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"The Toxic Nature Of Shame"
1 Corinthians 1:18-31
January 30, 2011

For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us
who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written, “I will destroy the wisdom of
the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.” Where is the one who is
wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made
foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not
know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation,
to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we
proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to
those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the
wisdom of God. For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s
weakness is stronger than human strength. Consider your own call, brothers and
sisters: not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not
many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise;
God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and
despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that
no one might boast in the presence of God. He is the source of your life in Christ
Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and
redemption, in order that, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.”

Last week I spoke of the troubles of this Corinthian church, and about how the
community seemed to be torn apart, and I did a bit of wondering about how our own
congregation has seemed to have missed out on that pattern of congregations often
finding themselves in deep conflict.  What I wanted to do this week, with this text before
us, is explore the deeper reason why this Corinthian church seems to have fallen into
theologically armed camps, with various sides taking on well-known leaders as their
various saints, justifying their point of view as being those that were espoused by
Cephas or Apollo, or other well-known leaders of the early church.  Why did this
community implode so badly?  Certainly we know the symptoms of the conflict, and Paul
in this letter certainly attempts to treat them in the later chapters, but what was the
disease, that thing, that germ, that made them so ill at ease, dis-eased, in the first
place, so as to cause them to go into that defcon 5 level of conflict you see in some
very troubled congregations even nowadays?  

Well, we can never really know for sure, of course, but I do think there is some sort of
clue left by Paul right here in this opening part of this letter to the church at Corinth.  
Almost right from the beginning, Paul feels compelled to address an issue that is not
our issue and certainly doesn’t bother us, and that issue seems to be around shame,
the shame they were feeling as fairly newly minted followers of Christ.  As I’ve said
many times before, writers in the New Testament often answer questions in the first
century that no one in the 21st century is asking.  This is one of those moments, I think,
because Paul seems to be making the case that these early Christians have nothing to
be ashamed of, in this Christ, and especially in the means and manner of his death.  In
our own times, we never think of being a Christian as shameful thing, as an
embarrassment.   But what we often miss is that the way Christ died, to be crucified like
a common criminal, was seen not merely as a mere fact, but was seen as blot against
Jesus and his message, and those that proclaimed his message.  There was no more
shameful way to die than crucifixion in the Roman world, no more scandalous way of
breathing your last breath than to be beaten, stripped nude, battered, mocked, and
then publicly displayed for all the world to see.  

And if you were an enemy of the Christian faith and you wanted confirmation about the
absurdity of this so called Messiah and his message, you would have only had to look
at the way that this Jesus died, so goes the reasoning of the ancient world.  If your God
or gods abandon you in your time of need, then obviously you and your message are
surely discredited, and a certainly worthy of being mocked and made fun of.  What a
bunch of losers—losers following after a loser God, crucified up there next to common
thieves, rapists, murderers.  For them, it’s like claiming that the guy they just executed
at the penitentiary is now the savior of the world—“really,” they would sneer at you,
“you mean the guy they just strapped down and shot through with death dealing
drugs?”  This is what your God looks like?  A powerless god?  Really?  There were a lot
of absurd claims out there amongst the multitude of religions throughout the Roman
world, but few were as astoundingly absurd as the god who gets crucified like a
common pickpocket, the very claim made by these early Christians.  You can only
imagine the rolled eyes, the sneers, the laughter emanating from many in the Roman
world, and no doubt that had come to affect the psyche of this Christian community,
and ultimately, caused many to feel the shame that their enemies felt they should carry
for following after such an obviously ridiculous God.   

And so Paul in our text today confronts those feelings of shame amongst those early
Christians, making his case that the Christian message about this crucified Christ, this
crucified Savior, this loser Savior, is not one that’s ever going to make sense in a world
that prized power and strength and winning, like the Roman world did.  The wisdom of
the world, to use Paul’s language here, is that “might makes right,” and that winners
win, and losers lose.  And yet Paul says that, in fact, that worldly logic has been
confronted and destroyed in the life and death of this Jesus of Nazareth, this Christ.  
Being smarter and stronger, they matter not to God, and in this Christ the world’s logic
gets answered with God’s logic—one can win by losing, and one can be stronger by
being weaker, by choosing the way of love rather than the way of violence and hate.  
The church at Corinth had been shamed by a larger culture that said that Christians
were fools and weaklings because they followed a crucified Savior killed like a common
criminal.  And so, not surprisingly, it was the lowly who embraced the message, who
saw in the words of those early evangelists, some truth, in that radical idea, that their
lives were worth something, that these lowly people, with no power, were people that
God gave a damn about.  

There is a piece of a wonderful poem by the poet Adrienne Rich that captures that
idea, the despair of the nobodies in the world, and yet who somehow and someway
believe that God is for them, is on the side of the weak and powerless rather than for
the strong and powerful.  Rich writes:  

My heart is moved by all I cannot save:
so much has been destroyed

I have to cast my lot with those
who age after age, perversely,

with no extraordinary power
reconstitute the world

In that early Christian church, these Corinthian Christians had come to believe that God
had thrown in his lot with them, in this moment, in this Christ, and if so, they would and
could do the same, with each other, and with God.  They would take the radical step of
throwing in their lot with this shameful criminal who died a criminal’s death, the worse
shameful death the Roman Empire could conjure up, and they would gamble on a God
who would win by losing, in this Jesus of Nazareth, a Savior who would reconstitute the
world with a new constitution, built on love rather than power.  

But still, to believe such a thing, is not to immunize oneself from the shame they had
been infected with in that Roman culture all around them, the culture that said the
winning is all that mattered, that might makes right, the rich are rich because the gods
reward the good, and the poor are poor because the gods punish the bad.  To be of
this religion, of this Christian faith, to believe in this God, was not easy an easy thing,
and so that infection of shame surely had crept into that church.  As someone like
myself who has served communities where a toxic shame was feed people from their
childhood, shame about who they loved and how they loved, I’ve seen the corrosive
and dysfunctional way shame can manifest itself in a particular community.  Toxic
shame makes people hold on fast to their points of view, cling to other saviors and
pastors they think manifest what they do not find in themselves, and toxic shame, oddly
enough, makes people so sure of themselves that they can excuse any destructive
behavior as the awful price that had to be paid for the sake of saving others.  

I have no doubt that much of the dysfunction going on in that Corinthian church is
traced back to the poison they had been fed in their Roman culture, a culture that said
that all that matters is to be on the side that wins, that conquers rather than is
conquered, and here they were, choosing to be with those who have lost their god to
the cross.  Paul knows it too, I think, and that is why he is writes these words, words
about God confounding the wisdom of the so-called wise, and affirming their goodness
by reminding them that God has chosen losers, losers like them, to make known God’s
love for all in this Jesus of Nazareth.  

Now, the very notion of shame is complicated, it’s more complicated than most have
ever really considered.  The word “shame” is actually derived from an older word
meaning “to cover,” which is often a natural expression of shame in us humans, the
lowering of one’s eyes, the covering of the face.  There has been some spirited debate
about whether or not shame is a good thing, and some have argued that we are a
cultural that has lost all sense of personal shame and we ought to recover that sense
of shame, so as to re-connect and re-bind a culture that seems to be spinning out of
control.  I admit that I’m a bit wary of those kinds of call for a revitalization of shame as a
weapon of social control, mostly because of the thorny question of who gets to decide
what one should be ashamed of—there are those that think I should be ashamed of
falling in love with Douglas, and others that do not, so who decides what we feed our
children when it comes to the diet of what is shameful and what is not?  I know many of
us experienced that diet of shame and now realize that we were, in fact, fed poison, with
our mother’s milk, as the poet Audre Lorde has said in one of her more famous poems.  

However, there is no doubt that there are things to be ashamed of, but what those
things are is certainly up for debate, even within the Christian community.  Perhaps we
should talk about guilt when such things come up, because there really can be such a
thing as good guilt and bad guilt.  Good guilt makes us aware of our real mistakes, and
call us to do better the next time.  But bad guilt, what the therapist John Bradshaw calls
“toxic shame,” can be so destructive as to destroy one’s life.  Bradshaw writes this:
"According to Dr. Pat Carnes at Golden Valley, there are presently 131 million addicts
in the United States. These statistics include addictions like eating, starving, vomiting,
gambling, working, buying, loving and the rituals acted out in sexual addiction. All
addictions are rooted in what I've called toxic shame. Toxic shame is the feeling of
being flawed and defective as a human person. Unlike guilt which is about actions that
transgress our norms of value, toxic shame is about our personal being. Guilt says, 'I
made a mistake,' while toxic shame says, 'I am a mistake.' Toxic shame is fostered by
norms which measure us, especially our sense of worth. Toxic shame is covered up by
perfectionism, power, control, judgment, criticism and blame. And these are the very
qualities spawned by blind obedience.”  John Bradshaw, "The Family," The Way Ahead:
A Visionary Perspective for the New Millennium, ed. Eddie Shapiro and Debbie Shapiro
(Rockport, Mass.: Element, 1992), 73-74.

Think about that for a minute: each of things Bradshaw that lists right there in that
passage I just read you was no doubt going on in that Corinthian church—the
perfectionism around the perfect beliefs, the power play going on between different
elements of that church, the control some wanted to wield over others, and the
judgment each side was laying on each other—and, of course, the criticism and blame
slung about that community in this first century “fight to the finish.”  But these
dysfunctional ways of beings don’t just happen in church families—they also happen in
our own families and I suspect there is not a person in this room that, with some time,
that couldn’t eventually trace out some of the ways that shame has wrecked a
destructive path through their home and family.  Shame makes parents over indulge
their kids, or maybe even ignore them; shame makes people buy houses they can’t
afford, and take on debt they cannot carry easily, and shame, if Bradshaw is right, is at
the root of so many of the addictions that wreck havoc on our families and friends.  

What is the solution for this disease within us, and sometimes within our own Christian
communities?  I actually think the solution is at least partially found in taking Paul’s
advice seriously here, that in our weaknesses, in our failures, in our many moments of
not measuring up, of not being smart enough, strong enough, wealthy enough, secure
enough, it is in those moments that God can show us that in our worst times we are
often at our best, that in those moments of losing everything, we can gain back the
world, and that God can take a moment when we too felt we had been crucified, and
God can make that moment into something else, make it into a moment of resurrection.  
God takes all those moments when we thought we were the mistake, those moments
when didn’t realize that we had just simply made a mistake, and makes them into a
moment of hope.  God is taking what is foolish in this world, the losers of the world, the
nobodies of this world, and making them winners, but in doing so God has changed the
very definitions of what it means to win and what it means to lose.  The philosopher
Friedrich Nietzsche once complained that Christianity was the religion of losers, and,
thankfully, he was right, though he certainly did not mean it as a compliment.  Shame
about losing and being a loser almost destroyed that church in Corinth, but Paul
reminds them that the Christ they follow wants them to let go of their shame and
embrace him, this one from Nazareth who has lost everything for their sake.  I like the
story that Ann Landers tells about a woman who was stark-naked and just about to step
into the shower when the doorbell rang. She hollered, "Who is it?" He shouted back,
"It's the blind man." She figured it was safe, so she opened the door. He looked at her
in shock and asked, "Where do you want me to hang these blinds, lady?"   (Ann
Landers, The Washington Post, October 13, 1998)  Now, that is where Lander’s story
ends, but I would add to it and I would end the story with the woman not slamming the
door, and running back to the bathroom, absolutely horrified that she was caught in the
nude, but, instead, I would have her pointing to the empty window, and saying, “right
over there.”  Now, I know that it makes less funny, but I think the point is that to live in
Christ is to choose to own the moments where we stumble, and believe that God will
make some good out of those moments, resurrection out of cross, and maybe we’ll
even get some window blinds out of a moment embarrassing vulnerability.  Amen.