By the Rev. Jon Ziegler
Don’t Blame Yourself
About fifteen years back, I was home from college for the weekend and I decided to get a haircut. And while I was waiting—I did what most people did back then (this was before we had smart phones): I picked up a magazine. It was In Touch Weekly, your source for “Celebrity Gossip and Entertainment News.” As a young college student, who probably took himself too serious, I can remember thinking how ridiculous and trivial the magazine was.
But then, I came across a quote—a quote so profound—that I asked the hairdresser if I could cut the page out of the magazine.
The quote was from none other than Donald Trump. This wasn’t the presidential candidate Donald Trump we know today. It was the billionaire real estate mogul turned television star of The Apprentice Donald Trump. And this what he said:
“You never blame yourself; you have to blame something else. If you do something bad, never, ever blame yourself.”
When many of us read that quote today, we are likely to quickly file it under just another extreme, audacious (and no longer surprising) remark from Trump. But if we reflect on it for a moment, we might note that this quote says something profound about our culture. This quote speaks on behalf of our culture. In fact, this quote is the prevailing wisdom of our times.
When Trump says to his apprentices, “Never blame yourself,” he is speaking the wisdom of Americans on both the political right as well the political left. Think about it. When was the last time you heard a politician (or a CEO or a neighbor or anyone really) just flat out admit they were wrong?
In his 1936 classic book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie describes how notorious criminals like Al Capone often fail to recognize any fault in themselves for their socially deviant behavior. “If…
Carnegie’s book demonstrates how Trump’s logic of “blame shifting” was already embedded in American culture going back at least 80 years. So, it turns out that Trump’s quote really is not audacious at all, but rather the long prevailing logic of our culture.
Beginning Lent
On the First Sunday in Lent 2016, I had the ‘logic of our culture’ in mind as I got up to lead our congregation through a penitential rite. We were preparing to pray through the Decalogue, the “Ten Commandments.” We were about to recall the instructions the God of Israel gave to his people and to consider the ways in which our lives fall short of his good plan. This would be followed by a confession of sin, when we would admit in front of God and in front of all those gathered that we have “done something bad” (to use the words of Trump) and we are to blame.
Before we started, I reminded the congregation that we were about to do something completely subversive and counter-cultural. In a culture that is always to looking to shift the blame, we are the ones who own the blame. In a culture that constantly makes excuses for its actions, we are the people who say,
We have sinned against you (God)
in thought, word, and deed,
by what we have done,
and by what we have left undone.
We have not loved you with our whole heart;
we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves.
We are truly sorry and we humbly repent.
There are few things that we could do that would be more subversive than to publically admit that we are wrong. And on that morning, that is just what we did that. We were a room full of kneeling radicals who were bold enough to tell a different story about ourselves.
Lent is all about repentance. And repentance does not mean a return to status quo. Nor is it about realigning ourselves with American values. True repentance always subverts the status quo. In our culture, at least for now, it’s a subversive action.
Therefore, Lent is not just a yearly tradition we observe or a time for giving up chocolate. It’s an opportunity for a radical realignment of our values with God’s values. Lenten repentance has the potential to posture us with enough humility that we can become the kinds of people that are useful to the Holy Spirit.
May God lead us into true repentance so that we may become his holy people, God’s special possession, that we may declare the praises of him who called us out of darkness into his marvelous light. Amen.
Jon Ziegler is the founding pastor of Gold Line Church in Highland Park and frequently orders “al pastor” from taco trucks.
[1] Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People, rev. ed. (New York: Simon and Schuster, ©1981), 33.
Title Image featured in Huffington Post. Found here.
