The murder of a brother is an unspeakable evil, but what Cain did was even worse: he tried to cover it up. "Where is Abel your brother?" asked God, and Cain replied, "I do not know."

Cain spent the rest of his days, as he said, as "a fugitive and a wanderer, trying to hide from God, from others, and from himself what he had done. Perhaps he hoped someone would kill him and free him from that exile but God closed that avenue of escape. How often Cain must have thought of taking his own life, but the fear that something worse might follow death stayed his hand.

The story of Cain and Abel is not really the story of how sin began, it's the story of sin's consequences. The first eleven chapters of Genesis are the story of sin's beginnings, spread, and results. It begins with the first couple in paradise, spreads to their children, and doesn't stop until the entire world is infected.

I want to call your attention to sin's two primary symptoms: death and alienation or separation. The Cain and Abel story illustrates both of them. Death is obvious; Cain slays Abel. Then Cain is separated from God, from his family, from all human contact-even from that which is most truly himself. Cain's inner turmoil indicated that he was at war with himself.

The story of Cain and Abel is not just a pious legend; it happens every day. We are always murdering the Abel is in our lives and paying the price in the currency of emotional distress and human conflict. Very few of us actually take up weapons and do in the people we don't like, but there are more subtle, insidious forms of murder.

Frederick Buechner has written that "of all the seven deadly sins, anger is possibly the most fun." Sometimes I really enjoy chewing over old injuries and imagining what I'd like to do to the people who inflicted them.

And then there is alienation. Scottish author George MacDonald wrote that the "one principle of hell is 'I am my own'." Jean Paul Sartre said, "Hell is other people." He was dead wrong.

If we refuse help to others or turn away the offer of help, will God say to us in the end, "Very well, have it the way you like it"? Surely, the most unimaginable horror would be to be alone with oneself forever.

Paul sets up an interesting contrast. He bids his Roman readers to "consider themselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus." On one side we have sin; on the other God. Sin is the principle of death and alienation, but God is Life and Love. How easy it is for us to forget that sin yields death, but God offers life abundant and everlasting!

How often I have heard the old saw: "Everything that is fun is either sinful or fattening." It is said that William Gladstone, prime minister to England's Queen Victoria, was the most righteous man in all England - and the most boring. Martin Luther complained that the devil had all the best music -- and then Luther took a dance tune and turned it into Christendom's most popular hymn: A Mighty Fortress is Our God.

In C.S. Lewis' The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the children from earth learn that Narnia is ruled by an evil witch who has declared it will always be winter and never Christmas. Then they discover that Narnia will be saved when Asian reappears.