do it our own way. This causes a rift, and the Bible describes this rift as having an effect on humanity s relationship with God and even with the rest of creation. The world itself becomes separated from us; it becomes a harsh experience for us, rather than one in which we fit naturally. That fitting in is what the Bible calls koinonia an interpenetration of beings God and humanity, humanity and humanity, humanity and the rest of creation. The Page 1
story of Adam and Eve includes the choice to walk away from koinonia and the sovereignty of God. The story of Cain and Abel comes after Adam and Eve are kicked out of the Garden of Eden. If we were to look at this from the point of view of human beings dealing with trauma, we re being told that the parents went through a huge, lifedefining upheaval. It separated them from what they were used to relationally, physically and spiritually. Taken at face value, one has to guess that had an immense impact on them with their personal relationships with each other. What does that do to their kids? Does the trauma parents experience impact their children and even their children s children? There is a lot of exploration into this and the essential understanding is that yes, it does. The trauma of parents will impact the lives of their children for generations. This ties with a word from the Old Testament. We read in the book of Exodus that God said the corruption of the father is experienced by the children to the third or fourth generation. The way you may have heard this is that the sins of the father are visited to the children to the third or fourth generation. If we interpret the words of the Bible according to the reality we see in the world, we realize that this is telling us what s normal. The destruction or corruption within the parent s soul continues to impact the lives and choices of the children to the third or fourth generation, until some person in the family breaks the cycle or chain someone says, this isn t the way life works and starts choosing life instead of death. Page 2
So, let s look at this picture. We have Adam and Eve whose relationship with God has been torn apart and they ve been exiled from the place where they were most at home, most relaxed and safest. Now, they are experiencing separation, or sin, in the deepest, most thorough manner possible. And then they have a child. When Cain is born, Eve says, I got a man. In our Bibles, we have left in this little phrase, from the Lord. But that phrase wasn t in the earliest manuscripts of the Bible. It was placed in there later by someone who wanted to make sure that God was honored. But, if we take as it first stood, what we see is that Eve, in her separation from God and maybe from Adam is claiming the creation of a child for herself. I got a man. Like, Look what I ve done. She s alone in this moment. It's a sound of separation. What was communicated by this sound to infant Cain? I d like us to consider the impact our experience of separation has on our children. Parents create an ongoing experience in the lives of children by the noises we make and by the actions we take. We need to remind ourselves that children are immediately absorbing any little bit of information as they are formed. We can miss this extravagant and elegant this absorption of information really is. Imagine that parents are going out together on their own for the first time since their baby has been born. Their baby has been a great sleeper, has a regular bedtime, but this night, the first night with a sitter, she is fussy, unsettled. The parents are struggling with whether or not to leave because the baby seems so different from almost any other night. Think of what s going on in the house in the last couple of hours. Maybe there s perfume in the air, maybe the Page 3
conversation and tones of voices have shifted to a new sound of anticipation, maybe the father is home a little earlier than usual. There are a thousand miniscule experiences going on around a human being who hasn t experienced any of these things this way before. So, what is the infant experiencing? Difference, even a magnitude of difference, and we all know how much human beings enjoy having their regular world made different. Infants are gathering cues on how to experience the world from the moment they arrive. We do not realize how much we teach our children through everything we do. I was reading the story of a Santa who was ringing a bell in New York at one of the Salvation Army kettles in the Christmas season after 9/11. He noticed that parents never let go of their children s hands as they had the kids put money in the kettle. Before that the children would be allowed to run over to him on their own. Now, by the squeeze of a hand, by the hanging on, children were being told that they should not feel safe or fun but should fear. The out loud statements we make around or even to our children, the silent, almost unconscious, actions we make with our children all of it teaches our children how to experience the world. What would the anxiety, frustration, anger, sadness, fear of Adam and Eve teach Cain? What would he have felt in relation to God? As Cain would experience the presence or even the lack of presence of God, he d build up a certainty, an assurance but of what? At face value, this story is about parents who have a major traumatic experience and that experience leads a child in their own understanding of the world. Page 4
So, how does this fit into the time when the two brothers bring a gift to God. There have been eons of discussion on the difference between the sacrifices of Cain and Abel. Why did God have regard for the one and not the other? The simplest reading is that Cain brought some of what he grew back to God and offered it up. Abel brought his best back to God. God calls Cain into community, into koinonia. He tells Cain to pay attention to how close separation is to claiming his heart and mind. And the way the Hebrew reads in the next section, it could be that Cain told Abel about the conversation. One way of understanding the Hebrew is that it isn t just that Cain says, Let s go out to the field, but that he tells Abel about what God said to him. There s something disturbing in that because it feels like a set up. It feels like Cain told Abel Listen to what God just spoke into my soul, let s go out into the field. It s has more of a feel that Cain is leading Abel into something, as if he suggested that they go out to talk this over. It feels even more like a set up before the murder. Children are both formed and spiritually formed. Parents and their histories help form a child and parents lead children into or away from the presence of God. This is why we take the Christian Spiritual Formation of children so seriously in our church. This is why the children go out to Worship Arts from the Cherry Street Worship. Not so they have their own worship, but so the little people in our community can explore the pieces of worship in a manner that shows them what s important about worship. You see, we teach our children the practices of Page 5
worship, the spiritual practices of Christians, so they can walk into the presence of God. We then tell them how the Bible tells us how to do these things. We do the same thing in the regular classes during the year. We teach practice first and Biblical support second instead of telling the Bible story first and then trying to tell them how to apply the story. My suggestion here is that Cain was walked away from the presence of God, over and over, and so when it was critical that he be able to come into the presence of God in frustration or anger, he couldn t stay there. We see the outcome of this played out in the family trees of Cain and the third son of Adam and Eve Seth. It says that God tells Cain that he will wander the earth. But, he decides not to. The next thing we see of Cain is that he is building a city. His children and his children s children all make stuff. As we read through Cain s line his family are the ones who make metal tools, who herd cattle, who create tents and who make musical instruments. They make everything, until you come to the end of that line and you come to a man named Lamech. Lamech, it says, decides to have two wives and he also decides to kill two men. Lamech boasts to his wives, Cain killed one man. I killed two. When Adam and Eve have their third son, something changed. Eve says, God s granted me a child. We re not sure what Seth means but it may mean gift. What Eve actually says in that moment is that God seth-ed me another child. Page 6
Cain s name meant got. Abel s name meant breath. And Seth s name may have been a sign that Eve had turned back in need to God. It may be that the further loss of Abel, turned Eve to God and she recognized life as coming from God alone. Koinonia is something we need to teach our children within our households and within our church. We must teach them to recognize the depth of their connectedness and need for each other and for God. We need to walk them into experiences where they get to learn each other and they can only do that as we do it with each other. Koinonia, that interpenetration, that participation in each other can only be learned by our children as they experience the adults around them doing it. We can t teach them what we do not know ourselves. We want to see our children grow in faith, to grow into Christlikeness, but that won t happen any further than they see it in us. The ways we grow in faith are the paths they will follow to come to the river of the Sovereignty of God. If they learn from us that we are all like ball bearings, bumping up against each other in a bucket we call church, then they won t have a need for it later. But if their experience is that we need each other, that we have to take the time to eat with each other and to learn each other, then they ll follow that path into the river. If we follow the lineage of Seth we discover that things went differently from Cain s line. When Seth s first child was born it says that people started calling on the name of the Lord. And if we look down through Seth s line, we realize that Page 7
what these people produced was families. It doesn t say they did anything but produce community, family, relationships until you get to a man named Enoch who it says was so tight with God that he didn t die. God just took him straight into heaven. It goes back on from there to families and families and families until it comes to a man named Noah the guy who saved the world. Relationships, community, koinonia We can get all sorts of guilty as parents, saying, Ahh! How am I going to teach my kids when I m not that good! But the point is not how good we are it s what kind of community are we building around our children. What s the koinonia in which they are growing? We gather as a church to learn each other and to have children grow up in the community of disciples not just our community but in the community of disciples. This is why it is so important for parents to send their kids off to Worship Arts and off to Spiritual Formation classes. They need to be in the full community of disciples so they can learn from all the disciples. So they can learn fun, so they can learn safety, so they can provide it for each other by learning to know God. So, they can wade into the river of the Sovereignty of God and learn life. Page 8