Some time later, Cain presented an offering to the Lord from the land’s crops 4 while Abel presented his flock’s oldest offspring with their fat. The Lord looked favorably on Abel and his sacrifice 5 but didn’t look favorably on Cain and his sacrifice. Cain became very angry and looked resentful. 6 The Lord said to Cain, “Why are you angry, and why do you look so resentful? 7 If you do the right thing, won’t you be accepted? But if you don’t do the right thing, sin will be waiting at the door ready to strike! It will entice you, but you must rule over it.”
8 Cain said to his brother Abel, “Let’s go out to the field.” When they were in the field, Cain attacked his brother Abel and killed him.
9 The Lord said to Cain, “Where is your brother Abel?”
Cain said, “I don’t know. Am I my brother’s guardian?”
10 The Lord said, “What did you do? The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground. 11 You are now cursed from the ground that opened its mouth to take your brother’s blood from your hand. 12 When you farm the fertile land, it will no longer grow anything for you, and you will become a roving nomad on the earth.”
13 Cain said to the Lord, “My punishment is more than I can bear. 14 Now that you’ve driven me away from the fertile land and I am hidden from your presence, I’m about to become a roving nomad on the earth, and anyone who finds me will kill me.”
15 The Lord said to him, “It won’t happen; anyone who kills Cain will be paid back seven times.” The Lord put a sign on Cain so that no one who found him would assault him. 16 Cain left the Lord’s presence, and he settled down in the land of Nod, east of Eden. (Common English Bible)
“Gifts Given and Received: Cultivating an Advent of Generosity,” Week One
All it takes for this particular bit of nostalgia is a taste of the acapella music, or the loud, garish early 90s colors, or even just some solid geography trivia.
As a child of the 90s, my burning ambition was—and honestly still remains—to be on the television show Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?
If you know, you know. If you don’t, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego was a children’s television show based on a video game series of the same name designed to teach geography to schoolchildren (and, eventually, history and grammar in the video game series). The brand even experienced a revival with a Carmen Sandiego cartoon that ran for four seasons on Netflix. You best believe I watched every episode.
So single-minded was my childhood pursuit that for one Christmas all I asked for—the only thing on my list to Santa—was a set of geography flashcards. And a candy cane.
Those flashcards were the first gift I remember asking for. They of course were not the first gift I received—that was my now-ratty stuffed lamb that, once upon a time many years ago played music, but which I still can’t bring myself to get rid of.
Each of us have a first gift—the first gift we asked for, the first gift we receive, the first gift we gave. And that includes God. The first gift God received was not the first gift God asked for, though, after giving us the gift of life, and today’s story describes the fallout when gift-giving ends up being more about the giver than the receiver.
This is a four-week sermon series for the season of Advent—not the Christmas season, that will come later—but for the four Sundays we spent preparing for Christ’s birth. As a preparatory season, Advent has its roots in penance, in us being penitential. It is why Advent shares liturgical colors (specifically purple) with Lent, just as Christmas and Easter share liturgical colors as seasons of celebration of new life.
In twinning this sermon series with our Advent devotional theme for this year, “Gifts Given and Received,” I considered whether any of us might need to do penance for any of our past gift-giving. That isn’t an invitation for public confession or self-flagellation, but rather, to ask ourselves, are we good gift-givers? Do we give thoughtfully and generously, in ways that put the receiver before us as the giver? Our devotionals allow us to consider such things in relation to Jesus, and I want to invite us over the next four weeks to reflect on those questions in relation to one another as well.
Because this is a pretty common thing, really! You probably know someone who is a subpar gift-giver! Maybe you are one yourself! (Again, I am *not* asking for public confession here.) So lets talk these next few weeks about the faithful spirit behind gift giving, and we begin today in Genesis 4 with the first gifts given to God by humanity: the fruits of Cain’s crops, and the firstborn lamb of Abel’s flocks.
The Cain and Abel story is one that I would say is well-known, but not necessarily well-understood, and part of that is down to the sheer amount of time that is supposed to have elapsed between their lifetime and ours. Most of the Bible is, in fact, a recording of stories after those stories would have taken place. Each of the Gospels was written, at a minimum, thirty years after Jesus’s public ministry, and the earliest of Paul’s letters were twenty. So it should not be a controversial thing to say that the story of Cain and Abel was not written down in real time, or anywhere close to it, but rather represents a post facto accounting, or even explanation, for God’s preferences for offerings.
While a number of the prophets we heard from this summer condemned animal sacrifice as hollow and insufficient compared to living a life in accordance with God’s covenant, the practice of animal sacrifice continued apace in ancient Judaism—as well as in many other ancient Near Eastern faiths. Animal sacrifice plays a pivotal role in the tenth plague of the Exodus narrative, the rivalry between Elijah and the priests of Ba’al, and more. Amid that tradition, it is natural to ask, “Well, when did God even start preferring animal sacrifice,” and the story of Cain and Abel supplies an answer.
Cain offers God a portion of his crop, and Abel the firstborn of his flock. The passage does not specify if Cain’s offering is a “first fruits” offering in the way that Abel’s was a firstborn offering, which could explain why God prefers Abel’s gift, but beyond that we are left with conjecture.
What I want us to focus on, though, is God’s response to Cain *before* Cain murders Abel. God is challenging Cain to see past the anger and resentment that comes from having your gift not be the recipient’s favorite.
And so once more—without asking for a show of hands—is that a feeling you have experienced? The jealousy that comes with having to acknowledge—or refusing to acknowledge—that someone else did a better job of picking out a gift for a beloved? That envy is what takes gift-giving and makes it all about the giver and their needs and preferences rather than the receiver’s needs and preferences, and it detracts from the spiritual practice of gift-giving altogether.
God knows this, and tells Cain that he—Cain—has a choice: become better as a result of this experience and commit to doing right, or succumb to the sin of envy and jealousy. Of course, Cain does the latter and murders his brother, earning a sentence of exile not only from his land but from God’s presence—as the passage notes at its conclusion, “Cain left the LORD’s presence.”
Your jealousy and envy over somebody else’s perfect gift doesn’t cause you to kill them and exile yourself completely from God, but it can still inhibit your relationship with them—and with God. God warned Cain of that, and in so doing warns us too.
Maybe that is all a bit too somber for something that is meant to be as festive as gift-giving, but think of this as a lesson for our generosity writ large: for whom is our generosity really expressed? Are we generous to others because of their need, or are we generous for more self-centered reasons, to make us feel good about ourselves?
Now, generosity, when it is done for the right reasons, should make us feel good—for the other person, for having made the world a slightly better and more compassionate place. But it should not inflate our own egos. It should not make us think, “Look at what a good person or a good Christian I am being right now in this moment.”
Generosity that generates pride is not godly generosity. Generosity that is motivated by envy or jealousy, or the desire to one-up another giver, is not godly generosity.
So think back to the gifts you yourself have wanted, and the gifts you have gotten. Did they always correspond, or have you occasionally received a gift and thought, “This gift is more about you (the giver) than it is about me?” Have you maybe given a gift like that yourself before?
That is really what I am talking about here—the spiritual and emotional layers beneath the gift itself. Because a gift is never really just a gift—it is an expression of value. It is meant to communicate something beyond, “Hey, I thought you could use some new sweatpants.” (Or, at least, it should.)
Gift-giving is language, a form of communication that we have varying degrees of fluency in. And I include myself in that—I am notorious in my family for my complete aversion to wrapping paper. If there is not a gift bag to be had, your gift doesn’t get wrapped. And I do mean notorious--when I proposed to Carrie, I had an acquaintance make a box for the ring out of my old California license plates because Carrie and I had met in California, when I was in seminary and she was a surgery intern. And I thought, "that's too obvious, she'll know right away," so I cast about for something to put the box in until I gave it to her...so I found a plastic grocery bag and handed it to her in that. I'm a bona fide relationship genius.
For me, the hope is that the gift itself, not what it came in, is what matters, is what communicates my affection for the other person. But your command of this language may vary, and that’s good.
Our gift-giving language goes back to the first gifts we asked for and received, and to the first gifts God received. From those experiences arose sets of customs that vary from culture to culture but which share the lingua franca of wanting to say, “You matter to me, and this is how I wanted to tell you.”
It is why it is appropriate for us to in turn call something like God’s grace a gift, because that, too, is an expression of value, of God saying to us, “You matter to me, and this, this grace, is how I wanted to tell you.”
And the reality we are preparing for—that is a-coming just
four weeks from now—is that this grace will be given to you in the form of a newborn
baby who would save you, liberate you, set you free with grace enough for
today, grace enough for tomorrow, grace enough to see you through to kingdom
come. All because God decided to say to you, "You, you matter to me."
By the grace of God, may it be so. Amen.
Rev. Dr. Eric Atcheson
Birmingham, Alabama
November 28, 2021