The Rev. Dayle Casey
The Chapel of Our Saviour
Colorado Springs, Colorado
May 24, 2009

7 Easter-B
Acts 1:15-26
1 John 5:9-15
John 17:11-19

Lent speaks to us of our past, offering Scripture for the liturgy that reminds us how we got to where we are. And Easter speaks to us of our future; it speaks if last things, of the life that God made us for, of the promised life God is calling us to.

Human history also speaks to us of our past and offers hints of where we might be going, but the perspective of history is limited, based, as it is, only upon the deeds and desires and limited vision of human beings. As one historian sees it, “the average age of the world’s great civilizations is a duration of about two hundred years each. Almost without exception,” he says, “each civilization passed through the same sequence – from bondage to spiritual faith, from spiritual faith to great courage, from great courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to leisure, from leisure to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependence, from dependence to weakness, [and so] back to bondage.”

One can quarrel with his description of the phases civilizations go through, of course, but the pattern of rise and fall does make sense. One after another, one civilization shakes off the civilization that precedes it, replacing the dominance of the power and wealth of the former with that of the latter, as if such rotation of cultural and political hegemony by means of military or economic power were the end and purpose of human life.

This pattern all started with a lie, the Scriptures remind us. In the beginning, “the Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to tend it and take care of it. Then God told the man and the woman what they could do, and what they must not do. And the serpent, the most crafty of all the animals which the Lord God had made, approached the woman and said, “Did God really say that you must not eat from any tree in the garden?”

And the woman said, ”We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say that we must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and must not touch it, or we will die.” But the serpent deceived the woman. The serpent lied to her and said, ”You will not surely die if you eat the forbidden fruit. Instead, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God.” And when the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to the man. And when God searched for the man to tell him the facts of life, the man hid behind the woman’s skirt, and the ground they lived on was cursed. Because the man and the woman listened to the lie, and succumbed to it, the ground began to produce thorns and thistles instead of sweet fruit. And for all time since, men and women have worked by the sweat of their brows. And they have been jealous of each other, jealous of what each other can do and of what each other possesses, even brother jealous of brother.

Now Cain was the very first son of the man and the woman in the Garden, and because Cain was jealous, he slew his younger brother, Abel. And when God asked where his brother was, Cain lied and said, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” So God moved Cain out of the garden, to the east of Eden, and Cain’s descendants began building themselves into nations, each of them trying to make a name for itself outside the garden by means of its own deceit and might and power. Before long there were the Japhethites and the Hamites and the Canaanites and the sons of Shem and of Noah, “according to their lines of descent. And from these all the nations spread out over the earth after the flood.”

“And as the sons and daughters of Cain moved out from Eden, they found a plain in Shinar, where they built themselves a city, with a tower,” a tower they imagined “would reach to the heavens” when they finished. But God confused their speech and stopped their building, and from there “the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth.”

And the rest is history. For all time since, there is the story of the rise and fall of one nation after the other, each of them in its turn mightily proud of its towers and its wealth and its power. There was the rise and fall of the Egyptians, and of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, and of the Assyrians and the Babylonians. There was the rise and fall of the Greeks and the Romans, and of the Holy Romans under Charlemagne, and the rise and fall of Byzantium, and the rise and fall of the empires of the French and the British and the Americans, just to mention a few in the western world, each of which, in its turn, thought it was the center of the world. And each of them was – for a time, and for a place. And, of course, there have always been the Chinese, forever waiting in the wings for their next turn.

But after each of them rose, each of them fell in its turn, because they built on sand. Because their building was founded on a lie. They did not build for eternity, but for a time and a place.

Mark Twain speaks of all this in his delightful little piece entitled, “My First Lie and How I Got Out of It.” “I do not remember my first lie,” he says, “[because] it is too far back. But I remember my second one very well. I was nine days old at the time, and had noticed that if a pin was sticking in me and I advertised it in the usual fashion, then I [became the center of the world and] was lovingly petted and coddled and pitied in a most agreeable way, and got a ration between meals besides.”

“It was human nature to want to get these riches,” he continues, ”and I fell. I lied about the pin, advertising one when there wasn’t any. You would have done it; George Washington did it; anybody would have done it. During the first half of my life I never knew a child that was able to rise above that temptation and keep from telling that lie.”

Cain did it. It was human nature to be jealous of his brother. It was human nature to desire Abel’s riches. Cain thought that it was Abel’s cattle that made Abel pleasing to God. He believed that it was what Abel had accumulated that was the reason for the favor God bestowed on his brother. So Cain fell; he lied about the pin. He advertised an enemy where there wasn’t one, and he went to war against his brother and stole his birthright, and his life. And the rest is history, that seemingly endless cycle of war, that cycle of deceit and violence of brother against brother, clan against clan, nation against nation. For all the centuries since Cain, the descendants of Cain have vainly offered up the blood sacrifice of Abel in the misguided hope that violence will gain for themselves, at the expense of their brother, the wealth and security, if not the favor of God, they themselves desire.

That is the story of where we came from. But Easter is the story of where God intends us to go.

The Incarnation – God’s appearance on earth in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus – is God’s response to the lie. And on the night before he died, Jesus intercedes for us, reminding us, and reminding God himself, of the truth about where we came from and about the life God made us for.

“Father, I am not praying for the world,” Jesus offered, ”but for those whom you have given me, because they belong to you. All that is mine is yours, and what is yours is mine; and through these you have given me, my brothers and my sisters, is my glory revealed.

“Those you have given me are still in the world, Father. But I am no longer in the world; I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them by the power of your name, the name you have given me. While I was with them I protected them by the power of your name, and kept them safe.... Now I am coming to you; but while I am still in the world I speak these words, so that they may have my joy within them in full measure. I have delivered your word to them, and the world hates them because they are strangers in the world, as I am. I do not pray that you will take them out of the world, but that you will protect them from the evil one. They are strangers in the world, as I am. Consecrate them by the truth; your word is truth. As you sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world, and for their sake I consecrate myself, that they too may be consecrated by the truth.”

We are strangers in this world, Jesus notes, just as he is. He does not pray, however, that God would take us out of the world, because the truth is that the garden God created is a good and wonderful place, the very place God made for us. So it is good that we are here. But Jesus does ask that God will consecrate us with his truth in order to protect us from the evil one, in order to protect us from the lies the world tells us. Because the truth is that God loves the world. And God love us, all of us, because God made us , because we are his sons and daughters, created by God as the family of God to live in love with one another.

The jealousy of Cain, insists Rabbi Harold Kushner, was rooted in the lies which the world and human history tell us about ourselves. The world lies to us and tells us that God does not have enough love and goodness to go around for everyone, so we must fight and kill and hoard to be sure to get enough for ourselves. This is the most basic lie of the world that Jesus asks God to protect us from.

Cain believed that because God was pleased with his brother’s offering, his own offering would not be pleasing to God. Cain believed that God loves one brother more than another. This was Cain’s jealousy, based on the lies of the world. Cain did not see the truth of the garden. He believed that love and favor are limited in supply, that if God loved Abel much, then that must mean that God did not love Cain. That is the lie of the Deceiver, the evil one. But the truth of God, the truth that reaches all the way back to Eden, is that the love and favor of God are like sunshine. The fact that you get all the sunshine you need, and more, does not prevent the sun from giving me all the sunshine I need as well. There is more than enough to go around, plenty of garden for all to care for and to share. If God loves my brother and favors his offering, there is still more than enough of God’s love and favor for me and my offering.

“So why are you angry with your brother?” God asks us. “Why is your face downcast? If you do what is right, will you not also be accepted?” But Cain would not hear the truth, and, by deception, he lured Abel to the fields and killed his brother. And the seed of Cain continue the lie. We continue to kill our brothers and sisters, in deed and in word, because of the lie which the evil one would have us believe in the world.

“There is a different way,” Jesus reminds us in his prayer for us. There is God’s way. “The truth is that we are our brother’s keeper. Jealousy and rivalry, like all sin, are based on a lie,” Jesus offers in his prayer for us. The truth is that we are all one, all of the same Father, all of the same seed. Trust that truth, and trust God, and you will live, Jesus says. And it is for the sake of this truth that Jesus intercedes for us on the night before he dies, asking that God will consecrate us all in this truth so that we might live in it with the assurance that we all matter to God, with the assurance that the love of God, and therefore our future with God, does not depend upon the towers we build or the armies we raise or the weapons we brandish or the power and wealth we accumulate for ourselves. All that is the way of the world in which Jesus is a stranger, the world God nonetheless loved so much that he sent Jesus into the world to save it from its lies.

So the evangelist John concludes his Gospel and his Easter message, his word of truth about the future. But the next day Jesus is arrested by the world he loved, arrested by the those who believed the lies of the world. And the world he loved crucified Jesus for his trouble. And he died, because of the lies. But on the third day, his Father, having heard his prayer, having favored his offering, raised him to life. And for forty days Jesus appeared to the disciples for whom he had prayed. He prayed for them, and for you and me. And he tells us to feed his sheep – and to proclaim the truth, the Good News of God’s love for the garden.

“There are lots of other things that Jesus said and did which are not recorded in this book,” John adds, ”but I have written these things here so that you may believe that Jesus knows what he’s talking about. Because Jesus is who he says he is, the Son of the one Father of us all, the one who opens our eyes to God’s life for us. He tells us the truth about the life God made us for by offering himself up for our sake, by offering himself up to the One who made the garden, by offering himself up for his brothers and sisters and friends, that we, too, may have life, life that is truly life, in his name.

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.