Exodus 3:1-11

Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian; he led his flock beyond the wilderness and came to Mount Horeb, the mountain of God. There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush; he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed.  Then Moses said, “I must turn aside and look at this great sight and see why the bush is not burned up.”  When the Lord saw that he had turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here I am.”  Then he said, “Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.”  He said further, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God. 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 spacious land, to a land flowing with milk and honey. The cry of the Israelites has now come to me; I have also seen how the Egyptians oppress them. Now go, I am sending 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?”

Matthew 16:21-26

From that time on, Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes and be killed and on the third day be raised. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.”  But he turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance to me, for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”  Then Jesus told his disciples, “If any wish to come after me, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.  For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life? Or what will they give in return for their life

Everyone’s Blood is Red, Everyone’s Tears are Salty

This morning in our readings we have God’s call to Moses in Exodus 3, and in Matthew 16 Jesus tells his disciples that he must be killed.

If you go to any city in the world and you walk down the street, what do you see? Do you see Muslims, Christians, blacks, gays, immigrants, criminals? These are only labels. They are words. Go to any city in the world and walk down the street, and you will see people. Just people. Living and breathing. Walking and talking. Human beings. And everything else is simply a story that you are telling yourself. We see the world through our stories. But our stories are invisible to us.

Everyone’s blood is red, and everyone’s tears are salty. Words so often divide people. People argue about words. But words and concepts are not reality. They are ideas. However, people are always people, and everyone’s blood is red. Everyone’s tears are salty. No matter what labels and words people use, that is the case.

 The antidote to hatred is love and compassion.

I once met a Buddhist nun who showed me a picture she carried with her all the time. It was a photo that reminded her to be compassionate, a photo that reminded her to work constantly on generating compassion in her heart, generating a heart and mind of compassion. The picture she showed me was disturbing. It was a photograph of a starving, emaciated boy in Africa. It was the kind of picture that makes you cry when you see such depth of suffering. She kept it with her all the time and looked at it when she felt her heart closing. Compassion is the antidote to a closed heart. When we feel the suffering of others, it opens our hearts.

Scapegoating and the Christian Nationalism

This morning I want to talk about scapegoating. This year we are celebrating the 250^th anniversary of the United States. And that is a wonderful thing to celebrate. But recently I’ve been hearing things I find disturbing. Things like, “We need to keep America a Christian country.” Well, there are so many problems with this kind of statement, I don’t really have time to go into it. But let’s just say, to be clear, that the founding fathers of our country never meant for the United States to be a Christian country. They were very careful to clearly define boundaries between religion and government. And so the movement called Christian Nationalism has nothing to do with Christianity. It’s a political movement that uses the word Christianity. But it is not Christianity.

True Christianity is not a belief system or a political ideology. True Christianity is a way of living, taking Jesus Christ as our example as we try to live a life of unconditional love. But Christian Nationalism is more like a code language that promotes white supremacy, condemning anyone who is not a Christian, meaning not white and not a Christian, as being somehow also not an American. So this is very problematic ideology, and it needs a lot of digging to really get at the roots and understand what is going on.

We need to understand the psychology of hatred. And so this leads me to this topic of scapegoating. And I want to focus here on scapegoating because scapegoating is the driving force behind so many conflicts. Scapegoating is driven by fear, jealousy, and a desire to maintain power. The scapegoat is the one who is blamed and punished for the sins of others.

The new Pharoah

Remember last week, we talked about the new Egyptian Pharoah and how he made the Israelites slaves. The new Pharoah was afraid of the Israelites, and so he made them the target of hatred. He convinced the Egyptian people to hate the Israelites, to regard them as outsiders, to regard them as enemies, to regard them as a threat and the source of all problems in Egypt. And so the Israelites were scapegoated. Driven by fear, the Egyptians oppressed the Israelites into slavery. In our reading this morning, Moses receives God’s call to go and rescue the Israelites from Egyptian oppression.

 Understanding Scapegoating

If we want to understand human conflict and the horrible things that human beings do to each other, we would do well to understand scapegoating. Scapegoating is a very ugly thing that people do to each other. It happens in societies, and it happens in families. If we can understand this unfortunate relationship dynamic, then we will recognize scapegoating when we see it, and we will be able to choose to no longer participate in it. Again, a scapegoat is a person, or a group of people, who are blamed and punished for the sins of others. Anytime you hear language that involves us versus them, that is, “us against them” language, you can bet that there is scapegoating at work.

Remember, these are all just words. But when people believe these kinds of words, really bad things can happen. In reality, there are no good guys, there are no bad guys, there are no Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, gays, transgenders, blacks, whites, or any other labels you can think of. These are all just words. But people are always people. Human beings are always human beings. Everyone’s blood is red, and everyone’s tears are salty.

We need to understand the horrible things that people do to each other in order to really understand the radical message of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, because the Gospel is based on unconditional love. Scapegoating is the opposite of unconditional love. Scapegoating is a relationship power dynamic based on fear and hatred.

The story of the Israelites in Egypt is a story of scapegoating. The story of Jesus is a story of scapegoating.

What is scapegoating? Origin of the word.

So what is scapegoating? Well, the origin of the term goes way back to Leviticus and the instructions for observing the rituals of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.

Now to be clear, the Jews did not invent scapegoating. I’m just talking about the origin of the word.

“On Yom Kippur, the ancient Hebrews would sacrifice one goat to God and lead another goat into the wilderness to bear the sins of the people away.”[1] So there were two goats. One was killed as a blood atonement, to wash away the sins of the people. And on the other goat, all the sins of the people were symbolically laid, and that goat was taken out into the desert.

 In Leviticus 16 we read, “Then Aaron shall lay both his hands on the head of the live goat and confess over it all the iniquities of the people of Israel, and all their transgressions, all their sins, putting them on the head of the goat, and sending it away into the wilderness by means of someone designated for the task. The goat shall bear on itself all their iniquities to a barren region; and the goat shall be set free in the wilderness.” (vs.21-22)

So it’s the goat that escapes, the scapegoat, that is the one who is blamed and punished for the sins of all the people. That’s where this term comes from. “The goat that escapes.” And then, the extended sense of scapegoat, the one that we use today in modern usage, evolved from this biblical use.[2]

Examples of Scapegoating

Scapegoating is something that we see in human societies. At a macro level, scapegoating has driven the worst atrocities in human history. For example, ethnic cleansing and genocide are driven by scapegoating.

A Modern Genocide

This past week, on Thursday, a man named Ratko Mladich died at the age of 84. He died in a prison hospital in The Hague, Netherlands where he was serving a life sentence. He was a war criminal. He was a Bosnian Serb military officer during the Bosnian War, and he was a leader in the siege of Sarajevo and the Srebrenica [sreh breh NEET suh] massacre in July of 1995. In the Srebrenica massacre, more than 8,000 men and boys were killed and buried in mass graves. They were killed because they were Bosnian Muslims. It was a program of killing driven by the fear and prejudice of scapegoating. This was a contemporary genocide, a modern day genocide, the first European genocide in Europe since World War 2 and the Holocaust.

In scapegoating, a weak and vulnerable group is targeted and blamed for all the problems in the society.

Looking for someone to blame.

You see, when there is a problem, the tendency is to look for someone to blame. Whose fault is this? Who did it? These are the first questions people ask. It’s our human nature to search for a culprit. It’s our human nature to blame others. Who is to blame? And even when the cause of a problem is unknown, people look for someone to blame.

The Black Death

For example, in the Black Death, the Bubonic Plague Pandemic that occurred in the middle ages, people did not understand germ theory. They did not know that the bubonic plague was caused by a bacterium carried by fleas that infested rodents. They knew nothing about germs in the middle ages, but they wanted to find a cause, and they wanted to blame someone. And so, they invented false accusations and scapegoated the Jewish people. They blamed the Jews for the bubonic plague, saying that Jews poisoned the well water. Of course, it was a ridiculous claim. But it stuck. People needed someone to blame. This need to blame drove them to kill Jews all across Europe, often burning them alive. In the Strasbourg massacre of February 1349, an entire community of 2,000 Jews was publicly burned to death. Scapegoating is driven by fear, ignorance, and the need to blame.

Matthew 16:21-26

In our second reading, we see Jesus telling his disciples that he will be killed. They don’t want to believe it. But Jesus understands scapegoating, and he knows that he will be blamed, he will be scapegoated and put to death. When powerful leaders need to stay in control, they often choose a weak and vulnerable target to scapegoat, a weak and vulnerable target on which to lay all the blame for the problems in society.

Scapegoating in families

And this operates in family systems as well. In a family, there are problems, there is stress, there is conflict, and, perhaps you have noticed, there is often one person in the family who will get blamed. One person in the family who gets labeled “the black sheep.” That’s the person who everyone can look to as “the one with all the problems, pointing the finger, the one who is causing all the upset in the family.” The black sheep, the scapegoat, takes on all the sins of the family, gets blamed for all the problems in the family. And it’s very convenient to have a black sheep in the family because then, no one else really needs to work on their own issues. It’s all because of “that one.” So this is something to take a look at.

The way of the cross.

How do we break free of this endless cycle of blame and hatred. The Gospel shows us how. It is Jesus’ message of love, (unconditional love) compassion, forgiveness, and healing that is the way out. This is not an easy path. Jesus said, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”

Remember, there are so many labels, so many names that people use to define “us” versus “them.” The invitation today is to remember that labels are merely words. Let us step beyond the false divisions that words create and see that we are all human beings, everyone’s blood is red, and everyone’s tears are salty.

Amen? Amen.

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/scapegoat, accessed August 29, 2026.

[2] Ibid.