You're listening to the Allender Center podcast with Dr. Dan Allender.

This week, Dan continues our series on scapegoating by reflecting on the experience of being

chosen to bear the violence and chaos of an entire system.

By reflecting on the categories of people who are often turned into scapegoats, we may begin to engage these age-old dynamics in new ways.

We scapegoat and we are scapegoated and where we left off in our last podcast is,

this is really personal and it needs to be taken into account systemically,

familiarly, and certainly personally and individually.

What I'm getting at is that we who struggle with envy, we who are the objects of other

people's envy, often need this intersection of relief and revenge.

We need something to quell the tumult, the green bile of envy. And that desire for

what another has that leaves us not only empty and alone feeling something of the force and the

weight of injustice, we want something to take away

that more than mere anger, that, that, um, dis-ease within us. But we also want the one who

becomes our scapegoat to pay. That's why just sending off into the wilderness

isn't enough. We want to know to some degree that being sent in the wilderness, as you find

in Leviticus 16 number of passages, that that's more than just abandonment and sending on.

It's also the sense that we send you out into the wilderness to be devoured and to be destroyed.

You become the relief of our need for revenge.

So at that level, it's the intersection of, I need you. I need you.

So every scapegoat has that element of, I need you. Simultaneously, I need you to suffer my heartache

and my loss and my shame. So that question remains. How do we know that we're being scapegoated? And simply

looking through the raft of people I've been privileged to work with, not only from the standpoint

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