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BUCKNACKT'S SORDID TAWDRY BLOG We should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in an attractive & well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, chocolate, bier or wein in hand, body thoroughly used up, totally worn out and screaming "WHOO-HOO, WHAT A RIDE!!!!!!"
Showing posts with label self. Show all posts
Showing posts with label self. Show all posts
06 June 2025
VERSE AND VOICE FROM SOJOURNERS 5JUN25
10 September 2016
A Sermon on Shame and the Bent-Backed Woman 23AUG16
A valuable lesson for all of us on how we treat others and especially ourselves from Rev Nadia Bolz Webber, listen to her sermon by clicking here
A Sermon on Shame and the Bent-Backed Woman
August 23, 2016 by
Click above to listen along. If you can’t see the audio player above, click here to listen to the audio.
If you follow the HBO show Game of Thrones you know that there are a lot of very disturbing and violent things that transpire on the show. But for me, the most disturbing was a scene of public shaming in which a character had her hair shaved off, was stripped naked and made to walk through the streets while people spat on her and chanted shame, shame, shame. It was a perfect external and physical depiction of what every day of Jr. High feels like if you are the fat kid, or the queer boy, or that weird bug-eyed girl.
I myself am not unfamiliar with shame of my physical body – especially as someone who suffered graves disease as a child, which set off a chain reaction of shame that for a very long time distorted my vision of the image of God in myself, something that is always being healed. This week I kept thinking about shame and the bent-backed woman. For in some way, she seems like such an embodiment of shame itself. I thought about how shameful it must have been to not be looked at in the eye, to know only the feet of those around you, to live as half a human. I wonder what bent her back to begin with? Was her injury physical or emotional or was it maybe both as it so often is. The text is silent on these things, but all week as I thought of her I thought of shame. I thought of how shame – often delivered through the words and actions of others within our homes or schools or churches –writes its own words inside us. As though shame writes its own story in our bodies and every stroke of every letter of shame pulls us down until we cannot look others in the eye. I know that so much shame has been created in you and me and many others through religion, by those who would use God’s holy name to shame us and others, but using Lord’s name to shame is is truly to use the Lord’s name in vain. Because shame does not originate from God. Shame is actually the great deceiver. And as I’ve said before I have no problem saying that I believe shame is demonic.
And it has been since the very beginning.
Like, Garden of Eden, very beginning.
See, thinking of shame embodied in the bent woman made me think of Adam and Eve and that very moment when shame was first introduced to humans and our human bodies.
Because in the beginning, in the Garden of Eden we were free and unashamed and lived in harmony with God and God’s love (you know, for like, 20 minutes…). Until deceived by the serpent into thinking that yeah, to be in harmony with God and God’s love is pretty cool, but what would be REALLY cool is to be LIKE God – which means to have the knowledge of good and evil. We were deceived into choosing knowledge of good and evil over love and inevitably, and with that came shame. Because until they ate of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, Adam and Eve did not feel ashamed of their bodies and they didn’t even think to hide their nakedness…
Yet when they were hiding and God said “where are you?” and they said “we were ashamed of our nakedness and afraid of you and so we hid” and God was like, “wait. Who told you you were naked?”
Well, that would be the deceiver. See, if God says who told you you were naked then obviously the shame they felt didn’t come from God. It came from the serpent.
Because while Adam and Eve had done something wrong, what they felt wasn’t guilt. Guilt didn’t make them hide their nakedness…it was shame – which they didn’t have when they listened only to God. But having listened to a voice other than God’s tell them who they are, shame was able to write its own story in their very bodies – trying to erase the story of love written in them by their creator – replacing it instead with a story of good and bad.
When shame was introduced into Adam and Eve, I imagine them no longer standing up quite as straight. Gone was the un-self conscious poise endowed by their creator. When I picture the introduction of shame, I picture Adam and Eve slouching, hiding, becoming small.
For some reason God allows us to live in a world where alternatives to God’s voice of love exist (for instance, the serpent) and those alternatives to God’s voice of love are where shame originates and there is another term for alternatives to God’s voice and it is that which we call the demonic. Shame is demonic because shame lies about us and our value and our beauty and our worthiness to be loved. Even though it is God herself who created us and gave us value and made us beautiful and did this all in perfect love.
Which finally brings us back to the woman with the bent back.
Jesus sees her. He knows that the shame that binds her is from Satan and not from God. So Jesus again defeats the deceiver. He touches her. And the Greek word isn’t the word for Healed but more like the word for “freed’ or “released from bondage.” That shame which Satan has written inside of her –is scattered as her spine is unfurled by love. She stands up straight, her shoulders back, her chin raised, her eyes available to give and receive light and love and recognition. She stands among them with the full dignity afforded her by her creator. And what was the response of the religious leaders who witnessed this miracle. Was it love? No. It was knowledge of good and evil.
They responded to Jesus by saying that how dare he do the work of healing on the Sabbath and in turn Jesus was like, you want to be ashamed of something – then be ashamed of THAT. Be ashamed of choosing knowledge of good and evil over knowledge of God and God’s love.
Jesus puts to shame: shame itself.
As I thought of all this, I thought that if the body is the place where Satan sews shame then how amazing is it that a human body is also what God chose to take on to be with us?
That God would, as we say, slip into skin and walk among us…choosing to make God’s home in an actual human body – in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.
All of this is to say, let’s not forget that the body matters. Your body is holy and beautiful to God. Your young, old, fit, fat, cis, transitioning, queer, disabled, strong body. Because the body may have been where the devil put shame in the very beginning but also it is the body that God will resurrect on the last day. Now, I know that really actually believing in a literal resurrection of the body or even the actual physical resurrection of Christ’s body three days after his burial is not something a lot of liberals tend to confess. It’s intellectually suspicious to admit to believing such fantastical stuff. But the fact is, that the Gospels are almost disturbingly physical in nature. Jesus is born in a barn amongst straw and animals, he was accused of being a glutton and a drunk, he touched people deemed unclean and was flogged and even spat upon.
So given the physical reality of the Gospel, this Christianity thing just has to be more than ideas for your head, it must also be salvation for your body. For after all, it is the human body in which God placed God’s image, the imago dei. I might piss off some of you outdoorsy nature freaks – but God could have chosen to place the imago dei – the image of God in the mountains, but instead she put it in our bodies. Bodies created in the image of their creator. We might experience the awesomeness of God in the mountains…but we see the image of God in the human body in all its perfectly glorious diversity.
I just can’t overstate the significance of this. Because while shame might be demonic and might pull us low with bent back, it is still no match for a God who goes to the cross, takes profound humiliation and insult into his body and responds with only forgiveness and love and then three days later defeats sin, death AND the devil by rising from the dead.
So beloved of God, let us put shame to shame as our Lord taught us. Because we are embodied souls. God slipped into human skin because God saves us in our bodies, not from our bodies. God saves us from the sin of believing our bodies are evil and need to be destroyed, or disciplined, or ignored. We have a body that comes from God. We are part of the larger body of Christ and we are saved through a body on the cross and at the table. The body of Christ broken for us so that we may know God’s love in our own broken bodies.
So as you come today to receive this body and blood of Christ, stand up straight as you are able. Do not be deceived by shame…Stand with the dignity and beauty afforded you by your creator. For you were meant do stand straight.
Amen.
About Nadia Bolz Weber
I am the founding Pastor at House for All Sinners and Saints in Denver, Colorado. We are an urban liturgical community with a progressive yet deeply rooted theological imagination. Learn more atwww.houseforall.org
04 September 2014
30 August 2013
CREATING A LIFE THAT REFLECTS YOUR VALUES AND SATISFIES YOUR SOUL IS A RARE ACHIEVMENT
JUST think about this....Over three years ago I decided to change the way I define myself. I have a job but it is not my life. So when I meet someone new, or someone I haven't seen in a while, and am asked what I do I tell them with what I do, all the things I like to do and what I am interested in. Their expressions are hysterical, I can see the wheels turning, know they are thinking 'He doesn't look rich" and 'Doesn't he have a job?'. And when I am done telling them about what I do in my life they ask ' But what is your job?' and I tell them I have a job but it is not my life and their first question was 'What do you do?' Most I the time I never get around to telling them what my job is......
13 September 2010
SERMON ON THE WOMAN WITH THE BENT BACK 12SEP10
FROM the lady preacher who calls her blog 'Sarcastic Lutheran', she often post great sermons and life lessons. Click the header to go to her blog.....you'll have to go there to see what other have e mailed her in response to her request......
Sermon on the Woman With the Bent Back
Luke 13:10-17
10Now he was teaching in one of the synagogues on the sabbath. 11And just then there appeared a woman with a spirit that had crippled her for eighteen years. She was bent over and was quite unable to stand up straight. 12When Jesus saw her, he called her over and said, “Woman, you are set free from your ailment.” 13When he laid his hands on her, immediately she stood up straight and began praising God. 14But the leader of the synagogue, indignant because Jesus had cured on the sabbath, kept saying to the crowd, “There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured, and not on the sabbath day.” 15But the Lord answered him and said, “You hypocrites! Does not each of you on the sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the manger, and lead it away to give it water? 16And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage on the sabbath day?” 17When he said this, all his opponents were put to shame; and the entire crowd was rejoicing at all the wonderful things that he was doing.
We know very little about the woman who was healed in our text today. The text is silent on the question of why was she healed and others weren’t. We don’t know why she bore the pain and humiliation of a bent back. Perhaps modern physiologists might be able to give a diagnoses, you know, now that we know SO much about human beings. Perhaps the source of her crippled physique was chiropractic in nature, perhaps a lack of calcium. Medically there’s only conjecture on our side of the 2,000 years that separate us from her.
None of us may have ever experienced the spinal reality of such a thing but The infirmity of the woman who was healed in our text for today seems spiritually familiar doesn’t it? Because her collapsed posture is the physical representation of being se encurvatus en se…, the self curved in on the self which, incidentally, is Luther’s definition of sin. Myopically unconcerned for anything but the self and having no thought for God or the neighbor. In other words, bent in a manner in which we see nothing but our own feet. We can come by it naturally – embodying the messages we receive from society and our families and our selves – that we are not thin enough, smart enough, rich enough, like our sister enough, or enough enough. This can just bend us in. Then add to it our cultural obsession with the self and the notion that we are our own Gods and the result is a deformity of identity. One particularly insidious example being our inability to forgive ourselves for not being God. For not being God! For making mistakes and getting things wrong and not hitting the mark. Hard to say which is worse – trying to be God for myself, or punishing myself for not managing to do something that isn’t actually possible in the first place.. What bends us over so that we see only self are the voices from inside or outside that try to overpower the sound of God naming us as God’s own.
It’s hard to say what it was like for her that day when everything changed. We think of this text in Luke as a healing narrative but really it was nothing less than an exorcism. Well, that and another opportunity for Jesus to pick a fight with the nice religious folks since all of this happened on the Sabbath. In all fairness the leaders of the synagogue were just doing their job when they said to the crowds that it was the Sabbath day of rest and not a time for healings. But see, Jesus does not violate the Sabbath by healing her. He fulfills it. By healing her he actually does Sabbath TO her. He physically embodies in her what Sabbath is, namely a time for putting aside our handiwork so that we might witness the handiwork of God. She is passive, in the midst of the faithful where she is restored to an upright position, no longer turned in on herself and is named as a Child of God’s promises. That sounds pretty sabbathy to me.
After she is seen, touched, and healed by Christ, she is named by him as a daughter of Abraham and restored to the dignity and wholeness of being a child of the promise. You know, this is the only place in the Bible where the term daughter of Abraham appears. Here Jesus places her in the history of God’s promises. And the promise to which she has claim...the promise to Abraham was not that his children and children’s children would be super rich and important and fabulous…the promise to Abraham was that his descendants would be a blessing to all nations. The good news for Abraham had little do with himself and had a lot to do with God’s love for the whole world.
So this daughter of Abraham is blessed to be a blessing. She encounters the Christ and For the first time in 18 years stands upright and praises God not because she got what she wanted but because praise is simply the consequence of wholeness.
Here’s where we finally learn what the purpose of her healing was. The purpose of her healing is not fulfilled when she stands up straight and it’s not fulfilled when she is named and it’s not fulfilled when she praises God. The healing is completed when the community witnesses new life in their midst and rejoices. In other words, her healing from God had less to do with her and more to do with God’s love for the whole world.
Having seen God’s mercy in the upright body of this daughter of Abraham, the community rejoices for having God in their midst. Right there in the mess of their broken lives and fractured hopes and crippled bodies. Right there in the midst of the hypocrites and religious legalists. There is where God shows up.
It’s the same for you actually. Your encounter with God’s grace has a purpose. Your being freed from the tyranny of self has a purpose. Your being acted upon by God…being made whole has a purpose: and it’s not so that you can collect higher self-esteem and a sense of well-being in order to Spiritually feather your nest. God does all of this for the good of your neighbor. It’s always been like that with God. You know why God gave us the 10 commandments? Because God demands obedience? So that you will be happy? nope. Because God loves your neighbor and would prefer you not steal from them or sleep with their husbands.
Having been restored by God, having been healed of being bent in on herself, this daughter of Abraham then bore Christ into her community. So if you too have been freed from bondage, if you have been shown selfless love, raised from the dead, restored to wholeness it is for the benefit of the community. Don’t keep it to yourself. Because like the bent woman, you really are blessed to be a blessing.
This week I asked you to email me examples of where God is healing you where you feel free and where you still feel bound. So, as an experience of doing Sabbath to each other hear now where God is at work.
04 February 2010
SILENCE FREES US....from 'FREEDOM OF SIMPLICITY' by RICHARD FOSTER
Something I need to learn and practice.....
Silence frees us from the need to control others ... A frantic stream of words flows from us in an attempt to straighten others out. We want so desperately for them to agree with us, to see things our way. We evaluate people, judge people, condemn people. We devour people with our words. Silence is one of the deepest Disciplines of the Spirit simply because it puts the stopper on that.
- Richard Foster, from his book Freedom of Simplicity
Silence frees us from the need to control others ... A frantic stream of words flows from us in an attempt to straighten others out. We want so desperately for them to agree with us, to see things our way. We evaluate people, judge people, condemn people. We devour people with our words. Silence is one of the deepest Disciplines of the Spirit simply because it puts the stopper on that.
- Richard Foster, from his book Freedom of Simplicity
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