It's not my fault!

Introduction

There are various topics that have been on my mind for some time, and one of them is the subject of "responsibility".

I would like to start with an example.

I know a lot about computers and am often asked for advice. That doesn't bother me and I'm happy to help.

I really mean that. This speech is not intended to be a public "Don't ever ask me again!".

Some people say "I don't mind" with a completely annoyed look on their face, or some people's faces are already characterised by burnout and they still groan a friendly "I'm happy to help."

That's not the case with me. You are welcome to continue asking my advice on computer issues.

I also have no problem putting up with the sentence that almost always comes up when computer problems occur: "I didn't do anything!" One of the reasons for this is that I have often said this sentence when I have to ask others to solve a problem.

But there is one thing that annoys me, one thing.

I don't know a lot of things that people ask me and I then enter this question - or keywords relating to this question - into an Internet search engine. And when a simple, functioning answer to this question appears at the top of the results list, I feel a little stultified.

After all, the person asking the question could have typed it into a search engine first, couldn't they?

Although it does increase my appeal as a computer genius when I answer questions via Google, I don't really have to. It's enough for my ego that my mum's computer problems sometimes solve themselves just by me entering the room.

Often it's not laziness at all, because many people are surprised when I point out that a lot of solutions can be found quite easily via a search engine. Of course, some questions are more complicated and require more in-depth knowledge, but a lot of things are quite simple. An important rule of thumb for determining whether the solutions already exist somewhere is to ask how many others may have already had this problem. If there are many, then there will most likely already be simply explained solutions.

I have seriously thought about giving some people a short introduction to using an Internet search engine, true to the motto:

Give a starving man a fish and he'll eat for a day. Give him a fishing rod and he'll be full for a lifetime.

But, and here we leave the computer area, do you want to learn how to fish? Do you want to take responsibility yourself and no longer just wait for the fish to be handed to you?

Or is our motto rather:

Give a hungry man a fish and he will be fed for a day. Give him a fishing rod and he will insult you because he has better things to do than waste his time hanging lines in the water.

I would like to reflect on this question of responsibility with you today.

To begin with, I would like to discuss

responsibility for your own guilt

to begin with.

The classic reference is Genesis 3:1-15;

Here they realised that they were naked. This is certainly not just about physical nakedness, but also about symbolic nakedness. If you have made a mess and others notice it, you often feel very exposed and that usually feels very unpleasant. This is sometimes much worse than if, for example, everyone were to see an ugly boil on your bum that is normally hidden by your clothes.

For physical nudity there is clothing, or in this case aprons made of leaves, how do you deal with symbolic nudity? Let's take a look:

This is the first strategy when you have exposed yourself. You hide, you isolate yourself. You can't stand it when others see you, because then they remember the embarrassing or even terrible mistake you have made.

You might even see an invisible ticker on other people's foreheads: "What a mess the bastard has made again!"

Some people even go so far as to hide from God because they can no longer cope with their own failures.

But God doesn't let him out of the situation so easily.

A very modern dialogue:

"What a load of rubbish you've done again."

"Actually, it's all my wife's fault."

Adam is very skilful here when it comes to distributing the blame.

Firstly, the wife is to blame, that's clear. But then it's actually God's fault, because it was the woman that God put at his side. Very clever, he really drove God into a corner.

But we are no better today. Somehow the passing on of guilt is deep within us humans. It starts in childhood.

If you have several children, you will have often heard the phrase "It wasn't me!" and if the child is still small enough and has not yet fully understood that some statements can easily be verified, then the blame is sometimes passed on to the sister or brother.

It is apparently very important to us not to be to blame.

Sometimes it is also the consequences of guilt that motivate us to adopt different strategies.

I once worked in a company where several projects failed. It was my first major company and a colleague explained to me that a lot of rescue packages are now being put in place following the failure of projects. It is important to explain why you are not to blame for the failure. Of course you also made mistakes, but the customer kept changing the requirements and so it couldn't work, etc., etc.

In such cases, of course, your job depends on whether you are to blame, so it is easy to understand such blame avoidance strategies.

But it often bothers you when you are blamed for something without there being any consequences. Guilt generally bothers you, you want to get rid of it.

And if another person is obviously not to blame, then you can always blame God, or fate or circumstances if you don't believe in God.

Eve also let the blame slip away:

After all, she was not so impertinent as to blame God. She could have said: The man you gave me was stupid enough to take the fruit, or the man you gave me was standing next to me and could have prevented it. Sometimes men and women play a kind of blame ping-pong in a relationship, which of course destroys the relationship at some point.

She's not doing that here, she's using the "I was seduced" strategy.

This strategy is sometimes used for serious crimes such as rape and even relationship offences such as adultery. You can also choose this strategy if you have committed a criminal offence in a group.

This strategy also exists in a modified form when it comes to the fact that one's own children have done something wrong. They were then seduced.

Some parents seem to take the view that their own children are always pure and good - in any case they are always good at heart - and the evil from outside, the bad other children, seduce their own pure and good children into doing bad things.

And what about the original seducer?

The seducer is not asked, he is really guilty, and of course this is not about the snake as a reptile but about the seducer in the form of a snake.

We have now learnt a few "loincloths" for symbolic nakedness: hiding, blaming the woman, blaming God (atheists choose "fate" in this case) and "I was seduced" or "my children were seduced".

Do these loincloths help? Maybe sometimes, because every now and then it works with cheating. But what happens to relationships if the blame is always passed on? What is it like in your professional life if you're always tying up parachutes?

Verse 21 contains another interesting sentence:

How now? They already had loincloths, so why did they still need clothes?

The loincloths made of leaves were not enough. They might work on the beach in bright sunshine, but when a fresh wind comes up, when it gets cold, the leaves won't do.

In the same way, loincloths are not enough for our symbolic nakedness. We need skins, and God gives us these skins.

This passage is the first time that the Bible mentions that animals were killed and is a reference to the death of Jesus Christ on the cross.

Through Jesus' sacrifice our guilt before God is forgiven and it is only through Jesus Christ that we learn to deal with our guilt properly before other people. It is then no longer necessary to hide, to let things slip away, it can be done differently, even if it is of course a learning process.

Let us come to

Responsibility for our lives

We are not only responsible for our guilt, but also for the life we have lived.

For me, this is not just about fulfilling our duties. I take that for granted, as it says, for example, in 1 Timothy 5:8 (New Testament):

However, the life of a Christian does not usually consist of fun-free duties, as this leads to dissatisfaction in the long run. And some Christians have also overextended themselves out of a misunderstood sense of duty and suffered burnout.

Ephesians 2: 8-10 (New Testament) describes the right way to do this:

You cannot earn anything with performance before God. Our Christian life is not a commission-based job.

God has prepared our lives, your life and mine personally, and you can discover with him what is right for you personally. And God will sometimes lead you down completely new paths that you would never have thought of. "Carrying out what has been prepared" may sound a little limited, but that's only because we can't imagine all that God has prepared. Maybe He wants what you especially want you to do and that you do it for God. Let's not belittle God. Life is not only great for others, no, everyone can live with God, in ups and downs, but always close to God.

However, I have to mention an important responsibility for our lives as the basis for what I have just said, and not just because it is one of my favourite verses (John 1:12; New Testament):

By "him" here we mean Jesus Christ and receiving him into our lives is our responsibility. This is the starting shot for life with God. No clergyman can do this for us. The relationship with God is a personal one and cannot be conducted via church representatives.

Another resulting responsibility is described in 1 Peter 5: 6.7:

Bring our worries to him? Yes, our responsibility is to be in dialogue with God, to bring our worries to him, to expect guidance and help from him. Of course, this does not mean doing nothing, but it is the basis of our decisions and actions.

Furthermore, our spiritual nourishment is our responsibility. "Spiritual nourishment" sounds rather strange, but where do we get our spiritual input from? Where do we learn about God? The church service is certainly a good thing, but if that is the only place of nourishment, then we are shifting the responsibility for that to the respective preachers on Sunday.

How is that right? Here is an example from Acts 17:11 (New Testament):

They tested what the apostle Paul taught. They were very open-minded, but not gullible.

Of course, it is easier to simply accept what others tell you, but that is not right.

Responsibility for others

Now we don't live alone. We have family, friends, acquaintances, colleagues, neighbours and somehow we are also responsible for them.

We find various examples of this in the Bible, e.g. Galatians 6:1.2 (New Testament):

The first sentence in particular sounds very pious, but the emphasis in the first sentence is on "helping one another", not hushing everything up under a pseudo-pious cloak. And if clear words are necessary to set things right, then they are part of it.

But we often tend to take a self-blame or "I don't care" approach. And this is where God's Spirit teaches us to show interest in others and also forbearance, i.e. interest and forbearance for those who allow themselves to be tempted to make mistakes. We like the nice people anyway.

The second sentence of the first verse also sounds pious ("do not fall into temptation"). Unfortunately, we often tend to think things like "It can't happen to me!". And here, too, God's Spirit can give us a more realistic assessment of ourselves.

The second verse shows in general how we can and should take responsibility for one another. Everyone has burdens and most of the time we want to keep them to ourselves.

It is also somehow difficult to tell others what is weighing you down. It is often difficult for others to sympathise with what is weighing you down. Proverbs 14:10 (NL) expresses it like this:

Every heart has its own bitterness and no one else can fully share its joy either.

Joy and sorrow are often very personal, and while you can cope quite well with joy that no one else can share, undivided sorrow can really get you down.

That's why bearing burdens together is an important task for the individual members of the congregation, and of course this requires sharing.

Sometimes this burden-bearing also means effort: (Luke 5, 17-20; NGÜ)

It was known that Jesus healed, so these men wanted to bring the paralysed man to him. It was not so easy, because it was all full. They were then quite painless and covered some tiles and let the sick man through the roof. It seems borderline to us to damage someone else's property in this way in order to help someone. In today's houses, you would have to saw through some battens, remove insulation and perhaps kick through some plasterboard.

But that was the case in this particular instance. Jesus not only forgave him his sins, but also healed him later, as you can read in the following verses.

Finally, I would like to give a negative example of how burden-bearing should not be.

A man called Job experienced bad things: all his children perished in a disaster, his possessions were stolen, he fell seriously ill and his wife left him.

Then something positive happens, because he has friends: (Job 2, 11-13 ; NL)

This behaviour is great. Who takes so much time for their friend's suffering? Can we do that and do we do it?

But then "well done" becomes "well-intentioned and badly done".

Job begins to complain about his misfortune. He doesn't understand why so many bad things had to happen to him and he speaks out about it.

Unfortunately, his friends are of the opinion that misfortune always also means guilt, and unfortunately they also say so, e.g. in chapter 8 (NL):

The opinion that misfortune is God's deserved punishment has been held from time to time in the past, which is probably why there is the book of Job in the Bible, because at the end it becomes clear that this is nonsense.

Of course there are misfortunes that are your own fault and I have also met people where I thought that if he did that, he was walking into his misfortune and he was walking into his misfortune. And of course I've also caused myself suffering through my own stupidity - like probably every other person.

But the important thing is that a "see" doesn't help the sufferer, nor does a "I-could-have-told-you-so". Apart from the question of why they didn't say it before, such diagnoses can unfortunately also result in stupid things like Job's friends.

The willingness to take the time to listen and offer help is the right way to carry a burden. And advice sometimes has to be given, but it has to be given very, very carefully, in a humble way, so that it doesn't turn into blows.

Summary

I come to the conclusion.

Personal responsibility involves first taking responsibility for one's own guilt.

Here we can learn from Adam and Eve how it should not be.

So false "loincloths" are:

• Hiding
blaming
• the woman or God
Passing on
• the blame
• Blaming our own guilt on
seduction by others

We also have to take responsibility for our lives.

Take on
• duties
, such as caring for relatives
Discovering life with God for ourselves
• through Jesus Christ
Taking care
• of our own
spiritual nourishment, e.g. by reading the Bible

We must also take responsibility for others.

Carrying
• burdens for others
and allowing ourselves to be carried by others
Taking
• time for
others and not lightly diagnosing the misfortune of others

AMEN

Blessing

2 Corinthians 13, 13