June 28, 2009 — Fourth Sunday after Pentecost
“The Shame of Sin” — Vicar Zickler
Listen to the sermon with the player below, or, download. (Right Click)
Grace Mercy and Peace to you from God our Father and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
The sermon text for today is the Gospel Lesson previously read.
Well, I have to admit, even after almost a year of working through texts, I still run into texts that are hard to preach. This week’s Gospel lesson is one of those texts. Sure it’s easy to say that here these people were suffering, one of them had even died, Jesus healed them, and now Jesus does the same for us. Well, that is, I suppose, the essence of the text, but there’s really a lot more to it. A lot. First of all if we just leave it at that, it becomes easy to think that what the story means is that if we properly take heed to Jesus’ words, “Do not fear, only believe” then that means we will see these same kind of healings and resurrections today. But this really isn’t what St. Mark is telling us by the work of the Holy Spirit. Secondly, if we just take this text and spiritualize it, we also miss what’s going on. By that I mean, if we say, well Jesus healed these people physically, and now He heals us spiritually, and that is all we say, even though it’s true, then we’re missing the point as well. See, there is much more depth to this text than that, but the problem in a lot of ways that causes us to easily not understand the depth of this text is that is that we have lost our sense of shame in this culture. We’ve lost the sense of the connection of shame and guilt to sin and death.
While to some degree shame has never properly been associated to sin and death, instead often being used to cut others down and make oneself look better, the association of shame to sin and death was a lot closer in those days than it is now. Just this month, here in the Seattle area, there was an armored car driver who was shot for the money he was carrying and the shooters took the money and went on a celebratory spending spree buying a $175 dinner at Red Lobster. Of course this is one of the worst examples of a lack of shame I’ve seen, but it is not unique. Think about how different sins are glorified in our culture, promiscuous sex is present everywhere on TV and movies, to the point that unwed mothers are often not even close to ashamed, but celebrated. Drunkenness is exalted; greed is exemplified by almost everyone and even our own government of all things. It goes on and on, all of this because shame is becoming non existent, and why wouldn’t we want it to be nonexistent? Wouldn’t it be easier to avoid shame and not acknowledge our wrongs and sins? After all, think about your deepest and darkest secrets. Would you want those broadcast to everyone around you? Would you want the things that you would like to forget that you have done to be announced from the rooftops? Of course not.
Well, in the Israelite culture, these issues of guilt were treated much differently because of their understanding of shame. They knew that shame and guilt were directly connected to sin and death. The shame that people felt for their sin was made much more tangible by the requirements of the Levitical Law, all those legal dictums that make up many of the “boring” parts of the Old Testament. They all had significance. For example, we see this poor woman today who had been bleeding for 12 years. This bleeding, according to Leviticus 15, would have kept her from being a part of the community at all. She would have been cast out as unclean, and would not have been allowed to attend worship services at the temple, she would not have been able to even have meaningful contact with other people. Leviticus 15:25-26 tell us, “If a woman has discharge of blood for many days, not at the time of her menstrual impurity, or if she has a discharge beyond the time of her impurity, all the days of the discharge she shall continue in uncleanness… Every bed on which she lies… shall be to her as a bed of impurity. And everything on which she sits shall be unclean.” So even if she touched garments they would have been unclean, and they would have brought shame on her.
Now for us today, in part because of our lack of shame, we look at this with confusion. We say, “Why would she be punished in such a way for something that is not her fault at all?” This gets to the heart of the matter. Why should she be punished? After all, as far as we know, she’s punished in the eyes of her church community for something she had no part in. Well, this shame that she feels is not for any particular sin. She doesn’t feel ashamed because she did something particularly wretched. No she is ostracized from her community because God wanted to demonstrate how pure He is, and how He is not able to stand in the presence of anything impure. So why does such bleeding bring this shame? What does it have to do with sin? It’s an imperfection in His creation; an imperfection that was not there when He created it, an imperfection that can’t even be present on the grounds where He manifests His holiness in the temple, nor among His holy people, who represent His purity. But this still doesn’t make total sense: sure God is holy, but why does this woman have to suffer for something she didn’t do? Because sin isn’t only something we do, what we call actual sin; it is who we have become after the fall, what we call original sin. We are sinful to our very core, our very being. Yes we’re created with the image of God, but that image is so tainted now by sin that it is unrecognizable and unable to reproduce anything but sin in and of itself, and it’s so contagious, it’s spread by any contact. This means God doesn’t only condemn us for what we do or don’t do, but because of what we are.
It’s this understanding that brought shame on the woman. She knew she was a manifestation of sin; that in this state she embodied the imperfections that had come about by the fall. She knew that shame and guilt went hand in hand and they were intimately connected to sin and death, that’s why she was as good as dead to the people around her. And this is why she was ashamed of sin, as ashamed of sin as we all should be in our times today. We know this deep down too, why do you think you felt a pang when I asked you about those secrets that you want no one else to know about?
But when we are dead as this woman was, as we all are born, as reflected in the pangs of our conscience, when we are dead like this, where do we find life? Where do we find a resurrection not only from the death from the community of God, but from physical death that comes with sin as well? Where do we find that resurrection that Jairus sought for His daughter who was so sick?
We find it in Christ, just as the woman did. We find it in Christ just as Jairus did on behalf of his daughter. Christ comes in our midst and He raises us from the death that we suffer when we embody sin in every way that we do. Whether we manifest sin in our deeds that deserve our shame, our actual sin, our deeds where we fall so short of loving God and loving our neighbor as ourselves, or if we are shamed by the things that come about not because of any particular sin, but because of all sin, original sin: the things like the women with the bleeding, the things that bring us shame that are effects of disease and illness: when someone has epilepsy and he is shamed by the seizures that come as a result; when someone breaks a leg and she is shamed by having to wear a cast for it to mend; No matter how the sin manifests itself, Christ brings life to all of these. He brings us out of the death that we suffer no matter how small and seemingly insignificant, but also no matter how huge and significant. He even brings us out of physical death just like He did for Jairus’ daughter. In all of this, He has promised to carry us out of into the life that He made that we will see in the New Heavens and the New Earth.
So how does He do this? He does this by bringing to us what He has won for us. On the cross He died that sins would be forgiven. He suffered for us on that tree and as Paul says in 2 Corinthians, “For our sake [God] made Him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God.” God made Jesus to be sin for us, so that we might be pure and righteous. So by the forgiveness that Jesus won for us, the forgiveness of our sins, Christ now gives us the righteousness that belonged to mankind at the beginning, He gives us the righteousness, the purity of God. And He brings that purity, that cleanness to us in the same way He did to the woman with the blood and to the daughter of Jairus, He comes and He makes contact with us. He comes and touches us in a physical, earthly way. He speaks the words to us, “I say to you, arise.” Those words that give us life by cleansing us from the shame of sin, even all of those sins which I keep mentioning, the ones that you want no one to know about in addition to all of the sins in our culture of greed and sexual immorality and murder. All of those are cleansed in His blood, John tells us, “the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin.” And Jesus gives us life by what Paul speaks of to Titus as “The washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit”: Holy Baptism. He gives us His purity by the washing of water with the word. He gives us His body and blood in the Lord’s Supper, that body which was so pure that it absorbed the impurity, the uncleanness of the woman with the blood and the impurity dead body of the daughter of Jairus, and it absorbed all of our impurity, making it His own to be punished on the cross, because He communicates purity by contact just as impurity has been communicated by contact throughout the history of Israel.
We are told in Ephesians 2:13, “But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ.” And this summarizes everything I have said. This is why the text today is so complex and full of depth. Sure, on the one level it is just a simple story of sin bad, Jesus good, Jesus saves from sin. But you can see that the understanding of sin communicated in the story is much more complex than we usually think of it. It isn’t just about sin as moral wrong, it isn’t just about how we are forgiven for those bad things that we do, it’s about the incredible and immense impact sin has had on the post-fall world. Sin has permeated every single aspect of life, it has seeped into every corner of this world, even as often as we try to forget it by hiding from the shame that we rightly feel, hiding by focusing on the wonderful things in the world, the beauty of the world, the joys and miracles present in it. But it’s still there, sin is always around rearing its ugly head, it separates us from God as we see in the woman with the blood, and it brings death as we see in the girl, but because of Jesus, because of His blood, we have been restored to God and His community and restored to life from the dead, so just like the woman and the girl we give thanks: thanks for Christ’s death and resurrection which give us life and purity, which He brings to us in His church by His contact with us in the Word preached and with water and bread and wine, all of which are our refuge from the awful shame that we truly deserve.
Amen
Now may the Peace which transcends all understanding guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.
