Moments of Shame, Moments of Grace

           It really wasn't anybody's fault.  The adult in me knows this.  We hadn't really practiced together at all, I'm therefore not used to the way she directs and I mis-read her cue.  What I thought was a "prep-beat" was her downbeat. The result?  It was not good.  The concluding, triumphant exit music for this beautiful service began as a disaster.  The choir began to sing as I played the last beat of the introduction, which meant that I and a couple of the other musicians were a beat behind.   And in the end, I stopped playing altogether, unsure whether to keep playing with the musicians who were with me, or to play with the choir and director.  By the middle of the first verse we were together.  None the less, this happened in front of a huge number of people who'd come for a very important memorial service.  I left feeling humiliated, but more, ashamed - I had failed a group of people I cared about at a memorial service that was important to me as well.  I had practiced, worked to play well, and the performance was not up to my expectations.  I was so upset that, rather than stay for the reception (which I had planned to do and which I had wanted to do), I just came home and ate pie after the service.  Yes, I know that eating pie is not the healthiest way to deal with problems, but it made me temporarily feel a little better, so there you have it.  We all have our coping strategies: pie eating is one of mine, so try not to judge it.  Perhaps another "coping" strategy is thinking up stupid, unhelpful ways of dealing with the shame, "Okay fine!  If this is how you are going to play for important services, it is obviously time for you to quit playing altogether.  You aren't good at this anymore.  This was a message to you.  And the message is 'DONE!'  You are done.  Finished.  Letters of resignation to be sent out in the morning."
           Fortunately, I'm slightly more grown-up in my behaviors than I am in my head.  I know this situation wasn't really anyone's fault.  It just happened that our lack of knowledge of each other and our limited time to practice together caused a misunderstanding, a misreading of cues.  There are other ways to prevent this problem in the future than just quitting.  This may be the first time I've played under this director, and my guess is it won't happen often, if ever, again.  If and when it does, we'll deal with it then, and we'll both come to it with a deeper understanding of the potential problems we might have.
          But, now that I'm moving out of that shame-place, I'm also able to take a step back and reflect a little on the power of shame in our lives.  We all make mistakes.  Some of them are met with feelings of guilt, sometimes we deal by blaming those around us, and sometimes we move more deeply into places of shame.  The difference?  Guilt is an "I've done something wrong that I feel bad about"  response.  Blame can be a number of things: inability to self-reflect, or guilt and shame transferred onto the other.  Shame on the other hand is "I am innately wrong.  Something about me is wrong.  I am bad, I am not right."  That is a deep place.  What causes a person to go there?  Probably years of conditioning that has told us that mistakes are not okay and that they somehow mark us as bad people.  Maybe our faith communities historically have had a hand in this: some faith communities tell their folk that we are innately "sinful," wrong, not deserving of God's love, and that can be embodied in us as shame.
          But our faith should instead, I deeply believe, help us to focus on our creation as good beings.  We are created good.  We are loved into being.  Yes, we make mistakes, but nothing, nothing is so big that it stops God's love for us.  God sees deeper, and I believe, with everything in me, that what God sees is the good, is the beautiful, is the "holy" even.  We are not mistakes.  We are not "wrong" as people.  We are loved.  Even something as big as a crazy music mess up in a memorial service should be treated with grace, with laughter, with a recognition that maybe these mistakes are calls to not take ourselves so very seriously.  Life happens.  And it is messy.  But in that mess is beauty.
       More importantly, it is often in the messy that we find God.  God comes to us in the least expected places: among the poor, among the disadvantaged, among the outcast.  Might that not also mean that God comes to us in the mess?  In the mistakes?  In the chaos and confusion and clashes of life?  It's easier to see it when that mess is taking place in others... we can see God, for example, in children who've been playing outside so hard that they are covered in dirt.  It's easy to laugh and delight and see God in their joyful, soiled, messy faces.  We can see God in funny or humorous situations that involve other people or animals: again we feel God in our own joy and delight.  When people misspeak and say funny things, our laughter is often God-filled happiness.  But when we ourselves make a mistake... it's hard to laugh at it, hard to delight in it, and even harder to find God in it.  
         So today I am looking for God in the mess.  And what I see is that we celebrated a man today who was described again and again as joyful, enthusiastic, fun, playful.  He was said to be filled with laughter, to include humor in every service.  So, we tried to make a service for him that was more perfect.  The laughter came in some of the stories told, but perhaps that was not enough.  No, perhaps it was not going to run perfectly because that would not have been a true service reflecting the joy and humor of Father Mat.  His service needed some chaos, some mess, some unexpected and unanticipated moments - moments where God could break in in a new and different way.  So having the choir sing a beat ahead of the accompaniest?  Well, maybe there's the humor for you.  Maybe Father Mat was laughing at us despite all our efforts to be perfect and great.  And maybe he was delighting in our humanity, in our flawed attempts to be just right.  It is inevitable in my life that the times that I try hardest to be perfect are the times I fail to be so.  I struggle and strive to stop seeing those times as moments of condemnation.  Instead, they are invitations to see as God sees, and to delight in our goofy, imperfect selves; to relax my own rigid rules of what is okay for myself, and instead to enjoy our crazy world for what it is.  Those moments of imperfection are also invitations for grace to come in.  There is no room in perfection for grace.  It is only in the chaos that there is space for grace to come swirling in with healing and light and compassion.  The invitation for grace is an invitation for God to be even more present with us.
       So, while I still wish the mistake hadn't happened, that we hadn't gotten off a beat, that the service was picture perfect in every way, I recognize that it was what it was: another opportunity to ask for, seek, find, and accept God's grace.  And today that grace comes in the ability to laugh at myself for ever thinking I could be perfect, even just for a service, and to rejoice that I was able to be there in the celebration at all, doing my best, no matter how it came out, and honoring an important man for the gifts he gave to this community.

A Personal Reflection on my book - insecurity, fear, and perhaps a bit of hope.

           My book came out.  You can buy it on Amazon. You can buy it from the publisher, Parson's Porch.  You can buy it directly from me.

         But this post is not actually a sale's pitch.  This is a more personal reflection on how hard it has been for me to step forward into this.  

         David Tullock from Parson's Porch Publishing found me through my blog and has been asking me to send him my stuff for publishing for about 4 years.  FOUR YEARS!  And every time he would send me an email, I would respond with "Oh yes!  I am interested!" but I could never move beyond that.  All I needed to do was to put the blog posts into a document.  This shouldn't have been hard.  I'd already done the writing.  I'd already done quite a bit of editing.  I'd actually already saved all of the blog posts in several documents (one for each year) because I'm just enough of a Luddite to not completely trust the internet to actually save my stuff for the duration.  So I had also saved them all already.  It was just a matter of doing some minor editing, pasting together several year's worth of posts and sending them off.  But I couldn't do it.  

         I'd think about it.  I'd talk to other people about it, all of whom would just look at me with puzzlement... I mean, why wouldn't I do this?  I didn't even have to FIND a publisher: I had one coming to ME!  I didn't have to worry about submitting and resubmitting and facing rejections.  I didn't have to try to figure out self-publishing.  I didn't have to ask for help.  Why on earth would I not do this? 

        Well, I'm busy.  I have kids.  I'm working full time.  I am still writing and that feels more important.  I have other projects.  My book about what our family went through should really take priority over blog posts.  I...

       I was full of excuses.  And none of them were true.  I had written a dissertation while working and having kids.  I had finished a doctoral program while working and raising kids.  I have experienced times when all I could dedicate was ten minutes a day to a project, but I know how to find that ten minutes in each day and I've done this before.  The most honest answer I could give to people was "I don't know why.  I just... can't."

       Marianne Williamson is quoted as saying,  “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be?  You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you.  We are all meant to shine, as children do.  We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone and as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give others permission to do the same.  As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others."  Was I afraid of success?  

       No, that didn't feel right.  It's not success that scares me.  It's being noticed at all.  And it's not being noticed in a good way, though perhaps that scares me too.  I worry more about being noticed and found lacking.  I fear being noticed and deemed "not good enough".  I am anxious about being seen and judged.  I worry some will feel I am "too big for my britches" and that I shouldn't think my book is worth reading.  I worry about being found to be a fake - someone who just plays at writing, pretends at ministry, acts as a person striving to follow Christ but somehow never quite makes it.  I am terrified of the haters and their ability to make me feel small, unvalued and unvaluable.  This is so much a problem for me that when my books showed up in the mail, instead of feeling happy or proud, I experienced a panic attack that made it hard to breathe.  My husband and children were thrilled for me.  A good friend offered to cater a book signing party for me.  Several people have spoken up at groups I'm in to proudly share the news of my book.  And, while I have been grateful for their care and their love, that wasn't the predominant feeling.  Each and every time someone shared about my book, I felt mostly embarrassment... or maybe even shame.  I wanted to crawl into a hole, run away, pretend it hadn't happened.  I wanted to "take it back" and tell the publisher I had made a mistake.  I had more panic attacks, and I wanted to apologize to everyone for wasting their time and money.

         Jesuit Priest Gregory Boyle wrote in his book, Tattoos on the Heart (New York: Free Press, 2010) that the prime issue of addicts or gang members or those who are extremely poor (or anyone living out their fear) is shame.  He says that while God finds us wholly acceptable, this is incredibly hard for those who have faced terror, violence or deep betrayal to accept.  He says that shame is the absence of self-love.  But, "it is precisely within the contour of one's shame that one is summoned to wholeness." (p44).  

        Isaiah 43:1 "I have called you by your name.  You are mine."  And, as Boyle said, "Out of the wreck of our disfigured, misshapen selves, so darkened by shame and disgrace, indeed the Lord comes to us disguised as ourselves." (p60).  This is not easy for me.  But I am stepping into the hope that maybe, just maybe, it is true for me, too, that God loves me beyond measure, as I so deeply believe it is true for all of those around me.  

        So for today, I will do my best to step out of the shame and into the wholeness of God's love.  For today, no matter what I experience or what others say or do, I will strive to embody the grace of a God who believes that all of us are, in fact, too small for our britches: we are loved beyond imagining, we are worth all that is.  And that means there are times when it is okay to step into our successes, and to celebrate the things we have done and the people that we are.  I hope you will consider buying my book.  And I will try to embrace the care it shows me when you do.

Sunday's Sermon - Haunted

2 Sam. 6:1-5, 12b-19

Mark 6:14-29

Herod had beheaded John the Baptist.  He had reasons for doing it, and may at some level have felt justified in his actions.  John had been critical of Herod for marrying his brother’s wife.  And so Herod had already put John in jail.  But Herod also respected John and feared John.  At some level he recognized the truth of what John had said, recognized that John was a man of God, just speaking God’s truth.  Herod had John arrested, and yet he liked to listen to John.  Herod felt touched by John’s words, even though he didn’t understand them.  But eventually, Herod was persuaded by Herodias’ daughter to have John beheaded.  And so, while Herod had his own reasons as well for wanting John gone, and while he could now put blame on someone else for pushing him to finally make the decision to have John beheaded, still, Herod knew in his heart that John was a man of God.  He knew in his heart that what he had done to John was wrong.  Herod knew this.  And because he knew it, he was haunted in his heart by what he had done.  We call this feeling guilt or shame.  And because of Herod’s guilt or shame, it was easy for him to believe that God, too, would punish Herod by raising John from the dead and bringing him back to physically “haunt” Herod the way Herod was haunted in his heart already by his guilt and shame.

Though Herod had listened to the man of God, still Herod did not know God.  He had not come to understand what John spoke to him.  Herod understood judgment, he understood revenge, he understood anger and hatred and fear and killing.  But he did not understand the God of love, the God of forgiveness, the God of new beginnings.  And so because of that, everywhere he looked, he was led by his guilt and his shame to see the world in terms of his pain, rather than in terms of forgiveness and new life. 

At some level he was right, not that Jesus was John brought back to life, but that God was present in the haunting of Herod, with his thoughts concerning John.  God wants wholeness for us and that means at some level it is God’s gift that we have feelings that call us to work through the stuff that we carry, the things we’ve done, the things we’ve left undone, the injuries we’ve sustained and the pain we’ve caused.  These things will haunt us, not because God wants pain for us, but because God calls us to deal with our pain, to confront it, to face it and work through it, to find ways to repent the things we’ve done wrong, to heal them, to “fix” them to the best of our ability, to grow, to become more whole.

A long ago time ago in the hills of Quong Zu province, there once lived a revered old monk who was a master of Zen Buddhism.

One day he decided that he would make a pilgrimage to a neighboring monastery, and not wishing to make the journey alone, he decided to take along one of his young disciples.

They started their journey early the next morning and in the true spirit of Zen each walked along engrossed in his own thoughts, and so they journeyed for many hours without speaking. By mid-day they had come to a small stream and it was here that they noticed a young girl dressed in fine silk, obviously contemplating how best to cross the stream without getting her precious clothes wet.

Immediately the old monk walked over to the young girl and in one smooth motion, he picked her up in his arms and walked out into the stream, then after carrying her safely to the other side, he gently put her down and walked on without having said a single word.

His disciple having watched this whole incident was in a state of complete shock, for he knew it was strictly forbidden for a monk to come into physical contact with another person. Quickly, he too crossed the stream, and then ran to catch up with his master, and together they once again Walked on in silence. Finally at sunset they made camp and settled down for the night.

The next morning after prayers and meditation the old monk and his disciple once again continued their journey, once again in silence.

After many miles, and no longer able to contain his curiosity, the disciple called to his master and said,

"Master may I ask you a question?"

 "Of course, you may" his master replied, "knowledge comes to those who seek it".

 Respectfully his disciple said, "yesterday I saw you break one of our most sacred vows when you picked up that young girl and carried her across the stream, how could you do such a thing?"

 His master replied, "That is true, and you are right it is something I should not have done, but you are as guilty as I am" .

 "How so?" asked his disciple, "For it was you who carried her across the stream not I."

 "I know" replied his master, "but on the other side I put her down. You, however, are obviously still carrying her."

At first this sounds like an admonition to let things go.  And it is.  There are things that other people do that we have to let go of, that we have no control over, that we need to put down and not allow to haunt us, to follow us, to become burdens on us.  Additionally, God is the God of forgiveness, and God calls us, too, to forgive ourselves and to forgive one another. 

But I also believe that many times our pasts haunt us because something in them is calling for our attention.  The reality is that it is those things that we avoid truly dealing with that haunt us for the longest, those things that we try to skirt around, rather than walking through that carry the greatest pain for us.

Have you ever felt haunted by something?  For me, this happens most often early in the morning, usually in the shower, I think of all the things I should have done/could have done/might have done differently.   When those thoughts come to us what do we usually do with them?  When we feel haunted by something, when a memory or a fear or a pain or a regret is so tangible that it seems to pop up regularly, I think it is our natural inclination to try to push it away, to try to squash it.  The more it pops up, the harder we work to dismiss it.  I hear from people “I try not to think about x, but it keeps coming to my mind.  I can’t keep it out.”  And from others, “so and so is dwelling on x.  They need to move on!”  But unfortunately, these comments show that we’ve missed the point in many ways.  Obviously we can’t just decide not to think about something.  And when we find ourselves obsessing over something, rather than seeing this as a problem that we need to block out, I believe it is often a call to do exactly the opposite of what we are trying to do, it is a call to pay attention, to deal with whatever it is that keeps arising, to find ways to heal it.  Only by going deeper in, by facing the pain can we then move on, can we no longer “obsess” or be haunted by a memory, a feeling, that guilt, that shame, that spirit of someone gone. 

A little girl was talking to her mother and the mom was listening while she was doing dishes.  She was responding appropriately to the comments the little girl was making, saying “uh huh” and “oh” and asking questions.  But finally the little girl said, “Mommy!  You are not listening to me!”  The mom said, “yes, I am honey.  I’m right here listening to you.”  The girl responded, “but Mommy, you are not listening with your eyes!”  I think that in many ways while we can become obsessed with a thought or a feeling, it doesn’t leave us, it doesn’t move on because we aren’t really paying attention to it.  We aren’t looking at it with our eyes.  We are haunted by it because we haven’t in fact given it the attention it needs to be healed.

That doesn’t mean that this is easy.  But the struggles that are internal are as important as the struggles that are external.  The struggles with our own grief, guilt and shame need as much intentional healing as those that are outside of ourselves.  How many of you have seen the movie, “A dolphin’s tale”.  The movie is based on a true story about a dolphin who got caught in a fishing net and whose tail was so injured that it had to be amputated.  The dolphin then was swimming by moving her tail sideways, which was causing injury to her back.  The care givers at the marine center who were trying to help the dolphin heal did not know what to do about it.  But the problem was not going to go away by simply seeing it daily without actually addressing it.  They began to try different prosthetic fins for the dolphin’s tail.  At first the prosthetic fins irritated the dolphin and Winter would shake them off, whack them against the side of the tank until they came off.  Again, the workers, those trying to help Winter, could have given up, but they didn’t.  They kept working on it until they found a prosthetic tail that Winter could use and swim with that did not irritate her.

While we can see that work has to be done to fix practical, day to day living problems, we don’t tend to give the same attention to our spiritual crises, our emotional and mental pain.  At my last church we had an annual mission trip.  One year the site where a bunch of us were working was the trailer home of a relatively economically poor woman.  She was not uneducated. She had been a school teacher. Her husband had been an electrical engineer; her son was a journalist in Italy. Still, her home was a mess.  And by a mess, I don’t even mean the fact that her roof had holes and that the floor was completely down to the subflooring, which was made of a cheap particle board, so cheap in fact that at one point one of our youth actually fell through the floor, creating yet another big hole in a floor already riddled with holes and patches over holes.  No, when I say it was a mess, I mean that this woman hadn’t done dishes in years, she just went out and bought more and more dishes (and not paper, but real dishes) to use rather than cleaning any of the old ones.  I mean that when we first walked in it looked like her floor was covered with carpeting, but we soon discovered that it was not carpeting but dog hair and other dog “products” that covered the floor, inches thick.  I mean that there was literally garbage piled throughout the house, and only a very narrow path through the garbage that allowed her to get from one room to the next, and that the back room of the house was completely filled to the brim with garbage.  We spent the week of our work camp fixing the holes in the roof, replacing the subflooring in the kitchen, but mostly, we spent the week simply cleaning the house.  We spent over 10 hours, each of the eleven of us, just washing dishes, packing up some to be kept elsewhere and some to be donated.  We took truck loads of garbage to the dump, and we cleaned, cleaned, cleaned.  We also spent a lot of time just listening, talking with her about her losses, about her pain, about the struggles in her life.  Still, a week is not a long time.  And as she sat telling us things like, “I know I need to just get over this” I realized that no, what she needed was more time to be heard, more time to heal, more time and attention to the pains inside to work through her past so that she would not continue to be so immobilized by depression that she was unable to even throw away her garbage or clean a dish.

Sometimes we don’t address these needs, the internal needs because we don’t know how to do it, or we don’t have the resources.  We think we should be able to “handle” things without help if it is an internal, emotional, or spiritual issue.  But God calls us to use all the resources available to us, God puts us in communities to help us, and God won’t prevent us from feeling “haunted” until we do address the issues that need to be dealt with.

We don’t know what happened with Herod after today’s story.  We don’t know if he was able to ask God for forgiveness or accept the grace God offers after his killing of John.  We don’t know if Herod was able to pray, to accept counsel, to talk and walk through his pain so that eventually he would no longer be haunted by John.  But we do know that we are given the story from today for many reasons.  And one of those is a simple reminder that what we don’t address will haunt us.  My challenge then for each of us this week is to not push away those uncomfortable thoughts and issues that arise, but to invite them into a deeper place within us, to address them, to discuss them, to pray about them, maybe even to get counseling and help for them if they are persistent.  My challenge for us is to see the “gift” in the hauntings of our lives, to remember that God calls us towards wholeness of our whole beings and that means taking the time to listen with our eyes, with our whole selves to those areas calling for our attention.  God is with us in that pain, and in the work we do to overcome our challenges.  Thanks be to God. 

Matthew 25: Clothing the Naked

Genesis 9:18-27

John 4:5-42

Matthew 25:31-46

Today we continue our study of Matthew 25 by focusing on clothing the naked.  But while making sure that everyone has enough to wear is an important call for all of us, today I actually want to focus on this at a metaphoric level. While I believe that Jesus meant these passages to be very literal, the gift in Jesus’ words and I think in all of scripture, is that there are always multiple levels of meaning and of value to us.  Since clothing people is generally not as big an issue in the United States (as we know our thrift stores tend to be overrun with donations of clothing and if you are like me, you clean out your closets of unused clothing or clothing that kids and ourselves outgrow on a regular basis), I want to focus on the other levels of clothing the naked.

Looking on someone’s nakedness is generally considered wrong.  This was even more true in biblical times.  As we read in the passage from Genesis, even when it involved an adult man seeing his father naked, this was a wrong that could lead to a complete change in one’s rank within the community and even within one’s family, apparently for generations. 

But we do this – this looking on the naked, in more than just physical ways.  For example, when someone is “exposed” – when a piece of a person’s private life, is thrown onto the TV screen through news stories, we tend not only to want to see, but to STARE.  We are curious.  We rubberneck on freeways when there has been an accident, we watch the news avidly when someone’s tragedy is aired, we talk and chitchat with others about the scandals we’ve heard about.  We look on the nakedness of those who are suffering and exposed in our communities on a regular basis, and usually we have very little shame in doing so. 

The result of this?  Well, we are given a small glimpse of the results of that in today’s first gospel lesson:  We have a woman who is “naked” in her community.  She has had five husbands and now is living with a man who is not her husband.  We don’t know the why’s of this.  We don’t know the reasons behind this.  We don’t know what has led her to this place or what has happened to her husbands, or why she is with the person she is with now.  But we know it is easy to condemn her even today.  And we know that she was severely condemned then by her community.  We know that in the middle of the desert she is choosing the hottest, most horrible and inappropriate time of day to come to the well.  And we know that the only reason why she would have done this was to avoid other people in her community.  The reason to avoid other people in her community is because she has been condemned, alienated, estranged by those others and left to come to the well at this, the only time she can.  She is naked in her community – stripped of her dignity, her respect, her place among her people.  Despite this, despite the shame she experiences probably daily, when she speaks with Jesus, she still chooses to be transparent, to be open and honest when Jesus asks her to bring her husband.  And that, I think, is a great part of why he chooses to stay in conversation with her at that time and to offer her water and life.  She stands naked in her community, and what he is really offering her is the clothing of a new life.

For us, offering the exposed, the naked, the vulnerable in our communities “clothing” is not always easy and the way in which we can do that is not always clear.  I encourage you to think about what that might look like in this place and time. 

There is an organization called BACA – Bikers against Child Abuse.  This is a group of self-identified “scary”, rough bikers whose goal is to protect, support and care for children who have suffered abuse.  A news story a few years back told about one specific girl who was sexually abused by her step-father.  She was so terrified by this man and by her experiences that she could not sleep at night, was scared all the time and was falling apart.  BACA began to escort her to school, they went to court with her and literally stood around her as she testified against her step dad. They stayed outside her house all night in a circle, on their bikes, so she could sleep at night.  That is a profound example of clothing the naked – helping them to find and wear strength once again, to wear a sense of pride and acceptance for who they are.  This is an example of protecting those who have been stripped, completely, of dignity, pride, and a sense of self, and helping them to find those again.

Another group of bikers, the Patriot Guard Riders forms an honor guard at military burials, helps protect mourners from harassment and fills out the ranks at burials of indigent and homeless veterans.  In addition to attending funerals, the group also greets troops returning from overseas at homecoming celebrations and performs volunteer work for veteran's organizations such as Veterans Homes.  They, too, stand with those who have been stripped by mourning and grief, who stand naked in their feelings, trying to honor them while others would expose them and take away their pride, their experiences and their opportunities for transitions such as memorials and returning into the community. 

Recently a new movement has also started in the United States to help heal the raw naked feelings of those soldiers who are returning after serving from war.  Our soldiers often return hurting, injured in feeling if not in body.  A program called Warrior’s Journey Home uses the principles of Native Americans welcoming back their fighters.  In Native American cultures, the fighters are sent to the perimeters to protect the tribe and when they come back, they are put in the center of the circle and promised the protection of the tribe from their naked, raw feelings in exchange.  We are beginning to do a similar thing here in the U.S., intentionally inviting our returning soldiers into circles of love and care where they are reassured that it is now our time to heal them, care for them, and offer them protection from their memories, from their “nakedness”, from the experiences which now haunt them.  The movement has an amazing success rate in beginning and encouraging the healing from PTSD.  I was able to be part of such a group, as a support person, at my last congregation, and found it to be an amazing tool of healing and empowerment for those suffering from their own experiences in war. It is a way of clothing the vulnerable and naked who have had raw experiences which leave them in a feeling of fear and exposure.

These are three ways that people clothe those who are “naked” in their feelings, and in their experiences, who are raw to what the world has thrown them and exposed as a result. 

But you will notice that none of these groups are church groups.  None of the programs I’ve mentioned stem from religious communities. The commentary, “Feasting on the Word” has this to say about Matthew 25:  “(Matthew 25 makes several very radical statements.  One) is about the practice of religion. You cannot read the paper and not be concerned about the role religion plays in the world. Terrible atrocities are committed by people shouting, ‘God is great.’ Religious officials hide clergy abuse, deny sacraments to those with whom they disagree. Religious leaders condemn each other, excommunicate each other, invest inordinate amounts of energy and resources fighting one another over who gets in and who is kept out, over whose doctrinal formulas are true and whose are false—over a whole laundry list of issues about which Jesus had absolutely nothing to say.  He did, however, say this: ‘When you did it to one of the least of these, you did it to me.’  Students of the New Testament know that the only description of the last judgment is in Matthew 25. There is nothing in it about ecclesiastical connections or religious practices. There is not a word in this passage about theology, creeds, orthodoxies. There is only one criterion here, and that it is whether or not you saw Jesus Christ in the face of the needy and whether or not you gave yourself away in love in his name.”  (Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary - Feasting on the Word – Year A, Volume 4: Season After Pentecost 2 (Propers 17 - Reign of Christ).)

What that says to me is that in some places at least, church is a place where we have one of the hardest times accepting the naked or vulnerable.  We hide behind our theologies and our creeds, arguing with each other, excluding each other, and being least authentic with each other.  We are so uneasy with the vulnerable that we not only fail to protect those who are, but we also fail to be vulnerable ourselves. 

James Angell in his book, Yes is a world wrote, “Church ought to be a set of moments when we become most expansively, openly and honestly ourselves.  Yet it is in the church where we often find it hardest to be ourselves: where we are often the most guarded, the most paranoid, the most unsure of being accepted and understood.”  It is in part for this reason, too, that clergy children have one of the highest rates of suicide and other emotional issues.  As Religion News Service says, “Beneath the stereotypes of preacher’s kids as either goody two-shoes or devilish hellions lies a tense and sometimes taxing reality, the children of clergy say. Studies show that many PK’s, as the lingo goes, struggle with issues of identity, privacy and morality.”  Rick Warren is the author of “purpose driven Life” and “purpose driven Church”, pastor of the Mega church Saddleback in Southern CA.  His 27 year old son committed suicide a few years ago.   Jay Bakker, the son of televangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, said he identifies with Matthew Warren as a fellow PK and as someone who has also suffered from depression.  “It’s especially hard because his dad wrote the book `The Purpose Driven Life,’ which has this incredibly optimistic tone,” Bakker said. “My parents wrote the same kind of books, and it was like, `Things are good for everyone else. What’s wrong with me?’ I can’t imagine the pressure he must have felt.” 

My own son’s counselor when I was in Ohio said to me numerous times that the best thing I might do for my son would be to leave serving the church as a career, where everything he did and every response I made in caring for him was evaluated by 80-100 eyes.  While I don’t find that same kind of critical looking here, I am aware that he has chosen to stay quiet and unobserved in the back most of the time he is at church.  He protects himself by being invisible inside these walls.

We all know each other’s business and mine has been completely transparent for the last 6 years or so.  We are all, in a sense, naked in front of each other.  How do we clothe each other, then, with care, with grace, with faith, and most especially with love?  How do we walk that path? 

First of all, we intentionally do not choose to stare at someone’s humiliation and shame.  That means we stay away from gossiping about what other people go through, we avoid focusing on other’s tragedies from a place of curiosity.  It also means standing WITH those who are exposed.  Being human clothing for others as we protect them from other staring eyes.  We walk all of this with intention.  We intentionally invite and welcome in those who are struggling.  We intentionally invite and welcome in those who are in pain.  And we do do this.  Through housing our recovery groups, through opportunities like the grief group that we offered for awhile, through other small group opportunities like the women’s Tuesday afternoon group, the quilting group, the men’s group, we do get to know each other, support each other and love each other.  But again, we are also called to do it for the “least of these”, which begins with keeping our eyes open to see God’s face in each and every person we meet. 

The Good News is that we can trust that, just as with the woman at the well, when we find ourselves “naked” and exposed, Jesus will come to us and clothe us as well.  Jesus sought out those most “exposed”, most naked in their communities because of their shame (like the woman today as well as the woman caught in adultery and the tax collectors and prostitutes), or because of their condition (the blind man, the deaf man, those with leprosy, the bleeding woman).  Whatever it is that leaves us exposed, Jesus seeks us out to clothe us with righteousness.  That is what God does – God finds us when we are in our most vulnerable, rejected states and God clothes us with love, with faith, with hope when we are most hurting, most exposed.  We can count on that Good News.  Today and every day.

Shaming "Humor"

          I've been thinking about teasing lately as I heard my kids interacting while on winter break. We were in the car a great deal and that meant that there was a lot of time for them to just be together and time for me to overhear their interactions.  My son has recently taken to what I call "mean" teasing... saying nasty things to people and then saying, "but I was only kidding!" When confronted on this, he pointed out that this is pervasive in our media: sitcoms and even comedians mostly specialize in this kind of nasty joking.  And we do tend to find it funny.  That's why sitcoms are so popular.  That's why our comedians make such big bucks. Some of our best known actors as well as our most popular programs specialize in humor that hurts.  To put it more positively, they speak truth to us in a humorous way that lets us hear and understand it at different, and often deeper, levels when it causes us to laugh. I get it.  I understand it.  And I also see and experience personally how devastating that kind of humor can be.  None of us found it funny when my son was spewing potentially true but definitely hurtful comments at my daughters.  Did it cause them to pause and look at their own behaviors with the possibility of change?  I don't think so.  It was just hurtful, and mostly untrue.

          I'm not saying there isn't a place for this kind of humor.  Again, I think our satire and other public forms of pointing out the hypocrisy in our country, in our behaviors as a people, in our way of life can be very enlightening. When comedy is used that truly brings us to laugh in a full and deep way at ourselves, at the ways in which we are falsely seeing ourselves or painting ourselves, when it is used to point out, again, our hypocrisies, it can really help us to see.

          But when it comes to personally shaming the real, specific, individual people around us with "humor", I find this to be not only hurtful but deeply destructive.  I had a friend for a brief period of time some years ago who used this kind of humor.  We lost touch with each other, but there came a point when the possibility of renewing the friendship arose.  I will tell you honestly, the only things I can remember about the friendship are the shaming, making-others-laugh-by-humiliating-me comments that he made.  That's it.  I remember every single one of those numerous hurtful comments, but I can't remember anything else about the friendship and struggle to remember why we became friends in the first place. Were there grains of truth in his teasing?  Yes.  But they were just that - grains.  They were not pointing out to me some deep and unseen flaw that I needed to work on. He took little errors in my speech patterns and in things I had shared with him in confidence and blew them up into "Look how ridiculous this human being is" taunting and teasing.  I didn't grow from this.  And while those around us enjoyed a good laugh at my expense, I don't think anyone else was made a better, more insightful or more aware human being because of his behavior either.  I don't know what inspired those comments except that he must have felt I (who struggle already with self-esteem issues) somehow needed to be taken down a peg.  Or maybe he needed to boost himself up; after all, it does feel good to have others laugh at our jokes, and putting someone else down can sometimes feel like we are then raised up.  But I also wonder how others remember him in the end. Do they think of him as funny, or as mean?  Do they think of him as clever, or as a bully?  Do they see him as a good and supportive friend or as someone who takes the opportunities of closeness to be cruel to those he supposedly cares for?

       I would challenge all of us to try to find humor less in things that are hurtful towards others and more in the silliness of all life.  Laughing is good for us, it is healthy for us, it is deeply healing.  But, like most beautiful and good things it can be used for evil and harm as well as for building up and making whole.  Being kind is so important.  It becomes more important as kindness becomes more elusive in the general population.  Every opportunity to be nice to one another should be grabbed by the horns.  Every chance we have to build each other up rather than tear each other down should be taken.  Every interaction with others can be a chance to spread love, good will, and grace.  I want my legacy to be one of helping others to be the best and most whole people they can be.  I don't want it to be one of diminishing others.  I would wish the same for you as well.

        And if there is something you want to confront in someone else, try to be more direct and loving about it rather than using your irritation as an opportunity to humiliate them.  If you want to use humor, use yourself as the object rather than someone else. Try not to participate when others are being shamed and humiliated.  I know it can be hard to stand up to bullies, but letting them destroy others should not an option.

          It's not hard to be gentle with those around us.  It doesn't take that much effort to be kind.  Laugh and love, but not at the expense of one another.  For we are all sisters and brothers to each other: family, whose call it is to build up, rather than tear down.