The Easter Scapegoat

Scapegoat – A person or group made to bear the blame for others or to suffer in their place.

At face value the resurrection of Jesus is a pretty unbelievable event, as most miracles are. But there’s no denying that Jesus lived and was executed on a Roman cross. What’s always thrilled me about the Bible is the symbolism of the book of Exodus in the Old Testament and the death of Jesus in the New Testament.

In Exodus, the second book of the bible, we meet God’s people, the Israelites, mired in slavery in Egypt, making bricks for all those giant pyramids. Enter Moses, who asks the Egyptian Pharaoh to let God’s people go free. Pharaoh refuses, so God hammers the Egyptians with a series of plagues. In plague No. 10, God tells the angel of death to kill the first-born son of everyone in Egypt. He instructs the Israelites to sacrifice a lamb and put its blood on their doorposts. If the angel of death sees the blood, he will “passover” that house and no death will occur. The people will be saved from death. Pharaoh then loses his son, and in his grief allows the Israelites to leave so they can start their 40-year desert vacation. It’s a good thing that No. 10 worked because ancient texts reveal that plague No. 11 was to have Fox baseball announcer Tim McCarver’s voice piped into Pharaoh’s palace.

While in the desert, God sets forth the entire constitution for the Israelite nation. He gives them all of their laws, feasts, sacrifices, and celebrations. One of the feasts was the Passover. It was a week-long remembrance of their escape from Egypt and how they were delivered from death by the blood of the lamb. The celebration included a special meal known as the Passover feast.

They also had another ceremony called the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur). This was when the priest would sacrifice a goat. Before killing the goat, the priest would lay his hands on it and symbolically transfer all of the sins of the entire nation to the goat. Then the goat was sliced up and his blood was poured on the altar in their traveling temple, the tabernacle. God has a bad attitude toward sin. It’s a really long story, but sin had to be paid for with death. God could have killed everybody for their sins, but he chose to accept the sacrifice of the goat instead. There were a lot less funerals that way. Plus he had made a promise to love his people.

There also was a second goat. This goat too had the sins of the people transferred upon it. This goat was led out into the desert where it was set loose to carry away the sins of the people. He was known as the ‘emissary goat’ in Latin, which was translated to ‘scapegoat’ in English (escapegoat). So, not only was the price of sin paid for through the death of the first goat, the people’s sins were also removed from the presence of God through the scapegoat.

Now fast forward on your biblical DVR to Jesus’ final week. He enters Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover. He is arrested shortly after eating the Passover meal and is crucified the next morning. With his death, Jesus actually did what the Passover lamb and the two goats in Exodus symbolized. He was sacrificed, willingly I might add, like a lamb at Passover. He accepted the wrath of God toward sin represented by the first goat, and he removed our sins from the presence of God as did the scapegoat.

The days of Exodus were a good 1200-1400 years before Christ. How did Jesus just happen to die during the Passover? How did the manner of his death mirror the Old Testament sacrifices? He could have been poisoned, starved, suffocated or buried to death? Neither of those methods involves the shedding of blood. Did the four gospel writers conspire to create a horrible death scene that just happened to symbolize the rituals explained in Exodus?

I find the events of Jesus’ death and their connection to the Old Testament stories more than just coincidence. Isn’t it possible that God arranged the whole thing? And if he could do that, then he certainly could have raised Jesus from the dead. Why would he set forth such a plan in motion? The answer too is found in Exodus. He chose to love his people. He chose to deliver them from Egypt and save them from death. He loves you too. Today we celebrate his love that rolled the stone away. A love that separates our sins from Him as far as the east is from the west, on the back of the scapegoat -- Jesus the risen Lord.

Chocolate's Dark Secret

“You cannot make chocolate without the cocoa bean.” -- Willy Wonka

My 1964 edition of Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory has a special place on my bookshelf. Its jacket is ripped and tattered. Its brown stains are presumably from chocolate chips or hot cocoa. In Charlie, Mr. Willy Wonka owns a magical chocolate factory.

In the book, Wonka’s factory workers are African pygmies called Oompa-Loompas. Wonka discovered them in the jungle living in trees, eating caterpillars, and desperately longing for their favorite food, the cocoa bean. With the approval of their leader, Wonka smuggled the entire tribe of Oompa-Loompas to his factory where he pays them in cocoa beans and chocolate. They’re so thrilled with their environment that they sing and dance while working.

Chocolate is one of my basic food groups. I don’t go a day without it some form. However, some recent knowledge about the chocolate industry is causing me to change my chocolate-buying habits. It’s terrible news, bad enough to break the heart of every Oompa-Loompa.

The information is so startling you’d think it too was a work of fiction. Chocolate comes from cocoa beans which are grown on plantations in countries near the equator. West Africa generates much of the world’s cocoa bean supply. More specifically, Ivory Coast is the largest supplier. I’ve read that it produces anywhere from 40-70 percent of the world’s cocoa supply.

The plantations are not serviced by Oompa-Loompa’s, but by another small, poor hungry creature: children. Children that are smuggled. Children as young as five. They are not paid, sent to school, or treated with dignity. They are beaten if they try to run away. In today’s lingo this is known as Human Trafficking.

European film makers Miki Mistrati and U. Roberto Romano made a documentary called “The Dark Side of Chocolate” that can viewed here at cultureunplugged.com. Watching the 46-minute film is truly worthwhile. It reveals how children are smuggled from the country of Mali to Ivory Coast. Mistrati and Romano find children working in the cocoa plantations. Lies, cover-ups, and blind-eyes are some of the film’s most notorious characters.

Here are some of the startling statistics about the chocolate industry:

· A UNICEF study reports that 200,000 children are trafficked yearly in West and Central Africa (Huffingtonpost.com).

· An estimated 100,000 children are slaves in the cocoa plantations of West Africa (slavefreechocolate.org).

· Some 1.8 million children aged 5 to 17 years work on cocoa farms in Ivory Coast and Ghana, according to the fourth annual report produced by Tulane University (slavefreechocolate.org).

· The report says 40 percent of the 820,000 children working in cocoa in Ivory Coast are not enrolled in school, and only about 5 percent of the Ivorian children are paid for their work (slavefreechocolate.org).

Nestle and Barry Callebaut, the world’s largest chocolate company; as well as food-ingredient companies Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland all have head offices in the Ivorian Coast city of Abidjan. Hershey purchases its chocolate from Nestle, ADM, and Cargill. In 2001, two U.S. congressmen drafted the Harkin-Engel Protocol which intended to end the child labor atrocities in the cocoa industry by 2008. All of the big chocolate makers signed on in support. However not many, and especially Hershey, found it necessary to follow through.

Slowly, progress is happening. According to stopthetraffik.org, Cadbury is starting to produce some fair-trade chocolate. Green and Blacks, which is owned by Cadbury, pledged to go completely fair-trade by the end of 2010. Kraft, who owns Cadbury has pledged to honor Cadbury’s fair-trade agreements. Mars has pledged to go completely traffick-free by 2020. Nestle has made their four-fingered Kit-Kat fair trade in the UK and Ireland. Hershey, the chocolate king of North America is severely dragging its feet.

The chocolate companies have to do more. They’re the ones with the wealth to create change. According to Ayn Riggs of slavefreechocolate.org the plantation owners and the fair trade groups need help. “It’s important that we don’t lose sight of the obligations of the Engel-Harkin Protocol. The fair trade organizations don’t have the resources to restructure the farms using child labor. Big candy does and should do what they said they would do many years ago,” said Riggs.

I know there are plenty of causes to support these days. But you can make a difference in this one without donating tons of cash. Maybe start with prayer. Pray that these children would be freed, that the smugglers would be stopped, and that the big chocolate companies would go “slave free.” Educate yourself. Spread the word. It will take discipline and information, but buying fair-trade products will have an impact. Write to the big chocolate companies to end human trafficking in the chocolate plantations. The anti-human trafficking group Oasis has a campaign to pressure Hershey to go fair-trade. (Oasisusa.org and raisethebarhershey.org).

Just the other day I watched the bunny-eared kindergartners at my school take part in an Easter egg hunt. I doubt that many West African children have Easter egg hunts. But they shouldn’t be smuggled, enslaved, and beaten for the profits of the big chocolate companies. They should be in school and having child-like fun. Or singing and dancing like Oompa-Loompas.

My Tiger Stadium Throne

The chair arrived in the mail in a large cardboard box. It was my one frivolous online purchase in the name of history and nostalgia. It weighs 21 pounds and dates back to 1912 when it was first installed. It’s green and made completely of metal. I wonder how many times it’s been repainted. I wonder what the people who used it have seen; the games, the triumphs, the heartbreaks. The chair came from Tiger Stadium in Detroit, my baseball home as a child and teen. The stadium is now gone, but I have the chair. It’s my own personal time-machine.

I’m certain it’s the chair I used 1974 at my first Tiger game. Reggie Jackson of the Oakland A’s hit a home run that day. When he stepped to the plate for his next at-bat, my father yelled, “Move the fences back!” I didn’t know the fences were moveable, I remember thinking.

The chair looked across the field at the centerfield bleachers where I spent dozens of high school evenings with my friends. We would drive down the Lodge Freeway and avoid the parking lots by finding a spot in the neighborhood near the cross streets of Cochrane and Pine. Elementary-aged children would ride up on their bikes and for a buck or two they’d offer to watch our car for us.

I loved how Tiger Stadium wasn’t surrounded by acres of parking lots that are guarded by ticket booths trying to siphon every dollar from its visitors. Except for the light towers on the roof, Tiger Stadium looked more like a warehouse or a factory that was capable of rolling out Mustangs and Cameros.

Once inside, the stadium was dark and cramped. Barren concrete ramps crisscrossed to carry us to the upper deck. From there we’d have to cross to the bleachers over a gangplank-like bridge. During day games, we’d walk the plank toward the bright light of the outside world that was nothing short of heavenly.

The chair was there when I sat in those bleachers with my dad in 1986 for an Opening-Day game against the Redsox. He had won two tickets by correctly answering a radio-station trivia question. Kirk Gibson slugged two home runs, both to the upper deck in right field, the second of which gave the Tigers the lead for good.

In 1999, I sat in almost the same spot for the stadium’s final game. The Tigers defeated the Royals, Rob Fick hit a grand slam for the ballpark’s last home run, and radio broadcasting legend Ernie Harwell led us in our goodbyes to the stadium.

I wanted to find a souvenir that night, a brick, a sign, something to keep forever. But defacing the stadium would have been sacrilegious. My memories would have to be enough. There was the game in 1977 when after Mark Fidrych beat the Redsox my dad sent me over to get an autograph from Carl Yastrzemski. There are memories of the game in which Hal McRae of the Royals hit an inside-the-park-homer. I remember sitting in the lower deck centerfield bleachers on the night the Tigers won their 35^th game in 40 tries to start the 1984 season. And I’ll never forget driving in from Grand Rapids on a rainy Friday in 1987 to see the Tigers win the first of three must-win games to steal the division title from the Blue Jays.

The Tigers have a new stadium now. It’s fancy, spacious, and well-lit. For years the city haggled over what to do with the empty Tiger Stadium. But nothing happened and slowly the abandoned ballpark became a symbol of the decaying city that surrounds it. I went back to Detroit in 2009 and made one more trip to the Corner of Michigan and Trumbull. I had heard that the demolition process had begun. I wasn’t sure, but I was certain that the ballpark had been flattened. To my shock, as I approached it from behind, I saw light towers reaching into the sky. I saw the familiar white tiles of the walls. The stadium was still standing.

However, I drove around the corner to see that only one section remained. It was just the part behind home plate and down the first base side. I felt like Charlton Heston stumbling upon the wrecked Statue of Liberty in the Planet of the Apes. The stadium stood in ruins. It looked like a building partially destroyed by a bomb or an earthquake. Tiger stadium was now baseball’s Parthenon, still standing, but a shell of its former self. The little gem of a ballpark had become a junked car sitting on blocks in a back alley. Only Detroit can screw up tearing down a stadium.

At home, I went to eBay to see if I could locate a souvenir. That’s when I found the chair. Baseball awoke from its hibernation on Thursday. I look forward to watching as many games as possible. And for the first time I see the Tigers on TV, I might just pull up the chair for old time’s sake.