6/19/60

Who is to Blame?

Scripture: Philippians 2: 1-13

Text: Philippians 2: 12-13; “Work out your own salvation ... for it is God that worketh in you.”

One of the fascinating facets of Bible study is the discovery that the Book records such a wide range of mankind’s experience in awareness of his God. Some of man’s reactions to his understanding of the Creator appear very primitive to people of our time. Some of the ways which earlier folk had of acknowledging God’s supremacy are a direct challenge to the confidence and selfishness which we have.

One of the instances of rather primitive understanding is found in the Old Testament book of Leviticus at the 16th chapter. The children of Israel had not long been out of Egyptian slavery. During the time that they wandered as nomads in the wilderness, they were under the leadership of Moses and of Moses’ brother Aaron. Moses was the man of decision, and of powerful leadership, but he was slow of speech. Aaron was often his spokesman and he served as the high priest of the Hebrew faith.

It appeared to Aaron that God was commanding his people in some such fashion as this: “A live goat shall be presented. And Aaron shall lay his hands upon the head of the goat, and confess the iniquities of Israel, and all their transgressions and sins. And he shall put them upon the head of the goat, and shall send him away into the wilderness. And the goat shall bear upon him all the iniquities of the people.” [Leviticus 16: 6-10]. What a simple formula that would be for the confession and eradication of a people’s sins!

When the conscious burden of wrong becomes too great to bear, look around for a goat. By some mysterious frankness, put the guilt on the head of the goat and then drive him away, carrying your guilt away with him. This scapegoat concept is obviously primitive. But it does have the primary recognition of man’s sinfulness, and the need to do something about it.

This idea of an “out” has crept into some of our Christian theology. In this kind of thinking, Jesus has become the scapegoat. And all that is required of the faithful is that we cast our sins upon him and he will, in miraculous fashion, free us from our iniquities and their consequences.

You can not get rid of evil as easily as that! For that is letting you and me off too easy. Salvation from sin is a process which calls for cooperation between God and man. And man can not so easily duck his part in that cooperative relationship.

Any theological doctrine which appears to free man from the responsibility of tackling his own sins is a dangerous doctrine to handle. Though Jesus is our Lord and Master and Savior in truth, we may not throw our sins and blame upon Jesus, as if he were our scapegoat, and walk away with no further responsibility. The Christian disciple, Paul, understood this, when he advised his followers: “Work out your own salvation, with fear and trembling. For it is God that worketh in you.” Only when God and man work together can sin be overcome.

The beginning of the whole problem lies in the recognition, first, that there is evil in our lives which must be dealt with and overcome. The various forms of selfishness present our constant field of battle. We let ourselves off easy with the recognition that a lot of self interest is necessary, and the supposition that the self-interests of many people somehow work together for a kind of community good. That is a comfortable doctrine for our middle class kind of society. But it needs the penetrating light of God’s demands shed upon it constantly. Middle-class respectability has often concealed its transforming selfishness by using a pretense of brotherhood to cover up a motive that is basically desire for profit. Karl Marx apparently felt it to be his mission to point out this subtle hypocrisy, and to declare that financial interest in making our living had more effect on our character than did our professed ideals! It is possible that the opposition to this declaration is most vehement where it strikes home the hardest!

Nevertheless, the Marxists have consistently been confined by an opposite error. Suspicion of middle-class virtues has always been a part of their revolutionary propaganda. But they have believed that the real virtues of unselfish sharing would blossom like the rose when the proletariat comes to power in a so-called classless society. With the abolition of most private property and with no class exploitation, there would be no meanness, no running after profits, no betraying of one another.

But something is obviously amiss. The so-called classless society has been put to the test; and it is found to be unconcerned with individual worth, more ruthlessly selfish as a class than anything the world has yet seen. The hardness and cruelty of a police regime, which was excused at first as a revolutionary necessity, has become even more ruthless and an official policy. Such things as love, and sympathy, and forgiveness and truthfulness are look upon as bourgeois weaknesses. The Nazis operated under the same kind of disillusionment while claiming to serve the people.

The painful part of the whole sorry picture is that selfishness continues to be a permanent factor in society, which we do not have enough power as individuals to eradicate. At the same time, having admitted the persistent presence of this evil, affecting all of our own lives, we are also in position to see that the grace of God is also a permanent factor, “wearying out evil,” as some Quakers say.

A good family is made up of selfish people, but it holds together because just enough of the self-forgetful spirit is there to renew affection, and forgive mistakes, and preserve trust. With this grace leavening the life, a purposeful minority can build what a majority fails to do. Hope may be reborn out of despair. God can work through a few to the many.

What can be said then to modern people to put the love of God, and the fear of God into effect? Something of this kind is needed in our lives. However, the “fire and brimstone” method of engendering fear no longer produces the desired effect. We are afflicted with an easy-going complacency. But we need to be fearful of being unfaithful!

Another primitive story of the Bible speaks to us at this point. Abraham’s “fear of the Lord” was based upon such a complete trust that he could go out “not knowing whither he should go” but fully trusting the purpose and the guiding of God. He was in the grip of an absolute obligation to give over everything that he had to the will of God. His salvation was worked out in complete, sacrificial trust of God’s command.

According to the Bible account, a day came when God “tempted” or tested Abraham to sacrifice that which he loved best, in order to prove his final devotion to God alone. After years of waiting and disappointment, a son, Isaac, had been born to the aging parents, Abraham and Sarah. And Isaac was more precious than anything else that they knew. But here was the divine urge in Abraham to sacrifice what he loved best.

So he rose up early in the morning, and packed for a trip to the mountain in Moriah. He said nothing to Sarah, his wife, for how could he ever bring himself to say, “Excuse me, Sarah, but I have to go away to sacrifice our son, Isaac.” What good would those words do? By the end of the day, he was ready. He saddled his donkey, gathered a supply of wood, carried some live coals of fire in a pot, packed a knife, took two servants and his son, and started. For three whole days they plodded toward Moriah. When he saw the mountain, he left the two servants and the donkey while he and Isaac climbed up the slopes to the right place.

Naturally Isaac was curious about the mystery of the proceedings. There was wood, and coals of fire, and the knife; but where was the lamb for the burnt offering? “God will provide” was all that he could lean from his silent father. Finally they reached the place. Abraham built a stone altar -- every stone with a heartache -- ; laid the wood, bound his beloved son on the pile, and lifted the knife. His upraised hand seemed to represent the last limit of self-renunciation that he knew. And just at that moment, a voice said to Abraham, “Lay not thine hand upon the lad ... for now I know that thou fearest God, seeing that thou hast not withheld thy son.” Nearby, Abraham saw a ram caught by its horns in the thicket, an unforeseen substitute for his son. [Genesis 22: 1-14]

Well, that ancient story is one of those unparalleled pictures, dramatizing to modern man the mysteries of spiritual conflict and the extremes of complete devotion in working out, with fear and trembling, one’s own salvation with God.

Now let us turn back to that other story of the scapegoat. See how this vicious practice of projecting our guilt and blame on something or someone else, works out in life. During the early days of the Christian movement, Nero, the Roman Emperor, selected the Christians as his scapegoat to divert public attention away from the problems of his empire. The result was that countless hundreds perished in the Roman arena, burned at the stake, or torn by wild beasts.

Adolph Hitler accused the Jews of being Germany’s number one problem. How can we forget the thousands upon thousands who were put to death in carefully planned cold blood at Dachau?

In Russia today, and in China and other communist-dominated countries, the scapegoat is the West. Earlier, the undesired classes of Russia were the scapegoats of the communist party. But since World War II, the party leaders have evidently found it a more unifying policy to promote the common hatred of America and her allies. And so we are painted, persistently and repeatedly, as warmongers intent on conquering the world.

Here in the US we are tempted to let communism be the scapegoat of our ills. Senator Fulbright, addressing the Senate during the recent revolution in Iraq, reminded us of some dangers in this state of mind. He said: “For years we have taken the easy way. Let something go wrong, whether it be in China or Nigeria, and we have a ready answer. The Soviet Union was behind it. What a perfect formula for the evasion of reality and, may I add, what a futile formula! If there is any single factor which more than any other explains the present predicament in which we find ourselves, it is our readiness to use the specter of Soviet communism as a cloak for our own failures. Look through the record of the past ten years and what does it show? When it is a question of spending on anti-Communist propaganda --- tens of millions of dollars are poured out willingly without much critical judgment. But when it has been a question of exchanging students, of interchanging the best of cultural achievements between nations, there has been much rending of hair over economy and the parsimonious doling out of the shekels. We have on a grandiose scale provided peoples of the underdeveloped nations with the weapons of destructive warfare, and have been miserly in providing them weapons to wage war on their own poverty, economic ills and internal weaknesses.” So says the Senator.

In an election year, we are going to do a good deal of “scapegoating” by laying blame for the corporate ills on the party opposite that of our own preference! We have our personal scapegoats as well. The student blames the teacher for the marks that are not what they should be. The parent blames the school for the lacks and gaps in the training of his child, while the teacher is tempted to say you can’t do anything much better than we are doing with the poor material that the home sends us. Poor church attendance is blamed on parents who either did not encourage us to go to church by their example, or are said to have required us too consistently to attend!

Ministers blame the materialistic age for the lacks apparent in their ministry, and parishioners sometimes appear to want more of just about everything except prophetic insight from their ministers. And so the world is full of people easing consciences and trying to justify themselves by passing off their lacks and failures and even their sins to another.

The danger in this mental practice is that it does two harmful things to us. First, it blinds us to our own weaknesses, and promotes the kind of phariseeism that sees the splinter in the other fellow’s eye while ignoring the log in one’s own eye. [Matthew 7: 3] Again, this scapegoat type of thinking tends to excuse every sort of evil, even murder itself, on the premise that the wrongdoer is the victim of unfortunate circumstance or environment. We may, and should, sympathize with people who are handicapped, or brought up in sordid surroundings, or issue from broken and unhappy homes. But there are hosts of boys and girls who have grown up under adverse circumstances who have nevertheless surmounted their difficulties and developed noble characters despite contrary surroundings. We only develop an irresponsible society when we are content to absolve ourselves, or our friends or neighbors, of all responsibility by heaping our sins on an unfortunate past.

We need rather to face our wrongs frankly. “God be merciful to me, a sinner,” and “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me” ought to be habitual prayers for us. The familiar Negro spiritual calls it correctly: “Taint my father, or my mother, but it’s me, O Lord, standin’ in the need of prayer.”

We also need to recognize, and accept, our own responsibility for shaping the thought and conduct of our own generation. Frequently this means standing firm for convictions that are not held by the majority. But it means adventurous thinking.

When Charles Kettering was 76 years of age, having served General Motors for 3 decades of research, he was asked why he looked toward the future with anticipation and hope when he could rest on the laurels of his accomplishment. He replied: “Because it is in the future that I will be spending the rest of my life.”

Progress in any sphere, is the result of right, fearless thinking which sees beyond the years. The American Revolution succeeded because a sincere, sacrificing minority believed in it, for it has been observed that there were more Tories than revolutionists in the colonial era. There came a time when John Adams wrote a great reminder: “Posterity, you will never know how much it cost the present generation to preserve your Freedom. I hope you will make good use of it. If you do not I shall repent it in heaven that I ever took half the pains to preserve it.”

Like our forebears, we must see, and accept, individual responsibility for helping to shape the thought and action of our time instead of blaming something or other for times being “out of joint.”

Ridding our lives of any whining attitude, and assuming a sense of responsibility will give us a consciousness of purpose in life and drive away our feeling of futility. Each day will be ennobled with the thought: “My life has meaning; God needs me and my influence to help Him build a better world.”

Instead of blaming others and seeking scapegoats, let each of us exclaim with sincerity, “Lord, here am I, use me.”

---------------------

Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, June 19, 1960