The Blame Game

            One of you recently asked me, “don’t you get tired of telling us the same thing every week?”  Somewhat proudly I responded, “What do you mean? I’ve yet to use the same sermon twice (at least not completely).”  Your response was, “I mean generally speaking.  You tell us every week that we are miserable sinners and God loves us anyway.”    

            There is really no arguing with that, I guess, but I hope I am not always that abrupt about it though.  I don’t think I’ve ever actually said “miserable sinner” in a sermon before—maybe a sorry sinner but never a miserable one!

Jokes aside, I hope I always follow the message of your sinfulness with the message of your belovedness.  I hope this because this is the gospel that I know through Jesus Christ.  I don’t get tired for preaching this sermon because Jesus preaches this sermon to me every Sunday too.

            This is a sermon that I don’t get tired of hearing because it sounds almost too good to be true.  It's like I need to hear it again to make sure I got it right.  Bishop Stough used to say that God saved the toughest cases for the priesthood--that's why I have to tell the same story every week!  

            So because this news seems to good to be true, God calls us miserable sinners back to church to remind us of the eternal truth of his justice and mercy, God reminds us that we are all sinners of his own redeeming.  And every Sunday, we act like that 3-year-old who keeps asking, “buy why God?” 

But why do you love me God?  I didn’t help that homeless guy on the side of the road this week.  I didn’t call my friend who is having a hard time because I was just too tired.  I spread a rumor about someone that was only half-way true. 

  But why do you love that miserable sinner two pews in front of me God?  They were rude to the cashier at the grocery store yesterday.  They didn’t hold the door open for me at church.  They didn’t do what they promised they would do.    

And when we finally stop asking why, God will say, “Because I said so!  I said at the beginning of time that I would always love you. Don’t believe me?  Here I’ll show you how much I love you.  Here is my Son, Jesus, whom I will sacrifice for you. Are you finished asking why?”   

In today’s Epistle lesson, Paul is trying to convey to the Galatians that the gospel of Christ does not appeal to human understanding.  Paul hammers this point home by using his own life as an example of God’s unbelievable love for all people.

Paul reminds the Galatians that he was one of the most miserable sinners of all time, a persecutor of the church, but God chose Paul, of all people, to be a messenger of the gospel. 

 Paul understands more than most that the gospel message defies human logic and that God’s favor has nothing to do with human effort and everything to do with what God in Christ chose to do for us. 

(Saul condones the stoning of Stephen - Above altar at St. Paul's Selma)

Paul understands more than most that the gospel is saturated with grace, saturated with the idea that your life is valuable not because you have done anything special but because someone else did something special for you, someone else makes your life valuable. 

And for this reason Paul can sound arrogant when he says, “and they glorified God because of me.”  Paul isn’t proclaiming how special he is.  Paul is proclaiming how God made someone as miserable as him special.  And if God can transform someone as miserable as Paul, then God can change anybody.     

Paul goes on to say that the gospel doesn’t appeal from human logic because the gospel isn’t of human origin, the gospel is of God, the gospel is revealed in Christ Jesus.  Do you really think humanity could come up with a message as radical as this one?  Again, like 3-year olds, we are too concerned with fairness to come up with God’s message of grace.

            Earlier this week the internet went crazy over a mom who lost track of her son long enough for him to fall into a Gorilla pit at the zoo. The horrifying event went viral on the social media from people who witnessed the account first hand with their smart phones.  As the story developed, the gospel that derives from human understanding started getting passed around—the blame game.  A game humans have excelled at since the beginning of time...(exhibit A: Adam and Eve)

            In the end, the mother of the boy came out as the biggest villain.  Her entire life was put under a microscope.  Talking heads dissected her every move.  The mother was made out to be both negligent mother and a hater of animals.  The mother lost the blame game.  Upon reflection, the whole event reminded me just how lacking the gospel according to human understanding is.

According to our human sensibilities, if blame can be put squarely on the shoulders of someone else, then we are justified and our hands are clean.  Perhaps, the biggest problem of the human gospel of blame is that it makes flawed human beings both the judge and jury.  We remove ourselves from the equation and act as if we are somehow innocent and above failure.

One of my classmates from seminary noted about the zoo incident, “sometimes bad things happen and there is nobody to blame.”  While I understand this point of view, it seems lacking because blame has to go somewhere even if it is split in several directions. 

I was more satisfied in what a blogger for Mockingbird said, “Sometimes terrible things happen, and there are no mechanisms for blame that will make anyone feel better…I wish that we could see ourselves in the trauma.  I wish that we would remember those times that we have completely lost control.”

In other words, we are all guilty.  Anytime something goes terribly wrong in our community, in our world, we all must be ready to admit that we are just as liable to make the same mistake.  We must be ready to admit that we are the lucky ones because we didn’t get caught or experience the consequences.  We must be ready to admit that it could happen to us.  And what then? 

When tragedies happen that involve human sin and brokenness, I hope we find the grace to remember the the words of Jesus, “let the one who has not sinned cast the first stone.”  I also hope we find the grace to remember that there is one person, in fact, who did not sin. Jesus, the only judge who is righteous, does not cast a stone but instead says to the woman caught in adultery, “your sins are forgiven, go and sin no more.”

The only one who could possibly judge this woman for her actions shows mercy and encourages amendment of life.  Surely, this is a gospel not of human origin but of divine revelation in Jesus Christ.   This logic doesn’t make sense to human ideas of fairness and justice. 

Even more, the woman caught in adultery lives in the same world as we do.  Much like a poor single woman today, this woman has no one to advocate for her.  This woman lives in the same world where judges give men with promising futures lesser sentences because their lives are deemed “more valuable” than the rest.  But Jesus choses to show her, of all people, mercy. 

Again, the gospel of Christ is proclaiming a radically different message.  The gospel of Christ shows mercy first to the poor, lowly, and disenfranchised (see lesson from Kings and Luke (Track 2) for today)—something that seldom happens in the human courtroom.

Yes, it seems as if the message of grace is too good to be true.  And when it starts to seem too good to be true, we abandon the same old message of God loving us miserable sinners. We look for somewhere to pin the blame.  We look for the most vulnerable and take it out on them.  We look for Gorilla mom because we want blood.  And blood is what God gives us. 

Jesus, the One who became the most vulnerable was nailed to a cross for all of us miserable sinners and the world was put to shame.  Jesus, the only One who did not sin, took the blame that was ours. 

And the good news is that Jesus rose from the dead to show us life beyond the blame game, a life where mercy reigns.  Jesus rose from the dead to show us what it means to really live into this title we are given at baptism—beloved child of God. 

Beyond the cross and the grave, God calls us to be a people who don’t have to play the blame game anymore.  Beyond the cross, God calls us to be a people who are done trying to live according the flawed logic of fairness.  Beyond the cross, God calls us to be a people who are alive because we live according to a love so powerful that it isn’t fair to anyone.  And this is what everlasting life looks like because God said so.  And so it is.  Amen.