Sacred Sex: Part III - Sex and Shame
John 4:1-18, 27-30, Hebrews 12:1-2
Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel The Idiot contains a wild and tragic character named Nastasia Philapovna. She is a temptress who enjoys seducing men of all sorts with her charm and intoxicating beauty. After spending only an hour with her, each of these men fall madly in love with her, but Nastasia takes even more delight by teasing them with her presence. She sleeps with the men during the night, but leaves them by morning, leaving them hopelessly pining for her love and attention. Naturally, she is despised by the other women in the town who are both jealous and afraid of her.
Prince Mishkin, who is the hero of the story and whom many readers of Dostoyevsky believe is a kind of Christ-figure in the story, sees more deeply into Nastasia’s soul. He understands what drives her—a “ferocious, self destructive sense of shame.”
The story reveals that Nastasia was abandoned and homeless as a child. She was eventually taken in by a wealthy patron who abused her and “kept her around like an ornament on a shelf that he could take down and occasionally fondle.” The shame of being abandoned, abused, and misused in this way had scarred her soul. Mishkin explains her plight to others in the story like this:
“Oh, don’t cry shame upon her, don’t throw stones at her! She has tortured herself too much from the consciousness of her undeserved shame…She had an irresistible inner craving to do something shameful, so as to say to herself at once, ‘There, you’ve done something shameful again, so you’re a degraded creature.’…Do you know that in that continual consciousness of shame there is perhaps a sort of awful unnatural enjoyment for her, a sort of revenge on someone?”
Dostoyevsky wrote his novel in 1868, but his insights into the human experience are timeless. He understood that shame, growing out of deep-seated and long-lasting human hurt, is the root of much self-destructive behavior. Much of that shame is connected to sexual secrets or experiences from the past and are especially destructive since, as we have said, sexuality is a significant part of the core of who we are as beings created in unity of body and soul.
Sexual shame has been with us from the beginning. As we have been talking about in the first two sermons in the series, the first humans were created to be “naked and unashamed” according to Genesis 2. When humans violated God’s law by seeking to be like God, eating from the forbidden Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, their eyes were opened and they suddenly realized that something was wrong. Instead of responding to God with repentance, however, they were overcome by shame. They no longer saw themselves, their souls and bodies, as beloved but as something to be hidden.
Adam and Eve were guilty, to be sure. We are guilty when we make mistakes and when we willfully disobey God. But shame is even more destructive than guilt because it attacks the core of who we are. Guilt says “I made a mistake.” Shame says “I am a mistake.” When we believe that we are a mistake, whether we get that message from within or from someone who treated us badly, then we, like Nastasia, are prone to treat ourselves accordingly. Shame causes us to hide the true self, the people we were created to be.
The story of the woman at the well is not technically about shame—we don’t know the details of the woman’s exploits like we do that of Nastasia Philapovna. She has often been portrayed as a kind of prostitute figure in some sermons and commentaries. We don’t know much about her, but I think from the text we can infer that she is dealing with some kind of shame.
Jesus encounters this Samaritan woman at a well. For a Jewish man to talk with a woman he didn’t know in public was one thing…that she was a Samaritan, a people group hated by the Jews, was quite another. Not only that, John tells us that their encounter took place “about noon.” Typically, water was drawn in the morning and evening as women came to the well and used the time as a social gathering. Clearly, this woman—coming alone in the heat of the day—was not one of the crowd. Was she being ostracized? We don’t know, but we do know that she is alone.
There’s a lot of richness in this passage, which talks about “living water” and the identity of Israel’s true Messiah, but what intrigues me is the way in which Jesus goes beyond theological arguments to address this woman’s deeper needs. Abruptly, Jesus asks her to “Go, call your husband and come back.” But she has no husband—in fact, Jesus somehow knows that she has had five husbands and the man she was living with was not her husband. There may have been many reasons for this and not all of them salacious. Life expectancy was short, wives were property given to the next brother in line when a husband died, we don’t know exactly. But the fact that she is alone at the well in the middle of the day seems to indicate that she has been shamed in some way, put outside the fellowship of the community. That Jesus asks about her husband in the midst of all this theological talk about living water would appear to somehow address the state of her life.
Shame is incredibly isolating and is usually an outcome of long-kept secrets. If we have felt rejected, abused, unloved, unwanted, exploited, or used in ways that damage our personhood, we can experience what John Bradshaw calls, “toxic shame.” Says Bradshaw:
“Toxic shame, the shame that binds you, is experienced as the all-pervasive sense that I am flawed and defective as a human being. Toxic shame is no longer an emotion that signals our limits, it is a state of being, a core identity. Toxic shame gives you sense of worthlessness, a sense of failing and falling short as a human being. Toxic shame is a rupture of the self within the self.” He goes on to say that toxic shame is what fuels all addictive behaviors. Because the painful self-exposure is too much, people turn to drugs, work, food, sex, or something else in order to find relief and acceptance.
My 25th high school reunion was last year and while I was not able to make the trek to Slippery Rock, PA, I did get some email addresses of my classmates and started to catch up on people’s lives. It was fascinating to me to learn things I didn’t know was going on with the people around me in the hallways each day. One of the girls wrote about her alcoholic father and her fear of going home each day. Another wrote of being abandoned emotionally by his parents. Another friend shared that she was sexually abused by an older brother and told that if she said anything he’d kill her. Now, as adults, all those teenagers who wore Members Only jackets and feathered hair in the 1980s bear the shame and scars of the past. I had my own pain to deal with—my mother had passed away, my father was absent, my stepmother verbally abusive—but we all tried to compensate by being cool or by overachieving or, for some, by engaging in risky or promiscuous behavior.
When shame goes deep, it alters our sense of who we really are and we construct a “false self” in order to hide it. I used to be afraid of the kids who smoked in the bathrooms between classes, wore big railroader boots and bullied people in the hall. I now know that that’s likely not who they really were. I can’t imagine what they may have dealt with at home. I used to be jealous of the jocks and cheerleaders, but now knowing some of their stories I see that many of them were hiding things, too. Then there were the kids that nobody talked to—what kind of pain did they feel? I found myself being profoundly sorry that I didn’t know then what I know now. I hope that any high school students here today would think about this and cut their classmates a break. You have no idea of the burden that person walking past you in the hall is carrying.
Many of us have lived life to this point believing that we are a mistake. Very recently I found out that, in a very real sense, I was a mistake. I was adopted as an infant, and I have been working with the court system in Pennsylvania to try and find my birth family. I’ve always wondered where I came from, whose eyes I have, what my genetic origins might reveal about who I have become. I was assigned a caseworker who actually tracked down my birth mother. The father’s name appears on none of the records. The caseworker contacted her to see if she would be willing for me to contact her. My birth mother refused. The caseworker told me that she is an older lady, well-established, and that her family has no idea that I exist. My birth was an accident, a mistake, and a deep, dark secret.
I can’t imagine what it must be like for her to have carried that secret all these years. I know that it’s been hard for me to not know my origins. In one of the books I’ve been reading for my doctorate, Steve Seamands, who is one of my professors, points out that “no matter how early or smoothly adoption occurs, every adopted child interprets being separated from its biological mother as personal rejection.” He goes on to say that “children of divorce generally perceive the split up of their parents as rejection, too.” I read that and it really hit me—I’ve spent much of my life trying to measure up, trying to make something of myself, trying to be the best, all as a way of trying to prove that my existence isn’t a mistake.
I imagine there are some of you here today who know what I’m talking about. Many of my high school friends and others whom I have encountered over the years, deal with this shame through anger—anger at those who rejected or wronged them, anger at themselves, anger at God. “How could God have let this happen to me?” is an often repeated question. It seems as though God is silent, distant, uncaring when we’re experiencing the deep wounds of shame. Why should we bother with God at all?
I’ve wrestled with that question myself, but a few years ago—even after many years of being a Christian—I was preparing a sermon and it hit me in such a way as to take my breath away. It was something I knew theologically, cognitively, but something I had yet to believe deep in my spirit. What happened? I really began to study the Cross.
The reading this morning from Hebrews urges us to “fix our eyes on Jesus” the “pioneer and perfecter of faith.” But look at the rest of it. “For the joy set before him, he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.” When we look at the cross, we begin to realize that God not only understands our shame, but has participated in it.
In the first century Roman world, people dreaded the shame of crucifixion even more than the physical pain of it. Roman citizens who were condemned to death were usually beheaded, quick and relatively humane. Crucifixion was considered to be too horrible and degrading, something reserved for the most wretched people in society. Crucifixion was done in public. Victims were always crucified naked (not with a loincloth, like many paintings depict), fully exposed and humiliated. Often the dead were left on the cross for days or weeks, crucified low enough to the ground that animals could slowly devour the carcass. There was not a more shameful way to die.
Jesus was subjected to the shame of the cross—all of it. He endured humiliation, nakedness, pain, scorn, derision, horror—the worst evil that humanity could visit on another. Yet, somehow, the early Christians said that Jesus’ shame was the way toward healing from our own shame. For the typical Roman or Greek, the Christian belief that someone who had been crucified was really a Savior and Lord was sheer madness. How could God allow that to happen? Well, if Jesus was God in the flesh, we have to ask an even greater question: Why did God allow this to happen to himself? Indeed, why did God willingly submit to human shame and suffering?”
Here is the answer. I like how Steve Seamands puts it in his book Wounds That Heal: “Because Christ willingly endured shame on the cross, we are able to find healing for our shame at the cross. Adam and Eve disobeyed God by eating fruit from an alluring tree in a garden. As a result, they were naked and ashamed. Jesus obeyed God while nailed to a shameful tree on a hill. As a result, we can stand before God, naked and unashamed. ‘A tree had destroyed us,’ said [the early church father] Theodore of Studios. “A tree now brought us life.”
In Jesus, God did not heap shame upon us. In Jesus, God did not ignore human shame and sinfulness. In Jesus, God did not condemn us. In Jesus, God instead took on our shame, participated in it, understood it, lived it. This is a God who loved us enough to go all the way for us. No matter what shame we have experienced, we now know that God has been there first and goes through it with us. I am not a mistake—I am beloved by God.
Let that thought hold you for a second. No matter who you are or what you’ve done or what has been done to you—you are beloved by God. That’s what this cross means. It was the ultimate symbol of shame—now it is the ultimate symbol of love.
We are broken and wounded people, but we are loved by a God who became broken and wounded on our behalf. If we want to be free from shame, we need to follow Jesus’ example. What must we do?
1. Name the shame. We said this last week, but it bears repeating. Naming what hurts us most deeply is the first step toward healing. Back to the story of the woman at the well: When the woman admits her situation, I think it’s very telling that Jesus doesn’t condemn her. He has simply helped her name the shame. Freed from the secret, the woman boldly runs into town proclaiming, “Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done!” Naming what we have done and what has been done to us, is the first step toward breaking the chains of shame.
2. Stop the blame. Many of us were shamed by circumstances and people who were beyond our control. We have been hurt, victimized, wounded. But while we cannot control what happened to us or through us, we can control how we react. Jesus did not blame those who crucified him. He chose not to react with vengeance or self-pity. We must not use our shame as a weapon to punish others or ourselves. We must accept responsibility for our lives and ourselves.
3. Practice forgiveness. Not only did Jesus not blame those who crucified him, he forgave them. This sounds counterintuitive, but the truth is that there is no healing of our shame without forgiveness. David Seamands, Steve’s father, was one of my professors at Asbury and in his book Healing for Damaged Emotions he writes this: “Facing responsibility and forgiving people are really two sides of the same coin. The reason some people have never been able to forgive is that if they forgave, the last rug would be pulled out from them and they would have no one to blame. Facing responsibility and forgiving are almost the same action…Jesus made it very plain that no healing occurs until there is deep forgiveness.
Forgiveness doesn’t mean that we forget or gloss over what happened. Forgiving means let go of the anger and pain we feel about the past and, instead, embrace the wonder of God’s grace and potential for our present and future. We cannot change what happened, but we can change what happens now. When confronted with hate and humiliation, Jesus chose love. It’s not an easy choice, nor is it often a popular one, but it is the only way we can begin to find healing for our damaged selves. We cannot often escape the consequences of our actions or those of others toward us, but we can choose to let loose the shame and guilt we feel by nailing them to the cross. The cross reveals what lengths God was willing to go to in order to forgive us. Can we then learn to forgive others and, even more so, ourselves?
I don’t know what shame you might be wrestling with today but my suspicion is that, for some of you, you’ve been carrying that burden for a long time. Today, I want to invite you to release it. The woman at the well became free after Jesus named her pain—we can be free, too. Remember that what we do with our bodies affects our spirits and vice versa. Sexual shame, or shame of any kind, can be deeply painful, but Jesus understands our pain, our humiliation, our brokenness. He himself was rejected, despised, forsaken, but chose to love. By his wounds, we might be healed.
I’ve set up a cross in the chancel this morning. In your bulletin are slips of paper. Rather than just talk about healing spiritually, I think its important that we do something with our bodies, too. I want to invite you, as we sing the hymn, to think about the shame you may be carrying—something that was done to you or that you have done that has kept you from experiencing the freedom of life that God created you for. I invite you to write that on that slip of paper. No one else will read it. It’s between you and God. And then I invite you to come forward and lay it at the foot of the cross. Offer your shame to Jesus, the one who understands it better than anyone.
Hear the good news: you are beloved. That’s what this cross means. May we bring our shame to the one who can bear it and heal us forever.
Sources: Seamands, David. Healing for Damaged Emotions, Chariot Victor Publishing, 1981.
Seamands, Stephen, Wounds That Heal, Intervarsity Press, 2003.
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