Genesis 3:1-7
“Shame”
March 16, 2014 - Second Sunday in Lent

         It’s 10:29 on a Sunday morning and I’m frantically trying to button a shirt or fasten pants that don’t fit. Or I realize I’m not wearing shoes. Or else I suddenly remember I haven’t prepared a sermon. Those are the sorts of dreams I have every once in awhile when I’m feeling stressed. I wake with this horrible dread that I’m about to be terribly embarrassed and everyone will see my underwear or discover that I’m totally unprepared for preaching that day.

         I’d guess some of you have dreams like that, maybe about work or school, maybe some other nightmare of total embarrassment and shame. You find yourself uncovered or unready and everyone is looking and laughing and judging. Tap into that sort of feeling and you can understand a little better how Adam and Eve felt at the end of our text this morning, as they wove those fig leaves together to cover their naked bodies.

         Last Sunday Mike Fargo did a great job of looking at this text to discover the root of Adam and Eve’s sin and much of our sinfulness. He talked about how their disobedience began when they failed to believe God, to trust in His care and provision for them. Out of that disbelief they tried to take matters into their own hands to assure their future.

         For this Sunday and the next Sundays of Lent, I’d like to look at what follows on that sin of disbelief, the consequences of failing to trust God and being disobedient. The first consequence shows up in verse 7 and continues into next week’s text in the following verses. It’s shame.

         As cultural observers point out, most of us here in America, in the west, typically think of sin in terms of guilt. We do something wrong and conscience bothers us. We feel guilty and look for ways to get rid of that feeling, either by atoning for our wrong in some way or by finding forgiveness from God or from others.

         So for us westerners we hear wonderful good news in the message that Jesus took our guilt upon Himself when He died on the Cross. When we hear those blessed words from John 3:17, “God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world through him might be saved,” we are relieved and grateful, thankful that our sins have been forgiven and our guilt taken away.

         Yet among Asian people, in cultures that in some ways may be more like the cultures of people in the Bible, the issue is not so much guilt as it is shame. Sin may not weigh heavily on an individual in terms of a guilty conscience felt in private. But when sin is made public, when a person’s wrong-doing humiliates him or her in front of family or peers, that’s when the real pain comes, the pain of shame.

         We often picture guilt in terms of dirt or a stain. With the proper treatment, it can be removed, washed away, as we like to sing in our hymns. But shame goes deeper. Shame is the feeling that I am in some way defective. It’s not just something sitting on the surface of my soul. It’s something deep within my soul, something which makes me unacceptable, makes me want to hide and turn away from others.

         I don’t want to be guilty of stereotypes or too broad generalizations. Americans do feel shame, and Asians do feel guilt. We’re all human and both shame and guilt are part of human experience. But we as Americans may be less in tune with the shame consequence of sin which is so strong here for Adam and Eve. Especially in the Old Testament, the Bible doesn’t have much to say about the pangs of a guilty conscience. It does have a lot to say about being ashamed.

         Look back at how Genesis chapter 2 ended, verse 25, “And the man and his wife were both naked, and were not ashamed.” Now see what they are doing in verse 7 right after they disbelieved and disobeyed God. They’re creating the first garments ever seen on earth, trying to cover the nakedness of which they are now suddenly ashamed. Their first feelings after sinning are feelings of shame. They don’t just regret what they’ve done. They feel shame. Something is wrong with them, something that needs to be hidden, to be covered.

         Think about it. They are husband and wife, the only two human beings on earth. It’s just them and God, but they are embarrassed to be naked in front of each other. Further down in verse 10 we find them hiding. Adam explains that they felt ashamed, afraid to be naked even in God’s presence. Shame has taken over their hearts and minds and is driving them away from each other and from God.

         On the one hand, we could do with a little more of the kind of shame Adam and Eve felt, their sense of disgrace and embarrassment before each other and before God. Popular entertainment seems absolutely bent on removing any appropriate sense of shame from us. Evidently on the Discovery Channel tonight you can watch the start of a new season of a reality show called “Naked and Afraid.” A man and woman, strangers to each other, are placed together on an island to survive, but with this gimmick. Not only do they have no tools and no food and no water, they have no clothes. It’s television’s attempt to recreate Adam and Eve’s situation, but without the shame.

         Hopefully, most of America will be too ashamed to watch such stupidity. But it’s sad that these men and women being filmed are not ashamed to participate and that the network is not ashamed to produce such junk.

         Note the connection in the TV show’s title however, “Naked and Afraid.” The nakedness is an attempt to up the fear factor in a reality show. It’s playing on the same feeling we have in those dreams about showing up for work without our pants. Being uncovered makes us feel vulnerable, frightened. That’s how Adam describes the feeling to God. They are afraid. So they cover up. So they hide.

         That’s what sin does to all our relationships, with each other and with God. It shames us and makes us afraid of one another, afraid of God. Even when we try and reach out, try to approach one another or move closer to God, we often come in shame, hiding something, afraid to let our real selves show.

         Our Gospel lesson began with a man who wanted to know Jesus better, who came seeking a relationship with him. But he comes at night. Nicodemus is a Pharisee. He wears his goodness around him all the time. He’s a leader of the Jewish people. So he’s ashamed to be seen coming to a country rabbi like Jesus.

         Nicodemus was also embarrassed and ashamed in front of Jesus. He covered it up with praise, telling Jesus how impressed he is with the rabbi’s miracles, how they demonstrate that Jesus must have some sort of connection with God. Yet Jesus cuts right through the compliments, through the smoke-screen of theological inquiry, and tells this man that he needs to lose his shame, needs to return to original innocence, needs to be born again. Yet as Nicodemus himself asks, how can we get that innocence back? How can we be born again, lose our shame?

         It may sound odd, but perhaps we in North America would be closer to a new birth if we had a little more shame, a deeper and stronger sense of embarrassment and fear regarding our sins. We can’t be born again, can’t receive the gift of new innocence, because we have no shame.

         Most of you know our oldest daughter married a Canadian and they live in Toronto in Ontario. One of the things we chat about when we talk is the latest news on their mayor, Rob Ford. His political career is full of questionable dealings and allegations. Last year he was accused of substance abuse and started out denying it all. Then the police turned up video of him smoking crack cocaine. Since then other video and police evidence show Ford drunk, doing other drugs, and possibly involved in criminal violence, even murder. Fittingly, the Toronto Police called their surveillance of him, “Project Brazen.” Despite admitting to many incidents of substance abuse, Ford refuses to step down from office and plans to run again for mayor this October. A man like that could use a little shame. Maybe the city of Toronto could use a little shame about having a person like that in office.

         But Rob Ford is just the extreme of a wider problem. We are so far from the original innocence of Eden that we’ve lost our shame. We sin and we’re not embarrassed. We watch films and television shows that would make our mothers blush and think nothing of it. We spend obscene amounts of money on ourselves for food and clothes and cars and entertainment, and suppose we just deserve it. We say hurtful things and imagine that we’re just being honest. For every sin we hide, for every guilty moment that makes us ashamed and embarrassed, there are two more that we’ve forgotten to be ashamed about.

         We could stand to be a little more like Adam and Eve in verse 7, covering up our shame, and little less like the shameless people on reality television or the brazen mayor of Toronto. Shame is a good and natural reaction when we have truly sinned, when we have failed each other and failed God.

         I do need to pause for a moment and say that there is bad shame, undeserved shame that also affects some of us. That too is part of the distortion of sin in our lives. You may find yourself ashamed, not because of anything you did, but because of something that was done to you. That kind of false shame is one of the devastating results of being abused, of being hurt by people you trusted.

         So I want to be clear that if you are feeling shame because you were molested as a child, or because someone you loved betrayed you, or because an employer fired you unjustly or out of prejudice, that shame is not good. It is a sad and ugly mark on your soul that ought not be there. God does not want you to feel that way. You don’t deserve to feel that way.

         Yet God has the same gracious answer to both kinds of shame. He loves us regardless of what we’ve done or what has happened to us. He sends that love to us in Jesus. We heard that Scripture verse today which has rightly come to be one of the best known and best loved. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son…” That is how God responds to shame… with love, a love that was ready to suffer shame and disgrace in our place.

         The thing about good shame, about the shame we really deserve and ought to feel about our sin, is that it puts us where we need to be to feel that love of God. That’s what Paul was talking about when he said in our reading from Romans 4 that Abraham’s justification was not by works, was not anything he had earned. The justification we get for ourselves is just like Rob Ford’s. We shamelessly ignore our sin and pretend it doesn’t matter. But when we are ashamed, when we realize that we stand before God naked in all our sinfulness with no way to cover up, then we can receive the gift, the gift of justification and righteousness which doesn’t come from us.

         As we will read in the next few weeks, sin has several consequences. Next week we will see how Adam and Eve’s led them to blame others for their sin. In two weeks we will see how sin brought punishment from God, brought hard labor and suffering into the world. And finally on the third Sunday from today, we will read how sin drives us away from what is good, away from life, away from God. But we will also hear that in the midst of all those negative consequences, God did something for Adam and Eve, down in chapter 3 verse 21. He made clothing for them, from the skin of animals.

         God did not tell that poor naked couple they did not need to be ashamed. He did not write their shame off as some misplaced or mistaken psychological condition. He addressed it directly by covering them, covering their shame with something more permanent than vegetation.

         Many Bible students have pointed out that God’s provision for covering Adam and Eve meant that blood was shed. Animals had to die for those skins to be provided. Pain and suffering had to enter the world for the first time. It’s a picture of how God would ultimately cover and finally remove sin and disgrace from us forever. Jesus would die in disgrace and shame in our place and His blood would be shed to cover our sins. God so loved the world, loved Adam and Eve, loved you and me, that He gave His only Son.

         Shame is a horrible experience. Some people suggest it’s no wonder that Asian cultures often have such a deep, strong moral code. People want to do everything they can to avoid that feeling of shame. Yet like Adam and Eve we all experience it, we all deserve it. Inside everyone of us are things we want to cover up, want to hide from each other, hide from God.

         Yet God came to Adam and Eve in love to cover their shame. He comes to you and I in the same way to cover us with the grace and love of Jesus. He does that by taking our shame on Himself, letting Himself be humiliated so that we can feel loved once again.

         We worry all the time these days about identity thieves. We’re afraid they will take our good name and use it to commit crimes. We will go use a credit card and find it’s been cancelled for fraud. We will try to get a loan and be turned down because someone has been running up bills in our name. We will go to the bank and find we have no money because the thief has been writing bad checks on our account.

         Yet God’s work in Jesus Christ, the justification He gives us through the Cross, is the reverse of identity theft. It’s identity gift. Jesus takes our bad name, our shame, and applies it to Himself so that He can give us a new and better identity in Him. He’s the one righteous Man who willingly trades His good name for our bad ones. Because of Jesus we find we have credit with God again. We have something in our spiritual bank account because Christ has covered our checks. He’s taken our shame and given us righteousness.

         This season of Lent is a time to remember and recover some sense of good, honest shame. That’s part of the discipline of prayer and fasting and reflecting on our sins. But the point is not to be lost in that shame, but to be freed from it. From the beginning, God provided a covering, a new life for people who were ashamed. Now He’s done that forever through His Son. And as we heard, “whoever believes in him will not perish, but have eternal life.”

         Amen.

         Valley Covenant Church
         Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
         Copyright © 2014 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj