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The First Sunday in Advent Heavenly Father, you sent your beloved Son to redeem us from sin and death, and to make us heirs in him of everlasting life; that when he shall come again in power and great triumph to judge the world, we may without shame or fear rejoice to behold his appearing. ~BCP, p. 378 This is the preface we use in our Eucharistic prayer each Advent Season. But once again this year, what I noticed in it were these two words: shame and fear. And, friends, here is the question I would like us to ask ourselves this morning. I wonder, what it would be like to live without these two forces in our lives. How would things be different for us, how might we see the world in new ways, or experience life in new ways, if fear and shame no longer held any power over us? What would Christmas be like for us this year if we were liberated from these dark forces? What would a new year be like? For me, at least, it almost beyond imagining. For I know all too well the power of shame and fear in my own life. How they hold me down. How they cut me off. How they keep me from my true self. And I would venture that, for each of us, nothing is more corrosive or destructive in what they do to undermine our hopes and desires. There is first the power of shame. It is a force whose sole purpose to negate, to belittle, and to rob us of our self-worth. Often enough, shame is confused with guilt, but it is really not the same thing. While guilt may have a positive moral value, shame is only concerned with the annihilation of our sense of self. Think of a time when someone either said aloud or in their actions toward you: “Shame on you.” Think about how it made you feel. It was not a judgment on what you had done. Rather, it was a judgment on who you are. And the feelings engenders in us are those of worthlessness and disgrace. In the face of shame, there is no possible way to recover our sense of worth and grace. Over time, shame can accumulate in us like a cesspool. It becomes internalized in us, this diminished sense of self drawn into the core of our identity. Our identity is that vital sense of who we are as individuals, embracing our dignity, our sense of adequacy and worth as human beings. All of these things, however, can be obliterated through protracted shame, leaving us feeling naked and defeated. The experience of shame brings on an overwhelming sense of exposure, and of the need to hide. We feel diminished, deficient, and this is unbearable. It makes us feel we have utterly failed in life. And to live in and with shame is to feel alienated, never quite good enough. Secretly, we feel we are to blame. We don’t belong. The deficiency lies within us. As such, shame is a true sickness of the soul. It has antidote, except one, and that is grace. The other great sickness of the soul is fear. Fear, the anxiety we experience in the face of danger, is an instinctive human response. It turns into a destructive force in our lives when it, like shame, becomes autonomous, living in and for itself. When fear takes over our lives, it will stop at nothing, consuming everything in its way. Out of fear, and action can be justified, any motive can be legitimated. Out of fear, we will structure our whole existence around anxiety and dread. As individuals and as societies. Fear is a cancer. It eats away at us from the inside out, eroding that which is best in us, our character, our virtue, our nobility, our sense of decency and justice. Fear, like shame, makes life intolerable, but as in a vicious circle, fear preys on itself. Fear is a terrible enemy. Jesus himself knew this. More than any other phrase in the Gospels, he says: “Do not be afraid.” He and those who followed him knew that there is no power as great as fear, except the power of love. So I wonder now, what would life be like without fear and shame? How would things be different for us if love and grace expelled every residue of these twin powers of darkness in and about us? Can we imagine it? Could it ever happen? Every so often, you know, I see life as it might be, bathed in the light of love and grace, and it makes my heart shudder. I remember a moment several years ago with our daughter Colleen. For years, she had pleaded with us that she wanted to play hockey. And for many years, we had been successful in discouraging her, thereby avoiding the nightmare of having to wake up for 5:00 A.M. ice time, etc., etc. Well, she would not give in. We threw up every road block in the book. I even resorted to a bit of shame of my own. As a non-hockey player, I asked her, won’t you feel bad sitting on the bench the whole season? As a non-skater, I asked her, won’t you feel embarrassed when you fall down, time after time, in front of your friends? After all, I said to myself, in my own adolescence, I wouldn’t have been caught dead subjecting myself to such shameful things, so bound up in fear and shame was I. But it didn’t matter to Colleen. Somehow, by the grace of God, fear and shame hadn’t possessed her as it had me when I was her age. And as I sat alone in that cold rink in the predawn hours, I would watch her gamely stumble about while her teammates skated by her leaving her in the dust. I watched her trip and fall and miss the puck, yet she did it with an exhuberance I have rarely experienced in my best moments. And it made me wonder: What would life be like to live like this, unashamed, fearless, grace-filled, self-loving? What would it be like to be exhuberant in my ineptitude? What would it be like to accept myself not in spite of my failings or my inadequacies as a human being, but because of them? I have to believe this, finally is what our Advent preface is about. Because, friend, our Lord God loves and accepts us as we are, with all our blemishes, with all our failings. Our Lord God loves us in all the ways we may feel worthless and diminished as individuals and as a people. Our Lord is coming, and our most fervent prayer this day and in this holy season, is that when he comes, truly, truly, may we without shame and without fear behold his appearing. Our Lord is coming in the blazing glory of a new heaven and a new earth, so that no longer need we be afraid or feel ashamed, so that we may, from this time forth, be guided in grace and filled with love in all that we are and all that we do.
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