S is for Shame
And the shame is on us. For what? For being mesmerized by those preachers and evangelists today who do promise to deliver the most glowing "works," and all without any great cost to their hearers -- in short, without faith or, as Paul puts it, "apart from faith." (Ro. 9:32) They offer us and our parishioners easy schemes for "getting" without "losing." Which is exactly what faith is not. On our TV screens and in our mailboxes they tempt our people, as one recent mailing did, with "golden prosperity guidance" and plastic "faith crosses," and all "free of charge." The offer promises solutions for your "finances," your job search, your "worry," your "blood pressure" -- "a continuous money blessing." "Free of charge." As if that is what's meant by "grace alone!" What is worse, the pitch comes replete with appeals to the Word, straight from the Bible.
What this hype says in effect to naive, gullible, pious Christians is this, "If you really are the sons and daughters of God, why are you poor or worried or ailing (shame on you) and why aren't you jumping at this chance to free yourself from that shame -- "free of charge," that is without the shame of The Cross, the real Cross, by just mailing back this postage-paid request for a free plastic cross?" What a travesty that is on Paul's words to the believer -- yes, to the "one who believes in Christ" -- "You will not be put to shame." But that is not the one whom this mailing addresses. To that I say, Shame, yet not only on these tempters or on our people who succumb to them but on us, who let ourselves feel outclassed by them, shamed by them, tempted to compete with them at their own game.
Pr. Norbert Kabelitz
Let's come to the point. Our problem seems to be centered in You, God. You give us your Word but do not deliver. Why did you answer the cry for bread from chronic complainers but not from one who was obedient, one who appealed to your statutes and ordinances, one who trusted he was your Son and yet was left by you to be orphaned and discredited and killed? Have you indeed forsaken him, as he himself finally asked -- forsaken him and us?
It is not as if we don't know better. We do. Even in our deepest temptations we do retain some inkling as to why Jesus could invoke the "statutes and ordnances" from Moses, mortifying as they are, and yet could trust that by "doing them [or by being done in by them] he will live by them." (Ro. 10:5) We do recall, though to our shame, that it is not "by bread alone," not by power alone, not by signs and wonders alone but rather -- and how much easier it is to say this than do it -- "by faith alone." We do remember, hauntingly, what Paul calls his preaching, "the Word of faith," and are haunted by the question, Have we dared to preach that: faith? We still know, alas, that without faith our works are dead. Instead, we have strained to accomplish works by our own self-exertion, by rising to the phony challenges of the televangelists, by "deciding" for them so as not to be heckled and