May 28, 2026
Then the Lord said to Cain, “Where is your brother Abel?” He said, “I do not know; am I my brother’s keeper?”
Genesis 4:9
As I was driving to work the other morning, there was a news story on the radio about the ongoing battle in many communities to keep data centers out. The reporter misspoke, saying that this topic has “entered the social conscience.” She meant to say, the concern over placement of data centers and their environmental and human impact has become a topic of which we’ve all become aware in the, “social consciousness,” of America. But she was more right than she intended. We aren’t just aware of it, we are wrestling with the moral and ethical question of, “if this is too dangerous for my backyard, is it too dangerous for everyone’s backyard?”
The old saying that should guide us as believers is, “if they are children, they are our children.” The first family of scripture loved to pass the buck… the woman made me do it… the snake made me do it. Is it any wonder one of their kids murdered the other and then when questioned responded, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” As humans, we are terribly good at protecting our own interests and skilled at ignoring the same impact on others.
I was never more aware of this than when I toured the Holocaust Museum in Israel, the Yad Vashem. I walked through exhibits about Germans forcing Jews into cramped neighborhoods with limited access to food and drinking water, and curtailed civil and human rights. I read the plaques and watched the videos side by side with armed 18 year olds in Israeli IDF uniforms and AK’s slung over their shoulders. Each exhibit asked the same question… how can one human being do this to another? And then we left the museum. I watched those uniformed kids walk back to guard a Palestinian slum nearby, surrounded by razor wire.
Whether it’s the building of data centers in any part of our country that can’t afford the legal battle, the funding of schools for poor children, someone else’s children sent to war to fight, relief workers arrested in the Mediterranean for bringing food to starving people, or families fleeing violence to work menial jobs to provide a better life for their children… we must always ask ourselves the same question and wrestle with the obvious answer. Am I my brother’s keeper?
Prayer
Lord, make me ever aware that the answer to any question of care and compassion for enemy or neighbor, stranger or brother, is always yes. Give me the strength to be the keeper and caregiver to all who I am able to be. Amen.
Rev. Brian Daoust
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