A Gospel to Make Our Eyes Wide

Before moving to New England, I spent a year in Central America living and working with a group of foster children. These dear ones had seen too much for their years, too much pain, too much loss, too much betrayal. They had been hurt by those they should have been able to trust, and they bore physical and psychological scars—and some even babies—as a result. The walls of the home we shared echoed with a dichotomous union of hurt and hope, anger and love, violence and embrace, truth and falsehood, tears and laughter.

They often congregated around my kitchen table, drinking tea, eating freshly baked cookies, laughing, and talking about their days, their hopes, their dreams. On the wall was posted one of my favorite passages of Scripture, Isaiah 61, handwritten on green cardstock.

The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is on me,
    because the Lord has anointed me
    to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,
    to proclaim freedom for the captives
    and release from darkness for the blind,

to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor
    and the day of vengeance of our God,
to comfort all who mourn,
   and provide for those who grieve—
to bestow on them a crown of beauty
    instead of ashes,
the oil of joy
    instead of mourning,
and a garment of praise
    instead of a spirit of despair.
They will be called oaks of righteousness,
    a planting of the Lord
    for the display of his splendor.

They would stand silently reading it often, faces twisted in concentration as they worked out the words they didn’t know. Then they would turn to ask me about it—what did it mean; why did I have it hanging on the wall?

The number of times they had heard the Gospel was more than I could count. They could easily repeat what they had been taught: that Jesus loved them and came to die for them on the cross. It was repeated in some fashion nearly every time a “group of white people” came from the States to spend a week or two with them. It was presented at the church I attended with them each Sunday, always in a reductionistic turn-to-Jesus-to-make-your-life-better form. Some of them professed faith in and acceptance of Jesus. Some of them had tried it and bitterly turned away because Jesus didn’t answer their prayers, as they’d been promised he would.

But the form of the Gospel as we read it in Isaiah 61 was completely foreign to them. The Gospel in which Jesus meets us in our dark, messy, hurting places. The Gospel in which he doesn’t magically make them go away but walks with us through them. The Gospel in which Jesus came to buy us—and our world—back from the slavery of the pain, brokenness, loneliness, and betrayal they were all too familiar with. The Gospel in which Jesus could take the worst, ugliest, and most painful parts of our lives and transform them into something beautiful. This Gospel made their eyes grow big in astonishment. This Gospel surprised them. This Gospel actually spoke to their reality and offered hope in the midst of its confusion and darkness. And I pray it is the Gospel that rests in their hearts still.

Jesus himself used these words from Isaiah to announce his good news. In Luke 4, he reads them aloud in the synagogue and announces “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” When Jesus first preached the Gospel—this was how he explained it. Perhaps we should follow his lead—to preach not only of how he redeems our souls but also how he redeems, restores, and transforms our bondage to freedom, our mourning to joy, our ashes to beauty, our despair to praise. This, friends, is a Gospel that should make our eyes grow wide. This is a Gospel that offers hope not just for eternity but for the here and now of our messy, broken world. This is a Gospel that will make our roots grow strong and deep, enabling us to rise as strong and steady as a giant oak in a storm. This, friends, is a Gospel that is beautiful. 

Blessed are those who are out of breath...

“Blessed are the poor in spirit . . .” – Matthew 5:3  This first of the Beatitudes could also be loosely translated “blessed are those who are out of breath.”

How many of us have felt out of breath? Doubled over, searing pain in our side, light-headed, gasping for air, willing oxygen in our lungs.

How many of us have felt spiritually out of breath? Deflated, uninspired, desperate for God’s presence, needy, hungry, hurting, uncertain perhaps, willing ourselves to believe, barely hanging on…Jesus says blessed are you.

There is a beautiful mystery in this. It was summed up by a dear woman I knew in college:

Growing as a Christian isn’t about getting it all together—it’s about dependence. It’s about knowing how much we desperately need him.

Perhaps this is why Jesus says we are blessed when we see how desperate, how “out of breath,” we are—because this is when we see ourselves rightly. This is when we can see how much we don’t have it all together, how weak we are, how needy we are, and this realization is what can send us running to Christ, throwing ourselves completely on the Gospel, because we have no other hope. Blessed are those who are out of breath—for theirs is the kingdom.

What a different picture this is from what is often presented in many of our churches and Christian organizations. How often do you hear someone share about what they’re struggling with right then, what sins they fell into last night, instead of what they were struggling with several months or years ago? How often do we categorize people into Christians and “sinners,” forgetting that “but for the grace of God there would go I,” forgetting that we too still fall short? How often do we feel pressure—within our churches!—to have it all together, to put on a smile, to hide our hurts and struggles? How often do we look to the victory of Christ, but forget the deep suffering of the Cross?

It’s easy to look at the Gospel as our ticket into Christianity but something we graduate from into bigger and better things. But this is dangerous. The reality is that the longer we walk with the Lord, the deeper we go with him, the more profound the Gospel becomes, the more we see how hopeless we are without it, the more we see just how much we are in need of Grace. It is never something we graduate from - the Gospel is for Christians too. Perfection, independence, and self-sufficiency lead us astray, away from the Gospel, tricking us into thinking that we magically now have the strength to handle life and reach holiness on our own. These things lead to bondage in our own self-assurance and false security.

Maturity isn’t about becoming strong as much as learning just how weak and helpless we are without Christ. The beautiful paradox is that the weaker we become in this way, the stronger we become, for it is when we are weak we give up standing on our own two feet, and allow Christ to be our strength. It is when we realize attempting to fix ourselves or "try harder" is a hopeless cause, and we look to the Holy Spirit to work in our spirits to make us more like Christ. The message of the Gospel is not “try harder” but “lean more heavily on my strength.” Desperation, neediness, complete dependence on God—these are the marks of maturity, these are the signs that we really “get it.” Blessed are those who are out of breath—for theirs is the kingdom.

Shame vs. Guilt: The Power of Compassion

How many times have you heard someone say “I feel like such a bad person”? How many times have you thought it secretly to yourself? How often does the tape of ‘I’m not good enough’ and its countless variations play in your mind?

                  KelseyyBarbara on Flickr

We hear it in so many forms: I’m not pretty enough, not smart enough, not strong enough. I’m never going to get this right. I’m not kind enough, patient enough, loving enough. I will never escape my past. It’s all my fault. I will never be a good enough mother, father, employee, spouse, friend. I’m such a mess, how can anyone put up with me? And so the mental tapes play. And so we become imprisoned by lies of shame.

Shame is focused on the self. It says that we are damaged, we are inadequate, we are less-than. Shame says that other people are perfect and have it together, but we never will. Shame worries over how we would look in others’ eyes if revealed for who we really are. Shame says “I am something wrong. I am a failure.”

This is different from guilt, which focuses on behavior. Guilt says, “I did something wrong. I failed.” Guilt sees the effects of wrongdoing and mistakes and is free to acknowledge where one went wrong.

Think of Adam and Eve in the Garden. Before sin, they were “naked and unashamed”—completely exposed but with no sense of shame to worry over how they measured up or what someone else saw. After sin, shame made its debut, and they covered themselves with fig leaves. Shame made them cover up, shame made them hide, shame made them afraid. Shame kept them from the healthy reaction of guilt, which would have pushed them to confess and say “We’re sorry. We did something wrong.”

Shame, you see, is always in conflict with guilt. Shame focuses on ourselves, keeping us from looking outward at what our behavior has done to others. Shame doesn’t let room for repentance, because it believes that we are failures and it’s the way it is; it will never change.

In her TED talk, Brené Brown discusses the difference between shame and guilt (see link below for the full video). Her research has shown that shame is strongly correlated to addiction, depression, suicide, violence, and eating disorders. Guilt, however, is inversely correlated to these things. In other words, the internal negative focus of shame leads to self-destruction and unhealthy behaviors. Guilt frees us from them.

So, all of those lies of shame—they do nothing to make us better people; they do nothing to help us improve our behavior. Shame does nothing to bring us to confession and repentance. Shame does nothing to bring about godliness. If I can go so far, shame is not the voice of God—it’s the voice of the enemy, the accuser, the destroyer who seeks to “kill, steal, and destroy.”

Brown goes on to say this: “If you put shame in a Petri dish, it needs three things to grow exponentially: secrecy, silence, and judgment. If you put the same amount of shame in a Petri dish and douse it with empathy, it can’t survive.”

This should deeply affect the way we respond to other people. When they come with struggles and sins, either obvious or hidden, in plain sight or subtle, confessed and repented or not—how can we avoid shaming them, knowing that it is godly guilt, sparked by the Holy Spirit, that will lead us to repentance? A shame-culture leads people to hide their sins and struggles, afraid of what people will think or say if they come to light. A shaming-voice tries to play the convicting role of the Holy Spirit by reminding the person how bad they are and how bad their action was. (Let me just say here that the Holy Spirit is really good at his job and most certainly does not need us to fill in for him.) A shaming-voice is finger-pointing, saying “look at them,” instead of a compassionate embrace saying “me too.”

This does not mean that we dismiss sin and its gravity. It does mean that our role is to be compassionate and kind, following in the footsteps of our Lord Jesus. It does mean that we must show acceptance even before repentance. Think of the so-called “sinners” that Jesus spent time with during his earthly ministry. He does not seem to have demanded they clean up their act before he would come to their house for dinner. He did not keep them at arm’s length until they reformed, afraid that he’d give them the wrong idea and they would keep on sinning. Instead, it was through Jesus’ kindness, compassion, and acceptance that they changed their ways; it was after coming into Jesus’ presence that their lives were transformed.

Think of the woman caught in adultery—everyone else was ready to kill her; they made her an exhibit of shame—but Jesus calmly wrote in the sand. He didn’t feel the need to say, ‘yes, look at this sinful woman.’ He did not condemn her. When Jesus said that the one without sin could throw the first stone, the self-righteous religious leaders of that day at least had the sense to drop their stones and walk away. I wonder if many of us today would have the same sense.

What people need is not shame. It’s not condemnation. And it’s not a human-Holy Spirit. What people need—and if we’re being honest, what all of us need—is to be brought to meet Jesus—and often that’s through his human representatives—the church. What people need is compassion.

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