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Prone to Wander
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis September 17, 2006, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Genesis 4:1-17 Mark 6:1-13
“Oh the places we’ve been!” since last we were all together in this sanctuary. Some to the mountains and others “down the shore.” A few have taken flight over an ocean and many more have traveled in time between the covers of a novel. Whether by way of the imagination alone or with a family in tow cross country, we have been wanderers for a season from the gathered fold of God in this place. And now, albeit a bit reluctantly, we say the time has come to stay put, to return to routine, to get down to business. But I am here to declare that the Word which has gathered us on this Homecoming Sunday is a Word that will have none of that! “You will be…a wanderer on the earth,” God says of our human destiny at the beginning of the story, even as God reveals, in the end, the One who has taken the wandering we have refused upon himself and commands us to “Follow.” We begin, then, with Cain, the first-born of Adam, the favorite of Eve, whose murderous jealously reminds us of this summer’s subtext, of the blood that has cursed the ground no less than Abel’s. “The stakes are high,” says Walter Brueggemann of this mythic story, “in our handling of disorders among siblings”. So it continues to be: Israelis and Hezbollah, Sunni and Shi’a, fundamentalist and free thinker, Christian, Muslim and Jew, marauding factions in Darfur or even minor infractions among kith and kin. “Am I my brother’s keeper?” we wonder before the headlines of terror and torture. Apparently not! And because we are not, our destiny under God’s judgment—ironically, as it turns out, for our own safety--is that of “a fugitive, a wanderer on the earth”. We can only read between the lines of God’s logic, but one take on God’s curse of Cain would be this: given the blood already shed, God may have reasoned that the last thing human beings needed was a country to defend, a territory to claim as their own, a plot of land to fence in, a place to call home between birth and death. In each case, our dwelling on earth is as behind a door that we think we may close and lock; yet that door becomes the very place, says God, where sin especially lurks…becomes the occasion, that is, for division, distance, distrust, and destruction. Therefore says God mercifully to Cain, “You will be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth.” The prospect of a life lived in such vulnerability and insecurity, of course, is as unbearable to Cain as it is to us these days: “…anyone who meets me,” he says to God, “may kill me.” Who better to know this than one whose preemptive murder of his brother has left him at risk in what is now a hostile world! God answers Cain’s complaint with faint assurance: “Not so!” says God. “Whoever kills Cain will suffer a sevenfold vengeance.” The gesture gives Cain no comfort on this side of death. But then God marks Cain with a mark that is both guilt and grace, judgment and mercy, “so that no one who came upon him would kill him.” That is to say, this dangerous fugitive, this aimless wanderer will have as his only trust the God who will uphold, direct, guard and guide him. It is enough and yet in such trust Cain us unable to abide. Therefore the road down which Cain and his wife begin to wander almost immediately forks. This murderous man marked as a sojourner under God’s witness protection program chooses instead to turn “away from the presence of the Lord [chooses not to trust God for his safety], and settles in the land of Nod [literally translated, the land of Wandering] east of Eden.” It is the fork in the road many of us have taken in our minds, the turn away from the God in whose presence we are profoundly guilty and in whose mercy we are given our lives back anew each morning. So we spend our days seeking someone or something more tangible for our trust; we spend our resources securing all that our seeking has accumulated; and we end our lives rich in things but poor in soul. Likewise, writes lay theologian Jacques Ellul, “Cain will spend his life trying to find security, struggling against hostile forces, dominating men and nature, taking guarantees that are within his reach, guarantees that appear to him to be genuine, but which in fact protect him from nothing.” Cain, of course, thinks otherwise. Refusing the destiny given him by God, he takes his own stab at eternity—a son; and has his own go at security—a city (meaning in Hebrew “to watch” and “to wake”). “In the first instance,” notes philosopher Leon Cass, “a city is a place guarded by a wakeful watch; it is not the market or the shrine but the watchtower or outpost that first makes a city a city.” In the watchful, wakeful city, Cain’s seed multiplies as his descendants settle down, establish a culture, create tools, build a stable economy and ultimately defend themselves against the brother whose keeper they are not. The last word we hear from Cain’s line in Scripture is a word of escalated vengeance spoken four generations hence by Lamech to his two wives: “I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man for striking me. If Cain is avenged sevenfold,” he warns, “truly Lamech seventy-sevenfold.” So it goes in the city, in the nation, on the earth still. There is a sense in which, though we have all returned from the hills and the oceans to a city [the one of brotherly love where the Giants…oh, never mind], we have returned to a place that cannot be home, in the sense of a place of defended certainty and security, to those for whom the story Scripture tells rings even vaguely true. Rather we return to this sanctuary today as a people whose spiritual condition, in the words of novelist Ignazio Silone, “resembles a camp of refugees…out in the open, existing by chance. What do you expect refugees to do from morning to night?” he asks. “They spend the best part of their time telling each other stories. The stories are not very entertaining, to be sure, but they tell them anyway—mainly to ‘understand’ what has happened.” How in the world could you and I understand what has happened in the months we have been away from one another if we did not spend the best part of our time telling each other and telling our children this story? But here is the incredible thing about the story we tell each other in the camp on the Hill: the story is not the story of Cain, a story of murder and mistrust, a story of fear and homeland security, a story whose line trails off with Lamech and is never heard from again in these pages. Rather we tell the story that begins when, at one hundred thirty years old and so by the mercy of God’s mysterious purposes, Adam knew Eve again and she bore a son and named him Seth, for she said, “God has appointed for me another child instead of Abel, because Cain killed him.” To Seth also a son was born named Enosh [meaning mortal…meaning vulnerable…meaning human]. At the birth of Enosh, we read, far from quitting God’s presence, people began to invoke the name of the Lord; and from Seth’s line, through generations of wanderers and exiles, according to Luke’s genealogy, there is born another son, God’s own Son who takes up the destiny Cain’s fear and distrust had refused. Son of Joseph, son of Matthat, son of Levi back and back and back, says Luke, to son of Seth, son of Adam, son of God! God’s son had no home. From birth to death, his life was a life of wandering. He was born away from home in a city that had no room for him. Those who were present at his birth—think of it—were the wanderers: the shepherds in the field, the wise men from afar. But it was business as usual on that starry, starry night for the inhabitants of the walled city who, led by Herod, believed he had been born to “bother [them], to trouble [them], to change [their] kingdom and [their] habits,” to threaten their way of life. This being Cain’s city, its inhabitants knew only one way to secure their lives: they set out to murder the child who was born a king. The Christ child flees in his mother’s arms to Egypt, his life secured by God’s mark upon even his first few wandering days. Then we know nothing of him until he emerges from the wilderness, a man destined to leave one place for another and another, a stranger especially in his hometown, a fugitive according to some, deserving death on a cross. Imagine Jesus instead settled in Jerusalem; “in his capital, near the authorities whom he could have influenced, near the high priest whom he could have converted, in his country’s religious nerve center, at the Temple where he could have preached to the theologians,” says Ellul. “What a mistake, what madness not to have seen all the advantages he would have had for his ministry by settling in Jerusalem!” Rather he took on himself “the totality of the human condition…refusing what [mortals] use to escape the condition God had decided should be his.” “Jesus takes [Cain’s] curse for himself,” says Ellul, “…accepts perpetual flight to remove the curse from [us], so that [we] might finally find a legitimate place to end [our] running [namely, in Him]; so that the call of chimerical horizons might no longer be a falsehood bound to a curse.” In a word, even as our humanity is revealed in his homelessness, he is our home! One thing remains for us to do in response: Follow me, he commands. And if we follow him, do you not see how it happens that we become the wanderers we were destined to be in him, not by our own doing or design but by his gracious claim upon our days? “Belief,” wrote a Presbyterian minister named Thomas Murphy, “has to do with the mind. Faith involves the feet.” Follow me, he says, and sends us out to the city that long ago has lost the story line. Wander the earth without shoes, he commands, because like Moses and according to the sages, we cannot not be everywhere in God’s presence if we are “protected against the uneven and unyielding and perhaps stony ground”; go forth without purse, he orders, lest we carry with us that which we trust more than God; and take only the shepherd’s staff, he says, lest we forget the One on whom we must lean. My fellow refugees, because in him God was pleased to dwell, then the land of Nod, east of Eden, can no longer be a place where we flee from God’s presence. Whether it be to the hills we hie or down the shore, whether we take the wings of the morning or travel to the farthest most parts of the sea, whether we return to the pews or quit the effort for a season, the God who has pitched a tent with us in the flesh and blood of a wandering Jew from Nazareth is our home. Follow him. Welcome home! Thanks be to God! |