Sunday nights are not active nights for my husband, Greg, and I. When we get home we put on our pajamas, eat take-out (usually Chinese), and sit in front of the television. This was going along just fine until the writers’ strike began to take hold, making our favorite Sunday evening television shows go off the air. Greg and I soon realized that there’s a multitude of reality T.V. shows available on Sunday evenings. The one we’ve been watching recently is called “Rock of Love 2,” and is certainly not a show I recommend to anyone. In this reality show, Bret Michaels, from the 80’s band “Poison”, is looking for his one true love. A whole bunch of women are put in a house with Bret, and are all competing for Bret’s love. As you can imagine, when you put a group of women who are all competing for the attention and love of one man in a house together, the result is not good. There’s a lot of fighting, yelling, screaming, and jealousy. As the group gets smaller, the girls begin to gang up on this one girl named Christy Jo. They find common ground in their dislike and jealousy of Christy Jo, and start being really mean to her. She was the scapegoat of the house, the person on whom all of the anger and anxiety in the house was placed. Christy Jo finally chose to leave for a multitude of reasons, and suddenly the scapegoat was gone. I remember telling my husband that it was only a matter of time before the women in the house picked out another scapegoat. Sure enough, the next show all of the girls ganged up on another girl, Daisy, and made her the scapegoat.

This “scapegoating” is common in families, groups of friends, work situations, churches…really, any place where you have a group of people working, living or in relationship together. All of the anxiety, anger, and fear are placed on one person. That person is the person on whom all the negative stuff in a group is blamed. For example, if a particular project fails in the work place, the scapegoat is blamed for single handedly making it fail. If a church is going through turmoil, the scapegoat is blamed for singe handedly tearing apart the church.

What makes the idea of scapegoating even more interesting, however, is that it’s Biblical. Leviticus 16:21-22: “Aaron shall lay both his hands upon the head of the live goat, and confess over him all the iniquities of the people of Israel, and all their transgressions, all their sins; and he shall put them upon the head of the goat, and send him away into the wilderness…The goat shall bear all their iniquities upon him…” All of the sins and iniquities—all of the anger, jealousy, anxiety, fears—are laid upon this goat, and the goat is sent away. The people no longer have to be responsible for their sinfulness, anger, jealousy, anxiety, and fear. They’ve laid everything on the goat and sent it away. It’s just that easy, right?

But here’s the kicker: it’s not just that easy. You see, scapegoating, whether that be placing your sins and anger on a goat or on a person, does not take care of the sin and anxiety. In fact, it only seems to make everything worse. God knows this. God knows that scapegoating does not work, so he sent his Son, Jesus Christ, to be our final scapegoat. Jesus became the ultimate scapegoat, whose death and rising again to new life offers us freedom from our sins, anger, fears, and anxieties. Our second reading today, from 1 Peter, says, “You know that you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your ancestors…with the precious blood of Christ.” These futile ways of our ancestors include scapegoating, finding something or some person upon whom we lay all our sins. These futile ways are wiped away by laying all our sins on God in human form. That is the only way to fully wipe away our sins.

Jesus died almost 2000 years ago, and yet we still find ourselves scapegoating. We still work to find people upon whom we can blame all of our sins and anxieties, just like in this reality T.V. show Greg and I have been watching. There’s a reason it’s called reality T.V.—because it’s reminiscent of reality. How often have we seen people scapegoating? How often have we been guilty of scapegoating? I have seen it in my groups of friends, at my work places, and in almost every church to which I have belonged. The problem with this scapegoating is that it only makes things worse. Scapegoating only creates a culture of blaming others for our own sins and fears. It creates an endless cycle of violence. This culture of scapegoating makes the least sense in a church. We know that Jesus died for our sins. We know that the Lord has saved us from our sins, anxieties, fears, and anger. We have no reason to scapegoat. We have no excuse in a Christian church to place all of our sins and anxieties on one or two people. Our sins, anxieties, fears, failures belong to us, not another person. And they only belong to us so long as we are not willing to hand them over to God.

Only a few weeks ago we experienced the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Our Savior died and rose again so that our sins, the sins of all people, might be wiped away. But there’s a catch here. We have to accept Easter, accept that Jesus died and rose again for us, in order to receive that salvation, that wiping away of our sins. It is free, but we have to accept it. In John 3:19-21, Jesus says, “…the light [Jesus] has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed. But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.” Jesus, the light of the world, has come into this world. We have a choice to make. We can either be people of darkness, choosing to run from the light lest our sinfulness be exposed, or we can be people of the light, running towards to the light knowing that light is our Savior whose blood washes away the sins of the world.

It’s a choice, then, as many things are in this world. Free will. Freedom of choice. What choice will we make? Will be we people of the darkness, continuing the culture of scapegoating? Or will we be people of the light, accepting the death and rising again of our Savior Jesus Christ? The writer of 1 Peter describes so beautifully what happens when we do accept Christ—because he understands that it’s not just a matter of saying, “I accept Jesus Christ as my Savior.” Accepting Christ means living a radically different life than before. The author writes, “Now that you have purified your souls by your obedience to the truth so that you have genuine mutual love, love one another deeply from the heart. You have been born anew.”