Tag Archive - guilt


The Christian craving for guilt

January 27, 2012 in GODSTUFF with 1 Comment

Christians love feeling guilty. In fact, they positively crave it. In fact, to Christians, guilt feels like devotion. The popularity of books like Francis Chan’s Crazy Love and David Platt’s Radical testifies to this. Anyone who speaks or writes of all the ways the church is blowing it, falling short, and insufficient is almost destined to become a rock star.

It’s in our religious DNA. Read through the gospels and you will be hard pressed to identify anything Jesus said which could reasonably be interpreted as “shame on you,” yet if the Christian gospel as it has actually come to us throughout history could be summarized in three words, I could hardly think of three more appropriate ones. Shame on us for not reading our Bibles more. Shame on us for not praying more. Shame on us for having lustful thoughts. Shame on us for believing Calvin more than Arminius (or vice versa). Shame on us for leaning too much on God’s grace and love and not believing enough in punishment. Shame on us for liking rock and roll, dancing, and places where these things are happening. Shame on us for having marriages that crumble, just like everybody else. Shame on us for missing church. Shame on us for not caring more for the poor. Shame on us for wanting to live the way all God’s other creatures live — in the moment, not analyzing our performance every second of the day, not constantly feeling inferior (or superior) — just wanting to live in peace.

Shame on you is the message. It’s hard to hear it for what it is, because it always come disguised as well-meaning books by well-meaning preachers/teachers, telling us in well-meaning ways how we can be more of all the stuff those preachers obviously need us to be in order for them to sleep well at night: more passionate and compassionate, more fired up, more generous, more committed to God, the church, and our marriages, more, more, more. (Sounds nice, doesn’t it? Many of these are good things!) And the church laps this up. We buy these books and listen to these messages because we are so convinced of our insufficiency. After all, our marriages really are busting up. If we’re honest, we’re really not as committed to God and church as we think we should be. We really don’t give as much as we know we should. So Chan, Platt, and the gang are telling us what we already know is true. We, both individually and collectively, suck.

But the church has NEVER been sufficient, or full of the kind of people Chan cites as the right kinds of Christians. I thought that’s what Jesus was for. I thought the message of Jesus was that we are loved by God in full knowledge of our shortcomings and insufficiencies. Whose gospel is it that we can fix things if we just try harder? And when did anyone get the impression that we can ever try hard enough to assuage our own deep sense that we are not good enough and could always do more? Guilt is killing us, but we love it. We just can’t let it go.

We think guilt helps us perform better, be “better” Christians (or maybe just better human beings), so we refuse to let go of it. But guilt doesn’t help us perform better, it paralyzes us. It reminds us constantly of our insufficiency. As spiritual as guilt makes us feel, it’s what is trapping us. We simply have to let it go.

Guilt always makes everything, ultimately, about us. If I try to love you because I feel guilty for not loving you, I’m loving you not because you are human and deserve to be loved, but to assuage my own guilt. If I give to the poor not because generosity is good but because I feel like a scumbag for not giving enough, I’m not giving for the sake of the poor, I’m giving so that I can feel good again. If I go to church not because church is good and helps me connect to a community of people who love and care for me, but simply because I feel sinful and guilty for not going, then going to church is just about me not wanting to feel guilty anymore.

That’s why you’ll never get anywhere with guilt. Francis Chan, Platt, and so many other guilt-mongers are making the right diagnosis, but their solution is part of the problem. Try harder. Cling tighter to that banana. But the answer is to let go of the banana and plunge headlong into the gospel — the good news that we are fully loved, fully accepted by God at this very moment, insufficiencies and all. As Richard Rohr says, we don’t change so that God will love us, we come to know God loves us so that we can change.

As I learn today that I am loved, change occurs in me. As I learn tomorrow that I am loved, more change occurs. This is an eternal process. At no time do I get to say, “Okay, I now know that I am loved — what are all the projects and things I get to start running around and doing?” This misses Jesus’ crucial words about “abiding” (John 15). To abide is to remain rooted in that love, so that our actions for good are springing directly from God’s loving action for good that is at work in us. This means there is no room and no need for, “Yes, but you must balance being loved with taking action.” There is no separation between love and action. We can trust that being loved does and will lead to action — and to the very best kind: the non-guilty, non-forced, non-judgmental, non-clamoring, non-needy kind.

When we begin to move into this moment by moment experience of being loved, we find that our sense of guilt is beginning to be replaced by a sense of gratitude. We let go of the banana and, for the first time, we are free to become all the things we have always felt guilty for not being. Sounds like fruits of the Spirit. I am going to end this post with a passage from scripture. As you read, replace the word “God” with the word “love.”

Romans 8:10-11 (MSG)
10 …for you who welcome him, in whom he dwells—even though you still experience all the limitations of sin—you yourself experience life on God’s terms. 11 It stands to reason, doesn’t it, that if the alive-and-present God who raised Jesus from the dead moves into your life, he’ll do the same thing in you that he did in Jesus, bringing you alive to himself? When God lives and breathes in you (and he does, as surely as he did in Jesus), you are delivered from that dead life. With his Spirit living in you, your body will be as alive as Christ’s!  (emphasis mine)

 

 

The Shame That Drives Us

June 4, 2010 in GODSTUFF with 4 Comments

By and large, churches are still trying to shame people into right living.  Some of the biggest-selling books on Christian living in the past few years are shame-based books.  Shame-based books are written by (usually well-intentioned) shame-based people who live shame-based lives and preach a shame-based gospel.  You’d think after centuries of the shame-game, we’d realize shame, fear, and threats do not work.  If they worked, the Catholic countries would be the most moral countries on the planet, but they’re not.  If they worked, the Holocaust could never have happened in “Christian” Europe, but it did.  If they worked, Christians would be known the world over for their compassion, their generosity, their love, their kindness, and their openness to people who might think differently from them, but we’re not.

As long as I have been in ministry, my message has always been, “There’s something wrong with the way we’re preaching the message.”  We’re  not getting it, and we’re not getting it on very deep and fundamental levels.  Levels that lead to depths of violence and lovelessness that are stunning to those who are  not Christians.  This is not about shame.  This is not about feeling guilty for anything.  This is not about working hard now so I can know God later.  This is not about earning the reward, it’s about finding that after all our years of trying to earn it, we had it all along.  But shame won’t allow us to take it.

In a Christian world without shame, many pastors would have little to preach about.  In a Christian world without shame, many Christian authors couldn’t find readers.  In a Christian world without shame, many of the people who now flock to our churches to receive more lashes every week would find that the relentless love of God does not demand more of them but less — and then eventually leads naturally and easily to the “more” we are all seeking in our tortured efforts.  But we’re shame-based people.  Taking something we haven’t earned is — well — shameful.  We must deserve it and if we don’t deserve it, we must reject it.  That is why the lavish grace of God, freely available to all people, languishes on the shelf.

I hear regularly of preachers who will not do weddings for couples who live together.  After all, it’s important to stand on principles, isn’t it?  After all, if preachers don’t create those firm boundaries, who will?  But the point of the gospel, the point of the Christian god being a bloodied and naked man hanging on a piece of wood, is that love has no limits.  Love does not seek to divide.  Love does not say, “I care for you, but it’s important no one gets the wrong impression, so I cannot be open to you in the following ways…”  When love is truly love, it dies for the one it loves.  It suffers the humiliation and pain that sometimes comes with love, taking pain into itself and  never seeking to make victims of anyone else.  Isn’t marriage what we want to see, pastors?  Don’t we want to see people making those commitments to each other?  But we stand in judgment over them for living together without marriage, then refuse to actually bring them into matrimony because they live together, and then judge them for living together?  Is this madness?  Scratch that — it really wasn’t a question.  Yes, it is madness.

Love wills the good of the object.  That’s love.  Love wants what is best for the one loved.  If a pastor believes marriage is better than living together, and loves the people in front of him/her, then he/she will seek to “love them into marriage.”  Turning people away because they are wrong (regardless of how strongly we feel about their lives, choices, behavior, etc.) is exactly what Jesus NEVER did.  How do we come up with so-called Christian systems of ethics that not only endorse things that Jesus never did, but that actually claim that our Jesus-less way is the most moral and ethical thing we could do?  Until we can come up with a way of understanding Christianity that actually allows us to love people the way Jesus did, instead of creating systems of excuses for not loving them, we’re missing something so critical that our entire message is in danger of being invalidated completely.  Attesting to this trend are millions of God-seeking and God-loving people who have found the church to be an inhospitable place for them or people they love, and dropped out in pain and frustration.

But this is what shame does, and the only thing shame can do.  Many who can no longer stand the shame and are hungry for love (which, of course, is what the message is supposed to be about to begin with and which, ironically, almost no one denies, even while we continue to teach shame) end up leaving the church.  For those who outgrow their shame-based identity and hunger for love, it becomes difficult to find a Christian church that preaches that gospel.  Those who remain in the church are often (though not always) those who haven’t  yet gotten enough of shame and fear and guilt and are not yet ready to receive grace.

And guess what?  God loves them all.  Because that’s what God does.

I’m Think I’m Gonna Puke If…

April 29, 2010 in GODSTUFF with 10 Comments

photo via Flickr from ranguard

…if I get to the end of one more Bible study lesson and have to answer questions like, “How can you be more [XXX] (loving, joyful, peaceful, gracious, etc.) this week?” “What is one thing you can do to walk more in love this week?” “How can you be a good representative of Christianity?” “Who are you going to reach/pray for/forgive this week?”

…if I hear another pastor talking about how important it is to pass out “application cards” at the end of every single sermon, and require people to “do something.”

…if I read another book talking about how we can call people to ever higher levels of effort, striving, and intensity (modern church code-worded: “passion”).

That’s stuff I obviously feel strongly about. I feel as strongly as I do because this is stuff propagated by those who presume to teach others. I feel a bit less strongly, and a bit more moved with compassion, by the results of this Puritan-work-ethic-do-it-yourself-with-a-bit-of-God-on-the-side Western/evangelical madness in the lives of the people who sit under this teaching every day of their lives. Here’s how this comes out of the average Joe/Josephine in the pews:

  • I’m trying to be more…(probably whatever their answer was to the first question at Bible study, above)
  • I know I don’t do enough… (witnessing, Bible reading, praying, going to church, etc., etc., etc.)
  • I know I don’t know…(the Bible well enough, how to lead a small group well enough, as much about God as my neighbor, etc.)
  • I wish I could just…(be like Stan the Man, be a powerful witness, defeat my flaws, etc.)
  • God is…(hidden, hard to find, hard to know, cold, etc.)
  • Obviously, that person is…(gay, Democrat, crude, slutty, super-conservative) so he/she can’t really be known by God.  At least not in the way that I am.
  • I love God, but I am…(divorced, gay, a smoker, an alcoholic, a Buddhist, a progressive, sinful, unstable, burdened by guilt, not quite with it yet)

I’ll stop there.  These statements above are what we teach to the mostly good-hearted people in our congregations when we take the approaches I’ve listed at the top.  Unwittingly we teach, “There is a good side and a bad side.  The good side looks like us.  If you are not on the good side, God does not love you — at least not in the same way.”  Unwittingly we teach, “Being a follower of Christ is about you.  It’s about what you do.  It is about your efforts, your feelings, your commitments, your striving, your opinions of who is right and who is wrong, etc.” We teach, “Get out your Bibles and hold everything up to “the light” of “the Word,” so I can measure and evaluate you, your thoughts, your feelings, your opinions, and your actions, and I can render a verdict about whether you are right or wrong, and therefore decide whether or not to validate you as someone worthy of the love of God.”

Do I seem angry?  I just went back and re-read this post and it feels a little angry to me.  It actually even sounds a little self-righteous.  That is obviously because I am part of the very system which I critique.  But not to be so is to leave it — to stand outside of it and kick dirt at it.  I can’t do that, because the truth is that I love it.  I do love the church.  It is so easy to be critical of what we refuse to invest in.  Far harder is to invest, to pour our lives in, and to live with results that are a lot less than the always-hoped-for stellar.

So this is all I have.  I do not pretend to have a handle on God, but I think that a good starting point is facing our cluelessness.  If I ask where any anger comes from that is in this post, it comes from being a pastor and seeing person after person in whom the fundamental pain in their life is a complete illusion, passed on to them largely by what we have taught them in our churches.  The illusion is that they are not good enough, and it is an illusion because the Christian message itself is that you are already good enough — you are already there — you are already in the loving presence of God.  Of course we really AREN’T good enough, but God loves us anyway in spite of our brokenness, and through every inch of it, and his love is what makes us good.  If Christians got their heads around this, the market for Christian books would drop drastically, as most of them are trying to help you learn about more efforts you can make, more things you can do, to “get closer” to God.  You’re already as close to God as you are to your own heartbeat, and the biggest tragedy in life is that you may not know that.

I am in the process at Wildwind of forming (this is not a secret — I’m preaching on this constantly) a community of people who are sick of trying — sick of measuring and evaluating their own spiritual performance and that of others — sick of finding themselves (and therefore – necessarily and always — others as well) lacking in some critical way — sick of feeling that God is out there and I have to find him.   Sick of deciding who does and does not get in on the love of Christ, and increasingly grateful to simply realize that we are loved.  Sick of putting faith in baptism, the sacraments, “personal confessions of faith in Christ,” “salvation experiences,” “the traditions and teachings of my denomination and religion,” and the ornaments of ritual and religion, instead of where faith alone belongs — in the risen Christ who created all people and all nations and all that there is and ever will be — who loves all, who came for all, and in whom every single one of us on the planet lives and moves and has our being.

Paul said, “Who will rescue me from this body of death?”  In that he speaks of the entire construct by which we understand ourselves, by which we defend ourselves, justify ourselves, try to appear good and deserving of grace, by which we make judgments (even good judgments) of ourselves and other people and the world around us.  The whole body, the entire thing, is corrupt at its core and needs to be put to death.

QUESTION: How does this “putting to death” occur?