Tag: shame

Acts 2:36-42 – From Sorrow to Salvation

On By Tim EhrhardtIn Christian Spirituality Blog, Daily Bible Reading Blog, Year BLeave a comment
Baptism by American artist Ivey Hayes (1948-2012)

“Therefore, let all Israel be assured of this: God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Messiah.”

When the people heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the other apostles, “Brothers, what shall we do?”

Peter replied, “Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. The promise is for you and your children and for all who are far off—for all whom the Lord our God will call.”

With many other words he warned them; and he pleaded with them, “Save yourselves from this corrupt generation.” Those who accepted his message were baptized, and about three thousand were added to their number that day.

They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. (NIV)

Imagine we are all standing around in a huge modern-day lobby, ready to listen to Peter. We understand big events like this must be well-organized, so everyone is getting a name tag.  But the name tags are given to us with not only our first names; they also include our hidden guilt and shame.  People walk up to the registration table. “Name?” “Bob.”  “What are you ashamed of, Bob?”  “I stole some money from my boss once, and he never found out.” The person takes a marker and writes, Bill: Embezzler. 

Next person: “Name?” “Jill.” “Jill, what are you guilty of?” “I deliberately slandered a group of people. I said things that were not true about them because I did not like them.” So, the person writes on Jill’s nametag, Jill: Slanderer. “Name?” “George.” “What kind of guilt and shame are you carrying?” “I’ve been coveting my neighbor’s Corvette… and his wife.” George: Coveter. Person after person comes. 

Then, up to the table comes Jesus. “What is your shame, Jesus?” Well, in truth, none. So, Jesus starts walking down the line. He comes to Bob and says, “Bob, give me your name tag,” and puts it on himself. “Jill, give me your name tag.” He puts it on himself. “George, give me your name tag.” It goes on himself.

Soon Jesus is covered with name tags and a bunch of icky shame and awful guilt. Apart from Jesus, we cannot take the name tags off because we cannot shed the labels of who we really are. Christ bore the cross covered with all our guilt and shame attached to him. It was all crucified with him.

When the people of the Apostle Peter’s day understood who Jesus was and what he had done for them, they were deeply troubled in their spirits and their souls were horribly upset. They were cut to the heart with the things they had done which sent Christ to the cross. The crowd’s remorse was so deep and profound that they were beside themselves with spiritual pain and asked Peter,

“What shall we do!?”

Peter called them to “repent and be baptized.” To repent is to have a complete change of mind and heart; it is to express a courageous naming of shame, guilt, and sin. Repentance, then, leads to a 180 degree turn of direction to our lives. Repentance is realizing what we have become, and seeing it is not a good place to be.

Sometimes we lack awareness of how serious our situation really is and how at risk we really are. It may be hard to imagine our offense is bad enough to crucify Jesus. Perhaps we have self-justified our morsels of gossip or our lack of attention to the poor, only choosing to see our hard work and sincere efforts to do good.

For others, the problem with repentance runs deeper, having been raised in a legalistic environment. These folks lug around a guilt-laden backpack that would bend the knees of a mule. And most of the guilt, they realize, is neurotic—not based on any real transgression.  Every bad thought and each failure of faith is obsessed over to the point that they cannot shake the pangs of constant shame.

The good news is that the kingdom of God is near. In the name of Jesus Christ there is forgiveness, healing, and new life. If today there is a realization of being in a bad place in your life, whatever that place is, the cross of Christ addresses the deepest needs of your life. What shall we do?  Repent and be baptized.

Repentance, baptism, forgiveness of sins, and receiving the Spirit are all linked together in today’s New Testament lesson. Baptism is the sign and seal of God’s promise of forgiveness in Jesus; it visually shows us that God washes away our guilt and shame in the name of Jesus.

Baptism is a different kind of nametag, identifying that we belong to God. One who repents and embraces new life in Jesus Christ de-thrones all other competing lords and identifies as a beloved child of God.

The result of that ancient mass repentance and baptism was that three-thousand people were added to a small church of one-hundred-twenty persons! Since repentance leads to action, the new believers went to work devoting themselves to the apostles’ teaching and orienting their lives completely around Jesus through their constant fellowship together.

Allow me to be a bit more specific about what repentance looks like and does not look like. The prayers of the mildly repentant sound something like this:

“Easy-going God: We have occasionally had some minor errors of judgment, but they’re not really our fault. Due to forces beyond our control, we have sometimes failed to act in accordance with our own best interests. Under the circumstances, we did the best we could. We are glad to say that we’re doing okay, perhaps even slightly above average. Be your own sweet Self with those who know they are not perfect. Grant us that we may continue to live a harmless and happy life and keep our self-respect. And we ask all these things according to the unlimited tolerances which we have a right to expect from you. Amen.”

I like eggs.  I eat them nearly every day.  Fresh eggs are the best.  Sometimes I make an omelet, with, of course, bacon, green pepper, and cheese.  When I am making my omelet, if I crack open a rotten egg, I do not go ahead and mix it in with the others in the hope that the other good eggs will overwhelm the rotten one.

Grace can only be grace when we have a true realization of our guilt and shame. Grace is radical. It throws out the rotten omelet altogether and makes a new one so incredibly delicious that we never want to go back to the old way of making them. And it is for everyone who calls on the name of the Lord.

Godly sorrow, like the kind in today’s story, leads to repentance. In the Apostle Paul’s first letter to the Corinthian church, he called them out and insisted they turn from their old way of life.  In his second letter, he followed up with this: 

I know I distressed you greatly with my letter. Although I felt awful at the time, I don’t feel at all bad now that I see how it turned out. The letter upset you, but only for a while. Now I’m glad—not that you were upset, but that you were jarred into turning things around. You let the distress bring you to God, not drive you from him. The result was all gain, no loss.

Distress that drives us to God does that. It turns us around. It gets us back in the way of salvation. We never regret that kind of pain. But those who let distress drive them away from God are full of regrets, end up on a deathbed of regrets.

And now, isn’t it wonderful all the ways in which this distress has goaded you closer to God? You’re more alive, more concerned, more sensitive, more reverent, more human, more passionate, more responsible. Looked at from any angle, you’ve come out of this with purity of heart. And that is what I was hoping for in the first place when I wrote the letter. (2 Corinthians 7:8-11, MSG)

There are (many) times we need to feel awful before we feel wonderful – awful concerning how much we have hidden our shame and never let it see the purifying light of the gospel – but wonderful of how over-the-top good grace really is, once we have exposed the guilt and let Jesus replace it with God’s mercy.

O merciful God, we bring long-held grudges and recent grievances, and we chew them over, even at the foot of your cross. We tiptoe around chasms of misunderstanding, we pick our way anxiously among stumbling-blocks of language and culture, and blame each other for every misstep, even while singing of your Spirit. We tremble to name the troubles we see in the Church and the world, for fear of our own sins finding us out, for fear that we will become easy targets for everyone’s hostility. Have pity on us, for our hands are not strong enough and our hearts are not big enough to hold all together in love. We beg you to come to us, foolish as we are, downcast and despairing. We beg you to send us a breath of your Spirit with the perfume of resurrection and hope, through Jesus Christ, the Light of the world. Amen.

Psalm 31:1-5, 15-16 – Forsaking Shame

On By Tim EhrhardtIn Christian Spirituality Blog, Daily Bible Reading Blog, Year ALeave a comment

ashamed

In you, O Lord, I seek refuge;
do not let me ever be put to shame;
in your righteousness deliver me.
Incline your ear to me;
rescue me speedily.
Be a rock of refuge for me,
a strong fortress to save me.

You are indeed my rock and my fortress;
for your name’s sake lead me and guide me,
take me out of the net that is hidden for me,
for you are my refuge.
Into your hand I commit my spirit;
you have redeemed me, O Lord, faithful God….

My times are in your hand;
deliver me from the hand of my enemies and persecutors.
Let your face shine upon your servant;
save me in your steadfast love. (NRSV)

Shame is powerful. It keeps a person locked within themselves with their secrets hidden far from others. Far too often we try and cope with our shameful words or actions through promising to work harder, pledging to have more willpower, and/or plain old complaining that life is unfair. None of this gets to the root of our shame. Unlike guilt, which our conscience identifies as specific behaviors to repent of, shame is the message of our inner critic who obnoxiously decries that we are somehow flawed, not enough, and inherently lacking intelligence.

Shame is the insidious mechanism which interprets bad events as we ourselves being bad. Shame lives in the shadows and feeds on secrets – which is why the posture of shame is to hide our face in our hands. If shame persists, we withdraw from others and experience grinding loneliness.  Therefore, the path out of shame is to openly name our stigma and tell our stories. In other words, throwing a bucket of vulnerability on shame causes it melt, like the Wicked Witch of the West.

In contrast to the unhealthy hiding of ourselves within prison walls of shame is seeking refuge and hiding ourselves in God. Even a cursory look at today’s psalm evidences an open and vulnerable person who wants nothing to do with shame. The psalmist unabashedly and without shame is quite forward in presenting his wants to God.

The psalms are meant for repeated use, to be voiced aloud again and again. In doing this simple activity, we shame-proof our lives. God’s face shines upon us and takes away the shadows of shame. It is no coincidence that Jesus forsook the shame of the cross through publicly uttering the words of this psalm: “Into your hands I commit my spirit.” (Luke 23:46)

Unchecked verbal violence will eventually lead to physical violence. If wordy persecution comes from others, the primary tactic will most likely be shaming the people such persons want to control. Abusive people will frame a justification for violence because the people for whom they are leveling shame are “bad,” even “monsters.” If the verbal persecution comes from within, the shame can reach a critical mass of suicidal ideation and perhaps outright attempts at ending one’s life.

There is no living with shame. The good news is that we don’t have to. Instead, we can live in the strong fortress and the rock of refuge which is God. The Lord traffics in redeeming mercy and steadfast love, not in the demeaning judgment of shame. We can flee to God and find grace to help us in our time of need. There is no shame in reaching out for help. We all need deliverance from something. Its a matter of whether we are open to ask for it, or not.

Father God, into your hands I commit my spirit – everything I am and all that I hope to be – so that Jesus Christ might be exalted in me through the power of your Holy Spirit. I choose to leave shame where it belongs – nailed to the cross. With your divine enabling, I shall walk in newness of life through expressing my needs and wants with courage, confidence, and candor. May it be so according to your steadfast love. Amen.

Click You Are My Refuge sung by Shannon Wexelberg and Matthew Ward and allow your spirit to open.

The Inner Critic

On By Tim EhrhardtIn Christian Spirituality BlogLeave a comment

“Shame on Me” by Salvador Dali

“Shame is a soul-eating emotion.” –Carl Jung

I recently needed to miss a few days of work because I was down and voiceless with strep throat.  Since my bread-and-butter workaday life involves interacting with lots of people, I had to remain alone and sequestered to not get other folks sick, or sicker than they already are.  Even though I knew I was right where I’m supposed to be, it didn’t feel good.  I’m not really talking about being physically down and uncomfortable; I’m referring to an old insidious inner voice that took the opportunity to chime-in with my inability to speak.

I grew up on a stoic German heritage family farm.  Our values (mostly unstated, but you always knew they were there) revolved largely around hard work, independence, and getting things done.  Part of the unwritten creed was that you don’t get sick.  Illness is weakness.  Oh, not so much for other people.  For the neighbors that was fine.  It was okay and encouraged to help and support them if there was illness.

My dormant inner-critic (apparently lurking in the shadows just looking for the opportunity to be thoroughly revived and imbibed with the tonic of can-do’ism) starts-up with the old creed: “You’re not that sick.  You’re just lazy.  Get off your butt and quit making other people do your job for you!”

I’m not proud of my inner critic.  In fact, he’s downright annoying.  I don’t much like him.  Yet, by now in life I have come to learn that when the inner critic is having a voice it can only mean one thing: there’s some sort of anxious shame belief fueling him.

Shame researcher (yep, there is such a thing) Brene Brown defines shame as “the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love, belonging, and connection.”  As my native Wisconsinite friends would say: “Oofda.”

inner critic

Shame is as old as Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.  It goes beyond the sense of guilt of having done something we regret, to interpreting that sense of wrongness as having to do with our very personhood.  Some folks with shame try to work to get their honor restored through being a peacock – a kind of arrogant posturing and preening to put up the appearance that they are valuable and worthy of acknowledgment and love.  Others go the opposite direction and thoroughly denigrate themselves, withdrawing into an abyss of self-loathing.  This, of course, down deep in the slimy pit, is where the inner critic lives as some sort of large man-child who sits in the basement eating stale potato chips and drinking warm beer, having convinced himself that the world is too dangerous a place to dwell.

Whether a peacock or a man-child, both persons have the common problem of using unhealthy coping mechanisms to deal with (or avoid) the awful sense of shame.  Alcoholism and addictions, and thoughts and plans of suicide are just a few of the ways shame is dealt with.  These ways are devised to run as far away from the feelings of shame as one can get.  The inner critic, the judgmental voice within, seems to always paint the worst picture of no-win scenarios.  If we seek to become vulnerable and speak of what is truly inside us to others, the inner critic chimes-in with what a terrible idea this is – putting yourself at risk for more hurt.  Yet, if we clam-up and go back to unhealthy ways of coping, the inner critic berates us with a cascade of expletives that we would never dream of saying to another person.

As you can see, the inner critic is really us.  Therefore, he’s not going anywhere.  Oh, we could try to ignore him.  However, like a four-year-old kid wanting attention, ignoring him won’t make it go away.  Just the opposite, the critic will just talk louder and yell.  Instead, we need to confront the inner critic – have an inner dialogue and hear him out.  After all, the critic is us.  In a weird twisted sort of way, the critic wants to protect us.  So, like some helicopter mother, she hovers and barks at us.  This is really our anxiety talking – the worrisome mother within us that is fearful that harm will come.

You and I already know that we can’t get out of this earthly life without facing some hardship, difficulty, and pain.  Unfortunately, many people have endured terrible trauma and their inner critics try desperately to shield them from any further hurt.  And no amount of positive thinking and playing spin doctor will take away the memories and the deep pain.  As desperately as we might try to run from our emotions and keep our feelings at bay, they aren’t going away.  They must be squarely faced.

Feeling Wheel

In the biblical New Testament, we are told that Jesus endured the cross, “scorning its shame,” and sat down at the right hand of God (Hebrews 12:2).  Christ was subjected to severe public shame – beaten, cursed, stripped naked, and lifted-up to ridicule, even death.  He did not shy away from facing the full brunt of shame in all its humiliation and degradation.  He did it through not allowing shame’s power to have a hold on him.  Even the extreme shame brought upon him did not stop Jesus from setting his sights on the salvation of others.  Shame cannot survive where vulnerability exists; Christ became vulnerable, and, so, shame slithered away like the coward it is.

The inner critic’s mechanism is shame – the constant message that if I am exposed or vulnerable that everyone will see how weak, inept, stupid, or inadequate I am.  It is this barrage of internal judgment that keeps a person imprisoned and leads to unhealthy practices such as getting drunk alone in their room; having the inability to stop and rest; and, scheming to hide the true self through exaggeration and putting up a false face that we are just fine.

Awareness is power.  The reason I didn’t stay in the shame lounge smoking cheap cigars with only a lava lamp as light when I was sick is because of awareness – that my judgmental critic was speaking and that I could then interact with him.  We cannot face and deal with something or someone we don’t know is even there.  If I’m not aware, I am a victim of my own internal machinations, not realizing the inner voice of shame-speak.  However, with awareness, I have choices and can choose to acknowledge the inner critic, scorn shame, and voice out loud what is going on inside me.

To scorn shame does not mean to ignore it.  Rather, we bring shame into the light and expose it through a dedication to knowing what we are really feeling; making the distinction between our actions and our personhood; becoming aware of what things trigger our inner critic; and, perhaps most important of all, reach out and connect with a trusted person and tell your story of shame.

Our fears need neither to keep us locked in shame nor isolated from genuine human connection.  For when a warm relationship opens the way of grace and love to another, shame begins to melt away and a new season of life and growth can happen.  What’s more, through Jesus, radical acceptance and compassionate help is continually available.  “So, let us come boldly to the throne of our gracious God. There we will receive his mercy, and we will find grace to help us when we need it most.” (Hebrews 4:16, NLT)

Shame

On By Tim EhrhardtIn Exploring Church Ministry BlogLeave a comment
 
 
            There is a vulnerability crisis in the church today.  What I mean is that far too many Christians keep up appearances and keep their human interactions on the surface level.  Simple exhortations to not be that way will do no good because at the root of the behavior is shame.  If we want to have healthy behaviors in the church, Christians will need to have their identities fully based upon the person and work of Jesus Christ.
 
            Shame is a mindset, not a behavior.  It is the notion that something is wrong with your personhood.  It is to believe that somehow you are deficient, defective, or worthless as a person.  It is to not have the ability to distinguish between what I do and who I am.  When we live with a sense of shame (either knowingly or subconsciously) we are setting ourselves up to practice idolatry.  If we really think there is something wrong with our very humanity, we will seek something to base our value and acceptance upon.  This is why the workaholic cannot stop working, because he believes that by much effort, hard work, and productivity it will make up for the deficiencies in his life.  Others will then accept him.  Indeed, he will accept himself.  This is also why so few people take Sabbath breaks or take advantage of a day off or even all their vacation time.  After all, they feel too guilty if they are idle.
 
            People who live with a sense of shame do not realize that they have the right to set personal boundaries.  If you have a terrible time of saying “no” to people, then it is a good bet that there is some level of shame working underneath the surface.  It just seems selfish to such people to refuse a request.  Living with shame is awful because one feels as though she is simply not good enough as a person compared to others.  The over-responsible, over-achieving, over-functioning person is compulsive about doing things perfectly well so as to avoid feeling ashamed of poor performance.  Conversely, others avoid responsibility, under-achieve, and under-function in the belief that if they were to do the job they will surely fail – so best to not do it at all.
 
            The real problem with all this is that it is a performance-based life.  And, so, it is crippling.  Always wondering if you measure up is a depressing way to live.  Unfortunately, there are far too many performance-based churches out there which shame people for struggling, asking honest questions, not complying with man-made rules, and not being like everyone else.  If I have not made it clear enough yet, trying harder does nothing to break the cycle of shame.  Satan has enough of the world on a self-improvement path; let’s put ourselves on God’s path to freedom.
 
            If we confess our sins, God is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness (1 John 1:9).  Confess your sins to one another and pray for one another so that you may be healed (James 5:16).  Jesus has taken our shame away because he faced it down and achieved the victory for us that we could not achieve ourselves.  Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God (Hebrews 12:2).  The cross may have been a humiliating experience, but Jesus did not let that stop him from bringing us salvation from sin and shame.
 

 

            We do not need to wear our hearts on our sleeves in order to become more vulnerable with one another.  Struggles with life do not mean we are defective – it just means we are real people.  Unless we come to grips with scorning shame, we will live stunted Christian lives in plastic Christian churches.  Only through embracing the truth about ourselves, and accepting Christ’s sacrifice on our part, will we experience genuine spiritual and emotional freedom.  There is no need to live in the isolation of shame.  Our identity is in Jesus.