American Idols – Violence
Genesis 4:1-16
Sycamore Creek Church
Tom Arthur
February 28, 2010
[Note to reader: This is a manuscript and not a transcript. While I prepare a manuscript, I don’t preach from it. All the major points are here, but there are bound to be some small differences from the sermon as it was preached live. Also, expect some “bonus” material that wasn’t in the live sermon.]
Peace, Friends
Violence is all around us in our culture. It’s almost impossible to avoid it. Every morning when I open up the newspaper I’m greeted with the day’s news about violence. It’s around the world. It’s in our nation. It’s also local. It’s so local that for several weeks now as I’ve been driving to and from the office, I’ve been greeted by signs at the corner of Jolly and Aurelius seeking cage fighters. UFC is pretty cool on TV, but all of a sudden when it’s someone you love (your friend, boyfriend, son, husband…these martial arts sports are mostly guys right now) stepping into that cage, it’s not quite so cool anymore. Violence is in the movies and TV we watch. It’s in the sports we enjoy rooting for. The long-term effects on the brain of concussions in football are just beginning to get attention. We all know the joke: I went to a fight and a hockey game broke out. Violence is in our pastimes from video games to books. Perhaps most tragically, it’s in our homes. One in four women will experience domestic abuse in their lifetime and one in nine men will too.
Today we continue the series: American Idols. We’re looking at the things in our culture that compete for our attention and our worship. These things shape our imaginations in ways that might not be in line with the way that God’s love shapes our imaginations. They deform us rather than reform us. Today we’re looking at violence. Violence goes back a long way. It’s not something we Americans invented. Let’s begin with a story from Genesis of the first murder.
Genesis 4:1-16 (NLT)
1 Now Adam slept with his wife, Eve, and she became pregnant. When the time came, she gave birth to Cain, and she said, “With the LORD’s help, I have brought forth a man!” 2 Later she gave birth to a second son and named him Abel.
When they grew up, Abel became a shepherd, while Cain was a farmer. 3 At harvest time Cain brought to the LORD a gift of his farm produce, 4 while Abel brought several choice lambs from the best of his flock. The LORD accepted Abel and his offering, 5 but he did not accept Cain and his offering. This made Cain very angry and dejected.
6 “Why are you so angry?” the LORD asked him. “Why do you look so dejected? 7 You will be accepted if you respond in the right way. But if you refuse to respond correctly, then watch out! Sin is waiting to attack and destroy you, and you must subdue it.”
8 Later Cain suggested to his brother, Abel, “Let’s go out into the fields.” And while they were there, Cain attacked and killed his brother.
9 Afterward the LORD asked Cain, “Where is your brother? Where is Abel?” “I don’t know!” Cain retorted. “Am I supposed to keep track of him wherever he goes?”
10 But the LORD said, “What have you done? Listen — your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground! 11 You are hereby banished from the ground you have defiled with your brother’s blood. 12 No longer will it yield abundant crops for you, no matter how hard you work! From now on you will be a homeless fugitive on the earth, constantly wandering from place to place.”
13 Cain replied to the LORD, “My punishment is too great for me to bear! 14 You have banished me from my land and from your presence; you have made me a wandering fugitive. All who see me will try to kill me!”
15 The LORD replied, “They will not kill you, for I will give seven times your punishment to anyone who does.” Then the LORD put a mark on Cain to warn anyone who might try to kill him. 16 So Cain left the LORD’s presence and settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden.
This is God’s story for us today. Thank you, God.
I’d like to focus today on one verse: “You will be accepted if you respond in the right way. But if you refuse to respond correctly, then watch out! Sin is waiting to attack and destroy you, and you must subdue it” (Genesis 4:7, NLT). I think what we see here is that Cain’s primary problem wasn’t with his offering, it was with his reaction to what happened with his offering. He is given the freedom by God to respond in a loving way. He is given the freedom to choose reconciliation. Sin is crouching at the door of his heart waiting to pounce, but Cain can master it and subdue it. His anger and frustration need not destroy him or anyone else, but Cain chooses rather the path of violence.
The consequences of this path are immediate. Once Cain has killed his brother Abel he fears being murdered himself. Violence creates a culture of violence that the violent then live in fear of. There is a great irony in this story. Cain says he is not able to take God’s sentence for fear of being killed!
Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of this very same situation in the civil rights movement. MLK was first and foremost a Baptist preacher. He drew his inspiration and guidance primarily from the black church tradition of following in Jesus’ way. In an essay titled “An Experiment in Love” he outlines a philosophy of active non-violent resistance to the unjust laws of segregation and discrimination. He says:
To meet hate with retaliatory hate would do nothing but intensify the existence of evil in the universe. Hate begets hate; violence begets violence; toughness begets a greater toughness. We must meet the forces of hate with the power of love; we must meet physical force with soul force. Our aim must never be to defeat or humiliate the white man, but to win his friendship and understanding (A Testament of Hope, 17).
MLK had in mind not just the defeat of unjust laws but reconciliation between whites and blacks. If this was the ultimate goal, which I believe must be the ultimate goal for any Christian in conflict, then violence will never succeed in bringing about that goal. Violence must be met with love, not hate.
Many have taken MLK’s active non-violence resistance to be an invitation to let someone walk all over you while you sit by passively and let them do whatever they want. King spoke to this impression in the same essay saying:
It must be emphasized that nonviolent resistance is not a method for cowards; it does resist…It is not a method of stagnant passivity…For while the non-violent resister is passive in the sense that he is not physically aggressive toward his opponent, his mind and emotions are always active, constantly seeking to persuade his opponent that he is wrong. The method is passive physically but strongly active spiritually. It is not passive non-resistant to evil, it is active non-violent resistance to evil (A Testament of Hope, 17-18).
In other words, to meet violence with love rather than hate and more violence is for the bravest among us, not the cowardly. Evil must never be met with passivity. It must be actively resisted, and if one is to follow in the way of Jesus, it must also be non-violent.
Something King understood is that the violent are never unredeemable. God’s grace is still available even to the violent. God’s grace can transform even the violent. The mark that God puts upon Cain suggests that God is still providing for Cain. Cain fears being killed himself, and God provides protection.
The book of Genesis tells several different stories of individuals working out their conflict in non-violent ways. These provide models for how we might do so as well. Not all of them are ideal, but they are all acceptable.
First, Abraham and Lot in Genesis 13 resolve their conflict by putting distance between themselves. Second, Jacob and Laban in Genesis 31 do the same thing and take it a step further. They draw up a legal contract of sorts, a covenant signified by a boundary, that will keep them apart and from hurting one another. This is a kind of ancient personal protection order. Third, Jacob and Esau in Genesis 33 resolve a long-standing hurt with the threat of violence when Jacob gives gifts and outwits his brother in a game of language. Fourth, and perhaps the most ideal, Joseph in Genesis 50 responds to his brothers’ violence against him by forgiving them and even blessing them. Certainly Joseph’s response is the ideal, but sometimes in our broken world, the ideal is not available and one of the other options is the best possible non-violent option.
Recently our church was taught a model that contributes to a culture of reconciliation. It is called the Role Renegotiation model. I know, that’s a mouthful to say, but the model outlines in many ways the details of what Joseph did with his brothers. Let’s take a look at it by pretending that we’re in a situation where we are seeking a roommate.
The beginning of any relationship is gathering information. We put the word out that we’re looking for a roommate and someone responds. We sit down and talk about what our expectations are of one another. Eventually, we find someone with whom we think we can live and we make a commitment to move in and sign a lease together. There is a period of productivity and stability in which we pay the bills together. Everything is great. In fact, your new roommate has a killer entertainment system that you enjoy using to watch movies.
One night you’re already in bed when your roommate comes home. You’ve got an early morning meeting and you want to get a good night’s rest. Your roommate doesn’t even realize you’re home. He comes in, turns on his entertainment system, and all of a sudden you’re laying in bed and greeted with Aerosmith blasting in the living room. This is a pinch. You expect that when you’re trying to sleep, that it will be quiet. So you get out of bed, and tell your new roommate that you’re trying to sleep. He says that he’s sorry, and that he didn’t realize you were even home. He plugs in his earphones. No problem. That pinch or broken expectation was as easy as a quick fix. But something begins to happen. This scenario plays itself out over and over again. You start to notice a pattern so one night you call a house meeting. You go back to the beginning of the relationship and you renegotiate your expectations of one another. In the end, both of you agree that music won’t be played through the speakers past 9PM except on the weekends. Ahhh…back to stability in the house. It’s a good thing.
Unfortunately the stability doesn’t last because your roommate is laid off. The next month he can’t contribute to the bills. This is a bigger broken expectation than just a pinch. This is a crunch. There are several ways to respond to this crunch. The first is to just gut it out. You figure that you’ve only got four more months on the lease and then you can find another roommate. You live in boredom and apathy in your own home. You rarely talk to your roommate. You co-exist, but that’s about it.
A second option is that one day you come home and your roommate’s stuff is all packed up and gone. He’s left the house and moved in with his parents. He never told you this was going to happen. It was a “silent exit.”
A third option is that you say to yourself, “It’s going to be OK. He’ll find a new job in a couple of weeks. I’ll cover him for one month. It’s the loving thing to do.”
A fourth option is to go back to the beginning of the relationship and renegotiate. You call another house meeting and you sit down and talk it out. You agree to cover his expenses while he’s looking for a new job and he agrees to pay you back when he gets a new job. You also agree that if he doesn’t have a new job in a two months, that you’ll have to look for a new roommate because you don’t have the financial ability to cover both his rent and your rent for more than two months. At the end of the two months, your roommate has found a good new job and is slowly paying you back. Ahhh…back to stability in the house.
There’s one last option. You call the house meeting and your roommate and you can’t come to an agreed upon conclusion. You do agree that it’s time to find other living situations. He moves back in with his parents and you find another roommate to cover his part of the lease for the remaining four months. This is a “planned exit.” No feelings hurt. In fact, you agree that should the situation arise in the future, you’d both be happy to consider being roommates again.
This model of relationships is built on clarity of expectations. The temptation in any conflict is to go talk to someone else about your broken expectation and complain about it. We all seek to find someone who will join our pity party. We want someone who will agree with us and heap curses upon the person who isn’t living up to our expectations. The Christian way of resolving broken expectations is to go talk to the person who broke them. This is the path of reconciliation! None of this is possible if you don’t first make the attempt to talk to the person directly. I’d also encourage a good dose of humility in these kinds of conversations. It may be your expectations that need to be changed!
Right now I’d like to practice this model with you myself. I as your pastor was pinched last Sunday. Let me explain. There are many ways in which this church has exceeded my expectations this past month in terms of missions. We raised over $5,000 for Haiti. We collected many Haiti health kits. We also collected personal items for needs closer to home at the Compassion Closet. Kids Creek even joined in and collected items for the Holt Food Bank. Wow! That’s a lot of money and items.
Last week we had the opportunity as a church to give not only our money but also our time with the Church of Greater Lansing’s Food Drop. We collected $1,050 for this in our Christmas Eve offering. This was joined with 32 church’s offerings and altogether over $109,000 was raised. Wow! Last Sunday we were invited to deliver 2,800 boxes of food to people in need in the Greater Lansing Area. Only six people from SCC showed up and two of those were Sarah and me. Is this a problem? I think we can do better than this, don’t you?
The temptation for me would be to go home and talk to Sarah about it and complain to her, or to talk to my clergy friends and complain about how SCC didn’t meet my expectations for giving not just money and items but also their time, but none of those conversations are in the right place. The right place to discuss a pinch is with those who pinched you. So that’s what I’m doing now. Why didn’t we meet my expectations? The reasons could be many. Some of them might even be that the expectation wasn’t communicated well. Or maybe we were having mission fatigue after collecting all those items and money this month. Whatever the case may be, this is an invitation to begin a conversation about if and how we can do better in the future. Leave a comment on the blog with an idea about how we can do better or continue the conversation with me.
As we turn our attention toward communion, I think we will see that God served all humanity by being present to us. God was present to Adam and Eve in the garden. God was present to Abraham and the people of Israel. God was present to the prophets. God was most fully present to all humanity in the person of Jesus, God in the flesh. Jesus served all humanity by rejecting violence and submitting to death upon a cross. When faced with hate, he met it with love. In doing so, he turned death upside down and conquered it. We too can enter into that story of conquering violence with love.
May it be true in our lives not just by our own power, but by the power of God working in us whom we know as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Next Steps (share your experience with these next steps in the comments section):
1. Read some of the conflict stories in Genesis… (Genesis 13, 31, 33, 50, & Psalm 133)
2. Role renegotiate… (with someone you need to reconcile)
3. Explore Martin Luther King Jr. @ www.thekingcenter.org
4. Other







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