Can This Be The Christ?

Guest speaker Sylvia invites us to wrestle with one of the most difficult and often overlooked stories in scripture: the unnamed concubine in Judges 19. Through her story of suffering and betrayal, Sylvia asks what it means to see Christ in unexpected places, even among the most marginalized and dehumanized. This teaching challenges us to confront violence, resist dehumanization, and embody compassion, courage, and justice in our own lives.

Review Sylvia’s notes here and listen to or watch the teaching below.

Introducing the Scapegoat

Why do humans have such a violent streak, and why is it often targeted in such cruel ways at innocent people? In this second teaching in our Lenten series, Old Stories, New Lenses, Leah lays out the heart of René Girard’s theory on human behavior: the “scapegoat mechanism”. Here she explains his take on how violence is expressed in human societies and then uses that framework to look at the story of Joseph and his brothers in Genesis. This teaching provides the heart of the ideas we’ll be exploring through the rest of Lent.

Review Leah’s notes or listen to the teaching below.

This Is All Your Fault

How does mimetic desire lead to rivalry and then to violence against a single victim? This is a pattern literary critic and anthropologist Rene Girard noticed throughout literature and ancient mythology, but interestingly in the Hebrew Bible, he saw something different beginning to unfold. Listen in this week as Leah describes Girard's theory of violence, how it manifests in ancient myths like the Oedipus story, and what clues God might be giving in the Hebrew Bible to address and undo the power of violence at work.

Listen to the teaching below and/or check out Leah's notes here.