Hilton Head Island, SC – June 6, 2021
The Chapel Without Walls
Genesis 4:1-7; 8-16
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – And the Lord said, “What have you done? The voice of your brother’s blood is crying out from the ground.” – Genesis 4:10
Most non-fundamentalist biblical scholars are agreed that the first eleven chapters of the Book of Genesis are mythological, and were never intended to be perceived as historical. Thus the story of Cain and Abel, the two sons of Adam and Eve, is meant to be a literary illustration of how it is that people resort to violence in their disputes with one another, and how God inevitably responds to such behavior.
It is only fair to alert you to the sobering reality that this sermon is one of several that I will have preached before we return to our customary permanent “home” at The Cypress Retirement Community here on Hilton Head Island. The reason you are being subjected to these homiletical broadsides is because I was directed not to preach political sermons in The Cypress before COVID-19 descended on the world. Therefore, while we are consigned to holding our services in an open pavilion of the Jarvis Creek Park, I am unburdening myself upon you innocent bystanders of a growing burden of politically- and socially-oriented sermons while I am still free to do so. I appreciate your indulgence, if you are willing to indulge me. If you aren’t, I can only say with genuine hope that we will soon be back in The Cypress, and that then my almost-always pacific/irenic/gentle homilies shall return to your untroubled and untrammeled ears.
From the dawn of the evolution of the first Homo sapiens, human beings have violently attacked one another for a wide variety of reasons. This is not to say that everyone does that, because most people are seldom if ever violent, either as individuals or collectively in groups. Neither personally nor corporately do most people or nations physically attack one another, and that is religiously and socially a very good thing, as I’m sure we would all agree.
However, it is both a sad and tragic fact that citizens of the United States of America may be more prone to use violence against one another than the citizens of almost all other nations which have ever existed. That shameful feature is largely explained by how our nation came into being. Astonishingly, we defeated the strongest empire then in existence in an armed revolution against Great Britain in order to gain our independence. One of the main reasons behind that victory is likely that the citizen-soldiers of the thirteen colonies were better marksmen than the professional Redcoats. Americans had become quite proficient at killing both Indians and game animals with their guns in order to secure the land and their living. Our forebears were so good at what they did that within less than a century of winning the revolution they had created the third-largest geographical nation on earth, and much of that rapid expansion occurred by means of violence.
In the story of Cain and Abel, Cain killed his brother Abel because he was apparently jealous that God seemed to prefer Abel’s offering to God more than Cain’s own offering. The story doesn’t say how Cain killed Abel. But when God asked Cain where his brother was, he gave perhaps the smarmiest statement ever made by anyone in holy writ, and it occurred in the fourth chapter of the first book: “I don’t know; am I my brother’s keeper?” Not only had he killed Abel, but he tried to divert God’s inquiry with the most impudent statement that he could concoct.
God’s response to Cain was as instantaneous as it was withering. “What have you done? The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground!”
When anyone is killed by anyone else, the blood of the deceased cries out to God from the ground. Violence has resulted in blood being spilled over most of the Earth. Whenever it happens, the blood of the dead cries out to God. God did not create us to destroy one another. If it happens, however, the assaulters or killers stand before God in severe judgment. Premeditated violence can never receive complete divine exoneration, and most if not all spontaneous violence also undergoes careful divine scrutiny.
I want to address four of the most evident means by which violence has led to blood being spilled on American soil. They are: 1) The use of firearms,2) the use of police firearms to injure or kill unarmed citizens,3) the treatment of the native peoples of America, and 4) the treatment of Black slaves and their descendants in America. Rivers of blood are crying out to God from the ground because of premeditated or spontaneous violence against those who have been brutally killed or maimed.
Since their invention in the early fourteenth century, firearms have been the most common lethal means of resorting to violence against other people. The Second Amendment of the United States Constitution has unintentionally turned many Americans into the most murderous nationality in the world. There are tens of millions more guns in this country than the 330-plus million citizens of this country. In the growing numbers of mass murders, of which we have hundreds each year, still more guns are being sold to more citizens who imagine that somehow they will be safer if they own a gun. People who own guns, and especially those who carry them, are far more likely to be killed by guns than if they neither owned nor carried them.
Because of the perversely irrational support of the Second Amendment by millions of perverse Americans, twenty states have passed laws saying it is not necessary for anyone to need a permit to carry a concealed weapon (i.e., a pistol) on their person. Hiding behind the Second Amendment to prevent firearm deaths is like hiding behind a hand grenade with the pin pulled out to prevent being killed by a hand grenade. It is suicidal madness, but it is a uniquely-spawned form of American madness.
That leads into the use of police firearms to injure or kill unarmed citizens. Every year police kill about a thousand people. Only a quarter of them are unarmed; the rest have weapons in their hands. Almost no police in the United Kingdom were ever armed until very recently. Even now, few bobbies carry weapons. The same is true in many other nations. But in the USA, most officers of the law have “toted iron” for centuries. What would our movie westerns be without the sheriffs and marshals “packing pistols?” It is High Noon, True Grit, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. They may be classics, but gunfire is always the solution to the problems that are raised. Are Americans completely oblivious of any other alternatives?
William Barber is the president of Repairers of the Breach and is the co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign. He and a friend of his wrote an editorial in The New York Times (May 21) about Andrew Brown being shot five times by police in Elizabeth City, NC. In it they said, “If George Floyd forces America to face the questions of whether an officer who abuses power can be held accountable, Andrew Brown Jr’s blood cries out from the ground of eastern North Carolina for deeper changes. Justice demands systemic transformation….We call it The Third Reconstruction.” But will it be more effective than the original post-Civil War Reconstruction or the civil rights reconstruction of the 1960s? Or will the bills to reform police procedures languish in Congress or the state legislatures, never to be passed?
Unnumbered tens of thousands of native American people have had their blood splashed on what they considered their own soil over the past four centuries. You and I are not guilty of that, but the nation of which we are citizens is guilty. When they were being slaughtered, the people in the stronger force considered them less than human, and had little hesitancy to obliterate them in what they considered was an inevitable march toward progress, meaning the progress of white people over darker-skinned people.
The treatment by white Americans of native Americans is one of the two darkest chapters in our nation’s history. We killed far more Indians by our diseases, over which they had no immunity, than by our guns. Nonetheless, without question we killed countless thousands by guns from the arrival of English colonists in Jamestown in 1607 to the Battle of Wounded Knee in 1890. Rivers of blood accompanied the conquest of the people who lived here long before we appeared on their lands.
I have driven through many Indian reservations throughout our country. I lived three miles away from the Red Cliff Chippewa Reservation in northern Wisconsin in my first pastorate. No reservation I ever saw looked anything like anywhere I have ever lived, and I have lived in nine different states. Even though white Americans did not quite kill off all the native Americans, we have made life a living death for far too many of them on the desolate ground of their reservations, and their blood cries out to God. It was government-sponsored policies which herded them onto those remote patches of usually barren topography.
That brings us to the absolute worst of American official and informal social policies, which is
our treatment of Black slaves in the past and of their descendants in the present. Nearly everywhere in the world Black people are consciously or subconsciously considered inferior by many if not most white people. The only place where that is not true is in Africa, where Blacks outnumber white or brown people by large percentages.
In the United States, Blacks have the added disadvantage that most of their ancestors were brought here as slaves. The institution of slavery inevitably diminished the status of anyone who was thrust into that demeaning subservience. A bloody four-year war was fought to free the slaves, but it did not and could not grant them social or political equality. Numerous events over past years and especially since the beginning of the pandemic raise the question of whether, as a society, Americans have universally accepted the proposition that Black lives truly do matter.
In the same issue of The Times in which the Barber editorial appeared, Elizabeth Hinton wrote another opinion piece called Will We Ever Get Beyond ‘The Fire Next Time?’ She said, “Protests and rebellions will continue until the nation reverses its original misguided response to the civil rights era, and no longer empowers police officers to patrol communities of color with force. The logic of American policing – searching for potential criminals in low-income communities and protecting property in middle-class and wealthy areas – increases the likelihood of contact in targeted areas and, with it, police violence.”
It is to be fervently hoped that millions of white Americans have finally come to realize how fearful and jaundiced is the view of millions of Black Americans for how they perceive their treatment at the hands of the for-the-moment white majority. All Black Americans, but especially young male Blacks, have reason to believe that they will not receive equal justice to that which is administered to white, Latino, or Asian Americans, and that suspicion is based on solid evidence.
If nothing else convinced us of that, surely the centennial of the Tulsa attack on the affluent Black community of Greenwood in North Tulsa should have brought home to us the potential terror with which Blacks in this country live every day of their lives. Exactly a hundred years ago, in less than twenty-four hours, thirty-five city blocks were burned to the ground, and as many as three hundred men, women, and children were murdered, while hundreds of others were injured. A mob of as many as ten thousand armed white men stormed Greenwood in the middle of the night.
More than half of the April Smithsonian Magazine was devoted to coverage of the massacre. The actual date of the centennial happened to fall on Memorial Day, and last Monday evening there were two objectively presented documentaries about the Tulsa race riot. This was one of the worst if not the worst such racial altercation that ever occurred in our nation’s history. Nevertheless, within a few years it was skillfully erased from memory. The Black survivors in Greenwood were afraid to talk about it, and the political powers-that-be in Tulsa and Oklahoma managed virtually to obliterate it. In one of the documentaries, the current mayor of Tulsa, a white man in his forties, said he never heard about the Black Wall Street Massacre until he was a senior in college.
How could such a thing be hushed up? But how often does anyone recall the riots that erupted in dozens of cities after Martin Luther King was assassinated? Who likes to hear about blood crying out to God from the ground? On the other hand, when will America learn to confront its obvious racial gap instead of always trying to sweep it under the rug?
Is America a racist nation? Perhaps it is a linguistic impossibility for an entire country to be racist. However, without doubt there are millions of racists in America, many of whom have no idea that they harbor racist notions and thoughts in their heads and hearts.
God cannot solve the violent undertone of America. Only Americans, all Americans, but especially white Americans, can do that. And we can do it primarily by turning to God for guidance in how we must live with and treat one another. The Bible gives us hundreds of hints on how to do that. We call the Bible “the word of God,” but it becomes the word of God only when we make it a living reality within us.
We cannot allow state legislatures to pass laws that make it more difficult for people of color to vote. We cannot sit idly by while, with impunity, white policemen continue to gun down unarmed Blacks. We cannot claim to love everyone equally while we know that native peoples, Blacks, Latinos, and Asians experience a quite different and less welcoming America from the one that people of European ancestry regularly enjoy.
Referring to the glaring blots of American society, President Biden has often exclaimed, “We’re better than this!” Are we? Are we? Only we can answer that. No one else can answer for us.