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Whatever Happened to Shame?

By Charles Rush

July 27, 2008

[ Audio (mp3, 7.0Mb) ]

adulterous and sinful generation? What would that mean? The root meaning of ethics (ethos) or morals (mos) means custom or habit. Your moral life is not something that you do just once in an exceptional moment. Your ethical character is best reflected in the disciplines and habits that you develop and exercise continually. And you can tell a lot about a culture by the customs that they have.

What makes you blush anymore? It is a good question. When I was in graduate school, I had some colleagues in the psych department who put an ad in the personal columns of a news letter. The ad read as follows: “Married, professional man, 47, with problems at home, seeks dalliance with married or unmarried, intelligent woman.” They were curious about who would respond to such an ad. Much to their surprise, they were deluged with responses.

Here is one: “I'm a 34 year old female, pretty rubenesque, dark brown hair, dark blue eyes. I work as a nurse in a large urban hospital. My friends consider me bright, honest, interesting, conservatively bohemian and sensual. I have the usual vices.”

Here's another: “I am interested in the same things you are. I am 36, married. Discretion is very important to me. Please call only between 9 a.m. and 4:30 p.m.”

This one stuck with me: “I'm intelligent and married. I live in a deeply wooded area along the river where deer are an everyday occurrence. I could see you during the week, but never on weekends. I'm tall, slim, and decent looking. You could be seen with me without shame.”

What is it that makes you blush? That is our beginning question. The answer for most of us is ‘Not very much anymore'. We've seen enough of it that it is getting harder and harder to actually shock us and there is just less and less that is taboo so that yesteryear seems almost quaint.

When Elvis first appeared on the television on the Ed Sullivan show, the cameras would only show him from the shoulders up. Now you can flip on MTV any day of the week and watch a bumpety bump and grindy grind that make Elvis look like St. Francis by comparison. When Clark Gable uttered his famous last line in ‘Gone with the Wind' (Frankly, Scarlett I don't give a damn), it created a nation-wide sensation. Today if you walk down the halls of your typical Middle school, you hear a chorus of expletives previously associated with sailors a generation ago. When Ingmar Bergman moved in with Roberto Rossellini, her career plummeted. Today, less than half of people in Sweden even get married and our celebrities like R. Kelly, Paris Hilton, Pamela Anderson, Rob Lowe all have video footage of their sex lives you can down load right after church.

The truth is that we don't blush anymore and in the bible this is an implicit indication of the judgment of God. The popular notion of God's judgment is something like a hurricane or a tornado, some natural disaster that brings about doom. But the biblical idea is actually more nuanced than that. St. Paul, in Romans, suggests that we experience God's judgment when we are given over to our selves. The judgment of God is experienced as an absence, as a sense that we can do whatever we want. We slowly but steadily lose our conscience and allow our vain imaginations sway.

Our era has still largely been defined by Thomas Wolfe in the novel ‘Bonfire of the Vanities'. In that novel, Stuart McCoy is a fantastically successful stock broker who is worth millions. He refers to himself as the ‘Master of the Universe' because he controls so much power and money. He does not think that the ordinary laws governing the world apply to him. He is the master.

One day, he and his mistress are mugged. In a panic, he tries to flee in his Mercedes and kills one of the muggers with his car. The rest of the novel is about a reporter who sensationalizes the case to salvage his career undone by alcoholism, Jewish president in the Bronx who wants to prosecute the case to garner a few votes in the Black community, Mr. McCoy's defense attorney who leaks bits of evidence here and there so that his picture is regularly in the paper. Everybody has an angle, no one is interested in actual justice. Everyone has a price and no one much cares about morality. They are consumed by expediency. Greed has displaced morality across the board and the only difference is whether the greed is petty or whether the greed is gaudy.

At the end of the novel, the reporter is about to accept a Pulitzer prize for his expose. Half drunk and cynical, he quotes to himself our passage for this morning… ‘What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his whole life'. This causes him a moment of pain and silence, but stumbling towards the microphone, he concludes, ‘well everything has its price.'

An adulterous and sinful generation looks pretty much like this: it is our conscience being erased a bit at a time. In the process, we become shameless.

Jesus has this elusive comment that suggests itself as an antidote to shamelessness. He says, “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life, would lose it. And whoever loses his life for my sake will save it.”

What is this self that must be denied? It is this autonomous self, this self that is the ‘Master of the Universe'. It is that piece of us that is aloof, that thinks the rules of the game don't really apply to me. It is the independent self that wants to make up the rules for the moral universe so that we can spin them to look better than we are.

Not so many of us actually have that heady sense that multi-millionaires get from having so much they are tempted to buy their way out of any jam. But we all want to write the rules for ourselves. Just listen to the testimony of everyone this week who was caught in some jam and had to publicly defend themselves.

When we were in Princeton, George Gallup served on a board with me. He sent me one of their polls for my response. It pointed out that only 13% of Americans believe in all 10 of the commandments. It went on. 9 out of 10 of us lie on a regular basis. Over 1/3 of Americans have been unfaithful to their spouses. And here is the one that George highlighted: over 7% said they would kill a stranger if they were offered enough money. In short, we are a 7 ½- 8 ½ commandment people and we actually want to select which ones we will abide by and to what extent.

Karl Barth used to juxtapose our independent streak with the submission of Jesus. He used to say that this autonomous self in all of us was the one that died on the cross at Calvary and that through that Jesus became the true witness, the true disciple.

In that drama, from the outside, it looked like Jesus was weak, since he was mocked and had a crown of thorns thrust on him with contempt. But in submitting to God's integrity, through these events that looked like he was a man to be pitied, he actually overcame this autonomy and was in the will of God. In this sense, he was authentic, in ways that we are not. And it is this authenticity that stands in juxtaposition to cynical power, expedience. There is this ‘other-worldly' quality to his values. He stays focused on following in the way of God, on having integrity, regardless of the personal consequences to himself. He is integrated and focused in a way that we are not, suffused with this transcendent spirit. He is true to himself and true to God. He has an internal purpose and meaning that we realize that we lack when we look at the shape of his service and altruism. We wish that we were in tune with God like that.

I was watching the Academy Award winning ‘Best Picture of the Year' Juno. It is a cute film about a girl coming of age through getting pregnant at 16. But it is rife with subtle messages for our teens that are worrisome as well.

Juno lives in California. Her mother is absent. Her father is clueless. Her step-mother is useless. There are no adult figures in the movie that guide her morally or spiritually. Adults are actually absent from any meaningful role whatsoever. They just pop in to ask you if you are going to eat that night or just stay in your room that functions like an apartment within a castle that you never have to leave if you don't want to. No one seems particularly concerned that Juno got pregnant. No one has any moral judgment at all. She could have an abortion or have the baby, whatever.

Those important teenage questions about love, relationships, family – what it takes to find real meaning with each other. The adults around her are no help. They can't even figure out their own lives and the only spirituality is a vague reference to the Unitarian church. She is on her own at 16.

Obviously, it is just a movie and this is the way that teenagers from time immemorial like to depict themselves- as going where no generation before them has ever gone. But, I'm reflecting on this expression that we can live our lives without substantive moral reflection, without a spiritual foundation…

I get a call from my father. He has had an aortic aneurism recently that required open-heart surgery. Then they had a complication and had to go back in again. Then he had a stroke. Now one of the valves on his heart isn't working and the only solution is another open-heart surgery. He is too weak to endure it. He has aged 15 years in the last 6 months. The survival rate for the surgery is very poor and without it he will suffer heart failure in the not too distant future. He doesn't want to die. He is concerned about my mother whose mental state has deteriorated substantially. But he needs to make a decision and he wants his children to gather around him and help him in this difficult place.

How do you help a man face his own death? One thing I can tell you is that the Tom Wolfe “Master of the Universe” expedient approach to life suddenly seems spiritually weightless and irrelevant. The Juno world of moral and spiritual ‘what are you going to do dude?' is just downright fluff. The weight of our living and the joy of our living is oriented by the fact that we all must die and the true impulse for developing meaning and purpose follows from this fact. What difference did it make that you lived and breathed and had your being at this time?

The characters in the Bible certainly aren't perfect people, which is not the point. But they do have the experience of being filled with the Spirit of God from time to time in ways that override their spotty character so that they find themselves living profoundly and acting generously, almost in spite of themselves.

In the novel, ‘Cry the Beloved Country', set in Apartheid South Africa, the black priest Steven Kumalo keeps meeting people that are kind to him and help him when they should not be helping him because they are white or because they are too busy.

Often he would say to them, ‘You are a good man'. Inevitably, they would respond, ‘No Father, I am not a good man.' They knew that in their inner selves, they were not really good, but mostly expedient and self-interested. But their actions of kindness and self-sacrifice betrayed them, much as we read in James earlier this morning. Indeed, something of the Spirit of God had genuinely moved upon them, causing them to act in a mew manner. So the priest would say, “God has his hands on you”. More than once, they would respond, “Perhaps it is so.”

I want to remind you that this is true for you this morning. “God has his hands on you” and God will not let you go.

And this is why God gives us moral commandments. God loves us and does not want us to destroy ourselves or see us live lives that are dissipated and aimless. The Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount are guides around the pitfalls.

In Sarah Orne Jewett's novel “The Country of the Pointed Firs” a woman notices a number of painted wooden stakes around the property of a retired sea captain. She asks the captain why those wooden stakes are driven in the ground. He tells her that when he first bought the farm and plowed the ground, every once in a while his plow would snag on a large rock underneath the surface of the ground. These snags not only slowed his progress, but dulled his plow. So he put the up stakes to show where the underground rocks were located, so that he could avoid them. The 10 Commandments are like that. God points out the trouble spots in life. Avoid these things, and you won't snag your plow. Like parents putting restrictions on their children so that they will avoid some of the heart aches of life, God defines for us some things to avoid so that we might find life's fullness.

So let's return to our original question. What makes your blush? These days, it seems to me much of the time, more of us are actually more embarrassed to be associated too much with being a Christian. We would be more worried if people that we know through our careers thought we were religious. Part of that, no doubt, is legitimate because we have all known religious boors who wore their faith on their sleeve and annoyed everyone around them.

But, I suspect that part of it is that we actually find it easier much of the time just to be as cynical, indifferent, loud and ugly as much of the culture around us. When it comes to talking about things that are genuine and spiritual, too many of us are like the St. Lawrence waterway in winter: We're frozen at the mouth.

Walter Harrelson once put it like this. “Israel was not to make any images of God, because Israel was to be an image of God in the world. When the people of Israel are faithful to the God of the Covenant, then God has the right kind of representative in the world of human kind.” We are to be images of God in the world. Have this mind which was in Christ Jesus. Act out our faith and live the Spirit in your community.

There is an old Finnish proverb that says, ‘Even a small star shines in the darkness'. Let yourselves glow with love, caring, understanding. Do not be overcome by cynicism, indifference, and banality. Amen.