The Blame Game

The Blame Game (October 21, 2007)

“In those days they shall no longer say: ‘The parents have eaten the sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.’ But all shall die for their own sins; the teeth of everyone who eats sour grapes shall be set on edge.” Jeremiah 31:29

Bob Herbert is one of my favorite columnists in the Times. Last week he wrote about a new book by the veteran comedian Bill Cosby and Harvard Medical School professor Alvin Poussaint called Come on, People: On the Path From Victims to Victors about the problems facing the black community, especially young black men. 

According to Bob Herbert there is “a palpable undercurrent of love throughout” the book yet “it pulls no punches”. It in no way denies the fact of racism but it says clearly that “blaming white people can be a way for some black people to feel better about themselves but it doesn’t pay the electric bills.” According to Mr. Herbert, this is a “tough book”. “Victimhood is cast as the enemy. Defeat, failure, and hopelessness are not to be tolerated.” Hard times and rough circumstances are not excuses for degrading others or allowing oneself to be degraded. In fact, they’re not excuses for anything, except to try harder,” Bob Herbert says.

Now today’s sermon in not about what is ailing the black community. I note there is a whole raft of letters in today’s paper on Hebert’s column, so this is a controversial subject to be sure. Instead, it is about the almost universal human tendency to find the fault for things in some place other than oneself, to place blame on someone else and thereby cast oneself as the Almighty Victim. It happens everywhere – in our national life, in our home lives, in our personal lives, and no group or race has a monopoly on this practice.

Bahram Dehqani-Tafti was killed in 1980 in Tehran while he was working as an interpreter for NBC News. He had returned to Iran, his home country, after graduating from Oxford. He loved Iran and he was very aware that western countries had often meddled in Iran but he decried his people’s tendency, as he wrote at Oxford, “to continually shift the blame for our deficiencies onto foreigners.”

If the U.S. had been more aware of this we would have realized that our invasion of Iraq played right into this in the Middle East. And if we attack Iran we’ll just do the same again.

The blame game is the most popular game in the world. It happens in offices, on ball clubs, in businesses, in families, in show business, you name it.

A few years ago the Chicago Cubs blew a three-to-one lead in games and it was popular to blame a fan in Chicago who grabbed a fly ball.

One of the places it often happens is in churches. Playing the blame game is a universal addiction.

As far as I can tell the first to note this human tendency were the Hebrew prophets of the sixth century B.C. – Ezekiel, the prophet we know as Second Isaiah, and Jeremiah. Ezekiel and Second Isaiah preached to the captives in ancient Babylon, Jeremiah was among the bedraggled remnant in Jerusalem. Their people had been conquered and humiliated by the Babylonians and they knew they were victims. But, to use Bill Cosby’s words, they didn’t want them to stay Victims but to be Victors.

By all accounts a favorite proverb of the time was “the fathers have eaten the sour grapes and the children’s teeth are set on edge.” The point of this saying was in effect: “What’s the use of trying – our ancestors did wrong and we are paying the price, just as was foretold. The deck is stacked against us.” The sins of the fathers, said the book of Deuteronomy, would be visited on the children to the third and fourth generation. There it was: the Bible said it, I believe it, case closed. There is no Victimhood quite so strong as that which is supported by holy writ.

But Ezekiel, Second Isaiah, and Jeremiah all saw what Victimhood was doing to their people. It made them cry-babies – “How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land” and vengeful “blessed is the one who takes their children (that is, the children of our enemies) and dashes their heads against the rocks!” and malcontents. At the same time it removed from them any thought that they themselves might be contributing to their own problems – instead it was all someone else’s fault.

Yes, Jeremiah and Ezekiel and Second Isaiah proclaimed, the terrible things which happened were indeed divinely decreed punishment for sins, but renewal and restoration were still possible, and repentance was a meaningful action – nothing is inevitable, the situation can be changed. Throughout the Old Testament human freedom is an important part of the equation, and it is based on the possibility of a freely chosen personal relationship with God. Each person is still responsible before God for what he or she does and how he or she lives. Some scholars believe this is the main difference in outlook from the ancient Greeks, for whom “freedom” was always clouded over with an ominous inevitability about events, hence the phrase “Greek tragedy”. 

Our reading from Jeremiah this morning is a turning point in the Old Testament. It is the reading from which we get the division of the Bible into Old and New Testaments. It has been called the gospel before the Gospel. God will make a new covenant and write the law not on tablets of stone but on the tablets of the heart. To understand what the Gospel of Jesus Christ is all about you absolutely need these verses from Jeremiah. But before that you need what the prophet has just said about individual responsibility. Each person is to assume responsibility for his or her own actions – not blame the fathers, not blame circumstances, not blame any one else or anything else. Each person will die for his own sins – not someone else’s..

With freedom comes responsibility. Jeremiah was the prophet par excellence of a new religious consciousness about the direct individual personal relationship “written on the heart” of an individual before his or her God. But it demands first and foremost a willingness to put aside pride and recognize one’s own faults and confess them willingly before God. Only then can God’s law be written on the heart.

It’s that putting aside pride which is the tough part. So much easier to blame others. It is our pride which leads us directly often into the blame game. It is pride which keeps us thinking in “third person” terms instead of “first person” – “they did that….they should do this…the church should do such and such” instead of “we are responsible…I should do this….I need to do such and such….” It is our pride which keeps us from realizing we need a Savior, through whom a new covenant was established, a covenant written not on tablets of stone but on the human heart. It is our pride which keeps us often mired in Victimhood and thus preventing us from becoming the Victors we could be through a Savior, who loved us and gave himself for us.

At its best the church is a place to put aside the blame game, because here each person can recognize his or her own need, and also find a way to make his or her own contribution, to take individual responsibility for the church’s success, guided by the Holy Spirit, and to claim his or her own rightful part in it, to the greater Glory of God..

Charles