Shame Off You

There is an enemy who wants you to live in shame.  There is an enemy who delights in your shame.  His goal is to keep you chained up with it.

And he is clever.  So he doesn't tell you plainly this is what he is doing.  He just offers you ways of escape that he knows will keep you chained to it.

Shame comes from your conscience.  You know what is right and wrong.  When you do wrong, you feel it.  Sometimes you can't sleep because of it.  Sometimes old wrongs come back up into your mind to plague you.  You feel like you can't be totally honest with anyone about who you are and what you have done.  You worry that someone will find out.

Your enemy offers ways out: 

1. Justify your wrongs.  Adopt arguments that what you know is wrong really isn't.  Then feel enlightened that you have silenced that silly conscience with the shining light of reason.  Just don't examine those reasons too closely, and keep doing those things if you can.  You are truly a champion, you don't really do bad things, you are a defender of rights.  When that conscience speaks up in a quiet moment,  just stuff it back down, surely it is wrong. 

2. Glory in your shame.  Shout it from the rooftops and from hashtags.  Announce to yourself and the world that you are proud of what your conscience smites you for.  That will silence that silly conscience.  That will stuff that bothersome shame.  Surely feelings of shame are part of some warped collective consciousness, or some antiquated thing you were taught.  Just don't think about that too long.  Don't entertain other possibilities.  Don't imagine your conscience is a divine guide to goodness.  Why would a divine guide to goodness ever want you to feel bad about yourself.  Only people who do bad things should feel bad about it.  Surely I don't do bad things.

These are dead ends.  They will not silence your conscience.  They will not cover your shame.  They will keep you locked down in it until the day you die and go to answer to the one who gave you your conscience.  At best they will blunt the voice of your conscience so that it becomes merely a faint nagging feeling in the back of your heart.  But there is a Friend who wants you to be free from shame.  There is a Friend who delights in removing your shame forever and giving you the glorious gift of a truly clean conscience.  

He offers a way out.

1. An atoning sacrifice.  A true Friend came and acknowledged the depth of your wrongdoing and shame.  He looked into the darkest corners of your heart, knew what you have done and desired, and then he looked you in the face and told you he loves you.  And then he asked you to see how much he loves you, and he took the blame for all your wrongdoing on himself.  He took all your shame like a coat and put it on and went out into public with it where he was mocked, spit on, and killed for what you had done.  He took it all into the grave, left it there, and rose to new life.

2. Faith and repentance.  He says this is yours if you believe him.  Your shame and guilt can be gone, and your conscience can be delightfully clean, as clean as if you had never done a thing wrong.  You don't have to slay your conscience in order to silence the shame.  The shame has been owned and worn, punished, and is dead.  We come to experience this through repentance from our wrongdoing.  This means admitting it, all the way down to the bottom, throwing away all the excuses and self-justifications for why it really wasn't that bad in your circumstances, and calling evil what it is, even when you find it in yourself.  And then you turn away from it, telling God you hate it and don't want it anymore, and asking for his help to be free from it.  Faith and repentance:  Admit your wrongs, tell God sorry, believe that he loves you still, and that Jesus wore all your shame and there is none left for you, and then walk in freedom and gladness.

This is not a dead end.  This is the path to eternal life and joy.  Jesus will cover your shame and give you a clean conscience.  Repent and believe, and be saved.

Panegyris

Last weekend we went to a folk music festival in the forest.
As we walked up a dirt trail through the trees outside of Pagosa Springs we were greeted by a lively doe and her spotted fawn.  They saw us from a distance and ran over to the hill beside us to watch us climb the trail.  It was a good welcome.  

We knew we were getting close when we could hear the picking of stringed instruments and singing.  The trail ended in a large camp full of smiling people sitting around campfires playing music together.  We made our way to the entrance tent.  The lists were checked and the bracelets put on our right arms by a smiling helper in an almost formal welcome ceremony.

We wandered through the open glade towards the sound of the main music stage, moving through another narrow passage where we were asked to leave behind any drinks from the outside, only to be presented freely with clean water on the inside.  Once inside we saw a smiling friend, his eyes wide with excitement as he showed us around.  Dancing over here, shelter over there, kids playing freely down here, good beer under that tent, food up there.

The music was amazing, fun, and full of energy.  The highlight was the Oh Hellos, who had nine people on stage with band members running and jumping around throughout their long set.  Music from a fiddle complemented an accordion, a banjo mixed with two drum kits, and all the varied instruments blended together to lift us all out of our chairs dancing.  The raucous set ended with the whole band lined up humming the tune of Come Thou Fount in beautiful, haunting harmony.  The whole experience echoed for me the climax of the Silver Chair when Jill finally came out of the underworld right into the middle of an all-night Narnian forest festival under the moon, during the first snow, with music and dancing and a complex game of throwing perfectly timed snowballs between dancers.

Being part of this festival reminded me of the unique beauty of festal joy.  It is what we Christians aim for Sunday after Sunday in what could be called Resurrection-Fest; where we gather to sing, worship, hear about, and eat and drink in celebration of the death of death in the death of Christ, and life into the ages through his resurrection.  And then with all of this still ringing in my heart, I happened to read that we "have come to mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God, the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel."  Mysteriously, in Christ, we are already there with the angels in panegyris, in "festal gathering."  Soon all this darkness will be shaken loose and we will open our eyes and find ourselves, like Jill, in the middle of the greatest festival the world has ever known.  We will have dumped out our tepid water, and will be welcomed to drink deeply from the river of life forever.  There everlasting joy will crown our heads in the presence of the Chief Musician.

*Image credit: Folk West, http://www.folkwest.com/#!home/zoom/mainPage/i01mcc

Excitement, Butterflies, and Church Membership

I get excited about stuff.  The world is full of things to be interested in and excited about.  This summer I got excited about teaching one of my sons to play the guitar, and that excitement carried us through several weeks of spontaneous lessons.  Maybe you are like me in that getting excited about things is great for awhile, but it doesn't seem to have sustaining power.  Now I am trying to figure out how to schedule time to do lessons regularly, to commit to it, so that even on weeks when neither of us are excited about it, we do it anyway.  I know that in the long run, this will lead to the most reward for him in playing the guitar.  I have years and years of deep enjoyment from the guitar that came from excitement turning into commitment, leading to enjoyment and more excitement.

Marriage is this way too.  Romantic love is one of the most exciting things in the world, and it can sustain lots of activity, time, and devotion for a long time.  But even the butterflies of romantic love fly away some mornings, some winters.  Marriage is a way for the excitement to lead to commitment that lays the groundwork for years of deep enjoyment and more excitement.

A Christian's relationship with a church is this way too.  It is fun to get excited about a certain ministry, a certain type of preaching or mission, a certain group of people, or whatever.  And that excitement is good.  And that excitement is meant to lead to commitment to that local church, even when it doesn't feel exciting, even when it gets costly at times.  This is why we practice what we call church membership at Gospel Church.  To our culture it can feel overly formal and strange.  It can feel like an inauthentic element of true community.  But we believe that a solid, formal commitment to a specific community of people will in the long run lead to a deeper level of true community and enjoyment in that community.  Membership is an act of giving yourself to a community of Christians.  It is an act of committing to stay through seasons when the excitement wanes, to push through difficulties with people so that in the long run true community, deep connection, and seasons of great excitment sprout up.  If excitement is a butterfly, commitment is building the butterfly a home to return to year after year.