Pentecost 2021: Forgiveness v. shame
Clare L. Hickman
St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Ferndale
May 23, 2021—Pentecost
Acts 2:1-21; Romans 8:22-17; John 15:26-27; 16:4b-15
“The Holy Spirit doesn’t just make you dance and speak in tongues. It also makes you apologize, shut up and examine yourself.” I liked this quote when I saw it, and it got me thinking about the ways in which Scripture promises the Spirit will work on us in quieter ways, internally.
In Acts, we hear about the Spirit giving the disciples the ability to speak so that others could hear the good news in their own language. Which is most definitely a call to spread the gospel of Jesus to every nation of the world. But also, on an individual, internal level, this story speaks to the Spirit’s mysterious, miraculous ability to help us (quite simply) to listen and actually understand each other.
Next, in our Romans reading, Paul speaks those beautiful words about the way in which we groan, along with creation, in labor pains as we await redemption. We are longing. We are struggling. And we aren’t sure we will be able to do it. But Paul assures us that the Spirit is at work, bringing our prayers to God, with sighs too deep for words. The Holy Spirit acts as the bridge, helping us to talk to God, and helping God to understand us.
Finally, we reach the gospel, in which we learn that the Spirit not only facilitates understanding between one person and another, and between a person and God, She also helps a person understand themself.
Listen to the word. Among other thing in this passage, Jesus promises that the Spirit will prove the world wrong about sin. And the reason the world is wrong about sin, he says, is that it doesn’t believe in him. Which very much points to our resistance to the Way of Jesus; to the ways in which we fail to take sin seriously enough; to our reluctance to focus on the damage Jesus warns us of, the damage that comes from living according to the greed and selfishness of this world.
But I think it also points to another way in which we are wrong about sin. Which is that we take sin seriously, but we don’t really believe in Jesus’ power to forgive and redeem us. Deep down, we have a hard time believing that sin is actually forgivable. We struggle with other people’s sins, unwilling to let them be redeemed. And even more often, I think, we struggle to believe that Jesus could possibly forgive US.
We feel stuck in our sins. Labeled by our shortcomings.
Because it turns out, we find shame a lot more believable than Jesus. We trust shame more than we trust Jesus. Maybe that’s because shame has been with us for so long. Born in the pains and failures of our childhood, when we were defenseless against the idea that we were only as good as our worst moment. Whispering in our ear, telling us stories about who we are and what we are worth and maybe just how little we deserve because of that.
We all know people who struggle mightily with shame. They seem ruined by it, dragged down by the weight of their own wrongdoing or weakness. Some almost seem to have turned their shame into an identity: wielding their wounds and their flaws like a weapon, like armor, like a warning sign, like a cry for help. Except they don’t actually want help. Or rather, they don’t believe that anything can help, because they have no idea how to stop letting their shame write their nametag.
But the fact is, most of us carry some shame around. Even those of us who are just in general pretty emotionally healthy. We all have some scripts running in our heads, and some of us have an astonishing number of them, no matter how well we seem to be doing on the outside. We have scripts about who we are, and what we are worth. And we spend a remarkable amount of energy trying to drown them out, or frantically trying to prove them wrong.
Nadia Bolz-Weber tells a story from her seminary days, of an older pastor who commented to her, “Nadia, I’ve seen you around for years, and you give off a lot of strength. I think that’s what people see when they look at you, which is great. But … what is it we don’t see?” Which was, she notes, about the rudest question she’d ever been asked. Because she was trying really, really hard to hide “the thing under the thing” from both herself and other people.[i]
That’s what shame tells us to do: to hide those things, because other people can’t handle them, won’t accept them, and couldn’t possibly love or admire you if they knew what lay beneath. Shame tells us we need to be afraid, which means it tells us that sin wins, tells us that we will never escape our worst moment or our deepest anxiety.
Shame … LIES.
Who knows why we choose to believe shame? Who knows why we struggle against our own redemption, why we reject the possibility of our own forgiveness? But Jesus knows that we do; knows that we have a hard time trusting; and so he promises to send the Holy Spirit, who “will guide us into all truth.”
He sends the Spirit to breathe the power of God into us. He sends the Spirit to demonstrate that the forgiveness is real, that the redemption is real, that we can trust Jesus more than we trust that voice telling us that we are unforgiveable. Because HE knows us, and still he loves us. He knows the worst of all of us, and yet he would still kneel down to wash our feet. There is nothing hidden from him, and over and over, he passes us the bread at table.
And we take it. We eat it. Because the redemption is real. The forgiveness is real. And his love is stronger than our shame, even though (as Nadia says) the power of human shame could replace fossil fuel if only we could harness its energy. Which is why we need the Holy Spirit to work in us, to move us along, to open us up to God, and to help us understand each other and understand ourselves.
The Spirit comes as wind, and fire, and water. And she enters the earth that is us, bringing us alive and leading us into the truth of our redemption.[ii] So says Malcolm Guite, in the introduction to his sonnet for Pentecost, which I will share with you now:
Pentecost by Malcolm Guite
Today we feel the wind beneath our wings
Today the hidden fountain flows and plays
Today the church draws breath at last and sings
As every flame becomes a Tongue of praise.
This is the feast of fire, air, and water
Poured out and breathed and kindled into earth.
The earth herself awakens to her maker
And is translated out of death to birth.
The right words come today in their right order
And every word spells freedom and release
Today the gospel crosses every border
All tongues are loosened by the Prince of Peace
Today the lost are found in His translation.
Whose mother-tongue is Love, in every nation.
[i] Nadia Bolz-Weber, “The Confessional” podcast, Season 2, episode 6: “Rev. Jeff Grant, Minister and Co-Founder of Progressive Prison Ministries.”
[ii] Malcolm Guite, https://malcolmguite.wordpress.com/2020/05/31/our-mother-tongue-is-love-a-sonnet-for-pentecost-8/?fbclid=IwAR0HLilhXQz00_iUPYwyavQTOOcUIiz2Fu2eYG4HhaTQNxEK-mobLw2oCUk