A Cross Examination Part 2: Sin & Shame |
| Posted by Mark (mark) on Jun 24 2008 at 1:41 PM |
Sin can seem like a whirlpool sometimes; prowling about like a lion asserting its dominance, waiting to bear it’s nasty fangs and reveal it’s awful cyclonic glory; circling round and round, pulling you further and further down. Paul was well acquainted with it and revealed its vicious cycle in Romans 7. Sin begets shame, and shame, in our weakness, begets all manner of more sin; from deception to accusation to anger and pride.
Perhaps you recognize this cycle: I sin and immediately feel guilt and shame, which feed my resident insecurity/self-hatred. I try to punish myself to correct the problem, beating myself with the guilt and shame and vowing not to do it again. In my shame I try to hide myself; I turn my true face away from my friends and God.
Eventually I do sin again, no matter how hard I try. I do what I do not want to do. It was inescapable; not because I’m weak (which I am), but because I instinctively turned my face from God, just as Adam and Eve instinctively covered their nakedness and hid. I’ve cut myself off from the one who can set me free. I’ve done the opposite of wisdom, I’ve run from the cure. And how can I expect myself to make decisions sculpted by love, if I can’t receive it from Him who is love? This is the torment of sin. It’s how shame and sin foment each other onward and upward in a dark billowing cloud of death. Perhaps you even hate yourself for sinning, for being weak. But it is very difficult, if not impossible to receive love when you hate yourself. This blinds you to God’s love in spite of your sin and in the midst of your worst moments; and that false supposition causes you to sink further into the whirlpool.
This is where the hope comes in; it is where the cross applies directly to our everyday lives and the process of healing begins. This is where Paul wrote that there is no more condemnation for us. Because of the cross, shame is no longer to be a barrier between us and God; and if there is no shame, how will sin propagate itself? It can’t. Instead we have been set free in Jesus to run toward the Father in our weakness.
For too long sin and shame have manifested themselves in humanity, and in your life, and in my life, in the form of progressive independence. They’ve been busy at their work hiding, protecting, defending and justifying our hearts against rejection. In fact, I wonder if sin and shame are only understood inside the context of independence. Alternately, grace and love are manifest in progressive surrender, dependence, intimacy and vulnerability. If that is not a description of Jesus and his work on the cross, I don’t know what is; for the cross strips away our mask piece by piece, disarming our fear of rejection and our deep seated self-hatred (shame), with the radiating love expressed in His death and resurrection.
Yet, if this hope is real, why is it that so many of us who claim to understand the power of the cross, continue trying to fix ourselves by our own effort and strength (or more aptly, our own weakness). We strive by sheer force of will to perform well and be acceptable. But does an apple tree not bear apples? If you were an apple tree, could you stop yourself from bearing apples? By sheer determination could you produce oranges? And this is what most of us are doing in our struggle with sin.
Could it be that we don’t understand what Holy Spirit means when He says to Paul - in your weakness my strength is perfected? Don’t we understand that it is only by the healing transformation of the heart, that different fruit will grow. Attacking the symptoms without curing the disease will never work. You can prune back the apple tree all you like, but it will only produce apples more abundantly in the long run. Lest you kill the tree entirely and plant a different one, you will always have an apple problem.
And do we really think that preaching grace in one breath, while in the next still trying to fulfill the law, will ever set us free? But this is how so many of us live. We talk grace and live law; and the law stirs up all kinds of sinfulness, and so our Christian churches turn into bastions of sin; incubating and hiding it under the surface.
We must stop preaching grace with our lips and performance with our lives. It empties the cross and our testimony of their power. As long as we allow shame to hide our hearts, to project an unrealistic image of ourselves to the world, the message of our lives will always be law and performance. But in vulnerability everything changes. By being honest with our friends and God, we are free to run to Him in our weakness, instead of away. And how can we be vulnerable knowing we will get hurt in this sin-sick world? By trusting Him one step at a time; by learning that His love can heal our wounds, and thus we trust Him a little more. That is how love and trust build each other. It is not that we won’t get hurt by others; that we won’t ever fail again. No. It is that His love will get us through the hurts, and pick us up when we fall. And each time we are healed, or scooped up in His arms after we’ve failed, a little more trust is born in our heart, and we are less likely to fail the next time because we are loved and more importantly—we are beginning to truly understand that.
In the end we can’t accept the love of God until we admit our current condition (ie. surrender). This illuminates why God resists the proud but can’t refuse the humble, as pride is part of shame and asserts independence and isolation. On the other hand, humility is part of love, and surrenders; thus we cannot truly receive Him (or anyone) with pride, and healthy relationship can only exist where surrender is present in both parties. This is the work of the cross: that we might surrender daily; that we might reveal our nakedness and be healed of our rejection; that we might begin running to Him in our sin; that we might intimately know the Father once more.
