Shame Dares Forgiveness to Pass on its Way to Love

This is a very confusing sermon
and if it confuses me you guys are in trouble.

It is confusing because the story from Luke is confusing.
It is a story about shame
that takes a very sharp turn toward forgiveness
and ends up on a cul-de-sac about love.
Making matters worse,
we almost never talk about shame
while our conversation about forgiveness
is often based in an erroneous definition.
And never, that I know of
does anyone but Jesus
draw a direct relationship between forgiveness and love.

So I am going to talk about shame
on the way to understanding the process of forgiveness
and at the end, land on love.

For most of us it doesn’t take much scratching
in the ashes of memory
to uncover a burning ember or two of shame.

Each of us experience shame differently
depending upon our age, gender, ethnic and racial culture,
where we were raised, and by whom.

Like a lot of boys in our culture I was educated on shame.
Fears, tears, indecision, and weakness,
were all complicated
and became even more bewildering
because they were conductors of shame.
Somehow for boys,
at least when and where I was growing up,
it was wrong to feel afraid;
a sign of weakness to cry;
a violation of gender to reveal a weakness;
and an embarrassment to everyone if you showed indecision.

When such feelings boiled up
and became exposed
the pain was twice baked.

Whatever the original wound that stimulated those feelings
shame made it worse.
In fact, shame usually lasted longer than the original infliction.

That is what the story from Luke is about, shame.
And when it comes to forgiveness
shame is usually standing in the road daring us to pass.

Luke’s story is about shame
but ends up with a teaching from Jesus about forgiveness,
and the gnarliest offenses needing forgiveness
are often those tinged or mingled with shame.

Let’s listened to Luke’s story
with our faces pushed underneath the obvious surface
and see what else is there.

First, we need to recognize the culture behind this story.
It was a culture built and supported
by the duel scaffolding of hospitality and shame.
Hospitality was exceedingly important and
a requirement of every household.
In fact, to violate the customs of hospitality
brought shame upon the family name.
And yet, hospitality was also confined to the social stalls
into which the economic classes
and ethno-religious tribes were segregated.
Clear and narrow roles defined
and separated social responsibilities,
while absolute limitations on those roles
formed a rigid social structure.
Any violation of any norm, custom, or religious law
ignited the bonfires of shame
and could also result in shunning.
Whereas, in our culture shame is largely a private affair,
in Jesus’ time and place shame was public.
Here is why this story is about shame.

A fetching young woman intrudes upon a symposium,
a particular kind of party.
It was a Greek-style dinner party exclusively for men.
The well-dressed and socially comfortable guests –
merchants of power
and gatekeepers of success –
reclined on pillows around low tables
in the Roman manner for eating.
They were positioned throughout the room
in a pecking order that revealed each man’s
level of importance in the local society –
like a pack of dogs
every man was assigned a rank
and there was no social mobility.

The host was of course in the position of honor
and a guest’s relative proximity or distance from the host,
indicated his importance.
Jesus was seated on the right hand of the host –
the position of highest honor.
Jesus was also the focus of everyone’s attention,
at least until she entered the room.
Then all eyes were on her.

Knowing what we know now about shame,
honor, and place in that brittle social context,
it is not difficult to imagine the following scenario.
The story after all, is very cinematic.

The host stiffens.
His neck burns
and this eyes cast a steely gaze
right through the spectacle unfolding before him.

She sidles up and slips down gracefully beside Jesus.
Unselfconsciously Jesus scoots over and lets her in.

Her long slender, manicured fingers
lithely cup his feet
and begin to massage them
with the effortlessness
of one who has done it many times before.

As she works she sobs quietly,
offering no words
and giving no voice to unpack her tears.
Her weeping wets Jesus’ weathered feet.
The moisture darkens his dust-covered skin.

She leans over and kisses the hardened flesh.
Moisture from her lips dissolves a velvet layer of dust.
Then she employs her long silken hair
to envelop both feet like a towel.
An unguarded sigh escapes Jesus’ smile.
She lathers his feet with thick, fragrant lotion.

Now the camera angle widens,
backing away from Jesus’ deep pleasure and appreciation
so that we can see the host burning with fury.
The more Jesus forgets his place at the table,
the more his host twitches and squirms and reddens.
Jesus and the woman are raining shame upon the host.

We don’t usually think about the man who invited Jesus
when we hear this story, but we should.
Let’s notice it from his point of view,
or even that of the other guests
also wounded by Jesus and the woman.

A notorious outcast from polite society –
a publicly shunned
perpetrator of moral and religious offense,
and most likely a vast accumulation of offenses –
enters a forbidden forum unwelcome and uninvited.

Not only does her presence
publicly shame the host,
her presence morally defiles his home.
This is not just some little goof
that would be forgotten in a few days,
tossed off with a laugh as in our nebulous culture.
Her presence actually defiled the man’s home.
Made it dirty.

The host will have to suffer significant penance
in order to restore his home
in the eyes of the temple and God,
but the shame of it will never be cleansed.
Never.
The shame will echo on and on
every time someone remembers and talks about it.

Her presence shames the host
in a culture where shame was tantamount to social death.

And yet the guest of honor,
our pal Jesus,
seems oblivious to the damage
and in denial about the seething hatred
boiling up all around him.

Then, in the face of all the anger and scorn,
Jesus makes a shocking declaration.
This is also where the story takes is hairpin curve
away from shame and toward forgiveness.
Jesus actually says this:

There is, he says, a direct relationship
between how much we have been forgiven,
and how much we have forgiven others…
and our own capacity to love.

Let’s just hold that for a moment.
It is devastating.

How much WE have been forgiven,
and how much WE have had to forgive,
fashions our own CAPACITY
to love.

To put it another way,
those of us who have done the most damage,
and those who have been the most injured,
are the very people with the greatest capacity
to be the best at loving.

That is just wrong on so many levels –
and I don’t mean Jesus is wrong as in incorrect,
but what he is pointing out is massively unfair.
It is also profoundly true, at least in my experience.

But here is where we have also been handicapped
in our thinking about forgiveness.
There has been so much awful preaching
about forgiveness from Christian quarters
that it has made the subject toxic.

For one thing,
“Turn the other cheek” has been erroneously
intertwined with “forgive lest ye not be forgiven.”
Then there is the stunning absurdity of the bad advice to
“forgive and forget.”
Not only is “forgive and forget” impossible,
unadvisable, and just plain wrong,
it is not Biblical either, if that matters.

Throughout history and even in our own lifetimes,
clergy have counseled battered women
to forgive their abusive husbands or rapists
and urged oppressed classes and races and tribal groups
to bury the hatchet,
forget the past, and “let’s move on.”
That is toxic advice from perpetrators
not wise counsel from the compassion of solidarity.

So whenever the topic of forgiveness comes up
we need to stop and acknowledge
all the bad and corrupt counsel the church has preached.

We need to ask forgiveness for it,
and we need to dig deeper and listen harder to Jesus.

Here are four elements in the conversation about forgiveness
that are crucial for us to embrace and understand.

First of all, forgiveness is a process.
Forgiving someone for a significant hurt or betrayal
is not a static point on the horizon
that we arrive at once and for all.
Rather, forgiveness is a process, a RECOVERY process.

Just like an addict is never cured of the addiction,
but rather, becomes a participant in a recovery process
with ups and downs,
ins and outs,
highs and lows;
forgiveness is a process of recovery too;
a process without end.

Forgiveness is a HEALING process
that offers recovery but does not have a cure.
So instead of thinking of forgiveness as an accomplishment
or a task we have to achieve –
some kind of one-and-done event –
we need to think of forgiveness as a recovery process
that goes on and on,
further and further,
deeper and deeper.

And the second thing that needs to be said about forgiveness is that it is not a gift.

Forgiving someone is not something we give to THEM
it is a recovery process for US.
Forgiveness is for US when we have been wounded
and not for the perpetrator.
We enter the recovery process of forgiveness
for our own healing,
and not as a gift to the other person or people –
our forgiveness does not really help the other person
unless of course we have been reconciled
and are still in relationship with them;
in which case, it allows for a continued relationship.

So the first thing about forgiveness
is that it is a recovery process,
and the second thing about forgiveness
is it is for our sake as the injured, not for the perpetrator.

The third thing we need to say about forgiveness
is that it has no denial or amnesia in it.
Forgiveness does not forget.
Forgiveness does not tolerate abuse.
Forgiveness does not ignore the injury that took place.
Forgiveness does not pretend it no longer hurts.
Forgiveness does not use ‘understanding’
to rationalize the injury.
Forgiveness does not have an endpoint
when the injury is done and gone.

What forgiveness DOES do
is look into the wound
and see what is there to be recovered,
and see if there is anything worthy of redemption.

What forgiveness DOES do
is look into the wound
and judge what happened,
and judge the actions of the actors involved
by the criteria with which WE wish to be judged by others.

What forgiveness DOES do
is continue to look into the wound over time,
and see how our perspective changes what we see,
and continue to learn from it.

What forgiveness DOES do
is look into the wound
and talk out loud about it
with people whose wisdom and kindness we trust.

What forgiveness DOES do
is look into the wound
and accept that there never will be a time
that the wound is not present
but that there may be a time when the wound
gives us more than it takes away.

And that lead to the fourth thing we need to note
about forgiveness: it is a kind of grief.

I know that is not how we normally think about forgiveness
but consider what we know about grief,
the kind that follows death.
Grief can become something we learn to live with
and even an eventual source of strength over time.
That is also true of forgiveness.
Whether we need forgiveness for ourselves
or are working on forgiving someone else,
the memory of the injury never truly goes away
but it may become incorporated into who we are
just like the memory of the deceased person
when the pain of loss has dissipated.

The thing about emotional wounds and
injuries associated with relationships
is that they continue on in one form or another.
Either they become an endless source
of resentment and shame, or they are allowed to become a fire that tempers our capacity for love.

Let me repeat that, because it is the fulcrum
upon which Jesus’ teaching is balanced:
Either our wounds become an endless source
of resentment and shame,
or they are allowed to become a fire
that tempers our capacity for love.

We get to make that choice.
No one else has the power.
God doesn’t even have the power to make us decide
whether we will engage in a process of healing and recovery
or instead, stroke the injury of our wounds
and suck on the straw of resentment.

God has the power to help in our recovery
but we have to open ourselves to God
and to our woundedness
in order for the recovery process to take place.

We are like that host in Luke’s story who has been
injured and shamed.
Will we seek revenge,
nurse resentment for years to come,
or enter into a recovery process?
Will we swallow hurt, anger, pride, and shame
because we think forgiveness is a gift we have to give
the perpetrator of our injury?
Or will we embark on a recovery process
that seeks to learn from the incident,
free us from resentment,
and allow us to love more deeply?

So Luke’s story
and Jesus’ teaching,
as it turns out,
like forgiveness itself,
is really about our capacity to love.