Grace In The Midst Of Guilt And Shame
Sermon
Sermons On The Second Readings
For Sundays In Advent, Christmas, And Epiphany
At the begining of his ministry Jesus had a chance to impress the people he grew up with. According to Luke, chapter 4, Jesus was invited to stand up and read the Bible in his hometown synagogue of Nazareth. And why not? He was the latest sensation. His reputation as a teacher was starting to get around. He was the local kid who had made good. There must have been smiles and gentle ribbing as Jesus got up to read the Scriptures on that Saturday morning a long time ago. "Remember when he was just a child, helping Joseph around the carpenter's shop? Wow, look at him now."
Manuscripts weren't bound like books in the ancient Middle East. Important documents were on scrolls. A very long manuscript would be wrapped around two rods that looked a bit like rolling pins, and one would progressively unroll that long sheet until he found the place he wanted to read. When Jesus got up to speak he was handed the scroll of Isaiah, the Old Testament prophet.
Apparently Jesus could have read anything in Isaiah he wanted. He located the text of his choice and read it out loud. Then he rolled the scroll back, sat down and said, essentially, "You know those words I just read to you? They're all about me. You've been waiting 700 years for the person who would make those words come true. Well, that person grew up just down the street from you. Here I am."
Imagine a kid from your church's high school youth group striding up to the pulpit in the middle of a Sunday service. "May I borrow the mike for just a moment? It's so nice that you all came to worship today -- and by the way, you really ought to be worshipping me." We'd say, "Take the car keys away from that arrogant little whelp. What kind of nut case is he?" Actually, things were a lot tougher for Jesus in his own synagogue. Luke tells us that the insulted crowd tried to toss him off the local cliff. But Jesus blew their minds even more by walking away as if he weren't the least bit perturbed.
What exactly did Jesus read to invite the scorn of his neighbors? He chose the opening salvo of Isaiah 61 -- words that communicated, "This is the kind of Messiah I'm going to be. I'm here for the poor. I'm here for people with broken hearts. I'm here for people who have smeared ashes on their faces, because their lives hurt so badly. I'm here to give out new clothes -- a garment of praise to replace a spirit of despair." The King James Version memorably translates the last phrase, "a garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness."
Those pursuing certification in Lifesaving are required to demonstrate a technique that may one day save their own lives. Fully clothed, they must jump into deep water. While staying afloat they must wriggle out of their pants, tie the two pant legs together, then flip the open end (that is, the waistline) over their heads and catch enough air to inflate them, thus creating a crude life jacket. By means of those pants alone they must stay afloat for no fewer than 45 minutes.
Those seeking certification sometimes recall those as the longest minutes of their lives. Their remaining clothes feel plastered to their bodies. They can barely move in all that heaviness. They wonder if those who drown during this exercise at least receive their Lifesaving status posthumously. Isaiah 61's spirit of heaviness -- the spirit of despair -- is like the entanglement of clinging clothes.
Ours is a culture on the verge of drowning under the weight of unresolved burdens of personal guilt and shame. Despite our claims of post-Enlightenment wisdom and the keenest insights of the therapeutic industry, American society seems singularly ill-equipped to peel these burdens away. Guilt and shame, furthermore, are tricky animals. As feelings they are frequently experienced out of proportion to the realities that trigger them, and they are frequently confused with each other. Christians, at least, are in agreement on one matter: Jesus came to eradicate both guilt and shame.
What is guilt? It is the reality and/or the perception that we have done something wrong. What is shame? It is the reality and/or the perception that we ourselves are the "something wrong." Paul's words in the first chapter of Ephesians make the case that the cross is God's means of forever changing our encounters with these spirits of heaviness. Let's begin by considering God's grace in the midst of unresolved guilt.
Author and rabbi Harold Kushner tells of visiting two families deep in grief. Each home had lost an elderly matriarch who had died of natural causes. At the first home the son of the deceased woman confessed to Kushner, "If only I had sent my mother to Florida and gotten her out of this cold, she would be alive today. It's my fault she died." At the second home the son told the rabbi, "If only I hadn't insisted on my mother's going to Florida, she would be alive today. It's my fault she's dead."
Two homes. Two losses. Two men struggling to go forward under equal burdens of unresolved guilt. Yet ... was either of them actually responsible for his mother's death? Isn't it possible that both of them had saddled themselves unnecessarily with guilt feelings? That would be the assumption of many contemporary therapists. They would try to make a case that guilt feelings are universally inappropriate. They are irrational and destructive. They make us feel responsible for things that have already happened and cannot now be changed. They paralyze us. Therefore we should let ourselves off the hook and refuse to feel so guilty.
That sounds therapeutic -- until we open the pages of the Bible. God's Word identifies guilt feelings that are proper and necessary because they connect us with a status of guilt that is objectively real. God has planted in every human being a kind of moral seismograph that registers behavioral earthquakes. When we live contrary to God's desires, the seismograph goes crazy. What registers in our minds and hearts is guilt. The Bible would say that one reason we are besieged with guilt-like feelings is that we frequently do things that are truly wrong.
When it comes to this irregular emotion called guilt, Christians have a tough assignment. We need to walk in such a way that we don't veer to the left or to the right and fall off the cliff of one of two extreme positions. On the one hand, we need to avoid the idea that all guilt feelings are meaningless and irrational, and that we should simply find ways to cope. On the other hand, we need to reject the idea that just because we feel guilty we've therefore done something terribly wrong. Finding the middle path is difficult. Sometimes we feel bad when we shouldn't; other times we feel happy-go-lucky when we should be down on our knees before a holy God.
The first chapter of Ephesians has nothing to say about guilt feelings. Paul, however, makes an important contribution to what we know about true guilt. True guilt is a theological problem. It is directly linked to our relationship with God. When we have done something that is objectively wrong, an act that violates the moral laws of the universe, something inside us screams, "I need to be punished or I need to be forgiven. Something has to be done!" True guilt demands action. Here's the question: Will we try to erase our guilt through our own actions, or through God's actions on our behalf?
If we opt for the former, we can choose from a legendary list of strategies. First, we can shift the blame. "Sure, I've done wrong things, but it's not my fault. My preschool teacher warped me. It was the environment. It was the unfair way they graded the SATs in the 1970s." Recently several courts have heard cases in which adults are suing their grown parents for "wrongful birth." In other words, those parents should have known better than to bring such unhappy children into the world.
A second strategy is to seek punishment, or, as author Frederick Buechner puts it, "Our desire to be clobbered for our guilt, and thus rid of it, tempts us to do things we will be clobbered for." How else can we explain the incredibly bone-headed ways that would-be robbers, every year, manage to do things that lead police right to their doorsteps? Recently two Midwesterners tried to pull the front off a cash machine by running a chain from the ATM to the bumper of their truck. Instead of pulling the front panel off the machine, however, they pulled the bumper off their pickup. Scared, they left the scene and headed home -- with the chain still attached to the ATM, their bumper still attached to the chain, and their license plate still attached to the bumper. If we don't like the idea of God punishing us, we will certainly find a way for someone else to get the job done.
Likewise we can try to serve our guilt away. We'll be as good as good can be, and make up for our mistakes. We'll get forgiveness the old-fashioned way, the Smith Barney way: We'll earn it. This much is certain: We'll make ourselves miserable in the attempt. As a young monk, Martin Luther invested as many as six hours a day racking his brain to confess the sins he might have committed during the previous 24 hours. Did this make him feel closer to God? Luther wrote in his diary:
Although I lived a blameless life as a monk, I felt that I was a sinner with an uneasy conscience before God. I also could not believe that I had pleased him with my works. Far from loving that righteous God who pun-ished sinners, I actually loathed him ... I always doubted and said, "You didn't do that right. You weren't contrite enough. You left that out of your confession."
True guilt demands action. Our actions will never be adequate to take guilt away. But God's grace, in the midst of our guilt, is this: God has acted for us. Paul declares in verse 3 that God has "blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places." Guilt must either be punished or forgiven. Jesus accepted our punishment on the cross so that we might be forgiven. We read in verse 7, "In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace."
The miracle of this grace is that Christian disciples -- those who have received Christ's gift of new life and enrolled as his intentional imitators -- cannot sin themselves out of their relationship with him. Our sins cannot separate us from God. Nevertheless, our attitudes toward our continuing failures may create the impression that God has fled -- especially if we are unwilling to accept God's solution to the dilemma of ongoing guilt feelings.
Some Christians remain under the spell of the spirit of heaviness. Feelings of forgiveness have never come, or at least haven't stayed. Why does this happen? Far too many of us awake in the morning as if the cross never happened, or as if God's actions fell short. We've concluded that our sins are so big or so frequent that Jesus' death wasn't enough. During confession we imagine God saying, "What? You again?" Thus we're paralyzed. We feel just as paralyzed as the young man in the Gospel account who couldn't move until Jesus said to him, "Your sins are forgiven. Now get up and walk."
That's the key. If we wrestle with guilt feelings that seem to hang on and on, it's crucial to take Christ at his word when he declares us forgiven. He is not a liar. Some of us need to ask forgiveness for something else. We need to ask God forgiveness for acting as if we are somehow beyond the reach of grace, and for our unwillingness to believe the promises of scripture. We don't need to feel forgiven to believe God's assurance that in Christ we are forgiven.
We turn now from the realm of guilt to the even more challenging task of confronting shame. What is shame? It is a feeling -- a deep, relentless feeling that I am not the person that I should be, and that I can't wriggle out of the mess that I've gotten myself into. As Lewis Smedes beautifully puts it in his book Shame and Grace, "Shame is the dead weight of not-good-enoughness." Shame, of course, can serve the healthy role of demonstrating the gap between our character and the holiness of God. But all too often it settles down into the cracks of our consciousness as the despairing judgment that we will never get things right. Smedes writes:
Shame can fall over you when a person stares at you after you've said something inane at a party, or when you think everyone is clucking at how skinny or how fat or how clumsy you are. It comes when no one else is looking at you but yourself and what you see is a phony, a coward, a bore, a failure, a dumbbell, a person whose nose is too big and whose legs are too bony, or a mother who is incompetent at mothering, and, all in all, a poor dope with little hope of ever becoming an acceptable human being.
Unhealthy shame is all about being unacceptable. This kind of shame is not merely an alert that we are flawed people (which is certainly true and easily demonstrated). Unhealthy shame declares that we are unacceptable as human beings. We are not worthy of being loved. Such a feeling can only be described as a life-wearying heaviness.
We must fear for teenage girls who read the magazines that are specially designed for them -- specially designed to make them feel as if their skin and their bodies and their boyfriends will never look like those of the models who are on every page of those magazines. We must fear for the boys who read muscle magazines and take steroids because that's how to become an impact athlete, and that's how to impress a girl. We must fear for overly responsible people -- those who have the good sense to realize that the world is filled with pain, but the misguided sense that it is their job to fix it. When they fail, they feel devastated.
Sadly, church can be a place where many people experience the heaviness of shame. Sometimes it's because a congregation doesn't know how to speak of grace. Other times it's because worshipers can't imagine being embraced by a God who has any standards of excellence. Our ideal is to think like Jesus and talk like Jesus and be like Jesus. But in truth the vast majority of us have extended periods of time when we don't want to be anything like that at all. Maybe we sit in church and daydream about punching out our boss, or wishing that an annoying relative would just die, or pursuing forbidden sexual adventures, or running away from the people who are depending on us right now, or simply wishing that we could get all this over with, and simply be dead ourselves. Then when it's time to pray we think, "As if ... as if God would reach down and love me right now, since he knows what I've been thinking about." Thus we conclude that we're not worthy of being accepted -- by God or by anyone else who really knows our secret imaginings.
How do we escape the heaviness of shame? As Smedes points out, what we have to do is address the lies that we tell ourselves. Nobody gets up in the morning and says, "Boy, I think I'll tell myself a whopper of a lie today ... and then believe it." But that's what we do. We believe the lie that we have to make ourselves acceptable before we can be accepted, and our feelings fall right in line. They back us up all the way.
On the other hand, what does the Bible say? The Bible says that we can be healed. We need to forsake the lies and believe the truth. The truth is that we can replace the heaviness of inappropriate shame with the lightness of God's grace. The same Messiah who read Isaiah 61 in that synagogue also said, "Come to me, all of you who are weary and heavy-laden -- all of you who are drowning in the dead weight of not-good-enoughness -- and I will give you rest. Get into a relationship with me and you'll find that the way I lead you is easy. The 'burden' that I put on you, by comparison, feels so light" (Matthew 11:28-30, paraphrased).
That's grace. Do we deserve it? Absolutely not. If we deserved the love of Jesus it would be because we had done something to earn it. Worthiness, on the other hand, is different. We are worthy of something not because we have done something, but because we are somebody of incredible value.
That is the wonderful news splayed across the first chapter of Ephesians. God has declared us to be people of infinite value. Paul announces that God chose us before the creation of the world (vv. 4, 11). Our adoption as God's children was predestined (vv. 5, 11). This fabulous change in our identity happened "so that we, who were the first to set our hope on Christ, might live for the praise of his glory" (v. 12). On top of it all we have received the Holy Spirit as "the pledge of our inheritance toward redemption as God's own people" (vv. 13, 14).
Grace doesn't say, "Oh, look, you're not so bad. Here! I've found some hidden personal assets that you overlooked deep in your heart." God, with his eyes wide open, says, "No matter what is in your heart -- beauty or ugliness, virtue or vice -- you are accepted, because from the moment you were conceived I knew you, and every minute of your life you have been worthy. That is how I created you." Period. Christians are truly God's chosen people.
In his book Dangerous Wonder, Mike Yaconelli recounts a time he hired a man to lay tile in his kitchen. Yaconelli knew this man to be the alcoholic father of a teenager whom he had come to know through a youth ministry. The father had been emotionally and physically abusive to everyone in his family. Yaconelli determined not to be cheated or pushed around by this fellow. He demanded (and received) a written estimate in advance -- $350 for three days' work. When the work was finished the tiler said, "I need to talk to you about the money." Yaconelli braced himself for a battle royal. He writes:
I was ready for him and glanced at my wife with the look of testosterone on my face. He started to hand me the bill, but then paused for a moment and said, "A couple of years ago I was drinking too much. I am an alcoholic and was at a very low point in my life. I almost lost my family because of my drinking. I mistreated my wife and my children, especially my oldest son.
"But you and your wife spent a lot of time with him at a critical moment in his life when he could have gone either way. Shortly after that I went to AA, and I've been sober ever since. Because of you and your wife, I still have a relationship with my son. I've never been able to thank you, but I'm thanking you now."
He handed me his bill for $350. "Paid in full" was written across the page. This abusing, untrustworthy man ... had just shown this arrogant snob the meaning of grace.
What is the meaning of grace? It's that none of us deserves the love of God. None of us deserves another chance. That's the heavy part. But the lightness of grace is that God, magically, considers us worthy of being in a relationship with the Creator of the universe. The incredible news is that God has written across the debt-sheets of our personal lives, "Paid in full."
Manuscripts weren't bound like books in the ancient Middle East. Important documents were on scrolls. A very long manuscript would be wrapped around two rods that looked a bit like rolling pins, and one would progressively unroll that long sheet until he found the place he wanted to read. When Jesus got up to speak he was handed the scroll of Isaiah, the Old Testament prophet.
Apparently Jesus could have read anything in Isaiah he wanted. He located the text of his choice and read it out loud. Then he rolled the scroll back, sat down and said, essentially, "You know those words I just read to you? They're all about me. You've been waiting 700 years for the person who would make those words come true. Well, that person grew up just down the street from you. Here I am."
Imagine a kid from your church's high school youth group striding up to the pulpit in the middle of a Sunday service. "May I borrow the mike for just a moment? It's so nice that you all came to worship today -- and by the way, you really ought to be worshipping me." We'd say, "Take the car keys away from that arrogant little whelp. What kind of nut case is he?" Actually, things were a lot tougher for Jesus in his own synagogue. Luke tells us that the insulted crowd tried to toss him off the local cliff. But Jesus blew their minds even more by walking away as if he weren't the least bit perturbed.
What exactly did Jesus read to invite the scorn of his neighbors? He chose the opening salvo of Isaiah 61 -- words that communicated, "This is the kind of Messiah I'm going to be. I'm here for the poor. I'm here for people with broken hearts. I'm here for people who have smeared ashes on their faces, because their lives hurt so badly. I'm here to give out new clothes -- a garment of praise to replace a spirit of despair." The King James Version memorably translates the last phrase, "a garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness."
Those pursuing certification in Lifesaving are required to demonstrate a technique that may one day save their own lives. Fully clothed, they must jump into deep water. While staying afloat they must wriggle out of their pants, tie the two pant legs together, then flip the open end (that is, the waistline) over their heads and catch enough air to inflate them, thus creating a crude life jacket. By means of those pants alone they must stay afloat for no fewer than 45 minutes.
Those seeking certification sometimes recall those as the longest minutes of their lives. Their remaining clothes feel plastered to their bodies. They can barely move in all that heaviness. They wonder if those who drown during this exercise at least receive their Lifesaving status posthumously. Isaiah 61's spirit of heaviness -- the spirit of despair -- is like the entanglement of clinging clothes.
Ours is a culture on the verge of drowning under the weight of unresolved burdens of personal guilt and shame. Despite our claims of post-Enlightenment wisdom and the keenest insights of the therapeutic industry, American society seems singularly ill-equipped to peel these burdens away. Guilt and shame, furthermore, are tricky animals. As feelings they are frequently experienced out of proportion to the realities that trigger them, and they are frequently confused with each other. Christians, at least, are in agreement on one matter: Jesus came to eradicate both guilt and shame.
What is guilt? It is the reality and/or the perception that we have done something wrong. What is shame? It is the reality and/or the perception that we ourselves are the "something wrong." Paul's words in the first chapter of Ephesians make the case that the cross is God's means of forever changing our encounters with these spirits of heaviness. Let's begin by considering God's grace in the midst of unresolved guilt.
Author and rabbi Harold Kushner tells of visiting two families deep in grief. Each home had lost an elderly matriarch who had died of natural causes. At the first home the son of the deceased woman confessed to Kushner, "If only I had sent my mother to Florida and gotten her out of this cold, she would be alive today. It's my fault she died." At the second home the son told the rabbi, "If only I hadn't insisted on my mother's going to Florida, she would be alive today. It's my fault she's dead."
Two homes. Two losses. Two men struggling to go forward under equal burdens of unresolved guilt. Yet ... was either of them actually responsible for his mother's death? Isn't it possible that both of them had saddled themselves unnecessarily with guilt feelings? That would be the assumption of many contemporary therapists. They would try to make a case that guilt feelings are universally inappropriate. They are irrational and destructive. They make us feel responsible for things that have already happened and cannot now be changed. They paralyze us. Therefore we should let ourselves off the hook and refuse to feel so guilty.
That sounds therapeutic -- until we open the pages of the Bible. God's Word identifies guilt feelings that are proper and necessary because they connect us with a status of guilt that is objectively real. God has planted in every human being a kind of moral seismograph that registers behavioral earthquakes. When we live contrary to God's desires, the seismograph goes crazy. What registers in our minds and hearts is guilt. The Bible would say that one reason we are besieged with guilt-like feelings is that we frequently do things that are truly wrong.
When it comes to this irregular emotion called guilt, Christians have a tough assignment. We need to walk in such a way that we don't veer to the left or to the right and fall off the cliff of one of two extreme positions. On the one hand, we need to avoid the idea that all guilt feelings are meaningless and irrational, and that we should simply find ways to cope. On the other hand, we need to reject the idea that just because we feel guilty we've therefore done something terribly wrong. Finding the middle path is difficult. Sometimes we feel bad when we shouldn't; other times we feel happy-go-lucky when we should be down on our knees before a holy God.
The first chapter of Ephesians has nothing to say about guilt feelings. Paul, however, makes an important contribution to what we know about true guilt. True guilt is a theological problem. It is directly linked to our relationship with God. When we have done something that is objectively wrong, an act that violates the moral laws of the universe, something inside us screams, "I need to be punished or I need to be forgiven. Something has to be done!" True guilt demands action. Here's the question: Will we try to erase our guilt through our own actions, or through God's actions on our behalf?
If we opt for the former, we can choose from a legendary list of strategies. First, we can shift the blame. "Sure, I've done wrong things, but it's not my fault. My preschool teacher warped me. It was the environment. It was the unfair way they graded the SATs in the 1970s." Recently several courts have heard cases in which adults are suing their grown parents for "wrongful birth." In other words, those parents should have known better than to bring such unhappy children into the world.
A second strategy is to seek punishment, or, as author Frederick Buechner puts it, "Our desire to be clobbered for our guilt, and thus rid of it, tempts us to do things we will be clobbered for." How else can we explain the incredibly bone-headed ways that would-be robbers, every year, manage to do things that lead police right to their doorsteps? Recently two Midwesterners tried to pull the front off a cash machine by running a chain from the ATM to the bumper of their truck. Instead of pulling the front panel off the machine, however, they pulled the bumper off their pickup. Scared, they left the scene and headed home -- with the chain still attached to the ATM, their bumper still attached to the chain, and their license plate still attached to the bumper. If we don't like the idea of God punishing us, we will certainly find a way for someone else to get the job done.
Likewise we can try to serve our guilt away. We'll be as good as good can be, and make up for our mistakes. We'll get forgiveness the old-fashioned way, the Smith Barney way: We'll earn it. This much is certain: We'll make ourselves miserable in the attempt. As a young monk, Martin Luther invested as many as six hours a day racking his brain to confess the sins he might have committed during the previous 24 hours. Did this make him feel closer to God? Luther wrote in his diary:
Although I lived a blameless life as a monk, I felt that I was a sinner with an uneasy conscience before God. I also could not believe that I had pleased him with my works. Far from loving that righteous God who pun-ished sinners, I actually loathed him ... I always doubted and said, "You didn't do that right. You weren't contrite enough. You left that out of your confession."
True guilt demands action. Our actions will never be adequate to take guilt away. But God's grace, in the midst of our guilt, is this: God has acted for us. Paul declares in verse 3 that God has "blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places." Guilt must either be punished or forgiven. Jesus accepted our punishment on the cross so that we might be forgiven. We read in verse 7, "In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace."
The miracle of this grace is that Christian disciples -- those who have received Christ's gift of new life and enrolled as his intentional imitators -- cannot sin themselves out of their relationship with him. Our sins cannot separate us from God. Nevertheless, our attitudes toward our continuing failures may create the impression that God has fled -- especially if we are unwilling to accept God's solution to the dilemma of ongoing guilt feelings.
Some Christians remain under the spell of the spirit of heaviness. Feelings of forgiveness have never come, or at least haven't stayed. Why does this happen? Far too many of us awake in the morning as if the cross never happened, or as if God's actions fell short. We've concluded that our sins are so big or so frequent that Jesus' death wasn't enough. During confession we imagine God saying, "What? You again?" Thus we're paralyzed. We feel just as paralyzed as the young man in the Gospel account who couldn't move until Jesus said to him, "Your sins are forgiven. Now get up and walk."
That's the key. If we wrestle with guilt feelings that seem to hang on and on, it's crucial to take Christ at his word when he declares us forgiven. He is not a liar. Some of us need to ask forgiveness for something else. We need to ask God forgiveness for acting as if we are somehow beyond the reach of grace, and for our unwillingness to believe the promises of scripture. We don't need to feel forgiven to believe God's assurance that in Christ we are forgiven.
We turn now from the realm of guilt to the even more challenging task of confronting shame. What is shame? It is a feeling -- a deep, relentless feeling that I am not the person that I should be, and that I can't wriggle out of the mess that I've gotten myself into. As Lewis Smedes beautifully puts it in his book Shame and Grace, "Shame is the dead weight of not-good-enoughness." Shame, of course, can serve the healthy role of demonstrating the gap between our character and the holiness of God. But all too often it settles down into the cracks of our consciousness as the despairing judgment that we will never get things right. Smedes writes:
Shame can fall over you when a person stares at you after you've said something inane at a party, or when you think everyone is clucking at how skinny or how fat or how clumsy you are. It comes when no one else is looking at you but yourself and what you see is a phony, a coward, a bore, a failure, a dumbbell, a person whose nose is too big and whose legs are too bony, or a mother who is incompetent at mothering, and, all in all, a poor dope with little hope of ever becoming an acceptable human being.
Unhealthy shame is all about being unacceptable. This kind of shame is not merely an alert that we are flawed people (which is certainly true and easily demonstrated). Unhealthy shame declares that we are unacceptable as human beings. We are not worthy of being loved. Such a feeling can only be described as a life-wearying heaviness.
We must fear for teenage girls who read the magazines that are specially designed for them -- specially designed to make them feel as if their skin and their bodies and their boyfriends will never look like those of the models who are on every page of those magazines. We must fear for the boys who read muscle magazines and take steroids because that's how to become an impact athlete, and that's how to impress a girl. We must fear for overly responsible people -- those who have the good sense to realize that the world is filled with pain, but the misguided sense that it is their job to fix it. When they fail, they feel devastated.
Sadly, church can be a place where many people experience the heaviness of shame. Sometimes it's because a congregation doesn't know how to speak of grace. Other times it's because worshipers can't imagine being embraced by a God who has any standards of excellence. Our ideal is to think like Jesus and talk like Jesus and be like Jesus. But in truth the vast majority of us have extended periods of time when we don't want to be anything like that at all. Maybe we sit in church and daydream about punching out our boss, or wishing that an annoying relative would just die, or pursuing forbidden sexual adventures, or running away from the people who are depending on us right now, or simply wishing that we could get all this over with, and simply be dead ourselves. Then when it's time to pray we think, "As if ... as if God would reach down and love me right now, since he knows what I've been thinking about." Thus we conclude that we're not worthy of being accepted -- by God or by anyone else who really knows our secret imaginings.
How do we escape the heaviness of shame? As Smedes points out, what we have to do is address the lies that we tell ourselves. Nobody gets up in the morning and says, "Boy, I think I'll tell myself a whopper of a lie today ... and then believe it." But that's what we do. We believe the lie that we have to make ourselves acceptable before we can be accepted, and our feelings fall right in line. They back us up all the way.
On the other hand, what does the Bible say? The Bible says that we can be healed. We need to forsake the lies and believe the truth. The truth is that we can replace the heaviness of inappropriate shame with the lightness of God's grace. The same Messiah who read Isaiah 61 in that synagogue also said, "Come to me, all of you who are weary and heavy-laden -- all of you who are drowning in the dead weight of not-good-enoughness -- and I will give you rest. Get into a relationship with me and you'll find that the way I lead you is easy. The 'burden' that I put on you, by comparison, feels so light" (Matthew 11:28-30, paraphrased).
That's grace. Do we deserve it? Absolutely not. If we deserved the love of Jesus it would be because we had done something to earn it. Worthiness, on the other hand, is different. We are worthy of something not because we have done something, but because we are somebody of incredible value.
That is the wonderful news splayed across the first chapter of Ephesians. God has declared us to be people of infinite value. Paul announces that God chose us before the creation of the world (vv. 4, 11). Our adoption as God's children was predestined (vv. 5, 11). This fabulous change in our identity happened "so that we, who were the first to set our hope on Christ, might live for the praise of his glory" (v. 12). On top of it all we have received the Holy Spirit as "the pledge of our inheritance toward redemption as God's own people" (vv. 13, 14).
Grace doesn't say, "Oh, look, you're not so bad. Here! I've found some hidden personal assets that you overlooked deep in your heart." God, with his eyes wide open, says, "No matter what is in your heart -- beauty or ugliness, virtue or vice -- you are accepted, because from the moment you were conceived I knew you, and every minute of your life you have been worthy. That is how I created you." Period. Christians are truly God's chosen people.
In his book Dangerous Wonder, Mike Yaconelli recounts a time he hired a man to lay tile in his kitchen. Yaconelli knew this man to be the alcoholic father of a teenager whom he had come to know through a youth ministry. The father had been emotionally and physically abusive to everyone in his family. Yaconelli determined not to be cheated or pushed around by this fellow. He demanded (and received) a written estimate in advance -- $350 for three days' work. When the work was finished the tiler said, "I need to talk to you about the money." Yaconelli braced himself for a battle royal. He writes:
I was ready for him and glanced at my wife with the look of testosterone on my face. He started to hand me the bill, but then paused for a moment and said, "A couple of years ago I was drinking too much. I am an alcoholic and was at a very low point in my life. I almost lost my family because of my drinking. I mistreated my wife and my children, especially my oldest son.
"But you and your wife spent a lot of time with him at a critical moment in his life when he could have gone either way. Shortly after that I went to AA, and I've been sober ever since. Because of you and your wife, I still have a relationship with my son. I've never been able to thank you, but I'm thanking you now."
He handed me his bill for $350. "Paid in full" was written across the page. This abusing, untrustworthy man ... had just shown this arrogant snob the meaning of grace.
What is the meaning of grace? It's that none of us deserves the love of God. None of us deserves another chance. That's the heavy part. But the lightness of grace is that God, magically, considers us worthy of being in a relationship with the Creator of the universe. The incredible news is that God has written across the debt-sheets of our personal lives, "Paid in full."
