The Choice Before Us

Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis
October 4, 2009, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill

Genesis 4:1-16
I John 3:4-16

“And if you do not do well, sin is lurking at the door; its desire is for you, but you must master it.” Genesis 4:7b NRSV

“And if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door. And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shall rule over him.” Genesis 4:7b KJV

On this World Communion Sunday, the repair of the world must begin with this congregation as we seek the common good in a nation where the blood of our brothers and sisters cries out to God from the ground. The luxury of strolling down the avenue after church to look at art is a luxury not afforded families who live on the corner of Broad and Dauphin, a neighborhood where there is a one in nine chance you will fall victim to a violent crime. When it comes to gun violence, are we our sister’s keeper, our brother’s keeper in the city of brotherly love? This is the question we have ignored for too long.

On an average, gunfire wounds 3000 children of God a year in this city and kills 300 men, women and children annually. Beyond the city limits and given the unlimited ability to buy guns by the bushel in this state, guns sold here are used to wound and kill countless men, women and children across state lines. Consider the crack dealer in Trenton who spotted a pickup with Pennsylvania tags and an NRA sticker. The man was an ex-felon with a history of mental illness, so he could not purchase a gun himself. He approached the truck and asked the driver if he could help him get some guns. The answer was “Yes” and “By the time the feds caught up to them, Downs [the man driving the truck] had ferried about 50 guns from Bucks County shops to Hagins [the crack dealer] who moved many of them to Trenton’s pushers and gang members….In 2006, ATF traced 332 guns from New Jersey crimes back to Pennsylvania gun dealers. No other state sent more. The same year, 461 Pennsylvania guns were seized in New York City and state.”

Of the commandment, “Thou shalt not kill,” Martin Luther declared, “The world is evil and this life is full of misery. [God] has therefore placed this and the other commandments as a boundary between good and evil….Briefly, [God] wished to have all people defended, delivered and protected from the wickedness and violence of others, and he has set up this commandment as a wall, fortress, and refuge about our neighbor so that no one may do him bodily harm or injury.”

Apparently the commandment’s boundary has been an insufficient check on the randomly murderous instincts of disgruntled employees, high school outcasts, drive-by racists, abusive spouses, not to mention mentally ill drug dealers and desperate addicts. Luther therefore goes on to address those of us on the suburban sidelines concerning our responsibility for the violence of others:
    The commandment is violated not only when a person actually does evil, but also when he fails to do good to his neighbor, or, though he has the opportunity, fails to prevent, protect, and save him from suffering bodily harm or injury. If you send a person away naked when you could clothe him, you have let him freeze to death. If you see anyone suffer hunger and do not feed him you have let him starve. Likewise, if you see anyone condemned to death or in similar peril and do not save him although you know ways and means to do so, you have killed him. It will do you no good to plead that you did not contribute to his death by word or deed, for you have withheld your love from him and robbed him of the service by which his life might have been saved….

As we do nothing about the illegal and ubiquitous straw-purchases of firearms in this state, for instance, I think Luther would say we have violated the commandment because, though we have had the opportunity, we have failed to prevent our neighbor from suffering bodily harm. He would say that we are murderers!

Likewise, the Westminster Catechism enumerates the duties required by the sixth commandment, enjoining us to engage in
    …all careful studies and lawful endeavors, to preserve the life of ourselves and others, by resisting all thoughts and purposes, subduing all passions, and avoiding all occasions, temptations, and practices which tend to the unjust taking away of the life of any; by just defense thereof against violence, patient bearing of the hand of God…; by charitable thoughts, love, compassion, meekness, gentleness, kindness, peaceable, mild and courteous speeches and behavior, forbearance, readiness to be reconciled, patient bearing and forgiving of injuries, and requiting good for evil; comforting and succoring the distressed and protecting and defending the innocent.

From the perspective of our theological forebears, the question turns on our positive duty: what are those imperfect ways and means by which we should act to prevent, protect and save the innocent from another’s murderous intent? Were I now to channel my father as I did last Sunday, I would have to say that one of the imperfect ways many act to protect the innocent from another’s murderous intent is to own a handgun. If they are made harder to get, my father has said to me now and again, then the criminals will have free reign. But, I ask him as my mother flees the room, when does our “right to bear arms” (a right which originally had to do with the raising of a militia in the absence of an organized army) become not freedom but a mutually destructive tyranny that reigns in fear over both the victim and the perpetrator? Hand guns and hunting rifles are one thing, but assault weapons: AR-15s, AK-47s, TEC-9s are status symbols in the hands of drug traffickers. Moreover if we look at the rate of death by firearms in other developed nations, I am hard pressed to conclude that arming Upper Dublin is the way to go if we mean to secure the lives of the innocent.

To be sure when it comes to murder, the weapon still could be the candlestick in the library or the knife in the pantry or the rope in the attic. For this nation, however, the weapon of choice since the West’s wild settlement has been a firearm. Proposals to strengthen the licensing of gun owners as we license the owners and drivers of cars, questions about the continued peddling of weapons across state lines, calls for increased waiting periods—or minimally as my father would prefer, the enforcement of laws already in place, enforcement for which there is no money—all are attempts to discern our positive, collective duty, attempts to put in place the ways and means which might imperfectly foster the protection of innocent life. Of these ways and means I will go on record, without apology, as an ardent supporter. Yet that is barely the point of our current human predicament from the biblical perspective.

The point, says Scripture from the beginning, is our response to the sin that crouches at the door of our humanity. “Life,” says Walter Brueggemann concerning the story before us “is not a garden party, but a harsh fellowship among watchful siblings, made harsher by the heavy ways of God.” Note that the plot of Cain’s life and our own turns neither on sibling rivalry nor on the murder Cain’s jealousy provoked, but is our response to the “capricious freedom of God.” This “strange God of Israel,” inexplicably accepts the offering of Abel while rejecting the offering of Cain. There is no reason given. We are beside ourselves.

Trying to “know more than the Bible knows,” John Calvin sought some moral flaw in Cain that would explain God’s rejection. Perhaps the original sin of the previous chapter could make sense of Cain’s rage, but no. “The rejection of Cain is not reasoned,” says Brueggemann. Rather “[it] is a necessary premise for the story. Life is unfair. God is free. There is ample ground here for the deathly urgings that move among us.”

Scripture makes no apology for God’s almighty choice. Cain is simply put in the position of mastering the sin, of overruling the murderous anger which crouches at his door because God has favored his brother. In a time when it feels as though that same murderous anger is infecting every aspect of what once was a civil society, breaking the sixth commandment is no longer a sin reserved for drug dealers and gun runners. We are talking about our own silent acquiescence to the news of automatic weapons at town hall meetings, our approval of the murderous speech that passes as political rhetoric in the halls of Congress, our uncritical embrace of the hatred that blares over the airways day and night. We are Cain, angry that our ne’er do well brother requires our keeping of him. We are the elder brother who has worked hard and resents the welfare afforded the prodigal. “Why are you angry,” asks God, “and why has your countenance fallen? If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, is not sin lurking at the door; its desire is for you, but you must master it.”

“There was only one place that bothered me,” says John Steinbeck’s character Lee in the novel East of Eden, a retelling of the story of Cain and Abel. “The King James Version says this…‘and thou shalt rule over him.’ It was the ‘thou shalt’ that struck me, because it was a promise that Cain would conquer sin…. Then I got a copy of the American Standard Bible….It says, ‘Do thou rule over him.’ Now this is very different. This is not a promise, it is an order. And I began to stew about it.” In his stewing, Lee takes the story and the Hebrew word, which is timsel, to a group of wise Confucian scholars. “After two years,” he reports, “we felt that we could approach these sixteen verses of the fourth chapter of Genesis. My old gentlemen felt that these words were very important too—‘Thou shalt’ and ‘Do thou.’ And this was the gold from our mining: ‘Thou mayest.’ ‘Thou mayest rule over sin.’ …Don’t you see?” said Lee. “The Hebrew word timsel—‘Thou mayest’—that gives a choice. It may be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man….It is easy,” he concludes, “out of laziness, out of weakness, to throw oneself onto the lap of the deity, saying, ‘I couldn’t help it; the way was set.’ But think of the glory of the choice!” Timsel: You may rule.

Though listen carefully, for again the story is not meant to call forth our self-control. “Rather,” says Brueggemann, “it is a [story] about the awesome choices daily before us and the high stakes for which we daily take risks. The context for these risks includes the active power of sin which can just barely be tamed, plus the inexplicable arbitrariness of God who evoked the crisis.” We can rage against the heavens and choose to let sin rule, to let every aggressive instinct ambush the life we have been given together. “In the world of Cain and [God],” says Brueggemann, “there is an animal yearning for destructiveness that will destroy both the victim and the perpetrator.” Or together we may choose to rule the murderous rage that is threatening to overtake our land, to create space in this city of brotherly love to be human in, to quit political ideology and consider what is required of us if we are to be one another’s keepers, to ask specifically what God is doing in relation to gun violence to make and keep human life human.

The greatest clue we have of God’s action in response to murder is around this table. “Take. Eat,” he said to the one who handed him over to be murdered and to the others who were murderers by their failure to prevent, protect and save the Lord of Life. On that darkest of all nights, there was only one who ruled over sin, only one who did not withhold the love by which our life might be saved, only one who refused violence and risked the grave so that sin and death would never again crouch at our door. My brothers and sisters, because his blood spilled on the earth once for all, sin was overruled by love, a love that is the risk required of those who would be one another’s keepers, of those called to make space on this planet for being human in. Timsel. Thou mayest! Thanks be to God.

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