This sermon was preached for the second Sunday in Lent, February 25, 2024. Texts for this sermon were: Romans 4:13-25, Mark 8:31-38, and Psalm 22:22-30.
Someone recently asked me about ashes on Ash Wednesday - what it was all about and why we were running around smearing dirt on people’s faces all day. When I explained that the ashes were a reminder of our mortality, the preciousness of life, and our equality before God, she made a profound observation that stuck with me - probably because it resonated with so many conversations I’ve had with folks over the years. “I’m used to thinking about church as all about feeling guilty,” she said. “But church isn’t about that, is it? It’s about feeling connected to God.”
Lent is the perfect time to talk about guilt and church. And frankly, the predominantly Catholic Western Massachusetts is the perfect place to talk about it, too - so many active, lapsed, and former Catholics I’ve met associate their religious identity with feeling guilty all the time. Sometimes it’s with a sense of humor or even pride. But it’s also a huge reason people identify for staying away from church. It’s awful to feel guilty. If guilt was the main and overwhelming feeling I was made to feel at church, I wouldn’t want to stick around either. But sometimes, especially when I get the chance to really dig into it with people, I often discover that what people are reacting to, running away from, is not guilt but shame.
What is guilt and what is shame? Recently, various therapists, sociologists and psychologists have made a case for differentiating between the two sensations, and it’s a long overdue conversation that’s been happening lately in Christianity and the church, too. I’ve preached about Brene Brown’s definition of shame here at St. Mark’s before. I’ll share it again because it connects so powerfully with our Lenten theme of loneliness. Brown defines shame as: “the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging—something we’ve experienced, done, or failed to do makes us unworthy of connection.” Shame rejects the truth at the heart of the Gospel: you are worthy of love no matter what. Even when you cannot believe you deserve God’s grace and love, you have it. It’s yours. You belong to God. Forever.
What I haven’t talked about from the pulpit yet is Brene’s definition of guilt. Guilt is the discomfort we feel when we reflect that our thought, word, and deed - what we’ve done and left undone - has not lived up to our values, beliefs, and sense of integrity. In contrast to shame, guilt can be helpful, even though it’s painful to feel. In fact, lack of any guilt at all signals big issues with someone’s mental or emotional well-being. Lack of remorse even has legal implications in our justice system. From a medical standpoint, an appropriate level of guilt is good. In her book on marital infidelity, marriage therapist Esther Perel views guilt as a step out of shame and towards relationship repair. “The shift from shame to guilt is crucial,” she writes, “Shame is a state of self-absorption, while guilt is an empathic, relational response, inspired by the hurt you have caused another.” Guilt is a symptom of empathy.
Guilt, like grief, is part of the emotional price we pay for loving and learning to love better. So what does the ancient church say about guilt? First, Christian theology asserts that alienation and estrangement from God, neighbor, self, and nature - Sin - is universal, inevitable, something we are all caught up in.* And we make choices to deepen that estrangement, to harm ourselves and others, to abandon our neighbor, and turn away from love. Turning back to love - that’s repentance. Our awareness of our responsibility for harming others, our guilt, is a key part of what inspires repentance. The great early monastic St. John the Ladder calls guilt, or compunction, “the grief that makes for joy.”** The joy of reconnection through forgiveness and reconciliation. But when we let guilt fester, if we aren't given the tools or opportunity to move through it emotionally, physically, spiritually, if it is inflicted upon us irresponsibly and relentlessly, guilt descends backwards into shame.
And when shame convinces us we are unworthy of love and belonging, we disconnect. In our Wednesday discussion on loneliness this week, we recognized that sometimes a component of loneliness is feeling stuck - not being able to see ways to connect even if they’re obvious to everyone around you who loves you. Even if you are surrounded by crowds of kind and friendly people, even as a loving God calls to your soul over and over again, you can still be so convinced that you are so different, so misunderstood, so broken that you're sure if you were to reach out no one will reach back. Shame paralyzes us. Shame drives us to secrecy and silence.
At this point in the Gospel of Mark that we just proclaimed, Jesus has some hard truths to share about what’s ahead for him, and what’s ahead for his disciples. He will die on a cross and he will rise again. When Peter pulls Jesus aside and tells him to stop talking, I can’t help but see shame there. Perhaps Peter is worried about what others will think - who would choose to follow someone who is about to die a painful and shameful death? So his instinct is to cover, hide, silence all the parts of Jesus’ message that seem too uncomfortable.
Jesus’ response is to call even more people to him and to be even more honest about the price of following him. The way ahead leads to eternal life, but it leads through deep pain, discomfort, and suffering. Then he warns them about shame. Feeling ashamed of Jesus - that’s what threatens our connection with God. Shame would have us silence each other. Shame would have us hide.
Faith asks us to trust that joy and peace are waiting for us on the other side of an uncomfortable or painful experience. When we try to sidestep those experiences, faith sighs and reminds us that the only way out is through. A life of faith, the practice of faith, doesn't promise us escape or avoidance, but it does equip us for all those journeys through: through grief, through rage, through fear, and yes, through guilt.
I’m grateful for Lent - grateful that our church sets aside a whole season to contemplate and acknowledge that we all, at one time or another, let each other and ourselves down. Lent is designed not to inflict and dwell in guilt, but rather to teach us how to move through guilt in a way that strengthens our practices of love. These forty days are a great time to deliberately transform shame into guilt, and guilt into forgiveness and reconnection. To move from self-absorption to other-focusedness. To that end, we examine more closely what our values, beliefs, and integrity really are. We notice where our thoughts, words, and deeds don’t align with the people God calls us to be. Yes, we will feel discomfort from that greater awareness. But we don’t stay there, in that guilt, we don't let it fester. We practice moving forward toward connection. We practice apologizing and forgiving. We practice remembering we are worthy of love and belonging.
So yes, on each Sunday in these forty days, we begin our services with praying a prayer of confession together. In doing so publicly and all together, we rip away the secrecy and silence shame insists on. On our knees, we say together those incredibly powerful words at the start of every journey toward wholeness: I need help, and look around, we all need help. But we also hear the absolution right at the start, too. We hear God’s forgiveness pronounced over us by a priest on behalf of the church. We take into ourselves the truth that we are loved and we belong no matter what.
On the And Also With You Episcopal podcast this week, Mother Kelli Joyce reminded listeners that sometimes for some folks the general confession and absolution don't feel like enough, especially if you're carrying wounds - religious or otherwise - from a childhood steeped in shame. Sometimes people are still so stuck in the words they’ve just prayed in confession, all the shaming experiences they bring up for them, that the words from the priest just slide on by. Mother Kelli herself spoke about a small voice she sometimes has in her head that says to her during the absolution, “well, the priest didn’t know exactly what you were confessing and maybe she would not have said that to you…” That isn’t real, Mother Kelli says, “but the voice is real and the feeling is real and the fear is real.” And that’s how she knows it’s time to seek out another priest to do an individual confession and hear a personalized absolution. In the Episcopal Church, we call it Rite of Reconciliation and it's optional - simply another tool our tradition has to offer to liberate us from an oppressive sense of unworthiness, to move us through guilt to the joy and peace that's waiting for us on the other side. If you are having trouble hearing or believing the absolution on Sunday morning, come find me and ask me more.
Because church isn't about feeling guilty. Church is about tearing down the barriers that hold us apart, barriers like sin and barriers like shame. Church is about connecting to God and each other.
*“Sin” in Introduction to Theology, Third Edition, by Owen Thomas and Ellen Wondra, page 150-155.
**"A grief that makes for joy," A Season for the Spirit by Martin L. Smith, page 33.
Comments
Post a Comment