I’ve been reflecting on the concept of shame this week. The Gospel reading says that if we are ashamed of God then God will be ashamed of us. I’m not really sure Jesus said it, because he was more focused on shepherding the sheep and bringing people into the flock. It sounds more like something that a writer added to the Biblical writings later to keep the community in line. Nevertheless, shame plays a role in this Gospel.
Was Peter ashamed of Jesus in this
story? He certainly was after Jesus’
arrest. He was afraid of being arrested,
like Jesus was, so he denied Jesus each time he was asked, “Weren’t you with
him, too?”
What is shame? It has something to do with hiding something
because it is an embarrassment. It is a
feeling that something is your fault.
When Jesus rebuked Peter in this Gospel saying “Get behind me, Satan,”
it was because Peter was asking him to hide something about himself—the truth the
he would suffer and die. “I am the light
of the world,” Jesus said. He was just
shining on the mountain top, a bright light illuminating the truth. Jesus came to expose what is broken and
unfinished, not to ever hide anything.
Jesus came to expose the injustice in our world and light the way for us
to change it.
This is the first time in this
Gospel that Jesus mentions the cross.
The cross was an unthinkable punishment, an instrument of injustice to
frighten people, to expose them to public suffering and shame, so that people
would stay in their place and never challenge the powers of the Empire. So when
Jesus said he would expose himself that kind of suffering and shame, Peter
couldn’t even conceive of it—Jesus didn’t deserve it. Truly, no one deserves that treatment, but if
you could ever make any argument that someone deserved it, that wouldn’t be
Jesus. No one deserved the cross, but it
was used because it was effective, because people believed that those people on
that cross deserved their punishment, the same way we like to believe that
people are on death row because they deserve it and homeless because they
deserve it, because if they don’t deserve it, it could happen to any of us, and
it could. So Jesus continued to
challenge the Roman and Jewish leaders until they were so threatened by him and
those who might follow his example that they used the cross to crush him. The cross exposed Jesus in all his nakedness
and humanity, but it also exposed all the systems that crush people every day,
and even more it exposed the Empire as the fragile, violent, fearful, unjust system
that it is.
Shame is very powerful—the idea that
it is your fault. We tend to hide what
is shameful because it causes us psychological pain. I remember as a kid, I was ashamed that my
dad hit me. I didn’t tell anyone. They would think I did something to deserve
it, even if I knew that nobody deserves to be treated that way. Shame is why cycles of abuse continue. I remember when I started at my first
congregation. People left. We went from 2 services to one. I felt ashamed. I thought it was my fault that people left,
even though I couldn’t figure out what it was I had done. I felt that way for a couple of years. Then, our church council president at the
time compared our membership numbers with those of other congregations around
us—like 8 or 9 of them. It turns out all
the churches were experiencing the same decline. It was a trend. It was not my fault. I felt a huge sense of relief once Don shined
a light on what was going on and illuminated the truth for me. A lot of parents feel shame especially during
the pandemic. Many have lost their jobs
or had to quit. They feel stretched to
educate and entertain their children, keep them safe, manage dwindling financial
resources, and remain calm and collected stuck in the house together for a year.
What dragging our shame into the
light teaches us is about the systems of oppression all around us. My abusive home illuminated the cycles of
abuse that are passed down from one generation to another. It illuminated the lack of support for women to
leave a situation like that. It
illuminate the system of poverty that kept children in homes where they were in
danger. The changes in church membership
reflected the pressures of work, that wages were not keeping up with the cost
of living. It illuminated the feelings
of families that their children needed to be in sports and arts programs in
order to get into a good college. It
illuminated the need for some families to display their wealth and importance
by all the trips and activities they could be involved in. Illuminating these ills helped us understand
what was not life-giving or just about the world we were living in and helping
to create. When we illuminate the shame
that parents are feeling, we see them in turn shaming the teachers who haven’t
had it easy this year either. And we see
how we have piled the complicated tasks of education, childcare, mental health
support, child abuse prevention, suicide prevention all on teachers. How can we create systems that value our teachers
and care for our children? We need to
rethink how we’ve done things in the past, because they just fell apart.
When we illuminate the things we’re
ashamed of, we can learn from them about ourselves and the world. When we show the things we’re ashamed of,
other people can relate to us. They
realize they aren’t the only ones and that blaming doesn’t help anyone. Dan Wilson, for his Master’s Thesis,
developed an Evangelism program and one of the important steps before inviting
people to church is to examine your church and expose the skeletons in the
church closet. He encourages churches to
take a look at what they have hidden: difficult memories, things about which
the congregation might be ashamed, and shine a light, inspect them, examine
them, bring them out where everyone can get a good look and can learn from
them.
Spirit
of Life is a good church with a can-do spirit and a lot of love for the
community. And it is a place where
people have been hurt and excluded and made mistakes. This is nothing to be ashamed of. Jesus shows us that we can follow him to the
cross and make ourselves vulnerable, take a look at what could have gone better
and learn from it. It is hard work, but
it is good work. You have started to
trust me with your pain, little whispers here and there of the skeletons. I’m not afraid of skeletons. They are rather fascinating to me and they
teach us such a great deal. I will be
intentionally working on creating ways for us to face our skeletons together
and learn from them. With Jesus, we will
illuminate them because we have nothing to fear.
We
like to put bandages on our wounds. But
it is really light and air that help them heal.
We don’t have to cover anything up. When we expose our wounds caused in
and by the church, we begin the journey of healing. Then we are less likely to repeat our
mistakes or hurt each other in the same way, and our old wounds are less likely
to impair our efforts to bring healing and life to the community around
us. We learn from our mistakes and all
the things we’ve been ashamed of how to hold the pain and shame of others—we
can be unfinished together, we can learn together, we can be welcoming in a
whole new way to the community around us.
Abram
and Sarai were ashamed of the fact that they could not have any children. It was a sign they were not blessed, that
there was something wrong with them.
They thought it was their fault and everyone around them would have agreed
with that assessment. But God came to
Abram and Sarai and made a covenant with them.
God shined a light on their shame and said, “It isn’t your fault, it’s
just that I’m not done with you yet.” There is more to come. Their story was just beginning, even when
they were in old age.
I
love that the 2nd Reading says that Abraham never waivered in his
faith, because he waivered a lot—but God didn’t hold it against him. He was always questioning God, why he didn’t
have a child yet. And when he got good
and tired of waiting he went in to his wife’s maidservant and had a child with
her, even though the covenant was made with both Abraham and Sarah, that the
multitude of nations would come through both of them. Abraham’s story of faithlessness is not
hidden from us, but exposed so that we can see that if his faith was enough and
his was about the size of a mustard seed, and he is the father of our faith,
maybe we have enough faith, too. Or
maybe it is the faith of Jesus that saves us and not our own at all.
Peter
also waivered in his faith and was clearly ashamed of Jesus, yet God made him
the rock on which God built the church.
Will
God be ashamed of us if we are embarrassed and try to hide away our faith? God wasn’t ashamed of Abraham who was
constantly losing faith that God would keep God’s covenant. God wasn’t ashamed of the poor or naked or
hungry or mentally ill or incomplete and God never blamed the sheep that
wandered from the flock. The scriptures
say, “Nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.” One possible translation that we can make because
of that the lack of punctuation in the original Greek, makes the scripture into
a question instead, “38Those who are ashamed of me and of my words
in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them will the Son of Man also be
ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels?” Shame is an opportunity for shining the light
of Christ and investigating more why the world works the way it does and how
can God work through us to challenge the systems that make us hide away our
pain and replace shame with new life and hope.
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