Naked and No Longer
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CREATION M4 SERMON NOTES November 8. 2009
TITLE: Naked and No Longer Ashamed
Ken Shigematsu and Lee Kosa
TEXT: Genesis 3: 1-12
BIG IDEA: When we turn from God, we experience a sense of nakedness and a need to be covered by God.
PROP: real fig leaves, blanket (Lee).
When I was working in Japan, I remember our family had an informal family reunion just north of Tokyo at my grandfather’s luxurious country club. Our family had a large oval table by the window overlooking the golf course that my grandfather had designed with Robert Trent Jones. My strict grandfather was at the head of the table in suit and bolo tie. The men at the table were dressed in suits and ties and the women in dresses. I remember my cousin Blaik from Hawaii came to the dinner late… dressed in faded ripped jeans and a T shirt… My grandfather glared at him. Blaik walked over to the table and said (in English) what’s up guys and then walked over to me and my young sister and asked, “dudes… like uh… and I’m a little under dressed?” My sister and I said, “No… don’t worry about it.” We’re lying through our teeth.
Have you ever felt underdressed and ashamed?
Have you ever wondered where our sense of shame for originated?
Mark Twain said, “Man is the only animal that blushes and the only animal that needs to.”
Have you wondered why humans blush?
Today, we’re going to look at why human beings blush and experience shame and how God helps overcome.
If you have your Bibles please turn to Genesis 3:
GENESIS 3: 1-12:
1 Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, "Did God really say, 'You must not eat from any tree in the garden'?"
2 The woman said to the serpent, "We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, 3 but God did say, 'You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.' "
4 "You will not certainly die," the serpent said to the woman. 5 "For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil."
6 When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. 7 Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.
8 Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the LORD God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the LORD God among the trees of the garden. 9 But the LORD God called to the man, "Where are you?"
10 He answered, "I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid."
11 And he said, "Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?"
12 The man said, "The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it."
In Genesis 3, we read that the serpent (the devil) tells Eve that if she eats the fruit of the one tree that God has forbidden, the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, that her eyes will be opened and she will become wise and enlightened like God (Genesis 3:4). He promises she will be autonomous, free and fulfilled. More fully human.
When the devil tempts us to do something, he always promises that we will benefit in some way and suggests we’ll miss out if don’t go down a particular path.
(Do some of you remember the infomercial for the Ginsu knife set? They said the Ginsu cuts through frozen food like soft butter, chops wood, and cuts through a tin can--and will last forever and it’s only $9.99! The not so subtle sub-text is how could you survive without this?)
When devil tempts us, he always promises we’ll benefit in some way.
But, when Eve and Adam succumb to Eve’s temptation to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, are their lives, in fact, better off?
What actually happens to them? They immediately feel like something has been “taken” from them--they feel a sense of alienation and shame before God.
They also experience a sense of shame before themselves and before each other.
In Genesis 2:25 we read that before they sinned, Adam and his wife Eve were both naked, but they felt no shame.
But, in Genesis 3 we read that Adam and Eve sinned and they feel naked and ashamed.
One of the consequences for us of not trusting God and separating ourselves from his path is that we experience this sense of disconnection and shame between us and God, between us and ourselves, and between us and other people. We’re going to look at how we human beings experience shame and in these three ways and how we overcome this.
First we’ll see how when Adam and Eve eat the fruit, they experience this immediate sense of disconnection from God.
In verse 8 we read:
8 Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the LORD God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the LORD God among the trees of the garden.
The expression “the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day” is a symbolic way of saying that God was present and drawing close to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.
What do Adam and Eve do? They run and hide from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. Adam and Eve hide in the trees from God because they feel this sense of shame and alienation before God.
Rudolph Otto, the German theologian and author of the classic book, The Idea of the Holy, did extensive research on religious experience around the world. He discovered that wherever you go in the world you will find people who are both fascinated by God and fearful of God, people who want to both run to and run from God. He termed this feeling of simultaneous attraction and dread to God numinous awe. If you study the history of world religions, you will see in many cultures in many different times, and in many different parts of the world, people make some kind of sacrifice to God or the holy one.
Why is this? Is it because people feel drawn to God on the one hand, but on the other hand they also feel they are not worthy to enter the presence of God. So they feel they have to do something to earn God’s favour.
The stock market takes a catastrophic fall and a stock broker walks into a downtown cathedral and prays, “I’ll stop drinking, I’ll become a better husband and father if only you will help me out of this hole.” A woman is diagnosed with breast cancer and says, “God, bring me through this and I will offer up my life to you.”
One of the radioactive effects of sin is that we human beings don’t feel confident in God’s presence. We feel a sense of shame before God, so we feel that we have to bargain with God. We have to offer him something to be accepted.
So, sin disconnects from God; second, sin also disconnects us from ourselves. When Adam and Eve sin against God, they feel a sense of shame before God, but they also feel this sense of nakedness and shame before themselves.
We read in Genesis 3 of how the devil promises Eve and Adam that if they separate from God and eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil their eyes will be open, they will be wise like God, free and fulfilled—more fully human. But when they separate from God how do they feel?
They feel like something has been taken from them: they feel their nakedness and their shame. They no longer feel at ease with themselves… they feel inadequate. They feel like they need to cover themselves with fig leaves (use PROP), they need to reach for something to give themselves a sense of security and protection.
In Albert Camus’s novel, The Fall, there is a successful lawyer named Clamence, a respected but proud man. Clamence views himself as an upright, decent, and generous human being. He represents widows and orphans as a defence lawyer. He tries to be generous. He never accepts bribes. He sleeps with many different women, but he never hurts anyone… he reasons. All of this changes one night when a young woman attempts suicide by plunging off a bridge into a river, and Clamence does nothing to rescue her. In that moment he realizes who he really is... He notices his selfishness, his cowardice, his hypocrisy... that he is a fallen and broken human being just like everyone else.
Sometimes we feel a deep sense of shame, like Clamence, about ourselves because of something we have not done, or because something we have done.
Sometimes we feel shame before ourselves because we cannot meet the lofty expectations of our parents or someone significant in our lives.
Sometime we feel shame before ourselves because of a sin of someone else has perpetrated against us.
Canadian hockey star Theo Fleury has written an autobiography called Playing With Fire. In that book he describes how he was sexually abused by his junior coach Graham James. The trauma caused him to feel overwhelming in shame. He writes “an absolute nightmare every day of my life.” Fleury says, “The direct result of my being abused was that I became a f—ing raging, alcoholic lunatic… I no longer had faith in myself or my own judgment. And when you come down to it, that’s all a person has. Once it’s gone, how do you get it back?”
And to state the obvious, Fleury’s sense of shame over his abuse was not his fault.
And if you have been abused by someone who had some kind of power over you, you feel shame. It is not your fault.
Sometimes we can feel a sense shame before ourselves not because of things we have done or not done, but because of things that been have done to us.
Sometimes for no apparent reason, as such, we simply feel a sense of deficiency…a sense of lack…a being naked, a tree without bark.
(Because of this sense of shame before ourselves like Adam and Eve, we reach for fig leaf to cover our nakedness and shame.
Madonna, who seems to be always re-inventing herself, says, “I am driven to succeed out of the fear of feeling mediocre and uninteresting.”
Arnold Schwarzenegger, the governor of California, said, “I feel driven to achieve because growing up I never felt good enough, or smart enough, or strong enough.” But it is not just Madonna and the governator…
We all have “fig leaves.” I have them. You have them. For some of us our fig leaf is our education. For others it is our accomplishment at work, our popularity, our family, our religious practice, being a good person. But we need something to cover us.)
We human beings feel a sense of shame before God, before ourselves, and, third, before each other. After Adam and Eve sinned by eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they were not only needing to cover themselves with fig leaves because they felt inadequate in and of themselves, but because they felt inadequate before each other. Before they sinned, they were naked and unashamed, and now they are naked and ashamed before each other.
As we read on, we see in this story that trust has broken down between Adam and Eve as Adam blames Eve for eating the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Sin causes us to feel this shame and separation before each other.
As commentators Melvin Hugen and Cornelius Plantinga Jr. put it, after Adam and Eve sinned, “It wasn’t that they merely flinched when their partner’s gaze dipped southward; it was that they had trouble looking into each other’s eyes.” Part of us, instead of wanting to look one another in the face, we want to run and hide.
John Powell wrote a book called Why Am I Afraid to Tell You Who I Am? “If I tell you who I am, you may not like who I am, and it’s all that I have.”
So rather than risk rejection or being laughed at or someone yawning at you, it may feel safer to reach for a fig leaf and hide, and as we talked about a couple of weeks ago, spin an image of ourselves in the hopes of being accepted. But the problem is that when we spin an image of ourselves that makes us look better than we are, and when someone accepts that image of us, we are not sure that they are accepting us or the image that we have spun.
At this time I invite Lee Kosa to share part of his story with us.
Growing up my family we didn’t record a lot of home videos. In fact I only know of 3.
One is of some random soccer game I was in.
Another is of a Grade 4 school play, where I played Romeo in Shakespeare’s ‘Romeo and Juliet.’ In the video I have on black tights and look incredibly awkward on stage. This video has somehow disappeared and despite my mom’s frequent accusations that I destroyed it, I have no idea where it went.
The third home video I remember is of my brother’s first haircut.
My brother was about 2 at the time and I was about 7. In the video our whole family is in a room at a barber’s shop. In the room they have a fake horse from a carousel for the little kids to sit on, that is supposed to distract kids from the huge stranger with the large scissors who keep attacking their head. So my brother Jay in on the horse, my mom is holding him, and the barber is trying to cut Jay’s hair and Jay loses it and starts to cry, and my mom can’t console him.
My dad who is shooting the video, say’s something like, “Where is Lee? Lee get up there and sit with your brother.” My dad starts looking around for me in the room, the camera pans around back and forth, and then suddenly pans down, and a small yellow mound enters the frame, and then begins to slide out of the picture. And the yellow mound is me, hiding under my brother’s yellow blanket, looking something like this [sit up against drum kit wall with small yellow blanket over my body.]
I hated being the centre of attention when I was young. I hated having my photo taken, and I hated being in videos.
I just turned 30 two weeks ago, and growing up I used to hate my birthday, because my mom would have a party and I would be the centre of attention. Kids would come over and I would just want to hide. For some reason I felt ashamed to have so much attention turned to me.
In Grade 6 I had a very intense and passionate soccer coach. Whenever someone did something wrong during a scrimmage, he’d have us all freeze and explain what we did wrong and what we should have done differently. Whenever I had to freeze, I’d feel a lump in my throat as a watched the coach walk over to me and I felt the eyes of my teammates watching me. When the coach started talking to me, I’d cry, and I’d just want to hide. For some reason I felt ashamed to have so much attention turned to me.
My sense of shame was a combination my own sin, sin committed against me, and the sin of humanity. The effect of sin in my life gave me the sense that I was unworthy or deficient.
When people got close to me, I’d hide behind a blanket of shyness. When someone looked me in the eye, I’d turn away always afraid that if they looked to close, they might see my brokenness.
When the camera pointed at me, I’d hide as if the photo might reveal the ugliness I felt on the inside.
Even when I got married I couldn’t let my wife look too closely into my soul, because she might see the secret, dark, evil sin that scarred my heart.
When I became a Christian I kept God at arm’s length, or confined him to the Bible, out of fear that he might see how sinful, and full of shame I really was. God became very distant and scary.
I’d hide behind my blanket of shyness, because if anyone, my friends, God my wife got a glimpse of the real me, if they ever heard the kind of thoughts that ran through my head, if they ever felt the deep self-loathing inside of me, if they saw the real, broken me--I was terrified they would reject me as deficient, and unlovable.
So it was hard to get to know me, I was the shy one. If I opened myself up, took off the blanket, and people saw the real me and rejected me, that would have been devastating because the real me is all I’ve got. So It was better to remain hidden… shy, and, unknown, than known, hated, and rejected.
So here I am a shy, scared, shameful, hiding, sinner. Here Adam and Eve are too, shy, scared, shameful, hiding, sinners. And here we are all are. Hiding from one another, each with our different fig leaves, our different blankets. Some us with a blanket of humor, others shyness, others false confidence, others a good boy or good girl personna. You name it, we all have our different blankets and we all hide behind them at times. Isolated from each other, alienated from God.
But while we are cowering in shame, guilt and fear under our blankets, if we listen carefully we can hear God speaking. Can you hear him? Look what he is saying, vs. 9. “Where are you?”
And how do we hear that as sinners like Adam and Eve, hiding under our blankets? Is it WHERE ARE YOU!!!? [read very angrily with hostility]
In your mind do you hear a God is furious, yelling God, who can’t wait to get his hands on you so he can punish you? Does God want to launch into an angry interrogation so he can humiliate you?
That is what I thought for a long time.
But a few years ago I took the biggest risk of my life and began to take the blanket of shyness off, revealing my brokenness to other trusted friends. I exposed my sin to other people. I exposed the sins that have been committed against me… to other people. And as people saw what was behind the shyness, they accepted me. As I told God about my sin and described to him my specific shame, as I told him how deficient I was, he reached out and touched me. Jesus came alongside me. Friends came along side me, me wife came along side me. And as Christ and others have accepted me, the real me—God has brought profound healing and intimacy with others and with God into my life.
Yes, I still sin. Yes at times I still feel shameful. Yes, I still go back pick up this blanket [pick it up] and hide behind it. But now when I’m hiding from others, my wife, my friends, from God, when I’m scared, insecure, and anxious I hear God’s voice calling. “Where are you, Lee? I miss you. Yes, I see what you’ve done. Yes, I see how you feel. Yes, I hate sin too, but I love you more than I hate sin. That’s why I came. That’s why I allowed myself to be despised and rejected by others, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain. Like one from whom people hide their faces, I was despised, and seen as worthless. That’s why I took up your pain and bore your suffering. People thought I was punished by God, But I was pierced for your transgressions, I was crushed for your iniquities; the punishment that has brought you peace was on me, and by my wounds you are healed.”
Christ himself was stripped naked and humiliated on a cross, taking into himself our sin and our shame. Because he has taken upon himself my shame and your shame, we can come out from hiding. We don’t need to hide any more. There is no need for this [throw blanket] in God’s presence or in the presence of others.
And yet, we often forget, we get scared, shame washes over us, and we go back to our blankets, [pick it up] and hide.
And today many of us are here, myself included, with our blankets tucked away just in case. Some of us even have them on right now. And this morning, we sit and listen, to the voice of God as he whispers, “Where are you?” How do we hear him? How will we respond?
Let’s pray:
Like the loving father Jesus spoke of in Luke 15, God sees as his son as his daughter and says:
“I miss you. Yes I see what you’ve done… Yes I hate sin too, but I love you more than I hate sin… this is why I became a human being and died for you.
Will you throw away your blanket come out to me?
Will you throw away your blanket and become real before some trusted friends?”
CREATION M4 SERMON NOTES November 8. 2009
TITLE: Naked and No Longer Ashamed
Ken Shigematsu and Lee Kosa
TEXT: Genesis 3: 1-12
BIG IDEA: When we turn from God, we experience a sense of nakedness and a need to be covered by God.
PROP: real fig leaves, blanket (Lee).
When I was working in Japan, I remember our family had an informal family reunion just north of Tokyo at my grandfather’s luxurious country club. Our family had a large oval table by the window overlooking the golf course that my grandfather had designed with Robert Trent Jones. My strict grandfather was at the head of the table in suit and bolo tie. The men at the table were dressed in suits and ties and the women in dresses. I remember my cousin Blaik from Hawaii came to the dinner late… dressed in faded ripped jeans and a T shirt… My grandfather glared at him. Blaik walked over to the table and said (in English) what’s up guys and then walked over to me and my young sister and asked, “dudes… like uh… and I’m a little under dressed?” My sister and I said, “No… don’t worry about it.” We’re lying through our teeth.
Have you ever felt underdressed and ashamed?
Have you ever wondered where our sense of shame for originated?
Mark Twain said, “Man is the only animal that blushes and the only animal that needs to.”
Have you wondered why humans blush?
Today, we’re going to look at why human beings blush and experience shame and how God helps overcome.
If you have your Bibles please turn to Genesis 3:
GENESIS 3: 1-12:
1 Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, "Did God really say, 'You must not eat from any tree in the garden'?"
2 The woman said to the serpent, "We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, 3 but God did say, 'You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.' "
4 "You will not certainly die," the serpent said to the woman. 5 "For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil."
6 When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. 7 Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.
8 Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the LORD God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the LORD God among the trees of the garden. 9 But the LORD God called to the man, "Where are you?"
10 He answered, "I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid."
11 And he said, "Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?"
12 The man said, "The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it."
In Genesis 3, we read that the serpent (the devil) tells Eve that if she eats the fruit of the one tree that God has forbidden, the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, that her eyes will be opened and she will become wise and enlightened like God (Genesis 3:4). He promises she will be autonomous, free and fulfilled. More fully human.
When the devil tempts us to do something, he always promises that we will benefit in some way and suggests we’ll miss out if don’t go down a particular path.
(Do some of you remember the infomercial for the Ginsu knife set? They said the Ginsu cuts through frozen food like soft butter, chops wood, and cuts through a tin can--and will last forever and it’s only $9.99! The not so subtle sub-text is how could you survive without this?)
When devil tempts us, he always promises we’ll benefit in some way.
But, when Eve and Adam succumb to Eve’s temptation to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, are their lives, in fact, better off?
What actually happens to them? They immediately feel like something has been “taken” from them--they feel a sense of alienation and shame before God.
They also experience a sense of shame before themselves and before each other.
In Genesis 2:25 we read that before they sinned, Adam and his wife Eve were both naked, but they felt no shame.
But, in Genesis 3 we read that Adam and Eve sinned and they feel naked and ashamed.
One of the consequences for us of not trusting God and separating ourselves from his path is that we experience this sense of disconnection and shame between us and God, between us and ourselves, and between us and other people. We’re going to look at how we human beings experience shame and in these three ways and how we overcome this.
First we’ll see how when Adam and Eve eat the fruit, they experience this immediate sense of disconnection from God.
In verse 8 we read:
8 Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the LORD God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the LORD God among the trees of the garden.
The expression “the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day” is a symbolic way of saying that God was present and drawing close to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.
What do Adam and Eve do? They run and hide from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. Adam and Eve hide in the trees from God because they feel this sense of shame and alienation before God.
Rudolph Otto, the German theologian and author of the classic book, The Idea of the Holy, did extensive research on religious experience around the world. He discovered that wherever you go in the world you will find people who are both fascinated by God and fearful of God, people who want to both run to and run from God. He termed this feeling of simultaneous attraction and dread to God numinous awe. If you study the history of world religions, you will see in many cultures in many different times, and in many different parts of the world, people make some kind of sacrifice to God or the holy one.
Why is this? Is it because people feel drawn to God on the one hand, but on the other hand they also feel they are not worthy to enter the presence of God. So they feel they have to do something to earn God’s favour.
The stock market takes a catastrophic fall and a stock broker walks into a downtown cathedral and prays, “I’ll stop drinking, I’ll become a better husband and father if only you will help me out of this hole.” A woman is diagnosed with breast cancer and says, “God, bring me through this and I will offer up my life to you.”
One of the radioactive effects of sin is that we human beings don’t feel confident in God’s presence. We feel a sense of shame before God, so we feel that we have to bargain with God. We have to offer him something to be accepted.
So, sin disconnects from God; second, sin also disconnects us from ourselves. When Adam and Eve sin against God, they feel a sense of shame before God, but they also feel this sense of nakedness and shame before themselves.
We read in Genesis 3 of how the devil promises Eve and Adam that if they separate from God and eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil their eyes will be open, they will be wise like God, free and fulfilled—more fully human. But when they separate from God how do they feel?
They feel like something has been taken from them: they feel their nakedness and their shame. They no longer feel at ease with themselves… they feel inadequate. They feel like they need to cover themselves with fig leaves (use PROP), they need to reach for something to give themselves a sense of security and protection.
In Albert Camus’s novel, The Fall, there is a successful lawyer named Clamence, a respected but proud man. Clamence views himself as an upright, decent, and generous human being. He represents widows and orphans as a defence lawyer. He tries to be generous. He never accepts bribes. He sleeps with many different women, but he never hurts anyone… he reasons. All of this changes one night when a young woman attempts suicide by plunging off a bridge into a river, and Clamence does nothing to rescue her. In that moment he realizes who he really is... He notices his selfishness, his cowardice, his hypocrisy... that he is a fallen and broken human being just like everyone else.
Sometimes we feel a deep sense of shame, like Clamence, about ourselves because of something we have not done, or because something we have done.
Sometimes we feel shame before ourselves because we cannot meet the lofty expectations of our parents or someone significant in our lives.
Sometime we feel shame before ourselves because of a sin of someone else has perpetrated against us.
Canadian hockey star Theo Fleury has written an autobiography called Playing With Fire. In that book he describes how he was sexually abused by his junior coach Graham James. The trauma caused him to feel overwhelming in shame. He writes “an absolute nightmare every day of my life.” Fleury says, “The direct result of my being abused was that I became a f—ing raging, alcoholic lunatic… I no longer had faith in myself or my own judgment. And when you come down to it, that’s all a person has. Once it’s gone, how do you get it back?”
And to state the obvious, Fleury’s sense of shame over his abuse was not his fault.
And if you have been abused by someone who had some kind of power over you, you feel shame. It is not your fault.
Sometimes we can feel a sense shame before ourselves not because of things we have done or not done, but because of things that been have done to us.
Sometimes for no apparent reason, as such, we simply feel a sense of deficiency…a sense of lack…a being naked, a tree without bark.
(Because of this sense of shame before ourselves like Adam and Eve, we reach for fig leaf to cover our nakedness and shame.
Madonna, who seems to be always re-inventing herself, says, “I am driven to succeed out of the fear of feeling mediocre and uninteresting.”
Arnold Schwarzenegger, the governor of California, said, “I feel driven to achieve because growing up I never felt good enough, or smart enough, or strong enough.” But it is not just Madonna and the governator…
We all have “fig leaves.” I have them. You have them. For some of us our fig leaf is our education. For others it is our accomplishment at work, our popularity, our family, our religious practice, being a good person. But we need something to cover us.)
We human beings feel a sense of shame before God, before ourselves, and, third, before each other. After Adam and Eve sinned by eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they were not only needing to cover themselves with fig leaves because they felt inadequate in and of themselves, but because they felt inadequate before each other. Before they sinned, they were naked and unashamed, and now they are naked and ashamed before each other.
As we read on, we see in this story that trust has broken down between Adam and Eve as Adam blames Eve for eating the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Sin causes us to feel this shame and separation before each other.
As commentators Melvin Hugen and Cornelius Plantinga Jr. put it, after Adam and Eve sinned, “It wasn’t that they merely flinched when their partner’s gaze dipped southward; it was that they had trouble looking into each other’s eyes.” Part of us, instead of wanting to look one another in the face, we want to run and hide.
John Powell wrote a book called Why Am I Afraid to Tell You Who I Am? “If I tell you who I am, you may not like who I am, and it’s all that I have.”
So rather than risk rejection or being laughed at or someone yawning at you, it may feel safer to reach for a fig leaf and hide, and as we talked about a couple of weeks ago, spin an image of ourselves in the hopes of being accepted. But the problem is that when we spin an image of ourselves that makes us look better than we are, and when someone accepts that image of us, we are not sure that they are accepting us or the image that we have spun.
At this time I invite Lee Kosa to share part of his story with us.
Growing up my family we didn’t record a lot of home videos. In fact I only know of 3.
One is of some random soccer game I was in.
Another is of a Grade 4 school play, where I played Romeo in Shakespeare’s ‘Romeo and Juliet.’ In the video I have on black tights and look incredibly awkward on stage. This video has somehow disappeared and despite my mom’s frequent accusations that I destroyed it, I have no idea where it went.
The third home video I remember is of my brother’s first haircut.
My brother was about 2 at the time and I was about 7. In the video our whole family is in a room at a barber’s shop. In the room they have a fake horse from a carousel for the little kids to sit on, that is supposed to distract kids from the huge stranger with the large scissors who keep attacking their head. So my brother Jay in on the horse, my mom is holding him, and the barber is trying to cut Jay’s hair and Jay loses it and starts to cry, and my mom can’t console him.
My dad who is shooting the video, say’s something like, “Where is Lee? Lee get up there and sit with your brother.” My dad starts looking around for me in the room, the camera pans around back and forth, and then suddenly pans down, and a small yellow mound enters the frame, and then begins to slide out of the picture. And the yellow mound is me, hiding under my brother’s yellow blanket, looking something like this [sit up against drum kit wall with small yellow blanket over my body.]
I hated being the centre of attention when I was young. I hated having my photo taken, and I hated being in videos.
I just turned 30 two weeks ago, and growing up I used to hate my birthday, because my mom would have a party and I would be the centre of attention. Kids would come over and I would just want to hide. For some reason I felt ashamed to have so much attention turned to me.
In Grade 6 I had a very intense and passionate soccer coach. Whenever someone did something wrong during a scrimmage, he’d have us all freeze and explain what we did wrong and what we should have done differently. Whenever I had to freeze, I’d feel a lump in my throat as a watched the coach walk over to me and I felt the eyes of my teammates watching me. When the coach started talking to me, I’d cry, and I’d just want to hide. For some reason I felt ashamed to have so much attention turned to me.
My sense of shame was a combination my own sin, sin committed against me, and the sin of humanity. The effect of sin in my life gave me the sense that I was unworthy or deficient.
When people got close to me, I’d hide behind a blanket of shyness. When someone looked me in the eye, I’d turn away always afraid that if they looked to close, they might see my brokenness.
When the camera pointed at me, I’d hide as if the photo might reveal the ugliness I felt on the inside.
Even when I got married I couldn’t let my wife look too closely into my soul, because she might see the secret, dark, evil sin that scarred my heart.
When I became a Christian I kept God at arm’s length, or confined him to the Bible, out of fear that he might see how sinful, and full of shame I really was. God became very distant and scary.
I’d hide behind my blanket of shyness, because if anyone, my friends, God my wife got a glimpse of the real me, if they ever heard the kind of thoughts that ran through my head, if they ever felt the deep self-loathing inside of me, if they saw the real, broken me--I was terrified they would reject me as deficient, and unlovable.
So it was hard to get to know me, I was the shy one. If I opened myself up, took off the blanket, and people saw the real me and rejected me, that would have been devastating because the real me is all I’ve got. So It was better to remain hidden… shy, and, unknown, than known, hated, and rejected.
So here I am a shy, scared, shameful, hiding, sinner. Here Adam and Eve are too, shy, scared, shameful, hiding, sinners. And here we are all are. Hiding from one another, each with our different fig leaves, our different blankets. Some us with a blanket of humor, others shyness, others false confidence, others a good boy or good girl personna. You name it, we all have our different blankets and we all hide behind them at times. Isolated from each other, alienated from God.
But while we are cowering in shame, guilt and fear under our blankets, if we listen carefully we can hear God speaking. Can you hear him? Look what he is saying, vs. 9. “Where are you?”
And how do we hear that as sinners like Adam and Eve, hiding under our blankets? Is it WHERE ARE YOU!!!? [read very angrily with hostility]
In your mind do you hear a God is furious, yelling God, who can’t wait to get his hands on you so he can punish you? Does God want to launch into an angry interrogation so he can humiliate you?
That is what I thought for a long time.
But a few years ago I took the biggest risk of my life and began to take the blanket of shyness off, revealing my brokenness to other trusted friends. I exposed my sin to other people. I exposed the sins that have been committed against me… to other people. And as people saw what was behind the shyness, they accepted me. As I told God about my sin and described to him my specific shame, as I told him how deficient I was, he reached out and touched me. Jesus came alongside me. Friends came along side me, me wife came along side me. And as Christ and others have accepted me, the real me—God has brought profound healing and intimacy with others and with God into my life.
Yes, I still sin. Yes at times I still feel shameful. Yes, I still go back pick up this blanket [pick it up] and hide behind it. But now when I’m hiding from others, my wife, my friends, from God, when I’m scared, insecure, and anxious I hear God’s voice calling. “Where are you, Lee? I miss you. Yes, I see what you’ve done. Yes, I see how you feel. Yes, I hate sin too, but I love you more than I hate sin. That’s why I came. That’s why I allowed myself to be despised and rejected by others, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain. Like one from whom people hide their faces, I was despised, and seen as worthless. That’s why I took up your pain and bore your suffering. People thought I was punished by God, But I was pierced for your transgressions, I was crushed for your iniquities; the punishment that has brought you peace was on me, and by my wounds you are healed.”
Christ himself was stripped naked and humiliated on a cross, taking into himself our sin and our shame. Because he has taken upon himself my shame and your shame, we can come out from hiding. We don’t need to hide any more. There is no need for this [throw blanket] in God’s presence or in the presence of others.
And yet, we often forget, we get scared, shame washes over us, and we go back to our blankets, [pick it up] and hide.
And today many of us are here, myself included, with our blankets tucked away just in case. Some of us even have them on right now. And this morning, we sit and listen, to the voice of God as he whispers, “Where are you?” How do we hear him? How will we respond?
Let’s pray:
Like the loving father Jesus spoke of in Luke 15, God sees as his son as his daughter and says:
“I miss you. Yes I see what you’ve done… Yes I hate sin too, but I love you more than I hate sin… this is why I became a human being and died for you.
Will you throw away your blanket come out to me?
Will you throw away your blanket and become real before some trusted friends?”
posted by Shigematsu at 1:39 PM
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