Luke 13:10-17
When I was Grade 8, I remember sitting in science class one day, and some boys weren’t listening to the teacher––they weren’t doing anything seriously wrong––they just weren’t paying attention, and all of a sudden the teacher started speaking to them in a very sarcastic voice and belittling them. He asked them why they had bothered to come to class, and said things about their intelligence level, and really basically humiliated them in front of all the other students. I don`t know why I remember this incident so clearly, except that I felt angry that they were being so publicly shamed. And I wonder, to this day, if they remember that day and what they felt, because my experience has been that you never forget being shamed in public.
Shame is something we rarely talk about, and even more rarely admit feeling, and yet it’s an emotion that lurks underneath the surface of much of what we do. It’s different from guilt. Guilt is the feeling we have when we’ve done something we know is wrong. But shame is the feeling that who we are is somehow wrong––that who we are is somehow deeply flawed, or woefully inadequate, or doesn’t measure up at some fundamental level. The important thing to know about shame is that it usually starts from the outside. That is, we aren’t born with a sense of shame. Shame isn’t something that naturally arises within us––look at babies and young toddlers. No shame whatsoever. They feel joy, they feel anger, they feel sadness and excitement, all without us prompting them to, but they don`t feel shame. Shame is something we are made to feel, something other people put on us.
The church, actually, is pretty good at shaming. The shadow side of our Lutheran legacy, this emphasis that we are all ultimately curved in on ourselves and sinful, is that the corresponding proclamation that God through Christ forgives us and restores us to purity and righteousness and goodness too often goes unspoken. As a result, the church has too often become a place where people are shamed. Shamed for who we love and for who we can’t love, for what we do and for what we don’t do. Shamed for how we worship, for what we pray for and for what we don’t pray for. The church has even been a place where we are shamed for what wear, for what we look like, for how our children behave. Where we are shamed for not going to church often enough, for going to the wrong church, or for changing churches. In our Gospel reading, the religious leader shames the woman Jesus healed by telling her that she should have come on a different day to be healed! As a religious leader, I admit that we clergy have done more than our fair share of shaming people who come to God in need. I am fully aware that pastors have a legacy of shaming congregation members, a legacy that congregations as a whole have sometimes inherited.
But that’s the bondage of shame. Because it’s such an ugly feeling, one that makes us deeply uncomfortable, we bury it deep inside and don’t think about it, but in order to feel better, we end up shaming others. We all have the kid inside us, who tries to get rid of the pain of being hurt by hurting in return. Only as adults, we do it with shame. And then, we become ashamed for shaming others, and the cycle repeats itself. It traps us. It drags us down, it pulls at our necks like a millstone, and bends us over until we are quite unable to stand up straight, like the poor woman who came to Jesus for healing. When we have a strong sense of shame, we can feel it’s impossible to be ourselves, to speak our mind, to stand up for ourselves or others. We can feel trapped by our ailment of shame.
But this is not how God intends for us to live. It never has been. God’s plan for us has never been that we walk through our lives feeling bowed down and ashamed of our very existence, of our very being. For goodness sake, when God made humans from the dust of the earth, God said, “This is very good!” God wants our lives to be a delight to us, as Isaiah says, not a miserable walk of shame. This is why God forgives us, and heals us, and redeems us, and crowns us with steadfast love and mercy––all the things that we read in our psalm today.
But God knows that it is hard for us to escape shame so easily. Shame affects us more deeply than other emotions. And so God sent Jesus––God-incarnate, embodied in one of these bodies that we think are so shameful, to set us free from our shame, to heal us, to help us to stand up straight again.
Jesus does three things in healing the woman in our story. First, he sees her. Now this is scary. When people feel shame, a typical reaction is to want to hide. We don’t want to be seen––we want to be invisible––some people talk about hoping the ground will open up and swallow us. Because we are afraid of what will happen if people see us. We are afraid that they will recoil from us, reject us, run away from our shame, be ashamed of us. But Jesus doesn’t do that. Jesus sees this woman, bent over from the shame of her illness, and then Jesus calls her over. Jesus doesn’t send her away, to carry her shame with her. Jesus calls her over. Come to me, he says. Not so that he can shame her even further, not so that he can put her up on a bench in front of the congregation and hold her up as an example of how not to be, but so that he can lay his hands on her.
There is something almost overwhelmingly powerful in that moment. To be touched with love when you feel ashamed is… well, it’s life-giving. Because it’s acceptance. We live in these bodies, they are the only thing of us that exists, and when we are touched––hugged, embraced, or even just someone else’s hand laid on ours––it means that we are not as shameful as we thought. Our shame is not an insurmountable barrier between us and the world. We do not need to hide, or make ourselves small, or make our voices quiet, or hunch over so no one can see our faces. And to be touched by God’s own hand? It is an undeniable move of God towards us, it is an affirmation that our very existence in the world––in our bodies––is a good thing, and in that move, our shame disappears. God is not ashamed of us. No matter how crippled our bodies are, no matter how far they have fallen from where they used to be, no matter how sick or old or how much we weigh, no matter what shameful things we have done with our bodies or what shameful things have been done to us, God is not ashamed of us.
Of course Jesus no longer walks this earth the way he did two thousand years ago, but God is not done. God sends us. God sends us out, to see those around us who are bowed down in shame, to see them, to call to them, and to touch them. To affirm them as God’s creation, to see them as pure and righteous, to proclaim to them that God is proud of them, to free them from their burden of shame by saying to them as I say to you, “God is not ashamed of you!”
And what happens then is what always happens when God sets us free. We stand up, we look around us, we see that God delights in us, we see that there is reason to rejoice, and we lift up our voices! This is, actually, one of the reasons God has given us the sabbath. So that we might proclaim God’s love to one another, be freed from the bondage of our shame, and then together turn to God to give praise and thanks and rejoice at all the wonderful things God is doing. And so, on this sabbath, I say again to you, God is not ashamed of you, you are set free! Thanks be to God, Amen!
No comments:
Post a Comment