When I was young, I had a conception of God that was built around an economy of shame. If I did good things for God, he rewarded me. If I did things against God, he punished me. That conception affected every part of my life, especially in the situations that I knowingly did wrong.
I had a really good friend. We hung out all the time and went to the same school together. One time on a family camping trip, I woke up late one night as I was sleeping to find him lying on top of me. I was terrified. All I could think of was, "What's going to happen now?" I had heard reports that there were really hot places reserved for people who did stuff like this. Closing my eyes and wishing the situation would disappear, I silently waited for it to end. That night, I became a victim - not of a person - but of a self-shackling constraint of shame.
Three more times this happened, but those times I was not asleep. I participated. We would stay up all night and experiment with each other behind closed doors while the parents were sleeping. I enjoyed the intense feelings that came with it. Little did I know about the sexual drive that would accompany these acts.
Over the next few years, I would fantasize about doing the same things with other people as well. I couldn't get out of my mind the intense feelings that I had from that first night in the tent. There was a part of me that was absolutely terrified, and a part of me that enjoyed the feelings. But, I was living in complete shame. I considered myself the worst of the worst, a person God couldn't love and definitely a person no human being could love should they find out.
At the age of fifteen, I discovered alcohol. Out of self-hate and shame, I could catapult into existences I had never experience before. But then, I remembered what the pastor had said about drunkenness. There was a really hot place for people like me. From fifteen to twenty-six, I drank. That was my life in a nutshell. I held onto my constructs of shame as if they were the only solid structure I could build my life around. My idea of God had never changed, and Jesus was simply a human representation of the shame God. I thought shame was the gauge by which everyone was required to live. With this gauge, everything act and thought held in the balance.
In today's passage for Lent, we're told by John that God went through all the trouble of sending his Son to earth, not to point an accusing finger at the world or to tell the world how bad it was. I could never see this for most of my life. If there was anything I thought about God, it was that he was constantly pointing an accusing finger, especially at me.
John goes on to say that when we're addicted to practicing evil, denial, or make-believe, we prevent ourselves from experiencing "God-light," and we "fear being exposed by it." We run away from the light of grace and run to the familiar constraints of self-induced shame. When shame is our life gauge, we live by the rules that we place on ourselves. John proposes that believing in Jesus and the grace that he offers sets our lives according to a different gauge - a freeing one. No longer are we vacuumed in to our own condemning standards of right and wrong, but we experience the kind of freedom that allows us to experience a life that's whole and lasting.
For the first twenty-six years of my life, I had no wholeness and no sense of stability. And, I don't know how it happened that I entered into a different way of life. It's not that I started forming different constructs to build my life around, because that's what shame told me to do. I was constantly trying to build new economies that I could pour my resources into in the hopes of freedom. None of that worked though. The cornerstone of my change came with an acknowledged pain that I didn't know how to get rid of. I couldn't do it. Shame, which had once been my ally, had turned against me and was now trying to kill me. I didn't want to die though. As I was explaining all this to a friend, he offered a suggestion to me in front of Starbucks one night. He said, "When you get into your room to go to bed tonight, get on your knees and ask God to remove the shackles that have been around your ankles your whole life."
When he said this, I heard it. It sunk. That night, I did exactly what he said. I was crying like a baby. I couldn't believe it had been that long since I had felt a sense of hope. I got on my knees, with all the memories of the past rolling through my head like a clock out of control. I cried out to God, "God, please take these shackles off. I don't want them anymore!" This was the only time in my life that I can say I ever "felt" like a ton of bricks was lifted off my shoulders. Shame was the ton of bricks. The next morning I woke up and was scared at first because I was experiencing something I had never had before: peace.
That peace has stuck with me. It's whole and it's lasting. My tendency to screw up and do stupid shit hasn't changed one bit. What has changed is my perception of God and myself. No longer is God pointing an accusing finger, and no longer am I pointing an accusing finger at myself. When I believe in Jesus, I live by the construct of grace. Shame has no hold. It's dead, gone and buried never to see the light of day. God is no longer a pissed off loan shark, but power of freedom that intertwines my heart and my mind.
As we go out today, may we realize and accept that God is not pointing an accusing finger at us. May we realize that the rules we live by are the standards we set for ourselves. May we realize that when shame comes knocking, we don't have to let it in because there is One who has conquered it for good. As we practice letting go of some false economies in our lives, may we give ourselves grace through the God of grace. Amen.
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