Conquering Fear and Shame (June 9, 2024)
Genesis 3:8-15; Psalm 130; 2 Corinthians 4:13-5:1; Mark 3:20-35
[Adam and Eve] heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden.
I have a vivid memory of being maybe four or five years old. I had been just learning to read, and I was intrigued by the tag on one of the sofa cushions which seemed to have some writing on it, so I pulled on the tag until it came off. And there on the tag in large letters I read: “DO NOT REMOVE UNDER PENALTY OF LAW.”
That seemed bad, so I went to my dad – who was the only other person at home at the time – and asked him how to put the tag back on. And my dad – playfully, I think – said, “Wow, you’re really going to be in trouble now.” He may have meant it playfully, but I found the thought quite alarming. At that precise moment there was the sound of an emergency vehicle siren in the neighborhood, which wasn’t too unusual when I was growing up, and my dad said, “I think that’s the police coming to get you.” Terrified, I ran to my room and hid under my bed so the police wouldn’t find me. Not long afterwards, my mom came home and straightened the whole thing out – but the panic I felt at that moment was vivid enough that I can remember the whole incident like it was yesterday.
My father thought my reaction was hilarious, and objectively of course my reaction was absurd. The purpose of the tag is to inform the customer what’s inside the product they’re buying, so once you’ve bought it there’s nothing illegal about removing the tag. And even if it was illegal to remove the tag, it’s absurd to think that the police would know immediately – only Santa Claus knows if you’ve been bad or good – or that they’d rush sirens a-blazing to enforce the law. And even if the police were coming for me, I don’t think my hiding under the bed would have fooled them.
In my defense, I was four. I didn’t know any of these things yet. But I’ll bet you can tell a similar story about the first time you – perhaps quite innocently – did something you wish you hadn’t and realized you couldn’t undo it. The instinct is to run away, to hide, to disappear, to be ashamed – this runs very deep in all of us. Even if, logically, it doesn’t make a lot of sense. Even if we’re a lot older than four.
When Adam and Eve had eaten the apple, and God went walking through the Garden of Eden on an evening stroll, which was apparently the divine habit at the time, we read that Adam and Eve “hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden.” I doubt that hiding in the bushes was going to fool God, but it must have made sense to Adam and Eve at the time.
The response of God in the biblical story that we read this morning is, I think, quite interesting in what it says about how God reacts to our shame. After all, eating from the wrong tree is hardly the worst crime that human beings are capable of – if you had to rank crimes, it’s kind of down at the bottom with tearing off the “Do Not Remove” tag from a sofa cushion. In the toddlerhood of our species, you can forgive Adam and Eve from being a bit overzealous in their curiosity about this strange and beautiful world in which they had just woken up.
And God does not seem particularly bothered by it. God shows up for the evening stroll in the garden, just as before. It is Adam and Eve who try to hide themselves from God’s presence. And then God – who presumably knows full well exactly where Adam and Eve are; after all, where can we go where God is not present? – and then God says, “Where are you?” To make it clear to Adam and Eve that God is not hiding from them, that God has not moved one inch away from them. That God still delights in the creation and the garden and in Adam and Eve, the crowning glory of God’s achievement. “Where are you? I’m looking for you. I want to be with you. Where are you?”
And then Adam says the words that break God’s heart: “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself.” And God said, “Who told you that you were naked? Who told you that there is something wrong with the way that I made you? Where did you get the idea that I do not love you exactly the way that you are?”
Adam and Eve hear this question as God trying to figure out who to blame – “Who told you?” They point fingers at each other, and at the serpent. But I hear in God’s question a tone of deep sadness. I made you for communion with me and each other, and now you are afraid of me and ashamed of yourselves. How did this happen? How can we put things back together again?
God does several immediate things to repair the damage. For example, God allows Adam and Eve some fig leaves so they can bear to be present somewhat to one another and to God. If the unmediated communion God created us for has become too scary for us, God will settle for what we can handle.
But God also offers a promise: for now, the woman and the serpent will be enemies, but one day the child of woman will be victorious over the child of the serpent. Which is why in art the Virgin Mary is often depicted as standing on the head of a snake. Already in the first two pages of the Bible God has made the promise – the profound disruption of creation that has been the result of our falling into fear and shame will one day be undone. The tag will be reattached and, one way or another, all will be well again.
And when the woman’s child Jesus began his work, many people did not understand that he was coming to break the cycle of fear and shame once and for all. They assumed he was just like every other human being since Adam and Eve – that Jesus was just working out his fear and his shame like anyone else. Does he have power over demons? That just shows he’s the most powerful demon of all. Is he impervious to our attempts to use shame to keep him in line? He must be crazy. His own family, the authorities of his own religious community, are so caught up in their own fear and their own shame that they cannot see what Jesus is doing.
In fact, Jesus says, he is here to announce that we can enjoy communion with God again and so all sin can be forgiven– except, of course, the sin of not believing that forgiveness is possible, the sin of believing that communion with God and one another is impossible forever. If you believe that shame and fear are the human condition and the only way to deal with it is to make other people fear you – if you believe that God wants you to grovel in fear and shame forever – well, there is nothing Jesus can do to help you. Other than to try to show you that God has never given up on you.
Jesus continued to do this throughout his ministry, despite the opposition from those who could not believe that God was at work in him to break the power of fear and shame forever. Those opponents eventually nailed him to a cross, stripped him naked – and he was unashamed. And he continued to forgive and to love and to trust, and this is how he defeated fear and shame. Now he lives in the community that gathers with faith in his name, the community that Jesus calls his true family, the family that believes we can live together without being afraid of one another and without being ashamed or shaming others, but accepting one another as the beautiful children of God for whom Christ died.
A lot of us come here this morning with plenty of fear and shame in our history. This is a place to hear the good news that we can be free of that fear and shame and to try to live, if only for a few brief moments, in communion with others and with God unafraid and unashamed. There are other such places, of course. That’s why we have a Pride parade this weekend – for those of us who have been told by our families or our religious leaders that we are abominations before God to experience the joy and the power that comes from living unashamedly as we are, even only for a day.
But ultimately, what makes all of this possible is that God has revealed to us that God in Christ is willing to bear any shame, that God in Christ will absorb all of our fear and anger and despair, and meet us with forgiveness until we come to faith that God means to crush the head of the serpent’s offspring forever – to defeat fear and shame once and for all.
We do not always live up to this promise. Martin Luther once supposedly said that the Old Adam – his name for the part of us that’s driven by fear and shame – that the Old Adam may have been drowned in our baptism, but it turns out the rascal is a darn good swimmer. Fear and shame still keep popping up in us despite ourselves. But here at this table we are reminded of the family we are called to be, and that by God’s grace and mercy sometimes we actually get to be – a people redeemed and unashamed living in communion and love.