Every single one of us, at one time or another, has had that
classic anxiety nightmare. You know the one. You’re standing in front of a
crowd of hundreds, expected to make a speech, and you realize you forgot all of
your notes. Or you’re the new kid in a new school, and you look in the mirror
at the end of the day and realize you were wearing your shirt backwards and
inside out all day. Or you walk up to receive a prestigious award, totally
unaware that you have toilet paper trailing from the heel of your shoe. All of
these nightmares have something powerful in common. They are all about our
universal human fear of shame. Dr. Brene Brown, an author and research
professor who teaches in the graduate department of Social Work at the
University of Houston, wrote a book called Daring Greatly. This book grew out
of her extensive research on the subject of shame. In it she explains that
“shame is the fear of disconnection.” Since “connection, love, and belonging
give meaning and purpose to our lives, shame is deeply painful because when we
are ashamed we fear that something we have done or failed to do makes us
unworthy of connection. It’s that inner voice that says, ‘I’m unlovable. I
don’t belong.’ Shame makes us believe that we are flawed and therefore unworthy
of love and belonging.’” If we want to avoid shame, we only have two real
options, right? Never fail at anything; or—the more realistic option—hold your
cards close to your chest and avoid making yourself vulnerable. Have enough
dignity to keep your flaws hidden and private. Growing up we all learned that, while
it would be nice if the world we lived in were more understanding and
compassionate, people can be cruel. So our best strategy is to protect
ourselves. If we don’t put all of ourselves out there, we won’t get hurt,
right?
In the
Fall of 1994 my husband attended a service at Oakhurst Baptist church in
Decatur, Georgia. Something happened that day that flew in the face of our
conventional response to shame. One Sunday, during the time for shared prayers
of concern and thanksgivings, a man stood up in front of the whole congregation
and shared that he had been diagnosed with AIDs. He spoke through tears while
looking down at the ground, so he couldn’t see what people were doing. When he
finished, he began making his way back to his seat, his eyes still downcast. He
only made it a few feet before he realized people were coming toward him. He
looked up and saw hundreds of people in the congregation lined up in the aisle
waiting to hug him. The service ran long that day because they would not let him
sit down until they hugged him. When he finally took his seat he was weeping,
not out of shame, but in response to shame’s opposite—belonging. His diagnosis
had taken his health, his future, and his independence. But when he shared this
painful and personal news with the church he risked losing everything else: his
dignity; his reputation; his relationships; and his community. He put
everything on the line, and gave everything he had, making himself completely
vulnerable, and they did not shame him. They claimed him. What started out as a
walk of shame became a pilgrimage of grace. His congregation taught him that,
if he wanted to avoid shame, there were more than two options. He was no longer
forced to choose between being perfect or being guarded. They showed him that
it is possible to risk everything and be loved, just as he was. I have no idea
what music they played in the service that day, but as I read this story I
thought of the old Baptist hymn “Just As I Am.” In the church my husband grew
up in it was played during the altar call. It was the “come to Jesus” song. I
grew up in the Presbyterian Church, so I never quite understood altar calls.
But this man’s experience with his church family makes me hear this altar call
hymn in a completely new way. I hear it as he must have heard it: “Just as I am, though tossed about with many
a conflict, many a doubt, fightings and fears within, without, O Lamb of God, I
come, I come. He felt claimed. He felt welcomed. He belonged.
The widow
in today’s reading from Mark’s gospel knows the shame the man with AIDs must
have felt. As a widow in 1st century Palestine there was nowhere she could go
that shame didn’t follow her. Without a husband she was financially destitute.
She had no social status, no protection, and no power. She faithfully went to
Temple to worship God but, unlike the man at Oakhurst Baptist Church in
Decatur, Georgia, she received no grace. The gospel reading tells us that Jesus
sat down in the Temple with his disciples and watched her. Just before this
incident he had been teaching his disciples about religious hypocrisy. Now let
me be clear, Jesus wasn’t saying the whole Temple was corrupt. But he did
criticize the nature of giving within the religious legal system of the time.
Jesus wasn’t concerned that religious law required people to give. He
criticized a system that was using God’s law in a way that glorified some
people while shaming others. So he took his disciples into the Temple for an
object lesson. It’s a bit like an episode of Undercover Boss, where CEOs
disguise themselves as trainees in their own company to get a true sense of how
the managers run things. The Temple offering wasn’t taken up the way we take up
our offering. The collection box at the treasury was a copper funnel shaped
container which resounded according to how much was put into it. So when the
wealthy gave, everyone gathered could hear the loud rush of coins echoing
around. So when the widow put her two small coins in, the barely audible little
pings resounded, not with sound, but with shame—the shame of poverty. The shame
of belonging to no one.
What Jesus points out
to his disciples, in this painfully embarrassing moment, is not how ashamed the
widow must be, but rather how ashamed the scribes and judicial religious
experts ought to be. As he witnesses the widow’s giving, he shows the disciples
that she is a hero—a shining example of faith. But she’s not a hero of the
faith because she gives everything she has financially. This text is not meant
to be a holier-than-thou stewardship plea romanticizing poverty. What makes her
a hero of the faith in Jesus’ eyes is that she gives everything she has
spiritually. She is not afraid to make herself vulnerable. People as poor as
she was weren’t required to give. She could have avoided the public shame that
rung out in the puny pings of her coins. But she didn’t avoid it. Faced with a
worldview that offered her only two options—don’t fail, or have the decency to
hide your failure—she showed the scribes, the judicial religious experts, and
everyone in the Temple, that there was a third option—God’s abundant love.
What was clear as a bell to Jesus, as she made her way back
to her seat after making her paltry contribution, after those around her cast
shaming glances her way, was that this widow understood God’s kingdom. All that
Jesus had been trying to teach through his feedings, healings, and sermons, had
just been embodied by this status-less, powerless, penniless, vulnerable woman:
God’s love, the love that took on our human body, walked among us, ate with
sinners, gave sight to the blind, mended the brokenhearted, and loved us enough
to give His life, wants nothing to do with shame. The voice that uses God’s law
to tell people they are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging
does not reflect the voice of God. A church that is built on shame, ridicule,
elitism, and exclusion, is not God’s church. God’s church is built by hands
willing to get dirty, calloused, and worn; open, giving hands. God’s temple is
built by ordinary flawed people who know what it is to fail. God’s dream is
that churches are filled with people who walk to up to the altar week after
week, not because they need to show everyone how holy and together they are, but
because they know how fragile and vulnerable they really are; how aware they
are of their need for God’s abundant and sustaining love.
The great good news of the gospel today is that God calls
every one of us to be his church in the world. You are called, and I am called,
to become a community of ordinary saints who are courageous enough to extend
God’s extraordinary love and belonging to everyone we meet. In Christ, God has
equipped us with every good thing that we need to be His temple of love in the
world. When people show us their weaknesses—in their work, in their parenting,
in their spiritual lives, in their friendships, or in their family’s life—we
are called, not to shame them or turn away. We are called to claim them. As
temples of God in the world, we are invited to run down the aisle to meet them;
to look them in the eye, and to open our arms to them. Christ invites us to be
the community the widow never had. He calls us to make the altar a place, not
of shame, but of belonging. So when you come to the altar today, may you hear
the invitation to come, just as you are, “though tossed about with many a
conflict, many a doubt, fightings and fears within, without,” the Lamb of God
says come, just come. Be claimed by Christ’s abundant love for you, then go and
carry it out into the world. Amen.
