“Cain, Abel and Us”

A Sermon by

Rev. Robert M. Hardies

All Souls Church, Unitarian

Washington, D.C.

Sunday, 15 November 2009

Our reading this morning is from the Book of Genesis, Chapter 4, verses one through fifteen. 

Adam and Eve bore two sons, Cain and Abel.  Now Abel kept flocks, and Cain worked the soil.  In the course of time, Cain brought some of the fruits of the soil as an offering to God.  But Abel brought fat portions from some of the firstborn of his flock.  God looked with favor on Abel and his offering, but on Cain and his offering God did not look with favor.  So Cain was very angry, and his face was downcast.

Then God said to Cain, “Why are you angry?  Why is your face downcast?  If you do what is right, will you not be accepted?  But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must master it.”

Now Cain said to his brother Abel, “Let’s go out to the field.”  And while they were in the field, Cain attacked his brother Abel and killed him.

Then God said to Cain, “Where is your brother, Abel?”

“I don’t know,” replied Cain.  “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

Then God cried, “What have you done?  Listen!  Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground.  Now you are under a curse.  When you work the ground, it will no longer yield its crops for you.  You will be a restless wanderer on the earth.” 

Cain said to the Lord, “My punishment is more than I can bear.  Today you are driving me from the land, and I will be hidden from your presence; I will be a restless wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me.” 

But God said to him, “Not so; if anyone kills Cain, he will suffer vengeance seven times over.”  Then God put a mark on Cain so that no one who found him would kill him.  So Cain went out from God’s presence and lived in the land of Nod, east of Eden.

In the fourth chapter of Genesis, when Cain murders his brother Abel in a fit of jealousy, God recoils in horror at the crime:  “Where is your brother?” God demands, “What have you done?  Listen!  His spilt blood cries out to me from the ground.”

Where is your brother?  What have you done?  Tragically, this ancient story and these questions have never ceased to have relevance for us.

In 2002, John Allen Muhammad – known to many of us as the D.C. Sniper – terrorized our community.  In broad daylight, he picked us off, one-by-one, with a semi automatic rifle.  Muhammad was a soldier, a veteran of the first Gulf War, where he had been trained as a marksman.  So he rarely missed his targets.  A mother shopping for her children’s Halloween costumes at the mall.  A man filling his tank at the gas station.  A 13-year-old boy playing on a crowded schoolyard.  By the end of his 21-day rampage, Muhammad and his accomplice, Lee Boyd Malvo, had killed ten and wounded three.

“Where is your brother?  What have you done?”

How many of us were living in D.C. back then?  [Hands raised]  Then you remember those days, don’t you?  How scared and anxious we were.  How folks changed their commutes to avoid intersections where the sniper had killed.  How we shut down recess and made our children crouch down in the passenger seat of the car so they wouldn’t be targets.  How we warily eyed every white service van that passed us, because that’s what the sniper was allegedly driving.  It was not an easy month.  And, of course, just a year earlier we’d suffered through the 9/11 terror attacks, and then the anthrax scare.  It was all getting to be a little too much, frankly.  We found ourselves wondering what was happening to our world, whether something had fundamentally changed.  Already suffering from post-traumatic stress, we were in no mood to be terrorized again.

Which is why, when they finally caught him, the authorities did all they could to make sure that Muhammad was tried and sentenced in Virginia – not Maryland or DC – but Virginia.  Because in Virginia he could be subject to the ultimate punishment, the punishment for which everyone was clamoring:  death.

And so it was that this past Tuesday, November 20^th, seven years after his despicable, crime, John Allen Muhammad was executed.  At 9:00 p.m., before a crowd of prison officials, reporters and members of the victims’ families, executioners at the Greensville Correctional Facility just outside of Richmond pumped into Muhammad’s veins a lethal cocktail of three drugs:  the first to put him to sleep, the second to stop his breathing, the third to stop his heart.  He was pronounced dead at 9:11 p.m., having never one expressed one iota of remorse for the suffering he’d caused.

Since Tuesday, in order to prepare for this sermon, I’ve found myself going back over all the old arguments for and against the death penalty, the long list of pros and cons that we’ve all heard before.  Questions about deterrence and efficiency and cost.  Questions about what represents adequate justice and punishment.  And at one point I thought that today I’d trot all those arguments out for you.  But you know them already.  You don’t need to hear them again.  And, more importantly, none of those pros and cons really spoke to what I’ve been struggling with all week since the execution.

On Tuesday night, when I heard the news of Muhammad’s execution, I began to feel ill.  Sick to my stomach.  Nauseous.  And I couldn’t get out of my head those ancient words:  “Where is your brother?  What have you done?”  Except this time those words were accusing me.  And have been haunting me ever since.  “What have I done?”  What have we done?  I say “we” because this execution was carried out in our name.  We were the ones terrorized by Muhammad, and it was in all of our names that he was killed.

This is what was making me sick:  A nagging sense that I was complicit in an act of murder.  And that my humanity – that our humanity – had been degraded because of it.  You know, it was the same thing I felt when we first saw the photos and heard the news coming out of the prisons of Abu Ghraib.  Forced to once again swallow the bile of human degradation, human defilement, I was sick to my stomach.

Since Tuesday, I’ve found myself struggling with a question that I know many of you have struggled with.  You know, every year on my first Sunday back from summer vacation, we have a service in which I answer questions submitted in advance by members of the congregation.  And every year, without failure, one of the most frequently submitted questions is some version of the question:  “Must we respect the worth and dignity of those who refuse to respect the worth and dignity of others?”   Must we respect the worth and dignity of people who commit evil?

And the answer, I believe, has to be “yes.”  Yes, we must respect the worth and dignity of those who fail to respect others’ worth and dignity, because if we don’t then we erode the very dignity that we cherish and seek to protect.  Every time the state kills in our name, it demonstrates less respect for life, not more.  Less respect for human dignity, not more.  Every time the state kills in our name, we cede the moral high ground from which we judge those who kill.  We lower ourselves to the level of those whose acts we abhor.  Or maybe even below their level.  Because we don’t have the excuse of being criminally insane, or of committing a crime of passion.  When the state kills it is with cold premeditation and democratic consent.  Just like on Good Friday when Pontius Pilate tries to wash his hands of the death of Jesus, and turns the decision over to the people.  He asks, “What should I do with him?”  What do the people shout?  “Crucify him!  Crucify him!”  We debase ourselves when we do this.  It was the stench of that debasement that made me sick to my stomach on Tuesday night.

I’ll give the Commonwealth of Virginia credit for one thing, though.  At least the Commonwealth had the guts to tell the truth about what it was doing.  On John Allen Muhammad’s death certificate, the cause of death will be listed as “homicide,” the same crime for which he was found guilty.  I find that a rather stunning confession:  “You murdered, and now we’ve murdered you.”  And in that confession lies the moral hypocrisy at the heart of the death penalty.  We want to call the same act, homicide, a “crime” in one circumstance and “justice” in another.  And we can’t have it both ways.  We can’t have it both ways.

Since Tuesday, there’s been surprisingly little reflection on Muhammad’s execution.  What little there has been seems to have quickly coalesced around a consensus that justice was served.  And that Muhammad’s execution finally puts this awful nightmare behind us.  “Closure” is the operative word.  Now folks can have closure.  In an essay on the front page of Wednesday’s Post, reporter Paul Duggan wrote:  “It’s done now.”  “Accounts are settled.”  “Case closed.”

But is it?  Have we really achieved closure?  Or have we – by killing John Allen Muhammad – merely perpetuated the cycle of violence?  John Allen Muhammad was trained by the U.S. Army to be a killer in Iraq.  He returned home with Gulf War Syndrome and killed his neighbors instead.  As punishment, we killed him.  Now, nearly 20 years after the start of the first Gulf War, we’re still fighting a war in Iraq.  And just last week another soldier, Major Nidal Hasan, is believed to have cracked under the stress and killed 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas.  Will we demand his death, too?  Will that bring closure?  Will that end the cycle of violence?  Or does it just spin on and on?

As long as the cycle of violence is perpetuated there is no closure and there is no justice.  We need to reclaim the higher moral ground and end the cycle of violence.  Killers must be punished.  The crimes Muhammad committed cry out for justice, just like Abel’s spilled blood cried out from the ground in Genesis.  Justice must be served, but if our intent is also to restore the value of human worth and dignity, then we need to do something besides murdering murderers.  We need to find ways to uphold and reaffirm the worth and dignity of the human being, even in the presence of murder.

Do you remember the movie Dead Man Walking, with Sean Penn and Susan Sarandon?  Sarandon portrayed Sister Helen Prejean, a New Orleans nun whose ministry is to death row inmates and their victims.  Prejean has visited people on death row for over twenty years.  And has accompanied six people to the death chamber.  She says that when each of them was killed she asked them to look at her as they lay dying.  “I want them to see a loving face when they die,” she writes.  “I want my face to carry the love that tells them that they and every one of us are worth more than our most terrible acts.”

God has a face of justice.  No doubt.  But God has a face of mercy, too.  And it looks a lot like the face of Sister Helen Prejean, looking into the eyes of a killer and telling him that he is loved.  And in doing so, re-affirming the worth and dignity of all of us.  Now, we’re not God.  And the state isn’t Sister Helen Prejean.  But if we are going to find a form of justice that restores human dignity rather than further eroding it, then we’re going to need to learn from people like her.  We must abolish the death penalty once and for all, and find a new form of justice.  [Applause]

Until we do so, that ancient accusation will continue to ring in our ears, calling us to account:

“Where is your brother?  What have you done?”

Amen.

[Applause]