Introduction to BSA by new member Steve Hunsaker, May 7:
My name is Steve Hunsaker. I currently live in Salt Lake City. I was born and raised in Los Angeles. I have always enjoyed studying the stories from the Bible. I hope to contribute to this community [BSA] as much as you all have given to me…and I just joined last week!
I live my life as if God exists, striving to become a being of love. If there is a God, then God must be love. Every attribute of God must be as infinite as Himself. God cannot be sometimes loving and sometimes not. As Kierkegaard has said, “If one ceases to be loving, then one was not loving.” God’s essential mode of being is love. All virtues and attributes of God, serve love. If the image of God is love and we are created in that image, then we share the same essential mode of being, which is love.
Love demands that we love, regardless of skin color, gender, identity, sexual preference, political alignment, ethnicity, culture, church membership, religious beliefs, etc.
“To love another person is to see the face of God.” This image of God is not hair, eyeballs, nose or mouth. The only authentic image of God is humanity itself. On my account, the image of God is always moving to love – and that we are that love, embodied. Our hands and feet are the hands and feet of love. Practicing love daily will transform us, like the metamorphosis from caterpillar to butterfly, a metanoia to become a being of love.
Transforming into a being of love looks like a miracle. Creating miracles for others looks like being an angel. Being an angel to others looks like bearing their burdens. Bearing the burdens of others looks like fulfilling the law of love. Fulfilling the law of love looks like heaven. Heaven on earth looks like living with those we love.
I do not believe any religion or church to be true…and I am not even sure what that means.
This life might just be the only life we get, so why not try to make heaven?
Original Post
By Steve Hunsaker, 5/21/2025 – For me, the story of Cain and Abel is deeply meaningful.
“A certain man had two sons…” (Luke 15:11) Cain and Abel.
I think it is safe to assume that all sons seek the favor of their father (and their mother). Cain and Abel both sacrifice. They both offer something of value. They are both obedient. Could they both have been seeking the favor of their father, mother or as the story states, God?
As a father of two sons myself, I do not favor one over the other. I love them both very much. I love them equally.
But, as a son, I have sought the favor of my father, mother and God. During my youth and as a young adult, there have been many times when I have offered something of value to them with the hopes of earning their favor. As the oldest son of my parents, and therefore, the oldest brother – there have been many times where I have decided to hate my brothers or my parents because they did not show me any love or favor for what I had done for them. But, as I have grown older, I have learned a lot about love. I misunderstood love. I feel like I understand it a lot better now.
We are taught at an early age to offer up cookies for Santa Claus, to offer up a tooth for the tooth fairy and ultimately offer up our will, our obedience to God – all with the hopes of earning their favor.
We have told ourselves ridiculous stories about how love is a reward, when in truth, love is the law. Love cannot be deserved. Love is never a reward to be earned. Love is a verb and not a noun. Love requires my participation, not my perfection. There is no commandment to make ourselves perfectly lovable, because God never gave it.
Cain treats love as a reward that he has failed to earn. He treats love as a noun that he could, with very hard work, obtain. He treats God’s law as a measure for whether he deserves to be loved. The story Cain is telling himself is that love is about being loved and earning love…not about loving others.
Likely, Cain offered up a sacrifice and received nothing in return. This is the danger of being taught about Santa Claus and the tooth fairy…because it may teach us to believe that God is like some cosmic, celestial, heavenly vending machine. When bad things happen to us, after we have offered up our cookies and teeth, our good deeds to others, and even our sacrifices to God…can we, do we, still participate in love?
Treating love as a reward, we will always find that we have failed to deserve it and having failed to deserve it…Cain is filled with guilt and shame which leads to envy, resentment, anger and ultimately murder.
We constantly incorrectly interpret the symptoms of guilt and shame as signs that God does not love (favor) us because we do not deserve to be loved. As the older brother, Cain believes that love is a conditional reward. He thinks that favor can be deserved. He feels guilt and shame because there is something broken inside of himself. Filled with anger, the older brother refuses to join in the law of loving. (Luke 15:28) Cain thinks that love is a reward and he has earned it! His anger makes him a stranger to his brother and he hates his brother. So, Cain eventually kills his brother Abel. So sad!
It is impossible to use God’s law as a weapon for excluding others from love without also harming ourselves. Cain, feeling the weight of his burden and punishment, asks God for assistance. God does not destroy him.
Even after the first recorded evil act in the scriptures of Israel, God spares Cain. Cain goes on to have a family of his own.
The parable of “a certain man had two sons” (Luke 15:11) is best summarized by Nikolai Berdyaev who said, “The world began with a question from God, ‘Cain, where is thy brother Abel?’ and it will end with a question from God, ‘Abel, where is thy brother Cain?’”
I am writing about all of the instances of “a certain man had two sons…”. There are many stories to choose from and each have their own depth and their own meaning. Each story has a lesson of love within it. Quite remarkable. It might just be that the parable is asking us to research all of the certain parents, with their sons & daughters. What do we learn from them?
Response to Steve by Charles Bledsoe:
Once again I think we’re on the same page. To my mind it’s an error, a theological and soteriological error, to apply the ethic of earning to God’s love, or to conceive it to be meritocratic. My theology on God’s love is that it’s God’s nature, God’s ontologically fundamental mode of being and relationality; and that the upshot of this is that God can only relate to us in a loving, agapeic fashion, God can’t do otherwise, and so we don’t have to merit or secure God’s love and compassion by being obedient or righteous, nor can we forfeit God’s love by sinning grievously, even as grievously as Cain. Rather, being authentically conformed to God’s will and justified is merely a matter of making ourselves receptive to God’s love, of getting and living on the divine wavelength of love, so to speak.
Being blessed with the full benefit of God’s love does require something on our part, however; but what’s required is only our attunement to it, not our earning it. Love is always freely on offer from God, but we have to take God up on what God offers, and stop alienating ourselves from divine tenderness and benevolence. God’s love is not coercive, its full enjoyment won’t be forced upon us if we willfully choose to reject it.
Response to Steve from Michael L Waddell:
That was a lovely sermon. (I mean that without the mocking connotations people usually imply when calling something a metaphorical sermon! This is what sermons should be.)
I grew up hearing the parable you mentioned as “The Parable of the Prodigal Son.” I see now that the NRSV-ue names it “The Parable of the Prodigal and His Brother.” That’s much better. It’s as much about the “good” brother and what he needs to learn, as it is about the prodigal one.
Interestingly, scholars think that this parable was originally (in its Lukan context) crafted to symbolically describe two ethnoi, Jews and Greeks, showing that the God found the latter just as worthy as the former, even though they had lived without God for centuries. And the Cain and Abel story, according to Hendel et al, was originally about relationships between nations/tribes as well, the Kennites who farmed and the Habelites (?) who herded. And even if those particular meanings don’t resonate with us much anymore, it still encourages me to “love my brother” by encouraging my community to show love to members of other communities, people who are not like us and who might have been treated in ways far from brotherly in the past.
Steve’s Response to Michael:
Michael L Waddell – thank you for your remarks. It just might make a nice sermon, but that was certainly not my intent. Thank you for taking it the right way. I do tend to write that way though, perhaps I should work on not being so preachy.
Amy Jill Levine has taught me a lot about parables. She has said, that parables “afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.”
I firmly believe that parables should not be titled, for each character in the parable is equally important. Titles taint how parables are interpreted.
She has also taught me that when there are other parables seemingly within the same conversation, they too matter! For example, the other two parables in Luke 10, contribute to the interpretation of “a certain man had two sons…”.
Looking at all three, there is something about counting. Counting and noticing that 1 of 100 is missing, then 1 of 10 is missing, then 1 of 2 is missing.
When a Jewish teacher is teaching a Jewish audience, a Jewish story, and they hear “a certain man had two sons”, they may very well think of any one of many of those sons with their fathers, from the stories of Israel.
And this is why I love the Bible. For me, it is masterfully written.
