Dear People of Christ Church,
I recently had some time to spend with my kindle, and found Brené Brown’s The Gifts of Imperfection. I’ve read a lot of her stuff before, but hadn’t spent much time with this one. Brown’s research started out being about shame—our fear of being unworthy of love and belonging. Since love and belonging are two of the most central human emotional and spiritual needs, shame feels profoundly dangerous to us, and we try to avoid it at all costs. What’s worse, we have a tendency to further isolate ourselves when we feel shame, by bringing in secrecy, silence, and judgment of others to insulate ourselves from the pain. This then spirals out again, which leads to further isolating, further judging, and further suppressing of our feelings. The good news is that we can do things differently—if instead of nurturing our shame we nurture ourselves and remember our inherent worthiness, that cycle is broken. Reaching out to others, reminding ourselves that we aren’t defined by our failures, that we are worthy of love no matter what—Brown calls the capability for that work “shame resilience.”

It’s striking to think about shame in this way as we head into Holy Week beginning with Palm Sunday on March 20. Though we often forget it, Scripture can be profoundly psychologically insightful. Unfortunately we often do profoundly un-psychologically insightful things with Scripture!

In thinking about the crucifixion, we sometimes say that Jesus took on our shame and sin, to offer it to God, to heal us. The liturgy for the Stations of the Cross is full of this. That’s true, but Jesus didn’t do that as though we had a dirty shirt on and he took it off of us and put it on his own body. Instead. Jesus’ transformation of our humanity comes from the inside; his birth, ministry, death, and resurrection (yes, all four) symbolize God’s insistent, constant presence with us. It’s true that Jesus’ peaceful response to the violence he faced saved us. That’s true. In a very literal way, yes, we are saved by the cross. But we’re not “more saved” because it was “more worse.” We just are saved. Because God loves us. We just are worthy. Again, because God loves us.

Much is made of the crucifixion as being a particularly grisly and fear-inducing method of enforcing capital punishment. Many people were put to death in the Roman Empire, some by crucifixion, but by no means all. Crucifixion was a warning sign—it served to instill fear. That was its purpose. Yes, it was also shameful. But to say that Jesus’ death was uniquely shameful I think misses the point. The point is that Jesus’ death was not uniquely shameful. It was a way an abusive regime kept its people in line. That’s part of what’s salvific about it—that God experienced, from the inside, the worst of humanity. And God’s love would not be defeated.

We are all worthy—shame doesn’t have the last word for Jesus or for us. I’m getting ahead of us and close to Easter—there is a ways to go—but the resurrection is always true, even in the depths of Lent.

Blessings,
Sara+