Shipping Out Shame Series

It is on the highest interest level to hear of people's most embarrassing moments. Jane Wyman

tells of hers. She was preparing for very important guests and she put a note on the guest towels that

she had so carefully selected. The note read, "If you use these I will murder you." The note was

meant for her husband, of course, but in all the excitement of her preparation she forgot to remove

the note. When the evening was over and the guests had departed she discovered the towels were still

in perfect order, as well as the note itself.

She wanted to crawl into a hole she was so embarrassed. Something like this happens to all of us

at some time or other. Carl Michaelson tells of his little girl coming in with a tear in her pants and

his wife was angry. She had done this too often, and she said to her, "Now you go to your room and

sew up that tear." The poor little kid never had a needle in her hand. The mother went to check on

her a little later and there were her torn pants on the floor, but no little girl. She went searching and

when she saw the light on in the basement she called down, "Are you down there running around

with your pants off?" There was silence, and then a deep voice responded, "No madam, I'm just

reading the gas meter." Talk about embarrassing!

Art Linkletter tells about one of his most embarrassing experiences on his once popular show

People Are Funny. They had an auction offering the person in the studio who contributed most to

charity the chance to come up and hit him with a chocolate cream pie. The highest bitter was a

sweet little gray haired grandmother. She wrote out her personal check for 200 dollars. She picked

up the pie and smashed it completely across his face. Then she twisted it which forced the meringue

under his eyes. He said he would never forget that experience, but to add to the embarrassment her

check bounced, and he knew he had been had.

Life is filled with embarrassing moments. We feel embarrassed as children about our silly

mistakes that everybody laughs at. Then as teens we are embarrassed about our zips, our clothes,

and quite often about our parents. But it works both ways. And when we become parents, we are

often embarrassed by our children, and their behavior.

Shame because of our feelings of inferiority and our sinful desires are a normal part of

everyone's life. A Christian father writing in Moody Monthly says the most embarrassing thing he

ever did was reading the Bible with his children. The first thing they asked was why did Abraham

lie about his wife Sarah? His daughter asked, "Daddy didn't he love her?" Then came Lot in

Sodom and they wanted to know why the town homosexuals wanted to beat down the door of Lot to

get at his guests. Things did not get better when he got to David. Questions about adultery and

murder were not comfortable for him. He switched to Proverbs for a while, but then had to face:

"Daddy, what's a prostitute?" It was one of the hardest things he ever did because the Bible deals

openly with all the things that shame and embarrass us. But it did force him to prepare his children

for the real world.

The feelings of shame and embarrassment are not all bad. Peter the Great was once so angry

with a servant on his boat that he was going to throw him overboard and let him drown. The servant

reminded him that this would go on his record for all of history. This reminder cooled him off, for he did

not want the shame of that blot on his record. Shame prevented his sin. This is the positive value

of shame.

We need to be sensitive in some areas of life or we lose the ability to blush and nothing

embarrasses us anymore. We become hardened to the sinful nature of man. This is going on all the

time in our culture. People are on talk shows openly sharing their sex life. Articles in the paper deal

with the most intimate aspects of life, which were once preserved for the eyes of professional people

only. We are an open culture, and our children now watch on TV things that would have turned

most people's faces red with embarrassment only a generation ago.

There is no doubt that some openness on sensitive issues is good. The Bible itself is quite open,

but the fact is, if the openness does not carry with it a sense of shame and embarrassment it is

harmful. Paul in the last part of Romans 1 tells of how God gave people over to a depraved mind.