Shame tells us that something about us is unworthy of life and love.  Human beings wield shame as a weapon to control one another, but Jesus teaches us that there is no room for shame in the body of Christ. 

Vicar Jessica Christy
The Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Lectionary 23, year A
Texts: Ezekiel 33:7-11; Romans 13:8-14; Matthew 18:15-20

Let us pray.  Loving and living God, may the words of my mouth and the meditations of every one of our hearts be acceptable to you, our rock and our redeemer.  In the name of the Father, and the + Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.

Shame is a powerful weapon.  It tells the shamed person that there is something about themself that they should hate.  When we wield shame against someone else, we tell that person they are somehow unworthy of belonging, respect, or even life itself.  And we are living in a golden age of public shaming.  Our world loves to use social media to subject wrongdoers to the judgment of millions.  On facebook and twitter, we define ourselves and our values by the objects of our scorn.  The internet has made this easy, but the cross, the pillory, and the scarlet letter all testify that human beings have long known how to use humiliation to control each other.  The history of the church shows how often we try to demonstrate our righteousness by what, and who, we reject.  We’ve long acted as if we could exorcize our own sins by pinning them to a scapegoat and casting that person out of our midst.

But Jesus says that shame and rejection have no place in the church.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus recognizes the power of people to hurt one another.  We might be knit together by the Holy Spirit, but we too often treat each other in ways that have little to do with patience, humility, and love.  So Christ says that, when someone in your community hurts you – because someone in your community is going to hurt you – you shouldn’t air your grievance with them in the court of public opinion.  You shouldn’t avoid that person, or gossip about them, or work to drive them out.  Your sacred responsibility is to approach them in private, and to lovingly try to repair the hurt together.  If the other person won’t accept what you are saying, then invite in a few other trusted people, who can help the two of you discern the nature of the problem.  If the other person truly is doing harm, and if they still refuse to acknowledge it, then you need to engage the church to try to fix things.

That all sounds great, but then Jesus drops this scary-sounding line: “If the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.”  Historically, that’s been read as though Jesus is telling us to kick the unrepentant person out of the church.  In living memory, we have used this text to excommunicate people.  But Jesus doesn’t say anything about exile or excommunication.  He doesn’t say anything about public humiliation, or the severing of ties.  He says to treat the wrongdoer as a Gentile or tax collector.  And how did Jesus treat Gentiles, tax collectors, outsiders, sinners, and everyone else whom the world said he should reject?  He reached out to them.  He ate with them.  He healed them, and he loved them, and he died for them.

In his words and in his life, Jesus teaches us that change has to grow out of relationships.  It is only in love that we can become something new.  If we go about it in any other way, if we try to bludgeon someone into repentance, we will only further wound the body of Christ.  There is no room for humiliation, isolation, or expulsion in the church.  If we act from a place of judgment and shame, instead of a place of fierce, persistent love, we will destroy ourselves.

Because we see in Ezekiel that shame is paralyzing.  When this passage takes place, Ezekiel had already been a prophet for seven years.  For seven long years, he had been trying to convince his people that they were headed down the wrong path, but they weren’t ready to listen.  They didn’t want to believe that they bore some responsibility for the way that things were going terribly wrong in their world.  They covered their ears to Ezekiel’s hard truths.  But in this passage, we see the reality finally sinking in.  Ezekiel’s people at last acknowledge that they have sinned.  But then, they get stuck there.  They cry out, “our sins weigh upon us, and we waste away because of them; how then can we live?”

How then can we live.  The weight of their shame is destroying their very will to go on.  They feel so ashamed of themselves that they aren’t working to change their lives, they aren’t trying to return to God – they just want to curl up and die.  Ezekiel has finally achieved his goal, he has finally opened the eyes of his people, but his long-awaited victory rings hollow.  He witnesses that shame doesn’t work, because a message of shame is a message of death.

Shame kills because it tells us that there is something about us that can never be fixed or accepted.  It tells us that we have something to hide, that there’s something that could reveal that we’re not really worthy of life or love.  Shame is that thing that, when we face it, makes us cry out, “How then can we live?”  Shame chokes human spirits, and shame has ended far too many human lives.  It leads us only to death and despair.

So God gives Ezekiel a new message, a word of love to temper his words of judgment.  When God’s people are hurting, God says, no, I don’t want you to hate yourselves.  I don’t want you to suffer for your sins.  I don’t want to lose you.  I want you to return to me and find abundant new life.  Because God’s forgiveness is so much bigger than our shame.  The terrifying, wonderful truth about grace is that there is nothing about us that God finds irredeemable.  There is nothing about us that God finds unlovable.  God sees both our shining goodness and our ugliest, most secret places of shame, and God loves us in our entirety.  God doesn’t want us to keep making the same mistakes, but there’s nothing we could ever do to make ourselves the least bit more or less worthy of God’s love.  And that means that shame has no place in our relationship with God.  In Christ’s resurrection, we are free from the power of death, and so we are free from the power of shame.

This is the way that the gospel calls us to love one another – for if God does not shame us, then how could we ever shame each other?  As Paul writes, “Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.”  God’s law may call on us to change, to confess, to repent, but the entire purpose of that law is love.  Only love has the power to truly transform us.  Only love brings healing and wholeness to the body of Christ.  This means there is no room for shame in our shared life in Christ.  There is no room for shame with God, and there is no room for shame with each other.

Christ says, “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, I am there among them.”  We encounter the good news in each other.  When we witness to the saving love of Christ, we have the power to free one another from shame.  When we love each other in all our sinful humanity, we loosen our bonds of death and despair, and bind ourselves together into a community of life.

And that is what it means to live as the body of Christ.

Amen.

 

We might feel like hiding in fear, but God is calling us to step out of the cave and out of the boat for the sake of our neighbors, to bring Christ, in us, to the world.

Vicar Kelly Sandin
The Tenth Sunday after Pentecost, Lectionary 19, year A
Texts: Matthew 14:22-33, 1 Kings 19:9-18

In the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

We learn to fear through our life experiences, and each one of us has a different story. And while we all have fears, we try to hide them from most everyone. Being vulnerable doesn’t happen much in our society. This is why I take great comfort in the characters of the Bible. This basic human condition of being afraid isn’t kept hidden, but is openly shared throughout its pages.

In fact, fear is the first human emotion mentioned in Genesis. Adam and Eve were pretty happy go lucky until they ate from the Tree of Knowledge. Then, everything changed. After doing that God called out, “Where are you?” And Adam replied, “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid…so I hid myself.”

I relate to this theme of fear because it’s not new to me. For much of my life I’ve been followed by a shadow of fear in one form or another. Fear of failure. Fear of not being good enough. Fear of making a mistake. Fear of being ridiculed. Fear of an accident. Fear my child will be harmed. Fear of standing before all of you with the task of speaking a word from God. And then, there are all the other fears I have from simply living in the world today.

And do you know what Jesus says to that? “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.” More precisely, “Be courageous because I AM present. Do not fear.” I’m with you always.

The disciples had a great amount of fear in our gospel story today, but this isn’t the first terrifying boat and storm scene in the gospel of Matthew. There seems to be a progression of learning experiences Jesus puts his disciples through to get them to realize that following him wasn’t going to be smooth sailing and they were going to need some practice to work through their fears and gain trust in him.

The first time this happens, the disciples follow Jesus into a boat. In this scene there was an incredible storm. The boat was being filled with water and the disciples were panicking. Meanwhile, Jesus was fast asleep! “Lord, save us!” they cried. And Jesus responded with a simple question, “Why are you afraid?” Can you see Jesus slightly shaking his head and saying, “Look, I AM right here in this boat with you.” But, Jesus calmed the storm and the disciples were completely amazed by this. And they began to wonder who this Jesus really was.

Fast forward to this morning’s lesson. This time Jesus makes the disciples get into the boat without him and their boat gets battered by the waves or, better translated, tormented by the waves. But, interestingly, the disciples aren’t described as being afraid of the storm. Perhaps they already worked through this fear. In this scene, though, Jesus isn’t asleep during the storm. He’s up the mountain praying, but awake, and fully aware of where his disciples are and what they’re going through, like watching your kids from afar, ready to step in, if needed, but wanting to see how they’ll handle things when the playground gets a little rough.

And then, at about three or four in the morning, Jesus decides to walk toward them on water. Certainly not something you see every day! And even scarier in the dark! But Jesus seems to keep pushing the discipleship envelope. So, of course, they cry out in fear.

And what does Jesus say, “Be courageous because I AM present. Do not be afraid.”

And I love Peter’s response. He’s bold. He knows after all he’s experienced with Jesus, all the miracles he witnessed, that if it is, in fact, Jesus, he could do anything with his help. He wanted to trust. He wanted to believe. He wanted to be more courageous with his life. And so, Peter wasn’t testing Jesus as much as he was begging Jesus to command him to do something that he knew he would never do or could not do on his own.

If you think about who you are today, was there someone who encouraged you or inspired you or believed in you to do more than you ever thought you could? And with them in your life, you gained confidence. You stepped outside your comfort zone. You tested the waters and found out you could do it, and with them in your life, you did.

Jesus was that person for Peter. His life was changed the day Jesus walked along the shore and saw something in Peter that made him say, “Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.”

In the time spent with Jesus, Peter gained confidence and started believing in himself and knew if he tapped into Jesus’ power there would no limit to what he could do next. So, what Peter was asking Jesus might have been more like “Lord, I really want to be more than I am right now. Please help me to live into the potential you have for me and command me to come to you.”

The drive in Peter to overcome was greater than his fear. And, although things didn’t go perfectly, Peter learned that when his fear got the best of him, Jesus’ hand was right there to catch him and pull him back up.

These experiences helped shape the disciples for their future life without Jesus. A life that promised to be filled with persecutions and fears they had yet to encounter. So, they had to go through these discipleship challenges with Jesus in order to move from the place of simply wondering who Jesus was, to making the claim that Jesus was, indeed, the Son of God. If Jesus could get them to proclaim that he was the Messiah, like Peter eventually did, then maybe their fears wouldn’t paralyze them from the work God was calling them to do and calling us to do.

Because right now, beyond the shadow of my own personal fears, the media coverage every single day brings me great fear. We live in a world full of violence and hate. But, I am also frightened and shocked at what’s happening in our own country, like what took place yesterday in Charlottesville, VA. And I’m still coming to terms with the bombing of the Dar Al Farooq mosque a half mile from my house. This hate and disregard for human life is in my neighborhood and in yours. We need to come together in solidarity to confront evil with our collective love. God will be with us. It takes courage, but imagine the fear of the specific groups being targeted regularly. We, as God’s people, are called to work for justice and peace – to carry out the disciples’ mission. We might feel like hiding in a cave like Elijah or in the garden, like Adam and Eve, but hiding in fear will not end it. God is calling us to step out of the cave and out of the boat for the sake of our neighbors. To come forward one frightened step at a time, being seen, in numbers, and bring Christ, in us, to the world.

Let us end in the prayer that seems perfect for today and one I’ve come to love.

“O God, you have called your servants to ventures of which we cannot see the ending, by paths as yet untrodden, through perils unknown. Give us faith to go out with good courage, not knowing where we go, but only that your hand is leading us and your love supporting us; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”      (ELW, page 317, from Vespers)