Shameful Driving

     These days many people are sufficiently cut off from their neighbors that they no longer care what others think.  Last summer a fellow drove over the cones I set up to protect the fresh sealer I was spreading on the church parking lot.  I raised my arms as if to ask what he was doing.

       He gave me the finger.

       Honestly, I’m glad my disapproval bothered him enough for him to offer me his own.  I’m more worried about the kid who later drove through the wet lot and laughed.  Such people, as we say, “know no shame.”  They seem unfazed by the disapproval of others. 

       It’s a problem.

      And for that reason our culture has intensified its attempts to embarrass such people.  In varying degrees people may deserve this rising tide of ridicule. Businesses may deserve their negative reviews on Angie’s List.  Cheating boyfriends are ousted in front of a thousand friends on Facebook.  Celebrities become fodder for late-night farce while our most fragile people have Judge Judy scold them on national television. 

       Other people are slandered for a mere lapse in judgment.  Others have just taken moral stands that are completely misunderstood.  But in all these cases we seem to justify shouting at them; we boycott, threaten and single people out for public scrutiny—not because we are calling them to a transcendent moral standard, but because their behavior makes us mad.

     This culture of shame is a much bigger problem.

     Shame is an intensely painful embarrassment that will not easily go away. It spawns every form of defensiveness.  It’s the primary emotion which drives addiction and leads to death.  It is such a problem that after humanity made its first mistake, God fashioned clothes to hide our nakedness.  Jesus teaches us, that "If your brother sins against you, go and show him his fault, just between the two of you.”  The love of God covers over a multitude of sins.  The gospel offers people who have otherwise fallen into disrepute an opportunity to find in God a refuge from the disapproval of others.  

      God does not want to “put them to shame.” God doesn't want them cut off; he wants them integrated with their neighbors so that their neighbors feelings mean something.  I’m not sure it helps us or others to honk at people for their shameful driving. I’m not sure that publicly exposing people and creating a culture of perpetual outrage is doing any of us much good.

A Father's Day Note to the Bereaved

       National holidays like Father’s Day are too preachy for this preacher. 

     Don’t get me wrong. It’s important to honor parents. Scripture says that honoring parents is the first commandment that has a promise attached to it—“that it may go well with you and that you may enjoy long life on the earth." 

      Honoring parents is not a bad idea for Mom and Dad’s sake, either. 

      I usually have to fly to Texas right in the middle of cherry season, but this year my wife and daughters climbed up on the ladders and started picking cherries for me.  They picked and pitted and bagged and froze my favorite fruit in order to honor me with cherries on Father’s Day.    I was touched.

      But our national celebrations of parenthood can get on my nerves because in the pews every Father’s Day sit any number of children who do not know who their Daddy is.  Two pews down sits a man who ran away from his abusive father, whom he still regards as dangerous.  On the other side of the sanctuary sit children whose hearts ache because their loving Dad has died prematurely.   Their wounds are not rawer than the father who has cried through his prayers every night for a decade wondering where he went wrong with his kids. 

      These people are too bereaved for the sentimentality of Father’s Day. 

      This article is for them. 

     God would have them celebrate Advent, which assures us of the coming future that will heal all wounds.  Christmas speaks of a God who has come as an infant into a world of fatherless infanticide.   By Good Friday we learn that there is nothing he will not bear. By Easter and Pentecost we are declaring with him that death and failure are undone by the loving power that has come to dwell in our midst. 

     The church calendar has what Father’s Day lacks—dignity for the childless--adoption for the orphaned.  The secular calendar preaches about being thankful, but it does not offer a Father to the fatherless nor does it offer eternal life as the ground for true hope.