Ordinary Time, Fall 2007
Cycle C, Proper 25
October
28, 2007
Title: Never shamed again
Song leader: Roger Piper-Ruth
Worship leader: Kathy Railsback
Speaker: Linda
Special guest for Adult Ed and
Intergenerational: Marlene Kroeker,
Mennonite Mission Network
Texts: Joel 2:23-32;
Psalm 65; 2 Timothy 4:6-8, 16-18; Luke 18:9-14.
Joel 2:23 "Be glad, O sons of Zion, and
rejoice in the LORD, your God; for he has given the early rain for your
vindication, he has poured down for you abundant rain, the early and the latter
rain, as before. 2:24 "The threshing floors shall be full
of grain, the vats shall overflow with wine and oil. 2:25 I will restore to you the years which the swarming locust
has eaten, the hopper, the destroyer, and the cutter, my great army, which I
sent among you. 2:26 “You shall eat in
plenty and be satisfied, and praise the name of the LORD your God, who has dealt wondrously with you. And my people shall never again be put to shame. 2:27 You shall know that I am in the midst
of Israel, and that I, the LORD, am your God and there is none else. And my
people shall never again be put to shame. 2:28 "And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour
out my spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your
old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions. 2:29 Even upon the menservants and
maidservants in those days, I will pour out my spirit. 2:30 "And I will give portents in the
heavens and on the earth, blood and fire and columns of smoke. 2:31 The sun shall be turned to darkness,
and the moon to blood, before the great and terrible day of the LORD
comes. 2:32 And it shall come to pass
that all who call upon the name of the LORD shall be delivered; for in Mount
Zion and in Jerusalem there shall be those who escape, as the LORD has said,
and among the survivors shall be those whom the LORD calls.
Psalm
65:1 Praise is due to you, O
God, in Zion; and to you shall vows be performed, 65:2 O you who answer prayer!
To
you all flesh shall come. 65:3 When deeds of iniquity overwhelm us, you
forgive our transgressions. 65:4 Happy are those whom you choose and bring near
to live in your courts. We shall be satisfied with the goodness of your house,
your holy temple. 65:5 By awesome deeds you answer us with deliverance, O God
of our salvation; you are the hope of all the ends of the earth and of the
farthest seas. 65:6 By your strength you established the mountains; you are
girded with might. 65:7 You silence the roaring of the seas, the roaring of
their waves, the tumult of the peoples. 65:8 Those who live at earth's farthest
bounds are awed by your signs; you make the gateways of the morning and the
evening shout for joy. 65:9 You visit the earth and water it, you greatly
enrich it; the river of God is full of water; you provide the people with
grain, for so you have prepared it. 65:10 You water its furrows abundantly,
settling its ridges, softening it with showers, and blessing its growth. 65:11
You crown the year with your bounty; your wagon tracks overflow with richness.
65:12 The pastures of the wilderness overflow, the hills gird themselves with
joy, 65:13 the meadows clothe themselves with flocks, the valleys deck
themselves with grain, they shout and sing together for joy.
2
Timothy 4:6 As for
me, I am already being poured out as a libation, and the time of my departure
has come. 4:7 I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have
kept the faith. 4:8 From now on there is reserved for me the crown of
righteousness, which the Lord, the
righteous judge, will give me on that day, and not only to me but also to all
who have longed for his
appearing....4:16 At my first defense no one came to my support, but all
deserted me. May it not be counted
against them! 4:17 But the Lord stood by me and gave me strength, so that
through me the message might be fully proclaimed and all the Gentiles might
hear it. So I was rescued from the lion's mouth. 4:18 The Lord will rescue me
from every evil attack and save me for his heavenly kingdom. To him be the
glory forever and ever. Amen.
Luke 18:9 He also told this
parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded
others with contempt: 18:10 "Two men went up to the temple to
pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. 18:11 The Pharisee,
standing by himself, was praying thus, 'God, I thank you that I am not like
other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector.
18:12 I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.' 18:13 But the tax
collector, standing far off, would not even
look up to heaven, but was beating his breast and saying, 'God, be merciful to me, a sinner!' 18:14 I
tell you, this man went down to his home justified rather than the other; for all
who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be
exalted."
Quotation
to ponder:
How
is it, Lord, that I, who am so wise and knowing, gifted in the ways of language
and perception, so understanding,
alert
to every nuance and suggestion, and deeply read as well, should screw up with
such regularity? Amen.
--
Miryam Hammond
Preliminary
notes on service and theme:
At this point I’m thinking of working with the Joel
and Luke texts, continuing to wrap up some of the themes from our Fall series
on Jeremiah of sin/arrogance leading to devastation/repentance/humility; I
particularly am drawn to the inclusio in the Joel passage where the repeated
phrases my people shall never again be put to shame surround a gorgeous
re-statement of Exodus 20’s introduction to the Decalogue, the Ten
Commandments: You shall know that I am in the
midst of Israel, and that I, the LORD, am your God and there is none else.
Sermon in a sentence: Humility is knowing who you are, both “dust
and glory” (Chittister)—and knowing who God is. (Didn’t use: Humility is
the ability to recognize my right place in the universe, both dust and
glory. --Sr. Joan Chittister)
Introduction:
A woman, Gladys Crisp, visited a new church on a
brisk day in late autumn
and
took the initiative after the service
to
meet some of the people sitting around her.
“Hello,”
she said to the elderly man on her right.
“I’m Gladys Crisp.”
“So am I, honey,” he said. “I can’t ski anymore but I still love
winter!”
What wonderful days we’ve had this week, crisp and
clear
and
yet we also had rainy days
that
laid down snow in the mountains as well,
promising
both skiing
and
water in the meltwater streams next summer...
Reminds me of Billy Joe, a southern boy, visiting
the northern states.
He
decided to try something he’d never had the chance to do before—
skiing,
on real snow,
not
trailing a boat on the reservoir.
Unfortunately,
before he ever made it UP the hill
so he could try and come DOWN the
hill,
he was knocked out cold
by the chairlift.
He
called his insurance company from the hospital,
but they said they would refuse to
cover the injury.
"WHAT?!"
yelled Billy Joe into the phone.
"And why wouldn't you cover an
injury like this?"
"You
got hit in the head by a chairlift!" the insurance rep said.
"That
makes you an idiot...
and we consider that to be a
pre-existing condition."
Have you ever done something that was so stupid or
wrong or embarrassing
that
you could hardly look at yourself in the mirror for awhile?
What did you feel?
Humiliation? Shame?
Who was doing the name-calling?
Others,
or a voice within your self?
Seems like we all have voices within us
or
outside of us
that
don’t hesitate to put us down,
humiliate
us,
that
use shame as a weapon,
a tool to keep us in our place.
In one of my seminary counseling classes, the prof
asked me,
So,
what’s the difference between guilt and shame?
I didn’t have to stop to think; this one was way
too easy...
Guilt
is feeling bad about something you did;
Shame is
feeling bad about who you are.
We went on to talk about this some more;
my
prof said that shame is formed
by
external judgments on one’s essential character.
One is shamed by others;
eventually, however,
those
shaming voices can be internalized
by
the individual who believes them,
believes
the shaming judgments
on
their own character and worth.
Shaming and humiliation are often used as methods
of control by the powerful.
Comparing
prophetic voices:
This week we’ve moved on from our fall series on
Jeremiah
to
another Hebrew prophet, Joel,
who is thought to have done his work in Judah
a
couple of hundred years before Jeremiah came along.
The context for this short Old Testament book
was
a disastrous invasion of locusts that had wiped out their crops
and Joel took this opportunity to call the people
to repentance
and
to the hope of God’s intervention and restoration.
I find it interesting that for years,
Jeremiah didn’t hesitate
to
try to shame his people into repentance by name-calling—
remember
all the “stupids”?
and
his frequent long lists of their sins and stubbornness
warning
them that they are thus bringing
judgment
and disaster upon themselves?
And yet, as we saw last week, when the disaster
came,
Jeremiah
did not linger there;
he
did not use shaming as an ongoing tactic;
in
fact, the opposite.
At the point where you would expect his personal
judgments to lash out
with
vindication and frustration
he
brings a new word
a
new covenant
from
the Lord,
a
gracious word,
a
totally unexpected word:
Forgiveness.
All God’s continued dealings with the exiles
and
those dregs of the defeated people remaining in Judah
will
be based on forgiveness: a new
covenant....
But today’s prophet, Joel, is far softer than
Jeremiah
right
from the get go.
Joel doesn’t link the disaster of the plague of
locusts
as
directly or sharply to the sin of the people.
He does call for repentance,
which
implies something to repent about.
And he does talk about shame.
He talks about shame in a very interesting way—
and
that is what I want to focus on.
In his culture, shame was dished out generously;
all
ill fortune was understood to be deserved,
if
not brought on by one’s actions,
then deserved because of flaws in one’s character.
Ill fortune was always punishment,
always
a shameful, humiliating thing.
We have a hard time wrapping our modern minds
around this
as
it is different from our cultural assumptions,
but we will miss the thrust of these texts if we
miss this.
Shame:
The passage we’ve got today has the ancient Hebrew
equivalent of bolded italics,
a
writing technique that they used
to
make a clearly emphasized point in a written language
that
not only didn’t have italics
but
didn’t even have vowels....
When a Hebrew speaker or writer wanted to emphasize
a point,
they
would put it in the middle of repeated phrases,
like
the filling in a sandwich
or
like the books held between bookends.
In your bulletin, look at verses 26 and 27; do you
see the repeated phrase?
“My people shall never again be put to
shame.”
That’s the bread of this literary sandwich.
So,
what is the filling?
“You
shall know that I am in the midst of
Israel,
and that I, the LORD, am your God and
there is none else.”
The audience hearing Joel’s words
would have instantly recognized this sentence
as
the important emphasis in this passage;
they would also have recognized it as a takeoff
on
one of their most important scriptures,
the
introduction to the Decalogue, or Ten Commandments.
The connections between shame and the Ten
Commandments in this text
may
not be immediately apparent to us
and
to our modern ears so far removed
from
the context, the content, and the style of the prophet.
Up
close and personal:
I want to read something written by a woman
who
was raped
and
became mired in soul-destroying shame
that
kept her on the brink of suicidal depression for years.
She
worked with this passage
in
a very personal and healing way:
She writes,
“What caught my ear right away is the two times God
says, “And my people shall never again be put to shame.” No more shame! You know, the children in the country at that time were innocent;
they hadn’t left God and brought God’s judgment upon themselves. But the shame of the whole country became
theirs, too. They were hurt by the
destruction of the fields and the crops, even though they were innocent. Evil brings shame and destruction on
everybody, not just the ones who deserve it, But God is saying that there is an
end to shame: “never again, never again.”....
“Shame has been the plague of locusts in my life,
eating up all the good life-giving greenery that my garden was supposed to
produce. All those years that I was a
desolate wilderness! But God is saying
that those days are over. “And I will
repay you for the years that the swarming locust has eaten.” And I am seeing signs of that right now...I
have love in my life and in my heart. I
didn’t get completely eaten up by despair and suicide. I have better things to do and to be than
the garbage my shame made me think I was.”
She goes to talk about the sentence in the middle
of the sandwich:
“God is my God, there is no other. This comes straight out of the Ten
Commandments. Because God is MY God,
OUR God, and there isn’t any competition and because God is right here in the
middle of God’s people, we can’t be
shamed any more! If we show that
God is truly our God by our love and obedience like Exodus 20:6 says,
we
won’t do the things that can shame us.
If we are affected by other people’s sins against
us,
it
still won’t stick to us as shame;
God will be like Teflon coating and shame will
slide right off.
If
I get raped again, it won’t be because I am a disgusting low-life that deserved
it or asked for it. I will NEVER eat
that lie again. If
I get raped again, it will be because there is evil in this world and innocent
people get hurt—and that is exactly why God gets so angry about sin. And angry when no one intervenes....
“But this is telling me that what is really
important is to trust God. And God is
willing to pour out the Spirit on everybody,
not just men or not just women, or young people or old people, free or
slaves. And if God is willing to do
that, as bad as we all let God down day after day, certainly we can look for
signs of the Spirit in each other, different as we are, and overlook the ways
in which we let each other down. After
all, God is right here, in the middle of us as we muddle along, trying to
figure out what it means to be the people of God. This is really hopeful.” (Bethel,
in Transforming Images of God: a survivor’s resource for healing)
Conclusion:
antidote to humiliation is humility
It is hopeful.
When we know with truth, grace, and candor
who we are
who God is—
and who we are in God,
shame
cannot stick to us.
As the Lion Aslan says in CS Lewis’ Narnia book, Prince Caspian:
‘You come of the Lord Adam and the Lady Eve,' said Aslan.
'And that is both honour enough
to erect the head of the
poorest beggar,
and shame enough
to bow the shoulders of
the greatest emperor in earth.'"
And conversely, when we have this knowledge deeply
internalized, we can no longer stick shame on others, either.
In the gospel reading today,
Jesus is very direct with the shaming behavior of
those
“who
trusted in themselves that they were righteous
and
regarded others with contempt”
by
telling a pointed story which ends with
“all who exalt themselves will be humbled,
but
all who humble themselves will be exalted.”
The antidote to humiliation, shame, then
is
humility—
truly knowing who you
are, in God.
Let’s pray:
Lord,
help us to see ourselves clearly
with
grace and candor—
as
you see us,
always
lovingly, always compassionately.
And
give us the humility and the grace
to
extend that vision outwards—
to
see others,
lovingly,
compassionately.
In your name we pray, AMEN