Questions God Asks Us, Part 2: Where Is Your Brother?

 Friends, we’re now in week 2 of a 10 week sermon series I’m leading you in this fall based on a book titled Questions God Asks Us by pastor and author Trevor Hudson. In every chapter of this short book, Hudson looks at a question that either our Creator God or Jesus pose in the Bible, what we learn from that question, and how faithful people might respond.

This morning’s question is an infamous one, and it comes from the Cain and Abel story in Genesis 4. The first two of the three sons that Adam and Eve ultimately have, Abel is a shepherd who tends livestock, and Cain is a farmer who grows fruits and vegetables. They both bring an offering to God–Cain brings crops from his field, and Abel brings a lamb. God approves of Abel’s offering, but not Cain’s, for reasons we can speculate on but will ultimately never understand. God tells Cain to hang in there, if he makes good decisions it will all turn out just fine. Immediately after receiving that advice, Cain goes on a “little walk” with Abel, and kills him, and buries him in a shallow grave. These Genesis families, y’all. No matter how much me and my sisters got on each other’s nerves, I knew we’d never be that bad.

Naturally, God knows exactly what happened. When there’s only four people on earth, one of them has gone missing, there’s a trail of blood in the garden, and Cain is holding a dirty shovel, it doesn’t take CSI to crack the case. God pointedly asks Cain: Where is your brother? Since God already knows the answer, it’s not a request for information, but rather God grabbing Cain’s shirt collar with the Divine hands. Cain’s picks a terrible response, which only makes the whole situation worse: “I dunno, am I my brother’s keeper?”

Yes, Cain. Yes you are your brother’s keeper. At the very least, you’re your brother’s keeper-aliver. It’s the Bible’s very first murder, of many. This is a violent book, the Bible has a tremendously high body count. Reading through these stories, particularly in the Old Testament where many wars happen, can feel as heavy as watching the evening news, or doom scrolling on your phone–pick your mind poison. And it’s a tragic reflection of the human condition that the first death in the Bible is this story, not a story about a beloved elder passing away in their sleep. When God asks, Where is your brother? Or, Where is your sister? Or, Where is your sibling?, God isn’t asking us to point to the map. God is asking us how we allowed our sibling to end up in that peril. Where did our compassion fall short, and where did our lower natures, our anger and jealousy and greed take over?

We need holy accountability for those lower natures. We also need deliverance. That’s where Moses comes in, in today’s Old Testament story. Moses trusts God when the Divine tells him to stretch out his hand over the Red Sea, and he does, and God creates a temporary pathway to safety that Charleton Heston would eventually make look awesome on film. The Egyptian army is chasing after the Hebrews, who are escaping slavery and cruelty. God had asked Pharaoh over and over, Where is your brother? Where are your siblings? And Pharaoh, over and over, had not only shrugged his shoulders like Cain, but taken this a step uglier and said, “They’re not my brothers. They’re not my sisters. They’re not like me.” When the holy first asked Cain, Where is your brother?, God asked a provocative question. God could have asked, Where’s Abel? But instead, God identified the missing, harmed soul as a member of the family first. Abel is Your Brother. The enslaved Hebrews are Your Brothers and Your Sisters. Don’t forget that we started with only four people on one farm. We may have to draw the more gargantuan family tree that would put Ancestry.com to shame, but eventually we would find that we’re a human family. And even if we don’t think we have ancestors in common, we have God in common, and we have this earth in common. We’re responsible for one another.

In this morning’s New Testament reading, Jesus and Peter bring us right back to where we started with Cain and Abel–if we’re all siblings, that means we’re gonna fight. A lot. Conflict isn’t all bad. It’s natural to butt heads. We fight because we care so much. It’s natural to feel jealous like Cain, or threatened like Pharaoh. Harm will inevitably happen in a human family. But when it does, we have to recognize that harm, apologize for it, take responsibility, and forgive. Cain has to do the work of valuing and protecting Abel’s life, and Abel has to do the work of letting his brother put his grudge behind him. 

Peter knows that Jesus feels this way, he’s heard Jesus talk about the importance of forgiveness before, and he knows forgiveness is work. To Peter, forgiveness is a transaction. You did this much bad to me, so you owe me this much sorry, and then I owe you this much forgiveness. We have multiple stories of Jesus helping people work that out in real time in the public square, and ultimately negotiating a monetary price of forgiveness. It’s about the right number. Peter takes this to heart, and waltzes up to Jesus, hoping to get a pat on the head and a gold star for his numbers. Star pupil Peter asks Jesus, “Jesus, how many times must I forgive? Seven times?” Wow, seven. SUCH a big number. You can tell Peter wasn’t a mathematician. But surely no one has even been so generous as to forgive someone SEVEN times, right?

Unfortunately for Peter, this week’s question from God is not one that is meant to make you feel rosy, one where you walk away with a gold star. We’ll get there in this book, I promise. Several of these questions are about celebrating who you are, and what you’ve accomplished. But this question is about us realizing that the work of caring for one another is never done, and we can always do better. So Jesus tells Peter, no. Not seven times. Depending on your translation, either seventy seven times, or seven times seventy times. Yikes. I almost majored in math, but even I think those numbers are intimidating. And it’s a lot to ask of us. I have to forgive someone who hurt me seven times seventy times? What if I don’t even want to forgive them once?

Jesus breaks into parable mode: a story that didn’t really happen, but could have. A story about folks who struggled with this exact question–Where is your brother? An Average Joe owes a bazillion dollars to the Jeff Bezos of First Century Palestine. Jeff Bezos looks through his ledger and discovers the debt, and demands that Average Joe pays immediately. Mind you, Money Bags doesn’t need this debt repaid because he’s starving without it. He probably didn’t even know it was missing until he looked it up. In all the years he hoarded money that he couldn’t spend in ten lifetimes, God asked him “Where is your brother?”, and he told himself it was just the wind. But Average Joe begs him–please be merciful. I’m your brother. It’s a harsh world, one where your debts followed not just you, but your family, and if you couldn’t pay them, your whole family could be thrown in jail. Think about what it would be like to live in that world. In a world where your whole family could be imprisoned for life because you couldn’t repay the $5 your friend spotted you for Starbucks last week…how would you feel about asking for help? It was a society with no compassion. But Jesus illumines something important with this parable: just because we’ve seen people make heartless choices before, doesn’t mean they can’t surprise us. Sometimes we remember that we are one human family. This rich king remembers that the Joe Schmoe in front of him is his brother, forgives his debt, and lets him go.

But Joe learns nothing from the king’s radical compassion. He walks down the street and sees a friend who owed him a buck. The friend says, “Oh, man, I’m so sorry, my wallet is in my other jacket. Can I pay you back tomorrow?” God says, Where is your brother, Joe? And Average Joe doesn’t see his brother right in front of him, but throws him in debtor’s prison instead. And then the king puts Joe back on the hook for his debt. The message is clear: in a world where we hold grudges and resentments over one another, in a world where we don’t see our neighbors as our siblings, we’re not creating anything nice. We’re building a huge prison that will lock us all up. Where is your brother? If you can answer that question, you liberate not only your brother, but yourself, too.

I was working through this sermon, and this heavy question that God asks us, just as our nation observed the 25th anniversary of the September 11th Terrorist Attacks. Those of you who follow me on Facebook have heard some of these sentiments from me, but that sobering anniversary started in an extra painful way. I woke up at 6 to start getting my kids ready for school, and I rolled over in bed and grabbed my phone off the nightstand and checked my feeds on Facebook and Instagram. Note to self: don’t do that. I gotta stay off social media until I’m at least out of bed. But the very first posts my algorithm showed me that day were what I would call “rage bait”, or social media content that someone made in bad faith, not to sincerely voice their feelings but rather to make other folks angry. The internet is full of rage bait. It creeps into your feeds even if you do all you can to avoid it. And bright and early on September 11th, the rage bait posts were telling me who I can never forgive, whose descendants I need to lock up in a debtor’s prison…who could never be my brother, my sister, my sibling. #Neverforget. The public scorn toward Muslims and folks from the Middle East is harsher now than it was in the weeks and months after 9/11, which is saying quite a lot.

9/11 is a national trauma, one that wounded everyone who lived back then, and one that passes wounds down to every new generation. And the hurt, the grief, the anger, the fear, those are all very real. It’s a trauma on a scale that makes us finally understand what Jesus taught Peter. Forgiving seven times isn’t enough. Forgiveness isn’t a one-time transaction, it’s a slow process of accepting the broken pieces, little by little, and building something new from it. It’s waking up every morning, reading another news headline about war with the Middle East, and finding a way to put that in a box to get through the day. It’s looking at a permanently changed NY skyline and learning to appreciate a new thing. It’s waiting in line at airport security for 20 minutes and putting your shoes in a bin and your laptop in another, and remembering the days when security just took a quick peek at your carry on and let you go on ahead. It’s hearing every year how many people lost loved ones, how many victims’ remains have still not been identified, and explaining to my kids why the grownups are extra weary. How many times have we revisited that day? Seven times? Seventy times? Seventy seven times? Seven times seventy times? A million and seven times? Dude, who knows, I stopped counting. God asked, Where is your brother? To ears that wouldn’t hear it, and those ears will have to answer the question someday. But before the sadness and rage bait does us in, let’s never forget that God has asked all of us, over and over and over for 25 years, Where is your brother? Where are your siblings? And we’ve answered by coming together, helping one another, extending generosity, and being a people of peace. But a truly peaceful people extends that Shalom, one layer at a time, seven times seventy times a million and seven times over, until we’ve accounted to every Brother, every Sister, every Sibling on earth, we’ve faced the harm we’ve suffered and the harm we’ve caused, and we’ve forgiven, and made a plan to do better.

Let’s be our Siblings’ Keeper.

Amen.