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The Second Sunday of 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 in power and great triumph to judge the world, we may without fear or shame rejoice to behold his appearing. ~BCP p. 378 This past week, several of you have spoken to me about last week’s sermon, and your own struggle with fear and shame. It made me realize anew how deep and wide this issue is for many of us. And how devastatingly corrosive these forces can be in our lives. And then, in the course of the week, I read this letter: “Dear Family, These were the final words of 19 year old Robert Hawkins this past Thursday, written on a suicide note, before he hid an assault rifle under his sweatshirt, went to an Omaha Mall, killing eight Christmas workers and shoppers and himself. As the story of this young man has unfolded the past few days, there is the eerily familiar markers of earlier mass murderers. Evidently, he was kicked out of his home a year ago. The family that eventually took him in said when he arrived he looked like a lost puppy from the pound that nobody wanted. He dropped out of school. Two weeks ago, he lost his job, one week ago, his girlfriend. But the greatest thing, he had lost, it seems, was something taken from him years ago, his own self-worth. And what was left, written large in the suicide note he left, was a searing sense of shame. Today, I would like to say a few words about the relationship between shame and violence. And I do so, taking as my impetus, the witness of the biblical prophets who came, in the words of our collect, “to preach repentance and prepare the way for our salvation.” I do so, because shame and violence are in a death grip in our world, and most particularly here in America. Not a day goes by when news of another senseless shooting, another massacre, another set of statistics from the killing fields in Iraq and Afghanistan comes our way. Abu Grav, torture in Guantanamo, Virginia Tech, Columbine, the litany of violence goes on and on and on. Indeed, it is hard to deny what black activist and radical H. Rap Brown said forty years ago that “violence is as American as apple pie.” By every measure related to violent crime, we are far and away the most violent society on the planet. And to make matters worse, the media flaunts and glamorizes violence. It is estimated that by the time a child graduates from high school in this country he/she will have seen tens of thousands of images of violence on television Video games today, the best-selling sector of the gift market this Christmas season, are so horrendously violent, it boggles the mind. Yet violence has always been an indelible part of the human condition. The annals of history are soaked in blood. We, as a species, have always been hell-bent on our own destruction. It is true now. It was true three thousand years ago when the prophets of Israel railed against it. Thus the prophet Jeremiah proclaimed: “Violence and destruction are your lot, and for this I will make you a desolate land, says the Lord.” And the prophet Amos preached: “Woe to you who bring near the seat of violence!” Ezekiel condemned those who fill the land with violence. And Isaiah writes of his people that :”their works are works of iniquity, and deeds of violence are in the hands.” And thus, Habakkuk writes: “Destruction and violence are ever before me.” Violence, for the prophets of Israel, was a scourge, an abomination, a sacrilege before God. To be violent, to use violence, to condone violence, to justify violence, to remain indifferent in the face of violence, to accept violence, all of this, all of it, the prophets warned the people against and admonished them to forsake their sins. So how do we ourselves do this? How do give up the violence in our lives? How do we heed the warnings of the prophets and forsake our sins? One critical clue, in my mind, comes from the groundbreaking research Harvard Medical School psychiatrist James Gilligan of the relationship between shame and violence. Dr. Gilligan has spent the past the past twenty-five years in this state’s prison system studying the perpetrators and victims of violence. And this is what he concludes: “Children who do not receive sufficient love from others fail to build reserves of self-love and mostly feel numb, empty, and dead.” When there is an absence of self-love in a person the resultant feeling is one of shame. Such feelings can include humiliation, bitterness, and anger. Beneath this rage is this early frustrated need to be loved. Dr. Gilligan maintains that the emotion of shame is the primary or ultimate cause of all violence. Because shame inhibits people from loving others, because shame consists of a deficiency of self-love, violence becomes the primary and ultimate recourse for those for whom shame has annihilated the self. Dr. Gilligan goes on to argue that this is, in the final analysis, a gender issue. Violence and its corollary, shame, are primarily male issues. In all cultures and all eras of history, most homicides, suicides, wars, and even so called unintentional injuries and deaths, are committed by, and suffered by men. Robert Hawkins was a young man, and this is no accident. And it seems to me no simple accident that the prophets of Israel were all men speaking truth to men. So, if the women who are present this morning will indulge me, let me end with words from men meant for men. If we men are to give up the violence we do to ourselves, the violence we do others, and the violence others do on our behalf, I believe we must, each and all of us, come to terms with shame in all the ways it manifests itself in our lives. And we begin to do this, I believe, as the prophets themselves did it: by imagining a world without violence and shame. Over against those who would have us only imagine a violent world, though our media, through our politicians who are imagining and planning now World War III, we must recover this image of Isaiah, “where the wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, and the calf and lion and fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. Where the cow and the bear shall graze, their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. Where the nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den. Where we will not longer be lost to the powers of violence and shame; where we no longer will hurt or destroy on all the Lord’s holy mountain.” There is an old rabbinic saying: “Whoever brings shame to his fellow man loses the world to come.” For only in this peaceable kingdom, envisioned by the prophets, will there be any kind of future for our sons and daughters. Only in a world where shame and violence no longer have dominion over us, will we be able to live out our days without fear. And only as we give our fear and shame over to the Prince of Peace, will we be able to behold him, to welcome him, to embrace him as he comes in power and great triumph to judge the world, as our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
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