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Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
Welcome to the commons cast. We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to commons.church for more information.
Speaker 2:Today, we have patron saints. That's our new series, and it's also a term that has a very specific meaning in the Catholic tradition. Different saints who have been recognized by the church or often associated with different locations or activities. And if you look it up, you can find a patron saint for Pretty much anything. Couple of my favorites here.
Speaker 2:Saint Bibiana, the patron saint of hangovers. She was martyred in the 4th century. A church was dedicated to her in 5th, but the rumor was that after her burial, herbs began to grow near her grave that had medicinal effect Hearing headaches and hangovers, and that stuck with her. Sticking to the stampede related saints, saint Barbara is the patron saint of fireworks. She converted to Christianity in the 2nd century, was then tortured and killed by her father for it, who was then promptly struck by lightning striking him dead as well, and she has been the patron saint of thunderstorms and fireworks ever since.
Speaker 2:Now to be fair, her story was always a little suspect, historically, And so she was officially removed from the general Roman calendar in 1969. So just so you know, since the seventies, we've been watching fireworks on our own, God help us all. Still, fun as that is, I kinda love that the Catholic tradition assigned Such value to such normal things. I mean, there's a patron saint of ice skating, motorcycle riding. There's a patron saint of earaches.
Speaker 2:Honestly, I wish protestants would just let their theological imaginations run a little bit more free at times, but that brings us to maybe This new series, unfortunately, no. We are not going to explore some of the more eccentric saints of tradition, but we are gonna look at 4 people who have gone before us and in some profound way have shaped us. So in this series, Bobby and Scott and Yelena and myself Have each picked an author or a poet or a theologian or a writer that has impacted us that we want to introduce you to? So we're gonna talk about Amy Jill Levine and Mary Oliver and Anthony Bloom. And today, we're gonna talk about Reni Gerard.
Speaker 2:But first, let's pray. God of all grace, who comes to us today with arms open and heart wide, ready to embrace everything we bring with us here into this room. The joy of a summer week, Perhaps the weight of a hard weekend. Whatever it is, we trust that you meet us here with a smile. And in that embrace, we thank you for all those who have come and gone before us.
Speaker 2:Walk the path and welcome us to follow. Saints whose writings have changed our thinking or saints whose poems have kindled our imagination, saints who have quietly and humbly Demonstrated love for us with hugs and help and kind words when they were most needed. For all those who have guided us in a 1000 different ways And helped us here to this day, we are grateful. Grateful for them and grateful for your kindness expressed through them. Now may that recognition motivate us to become saints for someone new this week.
Speaker 2:In a smile or a gift, in the investment of care prompted by your spirit, may gratitude flow into gift just as it has for us. In the strong name of the risen Christ, we pray. Amen. Today, it's Winnie Girard, and it's very possible that you have heard me name drop Girard if you've been around commons for any length of time. In fact, I wrote my graduate thesis on a interpretation of violent imagery in apocalyptic literature.
Speaker 2:Not a fun read, by the way. Pick up my book upside down apocalypse instead, but Gerard has been in and around my thinking for a very long time. However, I haven't had a chance to talk through all of his different contributions in one sitting here at commons. And so today, I wanna talk about a few things, Imitation and conflict and religion and finally, freedom from it. But let's start with how or maybe better said, why I stumbled into Girard's work.
Speaker 2:See, I've been a pastor now for about 20 years. If you don't think I look old enough for that yet, Thank you. But I have spent most of my career working with people who are reengaging the Christian story. That is, I'm gonna guess, the story of a lot of us here today. We've grown up in or around the church, had experience with the Christian story, but at some point realized it was no longer working for us the way it did anymore.
Speaker 2:And for some people, That meant leaving the church for a season. For others, it meant searching out new forms of Christianity to explore. And that has largely been my work, helping people who are looking for a less caustic and more grace filled expression of Christianity that reflects the Christ they know, We're helping people who want to hold on to Jesus, but also want to engage their intellect and their skepticism with their faith, Helping people who need a new language to make sense of old ideas all over again. And in large part, my work has been about helping people find Jesus through the crust of Christianity that has often obscured his way. And pretty early in that journey, what I found was that a lot of people were quite captivated by Jesus, but often disturbed by the violence that seems to surround the religion that has taken shape around him.
Speaker 2:Now sometimes that was the violence of Christian history because there's a lot of that. Sometimes it was the violence of the Hebrew scriptures themselves because there's some of that. But often, increasingly, what I realized, it was actually the violence of the cross that was becoming a sticking point for people. Now don't get me wrong. The cross is a violent moment.
Speaker 2:A cross was a Cruesome tool of execution used by the Roman state. There's no softening that moment nor should there be. But sometimes, Particularly within protestant evangelicalism, there was this often uncomfortable implication that god not only wanted that violence or needed that violence, but perhaps maybe even that god somehow enjoyed the violence of the cross. And as alluring as Jesus, his teaching and his way in the world were, that implication that Divine violence is the way of the universe. That was a problem for a lot of people, and I felt it too.
Speaker 2:So I started looking for, reading, and studying, searching out what I consider to be thoroughly nonviolent interpretations of the atonement and the cross. If god was truly good, which was my conviction in looking at Jesus, what good was happening in this murder? And there were a number of different theologians that led me eventually on my journey to discover the work of Rene Girard. There was the Japanese American theologian Rita Nakashimi Brock. She really articulated the problems in how I was taught to talk about the cross.
Speaker 2:Very pointedly, she called certain ways of speaking about the cross cosmic child abuse, which was shocking and honestly kind of eye opening. That led me to Swedish theologian, PP Waldenstrom, who helped me recognize that if god is god, then the cross Can't be about changing anything in god ever. Not god's grace or god's forgiveness or even god's willingness to embrace us. None of that can ever change if god is god. So the cross then must only be about changing something about us.
Speaker 2:And that led me to searching out more sociological explanations for the cross. What is Jesus changing about the human story? Enter the French historian, Rene Girard. Now I say historian here because Rene was not actually technically a theologian, at least not by training. And I I think that was actually part of his superpower.
Speaker 2:Sometimes you get trained in something and you dive into something thing, and you learn the language of something and you find yourself eventually trapped by that something. I don't know if you've ever had a problem that you've been working on staring for hours at it, and a coworker walks by, looks over your shoulder, asks what you're working on, and they offer the perfect suggestion just like that off the top of their head. That's because fresh eyes see new things sometimes. It's really easy to get stuck in and then just find yourself stuck. So here's a tip.
Speaker 2:You wanna do better work, get more eyes on your problems, ask for more help, trust that people will see things that you don't, which is also, by the way, why you need to read Japanese American theologians and Swedish theologians and French and feminist and indigenous and queer and BIPOC theologians, They see things that you don't. And even when you don't agree, they still broaden the scope of your ability to see new things, which in itself is invaluable. But that's what happens with Girard. He's a French historian. He finishes his PhD in Paris, comes over to America, Gets a job teaching but can't find 1 in the history department, so he ends up teaching French literature because, well, he's the only guy at the university that can speak French.
Speaker 2:And he figures, okay, I'll make the best of it. But while he's teaching Albert Camus and Marcel Proust, he He starts noticing these memes and these motifs in these stories that he's teaching to his students. All of these His characters seem to be driven by their desire to be like someone else. And this is what he writes about in his 1st book, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, Self and the Other in literary structure. Nothing to do with theology.
Speaker 2:Jesus isn't even in there. It's all about how the characters in these French novels are driven by their desire to be like or even to become someone else. This gets him thinking. If this is what all of the great novelists are writing about, maybe it's more than just a good story. What if this is a reflection of something true in human nature?
Speaker 2:And from this, he starts to develop his first theory, which is called mimesis. Now mimesis is just a fancy word for imitation. When he starts to realize that imitation is actually core to what it means to be human. We imitate. That's what we do.
Speaker 2:The single most important invention in human history, language. It's just imitation. I grunt and I point at a rock. You grunt and you point at the same rock. We just invented language, and we did it by imitating each other.
Speaker 2:Now by extension, we've also created metaphor Because all of a sudden, a certain sound can mean, it can represent a certain something in the world. This means that, But you learned how to speak through imitation. You learned how to walk through imitation. In fact, everything you know about what it means to be human, you learned Not through instinct like every other animal, you learned it through imitation. And as far as Gerard is concerned, to be human is just to go around copying other humans.
Speaker 2:Pretty easy. And generally, it works pretty well. The problem is often, We're not particularly aware consciously of what we're actually imitating in each other. So here's an example I've used before. I like Coffee, obviously.
Speaker 2:Right? I mean, what other church has espresso this good every Sunday? Am I right? By the way, shout out to our coffee volunteers. You guys really make all of this happen for us here.
Speaker 2:Yes. Thank you. But you see me enjoying a coffee, and now you want a coffee. Except the thing is, you're not really trying to imitate the coffee. You're trying to imitate that experience, that profound joy you see in me when I drink a coffee.
Speaker 2:Any non coffee drinkers here? People who don't like coffee, I know you exist. I get it, but not really. You keep doing you. For those people here in the room that don't like coffee, have you ever wished that you did?
Speaker 2:Like, you wanted to enjoy this thing that other people seem to be really into? That's Atmimesis. You see people having a moment, and you wanna imitate what looks like a positive experience, but the drink is just unsatisfying and you wish it was Better. That happens to us all the time. We are imitating each other, but we triangulate our imitation onto the Thing that we can buy or possess or acquire as a shortcut to the real experience that we actually want to copy from someone.
Speaker 2:So if I wear the right jeans or I use the right phone or I like the right things, I can be like the person that I admire. I mean, that's the whole premise of advertising all around us all the time. Right? To map your desire to imitate a person onto a product that you can buy. Right?
Speaker 2:And assuming there's enough of that product to go around and enough coffee for everyone, things are great. It all works. Our wallets are just a little bit lighter at the end of the day, Except what happens when the coffee runs out? Well, that's when we have a conflict. And often, what happens is we think it's about the beans, but really it's about our sense of identity, who gets to be the one with the beans.
Speaker 2:And that leads into Gerard's 2nd theory, which is the scapegoat. See, Gerard realizes that imitation is human. Imitation is great, but As soon as imitation isn't realized, we have a problem, and it stops us in our tracks. So the early emergence of Homo sapiens seems to, from the archaeological record, have lived in small familial units exclusively. Now they were just as smart as us.
Speaker 2:Obviously, not with all the compound knowledge we have today, but they had the same mental horsepower. They even had imitation as a tool and primitive language to use, but it doesn't seem that they formed societies the way that we do. And without that scale, without that shared narrative of culture to unify them, humanity kinda drifted along lazily for a very long time without a lot of significant progress. Well, Girard theorizes that's precisely because of mimetic conflict. Imitation is great until resources are scarce, but when they are, conflict breaks out and the group divides back into small units.
Speaker 2:It mitigates the conflict, but it doesn't help us build a culture. And without a culture, it's hard to progress. But at some point along the way, we discovered a solution to this, and that was the scapegoat. You see, when resources are low and by the way, That can be material resources like coffee beans or social resources like prestige, relationship resources. But Whenever resources are low, conflict erupts, people get mad.
Speaker 2:And what happens when people get mad? Other people imitate that anger and things escalate even farther. But at some point along the way, humanity discovered by accident that if we can all focus our attention together And turn all of our frustration onto 1 person, a scapegoat to blame for all of the conflict, it can solve the problem for all of us. It's like 1 big cathartic release for everyone. So put some flames fans in the room with with a few Oilers fans, and you're not gonna find a lot of agreement there.
Speaker 2:Right? That is, unless you bring up the Leafs because nobody likes the Leafs. Am I right? A scapegoat, a villain, an enemy unites people together. And the problem is We tend to think that our social cohesion is built on what we share and what we imitate in each other, and it is, except it's almost always most strongly built on a shared enemy that we imitate.
Speaker 2:As human beings, we tend to value who we're not Far more than who we are. Let me say this before we go on today. If you get nothing out of today, if you're not interested in Girard at Oh, that's fine, but please listen to this. Fight the urge to define yourself by who you are against. What you're not is not interesting.
Speaker 2:Who you are, what you have, what you offer, what you uniquely bring to the conversation, Your history, your experience, your particular contribution to the world, even if you are still figuring it out right now, that's what makes you beautiful, not who you hate. And each of us here just in this room could spend even just 10% less time worrying about who we're not and 10% more energy celebrating who we are. I promise the world would be a better and, honestly, a far more interesting place to live. But this was Girard's key insight. Imitation is good.
Speaker 2:Imitation is human, but imitation creates conflict. And the best way to relieve that conflict, that tension, is to find a shared enemy, a common scapegoat to blame. The root foundation of human culture, our original sin is we are not them. And this is what enabled humanity to grow beyond small familiar units into larger societies that were held together through Shared narratives, and it's everywhere all around us. Think about sports.
Speaker 2:Think about politics. Think about religion. In fact, Gerard started to think about religion. In fact, he started to think that maybe this was the whole point of religion. We needed a reliable, stable way to create new scapegoats, and to keep letting off that pressure that was created by mimetic imitation and then resource scarcity.
Speaker 2:And so Girard, in the next stage of his career, starts examining religious traditions and looking for this theme. And he looked at all kinds of different religions and found all kinds of different systems, but they all came back to the central idea of a dependable scapegoat mechanism for the community. How do we know who to collectively blame for everything that's wrong? Religion can give us an answer, except there was 1 religion that Gerard avoided, and that was Christianity. So Gerard was a French atheist, and he was very much a student of the French revolution.
Speaker 2:And to be honest, he just really didn't want much to do with the dominant religion of Europe. Still, it's hard to be in academia and write about religious theory if you're not going to engage one of the major world religions. And so eventually, he relents, and he goes to the bible. And this is where things get really interesting. Because initially, he finds all the same tropes in the Bible.
Speaker 2:In fact, the term scapegoat that he uses comes directly from the Bible in Leviticus. Right in the middle of the book is the scapegoat. Once a year, on the day of atonement, a goat is selected, And the sins of the people are symbolically put on that animal, and then it is cast out of the community, sent into the wilderness on its own. So all those ritual sacrifices you hear about in Leviticus, those are not for the forgiveness of sins. Those are part of how ancient peoples expressed devotion and fealty to god.
Speaker 2:The goat from the day of atonement, Yom Kippur, was literally scapegoated. It was sent away. Once a year, we drive out all of that sin and conflict and tension and frustration. We push it out into the desert away from us, And we do it symbolically with a goat so that we don't have to keep doing it to someone in the community that we love. That's the whole point of religion, says Girard.
Speaker 2:And for him, that makes a lot of sense. It's what he was expecting to find, except that He keeps coming across these narratives that seem to intentionally challenge or chip away at that story. So the god of the Hebrews keeps saying things like, hey. Keep doing your sacrifices if they make you happy. But, no, I don't desire burnt offerings or sacrifices.
Speaker 2:I want mercy and justice and contrition. This idea shows up in the Psalms of Israel, Psalm 40 verse 6, again, in Psalm 51 16. It shows up in the prophets, Hosea six six, for I desire mercy, not sacrifice, acknowledgment, not burnt offerings. These rituals were never for god. They were always for us.
Speaker 2:There are even passages where the prophets start outright arguing with god about what's appropriate for god. In Habakkuk, there's this famous line, your eyes are too pure to look on evil. You cannot tolerate wrongdoing. And people use this all the time to say, see? God is holy.
Speaker 2:That's why god needs a sacrifice To cover sin before god can tolerate, even look at us, wretched little monkeys. You are terrible. God is holy. That's what the sacrifices are for, Except that's only half the verse. And the second half of the verse goes on to say, well, why do you then tolerate the right treacherous?
Speaker 2:Why are you silent while the wicked swallow up those more righteous than themselves? The whole point of the verse is the prophet is frustrated with god's patience and grace. God, you should refuse to tolerate wickedness. God, you should refuse to look at my enemies. You should disregard them the way that I do, but you don't, and I'm angry about it.
Speaker 2:Habakkuk is apoplectic that god is not playing by his rules about who god can be gracious to. And so Gerard starts noticing all of this, that the Hebrew Bible sets up the same scapegoat paradigm that he sees everywhere from French novelist to world religions. But just as quickly as it sets it up, it starts undermining it already. He starts suggesting that maybe we are like this, just like the French novelist said, but god, the divine, He's not like that. And so, of course, eventually, he moves to the new testament, and this is where Girard finally sees All of his theories both confirmed and then completely obliterated.
Speaker 2:Because in the Christ, what we see is finally someone who refuses to live by the scapegoat narrative. When a woman is caught in adultery and brought to Jesus, he says, the one without Finn can throw the 1st stone. In other words, don't pretend you get to claim your righteousness by pointing out someone else's mistakes. Her story has nothing to do with yours. When his disciples are rejected by a town that they're walking through, and they asked Jesus, hey.
Speaker 2:Do you want us to call down fire to destroy them? He laughs and he says, I don't know who you think you are. Give it a shot. Let me see how it goes. No.
Speaker 2:He rebukes them and he says, what do you think this story is about, guys? Why do you think I'm here? You think I'm here to point a finger at the bad guys? No. I am here to proclaim good news to the poor, Freedom for the prisoner, recovery of sight for the blind to set the oppressed free.
Speaker 2:My mission is to proclaim the year of the lord's favor, full stop. He rolls up the scroll. He hands it away. He sits down instead of continuing at the line that says, and the day of the lord's vengeance. The day of god's vengeance is your fantasy, not mine.
Speaker 2:I'm not interested. Jesus is very specifically taking a passage from Isaiah And doing what prophets do by pointing it in a new, better direction. Exam, What happens when someone comes along who breaches not just the walls of our contoured communities, but the very foundation of Scapegoating that underpins all of human interaction, they become a threat. Actually, the threat. Right?
Speaker 2:The only threat that really matters because Jesus is challenging the fundamental assumption that sits even below our religious convictions about the He's saying maybe we don't need an enemy after all. And so what happens is that in a crisis, we revert to form. And we turn on Jesus, And we scapegoat Jesus, and we try to blame Jesus for the instability that he's causing. We pour out all of our violence we can muster to shut him down. And there's religious violence.
Speaker 2:There's social violence. There's political violence. There's relational violence and humiliation. The gospels are structured so precisely no one is to blame for the death of Jesus. No one can be scapegoated for the scapegoating of Jesus.
Speaker 2:We are all of us faced with our culpability, except in that, We're finally free to see ourselves for who we truly are. Because every time that I scapegoat someone, Every time I blame someone else for my mistakes, every time I shift responsibility onto someone else, every time I say you're the problem, Not me. All that I am doing is what humans have done since the day we invented culture. Except this time, even on the cross, even while he is being blamed for my sins, Jesus refuses to keep the game going. In these words, father, forgive them for they do not know what they are doing, that right there is salvation.
Speaker 2:We don't know what we're doing. We are trapped in a cycle of violent imitation, but now if we want to, We can stop. Because now all of a sudden, the god who never wanted sacrifice becomes our sacrifice. Not because it was good, but precisely because God intends to absorb all of our religious violence and finally put it to death. So the cross is violent, but not because god is killing Jesus.
Speaker 2:It's because god is putting all of our violence, All of the violence we refuse to acknowledge on display for us to see in a way that we can't avoid it anymore. As Paul says, Christ becomes our sin for us. As John says, Jesus becomes the scapegoat who takes away the sin of the world. As Girard says, The Christ is the one who owes no debt to violence, the one who comes from God, the one who imitates only God, The only human ever born into the world without being shaped by the scapegoating that is human socialization, that one Gives his life away to open our eyes and free us from the sin and the violence that we can't even see for ourselves. That revelation alone, that realization that Jesus was not just another victim, But the scapegoat to end all scapegoating, that was enough for Girard to eventually convert to Christianity and Begin writing theology.
Speaker 2:He would join the Catholic church and remain there until he died in 2015. It was enough to spark in me new ways to speak at the cross that centered our violence and god's grace meeting in Jesus' death and resurrection, which ended up extending my career and eventually led to the start of common church. I would argue it's enough for all of us to take another Hard look at our lives and get on with this long, slow work of what we would classically call in Christianity, sanctification. Becoming aware of all of the ways that we tend to scapegoat and marginalize and blame others to justify ourselves, To realize that we don't need an enemy anymore, and you don't need to be rejected for me to know that I'm loved. I can know myself as god.
Speaker 2:Seize me, the beloved child of the divine. Because ultimately, That's what keeps me committed to the way of Jesus. A Christ that tells me not to smoke or not to drink or to use bad words is fine, I guess. But a Christ that constantly challenges me to look for, to search out all of the ways that my actions and my attitudes Actually hurt the beloved children of god that surround me in this world, that is the kind of Christ I would gladly give my life to following. It's a vision for the world that actually feels aligned with the kingdom that looks more like heaven, And it's a way of speaking about the cross that might actually have the power to change the world if we could only pick up our cross and follow it as well.
Speaker 2:Let's pray. God, for all those who have taken steps before us, writers and poets and theologian and the grandparents, all those who have demonstrated your way of peace to the world And then invited us to follow. For all of this, we are grateful. But now, god, we pray that these Stories, these words, these ideas would sink somewhere deep into us, and we would recognize not only your goodness, But your graciousness extended to us and to everyone we encounter, that our choices in the world matter, Are that the ways that we push others away to know ourselves as loved, the ways that we reject some To embrace others that this is not the way of love, and that we don't need these enemies and Scapegoats, these villains anymore, we can actually know ourselves as you know us, loved and beloved and capable of Extraordinary love in this world. God, might we begin to slowly put down the shields and the armor And the weaponry that have built up around us and protected us, to know that the way forward is the way of peace, In the way of grace, in the steps that will lead to a transformation of the world, a world that looks more like the kingdom of heaven just as you prayed.
Speaker 2:May our steps become prayers, and may our encounters contribute to your story and imagination for this world. In the strong name of the risen Christ, we pray.