Tag Archives: Blame

Blame or Cause

Job-wife (1)Living in the Spirit
September 29, 2015

Scripture Reading: Job 1:1, 2:1-10

So Satan went out from the presence of the Lord, and inflicted loathsome sores on Job from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head. Job took a potsherd with which to scrape himself, and sat among the ashes.

 Then his wife said to him, ‘Do you still persist in your integrity? Curse God, and die.’ But he said to her, ‘You speak as any foolish woman would speak. Shall we receive the good at the hand of God, and not receive the bad?’ In all this Job did not sin with his lips. –Job 7-10

Bad things do happen to good people. We get all tangled up in affixing blame in our society. I find this need to affix blame is never helpful and can be destructive. There is a difference between blame and cause. We do need to plume the depths of cause when tragedy happens to determine our course of action. For example, many of the first responders in the 9/11 attach on the twin towers in New York City are suffering grave illnesses as a result of the contaminated air they breathed when they rushed into the area to save lives. It is important to know the cause so we can development appropriate treatments. It is a waste of time, precious resources, and energy to dwell on blame.

Getting at the root cause of problems in society is complex while we can take one segment of a problem, contaminated air for example, and deal with it, we still haven’t explained why the bombing happened in the first place and what our response should be.

This is exactly where we find Job in our scripture today. His wife calls on him to curse God, blame God for inflicting such pain and suffering. The imagery is stunning. This poor man scraping open infected wounds with a broken piece of a clay pot. He refused to blame God, I think, because while he could not understand what was happening to him, he trusted that it was not of God. It went against all Job had ever known or experienced of God.

There is evil in the world with which we must deal every day. Our challenge is to keep the faith that God is greater than any evil and that we as God’s followers in the world today are to work with all due diligence to addresses the causes and consequences of evil as we work toward the full fruition of the Kingdom of God where there is no room for evil.

Prayer: Forgive us when we waste our energies on affixing blame. Empower our work in creating a just world. Amen.

All scriptures are quoted from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicized Edition, copyright 1989, 1995, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States of American. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

The Blame Game

blamegameLiving in the Spirit
August 26, 2014

 Scripture Reading: Exodus 3:1-15 

Then the Lord said, ‘I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land,…The cry of the Israelites has now come to me; I have also seen how the Egyptians oppress them. So come, I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.’ But Moses said to God, ‘Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh, and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?’ He said, ‘I will be with you; and this shall be the sign for you that it is I who sent you: when you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall worship God on this mountain.’ — Exodus 3:7-12

Jesus told us that God counts every hair on our head and knew what was happening with every sparrow. It should not come as a surprise to us then that God was fully aware of the plight of the Israelites. Surely there were many among those slaves calling out to God for mercy, but there were many perhaps who had given up, forgotten about God. God was still keeping an eye on them, too. And God sees the plight of families with children pouring out of Syria, Guatemala, Afghanistan, and Democratic Republic of the Congo in our world today. There are no easy answers to the problems that cause such migration, but we are called to seek solutions and offer assistance.  While it is usually beneficial to analyze what is happening to seek answers, it is a waste of precious time and resources to invest most of our energies in establishing blame.

I once had a supervisor for whom it was very important that she not be seen as the blame for anything that might have gone wrong in our challenging work with abusive and neglectful families. After spending long sessions with her where the time was mostly spent trying to fix blame, my co-workers and I discovered that we could forgo the blame game and get on about the business of addressing the issues, if in some way we would say “It was my fault, and I will never do it again.” That or a similar phrase seemed to lift the burden off her shoulders and free her to become a very good, proactive problem solver.

Jesus essentially did just that at the cross. He took the blame for all our misguided actions to free us to serve as his Body in the world today. We need to get about the business of doing just that.

Prayer: Great I AM, we thank you for the gift of your Son who frees us every day to serve you. And we thank you for hearing our cries and the cries of the oppressed. Show us what our response is to be and enable us to make it happen. Amen.

All scriptures are quoted from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicized Edition, copyright 1989, 1995, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States of American. Used by permission. All rights reserved.