No wonder we kill our goats.

Scapegoat: One that is made to bear the blame of others often as a way of distracting attention from the real causes.

It seems that we need to place blame on someone or people for various reasons. In my corporate life when something went wrong people always wanted to know who was responsible. Who can we blame? I guess it makes us feel better if we can make someone responsible for whatever troubles us. Peyton Manning made his offensive line the scapegoats for losing the game this weekend.

In some ways you could say Jesus was a scapegoat.

We like to kill our goats. It makes us feel better.

I recently watched the movie Dead Man Walking again. I did so through the eyes of a chaplain.

To me, scapegoating was the theme of the movie. Sean Penn’s character killed two young lovers and essentially made them scapegoats by loading all the sins committed against him by his own father. He then became the state’s scapegoat by being executed for all the pain and suffering he caused.

Someone has to pay for the sin, right?

Tonight I attended my second vigil in the past month at the church I serve where someone was being executed by the State of California. I met the family of the person being executed; we prayed for the victims; we prayed for the person being executed; we prayed for the prison guards; we prayed for the state; we prayed for each other; and then we laid hands on the family whose member was being executed and prayed for them. It was a very powerfu and eye opening moment.

I heard a man speak who flew in from Pennsylvania. He is a retired Methodist pastor. Basically his son was unlocking the door to his apartment and his next door neighbor was high on cocaine and extremely paranoid shot and killed the young man. The retired pastor came to speak against the death penalty. He explained that he was filled with rage over his son’s death and so he prayed to God to help him. After about a year he finally came to the conclusion that the only way he could heal was to forgive the person who killed his son. The pastor explained that killing someone who killed someone to show that killing is wrong is wrong.

It seems like anytime time someone is killed a lot of innocent folks suffer.

On my way home, for all the normal human reasons, I realized I wasn’t “feeling” all that compassionate for the person being executed. As I wrestled with my emotions, I realized I wasn’t called by God to feel compassion. I was called to act with compassion. I wish I could say that I am that spirtually evolved but I am not. I have much soul searching and maturing to do spiritually.

Acting compassionate isn’t easy and is beyond difficult—it is an act of will, surrender and trust in something much greater than me. Like the pastor who spoke tonight, we need God to do in us what we cannot do for oursleves.

No wonder we kill our goats.