Cain is Still Killing Abel

On Sunday morning I was in church, like many of you. A laywoman was leading the morning prayer and said in reference to the killing at the synagogue the previous day: “Please, God, remind us that Jews are just like us….”  It struck me how simple but profound that observation was.  They are just like us; in this context “us” referred to Christians worshipping together. 

The killer of the synagogue worshippers hated Jews and immigrants and refugees.  The man who sent pipe bombs last week sought to terrorize and perhaps kill people whose political loyalties differed from his loyalties.   Last Wednesday a man tried unsuccessfully to enter an African American church outside Louisville, Kentucky; he then went down the street to the Kroger store and killed two African American men.  As he walked by a European American witness, he is reported to have said:  “Whites don’t kill whites.”  None of these perpetrators thought their victims were just like them.

How do we end up with communities divided by fear and resentment, animosity and grievance over a sense of lost entitlement?  How do these beliefs morph into prejudice and indifference to the wellbeing of others in many of us and into hatred and violence in some of us?

I think the praying woman struck at the heart of it.  We convince ourselves that they are not “just like us.”  We come to believe the "other" is ill willed and is plotting to take from us what we deservedly possess and they do not deservedly possess.  Our misfortunes, failures, and disappointments are their fault.  Our anxious insecurities find a resting place in others who appear unlike us. 

The powers and principalities of this age know our vulnerabilities and exploit them for destructive ends.  Be assured there are forces around us opposed to God, and they know what makes us tick and plan their schemes accordingly (Eph. 6:10-12).

Evil does not show up with horns, searing eyes, and a red robe.  Evil shows up as our supposed ally and plays into our fears, disappointments, resentments, and failures.  It magnifies in our mind every slight ever done to us and tells us we are victims; it offers to us a path to self-vindication.  Evil says to us as it said to Cain long ago:  “You’re getting a raw deal.  Even the score.”

People of faith should be the first to see the lie in all this.  We have a common creator in whose image we are made.  In this way they are all like us, even the perpetrators of these atrocities.  All of us are bound together through an organic unity grounded in the all-inclusive love of God.  All of us are our brother’s and sister’s keepers.  The powers and principalities of our age do all they can to blur and eradicate this kinship.

It will not always be this way:

They will not hurt or destroy
    on all my holy mountain;
for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord
    as the waters cover the sea. (Isaiah 11:9)

Until that day the lies will continue to be told, and Cain will go killing Abel.

Jim Kelsey
Executive Minister-American Baptist Churches of New York State