That's Gonna Leave a Mark

As a child I was mostly a "good little boy" who generally got A's in school and went to church on Sundays. I was well behaved during worship. I sang the hymns and tried to listen to the sermons. I went to Sunday School and, as a small child, my father read Bible stories to me and my siblings each night.

It was all pretty typical stuff for a kid in South and then North Carolina as the 1960s gave way to the 70s. I assume it was also pretty typical that despite all this exposure to Church, Sunday School, and Bible stories, I didn't really know the Bible in any sort of depth. I knew that Moses went up the mountain, David smacked Goliath upside the head with a rock, and Jesus walked on water, but I'm not sure and had much sense of what any of itmeant.

And so I picked up a lot of my Christianity from "drinking the water" as it were. I accumulated the popular understandings of the faith that sometimes did and sometimes didn't cohere with what was in the Bible that I knew only in a Cliffs Notes sort of way. That meant that I had heard about "the mark of Cain" which shows up in today's Old Testament reading, but I didn't know it from the Bible.

I knew, in a vague way, that 'the mark of Cain" was something bad, something that let others know there was something wrong with you. Curiously - considering a childhood in SC and NC - I did not about the racist interpretations in American Christianity that labeled dark skin "the mark of Cain." I read about that as an adult. But that discovery was not nearly so surprising as the one that came from actually reading the story in Genesis.

What a stunner to find out that Cain's mark was there to protect him. Yes, Cain was in all sorts of trouble for killing his brother. Yes, the story depicts God punishing him, "cursing" him in much the same manner as had happened to his parents a bit earlier in Genesis. But in a pattern that never gets old in the Bible, earning God's wrath is never the end of the story. God makes clothes for Adam and Eve; God puts a "Do not damage" label on Cain; God forgives David for raping Bathsheba and then murdering her husband; and Jesus says, "Father forgive them," while on the cross. Not at all the sort of "mark" one might expect.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

A quick confession: I spend too much time on social media. There I see a lot of posts which suggest that many other people must have gotten their notions of Christian faith in a manner similar to that of my childhood. Whether it's posts inviting me to type "Amen" to insure a financial windfall, manipulative posts demanding I share a really bad picture of Jesus to prove I love him, or posts from self-avowed Christians who tell outright lies to justify hate-filled slandering of politicianss they dislike, there are scores of "Christians" whose faith seems to have little connection to the teachings of Jesus found in the Bible. 

Despite my having spent a good deal of my own life with a faith only vaguely connected to the Bible, these sort of posts on social media really set me off. I suppose I feel a little superior because my own barely biblical faith was mostly non-strident and benign. Regardless, I often can't resist the urge to help straighten these folks out. I attempt - in the most kind and friendly fashion, of course - to show them the error of their ways. I won't say never, but I'm almost never successful.

I not so secretly long for the worst offenders to get their comeuppance. They need to be exposed for what they really are. Their distortions of the faith need to be clearly pointed out for all to see. They need "False Christian" branded on their foreheads so that everyone will know to avoid and ignore them.  

But God, it seems, is not so quick to write folks off as I am. When God marks Cain, it's not what most people assume. God's response to the way we've screwed up the world is to join us in the mess we've made, to suffer and die in it. God still cares for Cain. God keeps loving sinners. Or, as Nadia Bolz-Weber puts it, "There is nothing we can do to make God love us any more or any less."

I'm really glad God loves me that way. I'm still struggling a bit with how God extends the same love to certain others.

Click to learn more about the lectionary.