Cain’s not Able

I was working on my notes for next week’s Grace in The Shadows lecture on Cain and Abel and I couldn’t help but think how pertinent Cain’s story is for us today.

It is interesting that when Eve names her first son she chooses to call him “Cain” a name which means “Acquisition”. Cain becomes the father of all who are acquisitive and driven to succeed. It is possible that she felt that in her first born son she had given birth to the child of the promise. However, far from bruising Satan’s head he would break his mother’s heart.

They must be tamed in Christ and we must move from a state of drivenness to one of desire. For when we are driven we are obsessed with an endless desire to prove ourselves to other people. However when we are governed by desire we are only intent on expressing ourselves for other people.

Never was this truer than today as the Credit Crunch bites even deeper into the psyche of our free market economy. I can’t help but reflect back to 1987. It was a year that I’ll remember for two reasons. It was the year I came to faith and secondly it was the year that the Financial Markets imploded. In 1987 I was working for the Merchant Baker J Henry Schroder Wagg’s retail arm and had a front row seat from which to view the chilling drama.

I have often said that it is not experience that is the best teacher. It is evaluated experience that is the best teacher. As this latest boom and bust saga unfolds I can’t help wonder what if anything we learnt from the 80’s experience.

That period in the 80’s was immortalised by the iconic movie Wall Street in which Michael Douglas’ character Gordon Gekko popularised the phrase “greed is good” it seems that 20 years later with the market in meltdown that we’ve failed to learn the lessons from that period of excess. In fact if Dick Fuld, the aptly named “Gorilla of Greed” ex Lehmann Brothers boss and 21^st century poser-child of greed is anything to go by it would seem that Gekko’s comment has been revised for the new post-modern-poster-Christian- millennium to read “greed is god.” And those who have the most are the most. I can scarcely imagine how one man can “compensate” himself to the tune of $250,000,000 in one fiscal year.

However before I point too accusing a finger at the Wall Street Titans of Greed I am conscious that we in the church have some housekeeping of our own to do. It is a sad commentary on the church and I regret one of the main reasons why people have lost confidence in the church that the very simple message of God’s unconditional love and acceptance has been commoditised into some dreadful parody. Our Rogue Traders maraud around the globe hypnotising people into believing in a hateful fear-based-pay-up-and-and-pay-up-if you don’t want your life to fall apart Christianity. We have our very own menagerie of Greedy Gorillas whose “compensation” is equally mind-boggling. The whole dreadful prosperity ministry the Bible belt’s equivalent of Wall Street is of much more concern to me than the problems on Wall Street.

If I am reading the press correctly then the underlying reason that the market in such a funk is that it has evidently lost confidence in itself and so nobody trusts anybody. My fear is that if we don’t get our house in order then the same will be true of the church. It may in fact already be too late. It high time that those of us who try to stand for genuine Christian values become more vocal in standing up for what’s right.

Isaiah 31:1

“ Woe to those who go down to Egypt for help and rely on horses, who trust in chariots because they are many and in horsemen because they are very strong, but do not look to the Holy One of Israel or consult the Lord!

Just as investors have been deceived into believing that the only way is up be it for stocks and shares or house prices certain sections of the church have hoodwinked people into thinking that godliness is a means to financial gain. Shame on us!

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