Most of us are holding it together pretty well. Some of us are quite high achieving. We don’t need to be rescued from shame and despair. Maybe. How many of you have gotten in the front of a room and done your thing, and received loads of affirmation, and one negative comment. What went home with you?
How much of our worth do we get from our job, our kids, from our fit figure or our able body, from our bank account or the car we drive, from somebody’s good opinion of us, from being better than somebody else, better than what we would dread being? We may get to find out, because these things don’t last. But before we find out the hard way, maybe we can pre-emptively ask the question: how hard are we trying to earn all those things, to prove to someone, to ourselves, that we are worthy? What if we stopped working so hard to avoid judgment? What if we really trusted the crucified and risen Christ to give us our worth and acceptance and belonging, and didn’t need to get it from anyone or anything else?
What would we be like? We would be humble, in the original meaning of the word: earthy. Not better than, not debased, just a feet-on-the-ground, wonderfully unique, part of the whole. We would be vulnerable: people would still judge us, and we would feel their judgment. But we would not be controlled by that judgment, because Christ, and Christ’s friends, would see our true worth, and remind us of it.
I’ll tell you a little secret. Well, it’s not a secret but it’s one of those things we never want to say out loud. We are all vulnerable, all the time. Anything we have could be gone in a heartbeat. But our worth, according to our faith, is sacred and eternal. When I remember that, I can be vulnerable, a little easier.
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Brea Congregational United Church of Christ
June 23, 2019
Vulnerable
1Cor. 1:18-30 For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. 19 For it is written,
“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,
and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.”
20 Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? 21 For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe. 22 For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, 23 but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, 24 but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. 25 For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.
26 Consider your own call, brothers and sisters: not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. 27 But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; 28 God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, 29 so that no one might boast in the presence of God. 30 He is the source of your life in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption, 31 in order that, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.”
“We proclaim Christ crucified.” Not my usual sermon topic. In fact this sermon may use up my quota on that topic for the year— I did two in Lent. I don’t take the cross lightly. Christians did not use the symbol of the cross to decorate their bodies or their worship spaces until after Emperor Constantine abolished crucifixion as a Roman punishment in the fourth century.
The first Christians had a hard sell. “Your leader died as a criminal, in the most shameful way imaginable. And he is what, the son of God? God? Right.” We have heard the story too many times. We do not hear the strangeness of it. A public, shameful death: that was easy to see, and easy to understand. But it is hardly the way to claim to be a spiritual leader, or start a new religion. Resurrection is hard to see. Normal measures of human value do not apply here. I want us to appreciate the strangeness of the Gospel, because in that strangeness is power for healing and redemption. If we reduce it to a formula, to something expected, we miss what is essential.
What is the scariest, most shameful situation you have had to endure? Don’t worry, this is not audience participation. In the ancient world, the pain of the cross was recognized as formidable. But the shame of the cross was truly the most horrible thing imaginable.
Being in the criminal justice system, in any era, is shame enough. I’ve been to jail. I was on the outside of the bars. I was visiting a church member who had despaired of completing his alternative sentence. He had no financial resources and no family to help him. He broke his parole by using a substance and testing positive for it, because he couldn’t come up with any other way to get a warm bed for a few weeks. His bed was courtesy of the Orange County criminal justice system. All I had to do was visit him. And it was the most soul-killing half day I have ever experienced in my life. How do they make prison so ugly? So demeaning? How do they make you feel worthless and valueless and hopeless just by walking into the building? Mind you, I was on the outside of the bars. Picture Jesus in an orange jumpsuit, behind bars, three strikes, he’s out and you will get just an inkling of the shame heaped upon him by his crucifiers.
We are nice, law-abiding people. We don’t do things that subject us to that kind of shame. Or if we do, we never admit it. Some of us don’t even have relatives who can shame us very effectively by pulling such stunts, though some of us do. Perhaps more to the point, most of us have resources to protect us and our families from such a shameful fate, resources like the color of our skin, environments that don’t lure us into illegal activities, and money for good attorneys if we do get into trouble. We want to hold ourselves above such shame and degradation. And often we can. But many of God’s children cannot.
Jesus chose to march right into this kind of shame. And this was not out of character. Think of the beatitudes, and Matthew 25: “I was in prison, and you visited me.”
We would like to believe that the people who get immersed in that soul-crushing level of shame deserve it. Setting aside the question of whether any human being deserves such treatment, I suspect in the circles Jesus traveled, as at our borders and in other places today in our own country, relatively mild transgressions or the whim of authorities could lead you to the shame of prison. Jesus lived in a country occupied by a foreign army, in a time when debt slavery was a regular occurrence, so it was very easy to land in prison for some trumped-up charge of treason like disrespecting a Roman soldier, or simply not being able to pay your bills.
Shame cuts us off from belonging, and from any sense of our own worth. Shame makes us want to hide, to avoid others before they can cause us the pain of shunning us or judging us. It was recognized in Jesus’ culture, as we cannot say aloud in ours, that anything that makes a person less than a full member the community may expose you to shame. Disability or disfigurement. Illness. Sexual impropriety, even if you’re the victim. Destitution. Social and ritual transgression: they called it sin. Those kinds of things that when we see them, our first instinct is to keep our distance, to shun. All those things that made Jesus go out of his way to turn toward people in Gospel stories. And then, at the end, he took the shame upon himself. In struggling to make sense of Jesus’ shame, his followers found Isaiah 53: “He was despised, shunned by all, pain-racked and afflicted… we despised him, we held him of no account, an object from which people turn away their eyes.
Was Jesus enduring the shame of the cross to pay our cosmic debt to a legalistic God? You know I don’t buy that interpretation. Or was he joining us at the core of our vulnerability and shame, so we would know that the shamers do not have the last word, and so we would know that we are never alone?
The maven of shame in our culture is Brené Brown. She is a research professor of social work in Texas who has done research on shame. She might be on to something, because her 2010 TED talk called “The Power of Vulnerability” has been watched 41 million times. In our culture shame and guilt are two different things, she says. Guilt says you did something bad. Shame says you arebad. Guilt says you didn’t doenough. Shame says you are never enough. Of course we don’t tell people this in polite conversation. We don’t have to. We all learned, from parents or teachers, or mean kids in middle school, that look that tells you that you are less than. And we don’t even need that look. We can shame ourselves all by ourselves.
There is another important difference between guilt and shame in Brown’s research. Shame is highly correlated with addiction, depression, violence, bullying, eating disorders, suicide. Guilt inversely correlates with those things. Guilt says: you made a mistake. Clean it up. Shame says: you are a mistake, so don’t even bother trying.
Three things, says Brown, cause shame to multiply exponentially. Secrecy, silence and judgment. Jesus had some things to say about judgment. And our Christian tradition has some healthy tools to overcome secrecy, like confession, spiritual direction, and spiritual friends.
One thing can eradicate shame. Empathy. Telling your story to another person: not just anybody, but someone who hears you, and doesn’t judge you, and maybe even says, “yeah, I’ve been there too.” We know the risen Christ, who has been through the worst shame imaginable, and he reaches out to us. He can touch us with a heart as big as the whole universe and he understands, and he does not judge. If we do not need him to reach out to us, because we are free of shame on any given day, then we who follow him can reach out with him, to those who do need empathy. He can’t do it without us.
Most of us are holding it together pretty well. Some of us are quite high achieving. We don’t need to be rescued from shame and despair. Maybe. How many of you have gotten in the front of a room and done your thing, and received loads of affirmation, and one negative comment. What went home with you?
How much of our worth do we get from our job, our kids, from our fit figure or our able body, from our bank account or the car we drive, from somebody’s good opinion of us, from being better than somebody else, better than what we would dread being? We may get to find out, because these things don’t last. But before we find out the hard way, maybe we can pre-emptively ask the question: how hard are we trying to earn all those things, to prove to someone, to ourselves, that we are worthy? What if we stopped working so hard to avoid judgment? What if we really trusted the crucified and risen Christ to give us our worth and acceptance and belonging, and didn’t need to get it from anyone or anything else?
What would we be like? We would be humble, in the original meaning of the word: earthy. Not better than, not debased, just a feet-on-the-ground, wonderfully unique, part of the whole. We would be vulnerable: people would still judge us, and we would feel their judgment. But we would not be controlled by that judgment, because Christ, and Christ’s friends, would see our true worth, and remind us of it.
I’ll tell you a little secret. Well, it’s not a secret but it’s one of those things we never want to say out loud. We are all vulnerable, all the time. Anything we have could be gone in a heartbeat. But our worth, according to our faith, is sacred and eternal. When I remember that, I can be vulnerable, a little easier.
Humility and gratitude, vulnerability and joy: they’re interlocked. You can’t have one without the other. Do you remember a time when you have gazed at a loved one, and realized that you loved them so much you could hardly stand it, and suppressed a shudder, realizing how vulnerable that love made you? That vulnerability is the love Jesus died to show us.
The Christian story says God emptied himself, became the lowest of the low, endured the shame of it, became vulnerable to the worst kinds of abuse at the hands of people, to show us the way out of shame to courage, freedom, joy and gratitude. This is not business as usual. This is not religion as art, or for form’s sake, or for social control. This is gospel: Good News. And if enough of us really lived it fully, the social consequences would be devastating. No danger of that at present. Still, we try to do our small part.
I am happy to report that the church member I visited got out of jail, and recognized that he did have family: his church family. An empty nester couple with a tiny home gave him their son’s bedroom, and made him a part time job. They made themselves vulnerable, in a way I don’t advise you to do without serious and prayerful consideration. In this case, it worked. He stayed drug free, and “graduated” from his alternative sentencing program about a year and a half later. He knows gratitude in a way I suspect few people do.
Facing shame, we discover, vulnerability is courage. We don’t have all the answers. We make mistakes. We get hurt. That’s how we learn and grow and create. And our worth does not depend on our being right, or being good enough, or being approved of. Our worth is a gift from God that can never be taken away. A gift from the God who is vulnerable, who longs to be a part of our lives. May that knowledge make us humble, and very, very grateful. Let us not hide in shame, but risk reaching out, being honest, being vulnerable. And let us renew our pledge to serve the risen Christ, who invites the last and the least to the place of honor at the feast of God. Amen.
