Today's sermon is about the deconstruction of language, particularly religious language, that we have often experienced as shaming or judgmental.
I want to begin today's sermon with a meditative exercise. If you will, seat yourself comfortably in your chairs, close your eyes for a moment. Now, take a deep breath and think back to your early childhood memories when you were first exposed to religion, first exposed to God. Go back to your earliest memories of church. Think about how you felt in church. Did you feel safe or scared or bored? Open yourself to those early feelings and experiences. Think about what you were asked to believe and how you were expected to behave. What messages did you receive that made you feel good about yourself? What message made you feel bad about yourself? Did your experiences of church make you feel safe or fearful? Try to remember what might have made you feel that way. Now open your eyes, come back fully into the present time and place. Some of you may very well have had some troubling feelings and thoughts as your childhood memories surfaced. Some of you may simply have gone to sleep. Those of you who went to sleep missed the free hot-dogs and coke.
I asked you to participate in this exercise precisely because I think many negative feelings that might have surfaced about church came from how the words that we heard and how language was used to wound and not to heal. It would seem that many of these words came from a place of shame instead of Grace.
What I hope to do this morning is explore how some of the words we heard and used came to be, for us,"forbidden" words, words like: God, Sin, salvation, soul, blessing, grace, evil, redemption, revelation, resurrection, lord, and not to be excluded, Amen.
These are some of the words likely to have been on your own list of "forbidden" words. These are the words that call up images and feelings that didn't feel right. While your list will naturally differ from your neighbor's, they share at least one thing in common: they can and do cause you pain and emotional turmoil. For the fortunate ones here today these words have no negative connotations. Most likely you had good teachers, pastors and mentors as you matured religiously. These words are highly charged precisely because of the power we give them. Our response to them is often a knee-jerk reaction, bordering on the irrational. We tend to close down mentally and emotionally because of the images these words call forth. The question is, why do these words produce such strong emotional and visceral responses? What lies behind our strong reactions to them? Why do these words hurt so much? That's what I intend to explore with you today.
The primary reason I think these words can hurt so much is that they remind us of experiences of shame, often beginning in our early childhood, a time when we had little power over our lives, and less understanding of what people meant by their words, and still less ability to understand why they made us feel so bad. Our early childhood experiences have conditioned our adult response. We experience emotional distress because these words bring back many of the old childhood feelings of being defective, humiliated, inferior and of being a failure. It was as if these words judged us wanting and we had no idea why that was so. Our first ingrained response to such judgment was to feel ashamed. Unfortunately, for too many of us, we experienced this early sense of shame in our first encounter with church, a place that should have been safe, a place that should have enriched us even as it enfolded us in love.
I remember my former wife, Jane, telling me how she experienced this kind of shame. It began when she was forced to go to church, very much against her will.
She remembered those Sunday morning experiences of shame as if they had happened just yesterday. She was surprised that in telling her story, the feeling called forth was still raw. Even after forty years, the words still hurt. Such is the power of church and religious language.
She remembered hearing the message that she was a sinner, and because she was, Jesus had to die. She was made to feel personally responsible for killing someone she didn't even know. Somehow, without any understanding of what she had done, Christ suffered and died for her sins.
As she began to grow in wisdom, she began to question what this all meant. Asking questions then became another occasion to be shamed. A good girl accepted what the minister, Sunday school teachers, parents and other adults said. Questioning was an affront to those in positions of authority. Just asking the question, what does this or that mean, became an occasion for a child to be shamed, either by the institution of the church or those who dwelled within its walls.
The people she should have been able to trust, those who mentored her along her journey to faith, became her accusers. Each of them helped fuse the words of faith to an experience of shame. It is not surprising, then, that her feelings of shame would cause her to reject the language of God's love. For those of us who had a similar experience, there is a lurking sense of betrayal deep within our hearts. This was not the way to learn to love God or yourself. Such a betrayal, and I don't think that is too strong a word to use, must be grieved before we can begin to accept the language of faith as an instrument of Grace rather than the hammer of shame.
Unfortunately, this is an all too universal experience. It doesn't much matter whether we are Christian, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist or Hindu. Jane's feeling of shame is also ours. Given such a history, it doesn't take much to tap into a host of uncomfortable thoughts, troublesome behaviors, and a sense of spiritual abuse and betrayal.
Given such an experience of shame, why wouldn't we all react with a sense of self-hatred, played out in any number of unhealthy ways? For some of us, our response takes the form of a kind of paralysis, an inability to react rationally to the words of faith. For others, there is a loss of energy, escapism, withdrawal, perfectionism, negative self-criticism, and not surprising, rage. Sometimes we might get just a little bit cranky with the person sitting next to us on Sunday morning.
Like many of you, I have had my share of trouble with some of these words. For me it was Christ the Savior. The words stuck in my throat. The divinity of Christ had been used to persecute the Jews, of whom I was one. Fortunately, I began to understand that each of us, individually and collectively, allows these words to become "forbidden." All of these words can affect us for good or ill, but we have the power to determine which it will be.
This lesson was brought home to me in a most powerful manner. As a Unitarian Universalist, I had a good deal of trouble with the concept of Grace. This was especially true for me since at the time this happened, I considered my self an agnostic. I was troubled about how to describe adequately an experience of Grace while avoiding the use of the word.
I had what I can only describe as an experience of Grace. Even after nine years I still feel uncomfortable talking about this vision. I don't know what else to call it, though. Words tend to diminish the profound nature of my experience.
My vision was of a bearded man bathed in yellow light. I reached up to this apparition with a sure sense of healing. I cried over and over again, "Oh, God, oh God." It was not that the image in my vision was God, but that I was seeing something beyond my understanding and previous knowledge. What I do know is that I was transformed. This experience brought forth tears of joy and healing. I remember holding myself and feeling totally at peace, as if I had just been told, without words, that I was loved just as I am, a child of God, worthy of her love. I had an unshakable sense of healing and well being. The child within was safe and secure, beyond the betrayal of those who would use language to hurt not to heal.
This healing yellow-orange light entered my outstretched hands and coursed through my body, setting me at peace. I have no other word but Grace to describe what I felt. Till that moment, I had never had a similar experience and have not since. Maybe, one only has such a transformation once in a lifetime. If so, that would be enough. I felt blessed.
This experience taught me that we could look at words and choose how we respond to them. Each of us here is given the opportunity to decide whether a word is put on the forbidden list or taken off the list. Grace is no longer on my list. Since then I have resolved not to let words shame me.
For far too many of us, our feelings of shame are still very strong, and therefore so is our conditioned response to these words. But even shame can be good, in the sense that it can be temporary and a way that tells us that there is something wrong with our relationship with the rest of the world. It tells us that our connections with other people are broken and in need of repair.
These words do not have to be forbidden if we stay open to all of their nuances and possibilities of understanding. Such words are part of our religious heritage. We do not have to be trapped into accepting someone else's definition of what these words mean. We can embrace these words, rather then tremble before them. They are rich in meaning and can be devoid of judgment and shame if we choose. We can redefine the words that became forbidden during our early childhood.
As thinking, rational Unitarian Universalists we can re-image these words and allow them to serve us on our journey towards wholeness.
All of these so-called "forbidden words" rise out of a place of grace or shame. If our words come from a place of brokenness, they are a source of shame. If they come from a place of wholeness deep within us, a place where we feel loved and accepted, then they do indeed come from a place of grace. My prayer for all of us is that the words that we use and the meanings that we give and take from them, heal us, and lead us to feel grace and not shame.
Let it be!!
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