November 10, 2013 | 4:00 p.m.

Rebuilding Our Lives

Adam H. Fronczek
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Genesis 25:19–34, 33:1–17

Brene Brown is a research professor at the University of Houston who has spent the last ten years studying vulnerability, courage, and shame. Her own story is one of growing up avoiding vulnerability at all costs. She writes about herself, saying, “I have spent my entire life trying to outrun and outsmart vulnerability. I’m a fifth-generation Texan with a family motto of ‘lock and load,’ so I come by my aversion to uncertainty and emotional exposure honestly.” And while she still struggles with the idea of vulnerability in her own life, her prolific research and the attempts she has made at being more vulnerable in her own life have convinced her, and millions of followers, that “vulnerability is the core, the heart, the center, of meaningful human experiences” (Brene Brown, Daring Greatly, pp. 7, 12).

As I noted, vulnerability isn’t all Brene Brown talks about and researches. She also studies something that keeps us from being vulnerable, that keeps us from getting to the core, the heart, the center, of meaningful human experiences—and that thing is shame. Shame, the embarrassment, the fear, the “I’m not good enough” feeling that extends from things we’ve done or that have happened to us in the past.

Shame is easier to illustrate than to describe, so here’s a story about shame:

Those of you who are here regularly have heard me talk about Walter White before. He’s the lead character in the TV series Breaking Bad. For those of you who don’t know the show, Walter is a regular guy, a high school teacher with a wife, a son, and a daughter on the way when he is informed that he has a very serious case of lung cancer. His only chance is with an experimental cancer treatment that his health insurance won’t cover, and aside from that expense, he’s terrified of what will become of his family after he dies. The premise of the show is that Walter, finding himself in this desperate situation, uses his knowledge as a lab chemist to start cooking methamphetamine—he becomes a drug dealer. And over the course of the show he not only cooks meth, he becomes a lot of things that go along with dealing drugs: a thief, a liar, a murderer, and essentially a terrifying person. But he does make money, and not just what he needs, but more than he can ever spend or even launder—millions and millions of dollars.

The real mystery of the show emerges when he has come to this point when he doesn’t need any more money and everyone in his life wants him to stop, to get out of the drug trade—he has a free pass to get out—and he won’t do it. He seems addicted to this horrible life he has created. And in a masterful exploration into the human psyche, there is a scene that tells us why.

Walter tells his drug-dealing partner, Jesse, about a story from graduate school. Walter and two friends had come up with an idea in the chem lab and started a small company. They called it Grey Matter. But shortly after the company got off the ground, Walter had a falling out with the other two partners, and he let them buy him out for $5,000. Today, Grey Matter is worth billions, $2.16 billion, to be precise—Walter looks it up every week. Walter tells Jesse this story, this great shameful secret of his life, this opportunity he messed up royally, and as he explains what he is trying to do for his family by continuing to be a greedy, bloodthirsty drug dealer, he makes a reference to the Bible. As he tells Jesse the story of Grey Matter, he says, “I sold my kid’s birthright for a few months’ rent.”

That reference, the selling of a birthright, comes from the story of Jacob and Esau. Jacob and Esau are brothers—twins. Even though Esau is older only by a matter of minutes, that’s all that matters. In the ancient world, the oldest son was the owner of the birthright, the claim to the family name and inheritance, and the younger children had to make their own way in the world.

As the story goes, one day Esau returns from the hunt. Hunting wasn’t a hobby in the ancient world. It was a means of survival, and it was dangerous. Esau comes back from the hunt exhausted and starving, and he finds his brother Jacob in the house making some soup. Esau begs his Jacob for some food, and Jacob, crafty younger brother that he is, convinces his starving brother to give him the family birthright for a bowl of soup.

Obviously this destroys the relationship between the brothers. Jacob has won the birthright but flees the family home, afraid that his brother will kill him. Esau, you can only imagine, is filled with shame, in disbelief over what he has lost in a moment of hunger for instant gratification. Jacob and Esau don’t speak for years.

These two stories, Esau selling out for a bowl of soup, Walter White for a quick $5,000—they may seem to us like crazy choices, but the nature of these choices, the quick fix or instant gratification in the face of amazing loss, these choices may hit closer to home than you may think. Doesn’t it sound an awful lot like the man or woman who destroys a marriage and loses a job for a thoughtless affair with a coworker? That’s a good example, but it doesn’t have to be something that involves bad intentions. What about a person who, in good faith, made a bad investment and lost everything? It could be any number of people who lost everything in the recession because they bought a house that lost its value or ran up their credit cards and then got laid off when the company folded. It could be a person who suffers from addiction and chose alcohol or gambling or work, for that matter, over being present to their family.

Now imagine that the affair is over, the house is gone, the addict has sought help, and years have passed. The thing that is the hardest to get rid of is the shame, the shame that results from having made a bad decision that you feel will follow you all of your life. That’s Esau. That’s Walter White.

Brene Brown might suggest that Walter’s behavior, though perhaps an extreme example, is a textbook response to shame. Research tells us, she says, that “shame is highly correlated with addiction, depression, violence, aggression, bullying, suicide, eating disorders . . . and guilt is inversely correlated with those things. The ability to hold something we’ve done or failed to do up against who we want to be is adaptive” (TED Talk, March 2012). There are a whole range of negative things that happen to people who don’t know how to deal with their shame. It’s a dangerous thing.

That’s why it’s important to lift up what happens at the end of the Jacob and Esau story. The two brothers have been apart from each other for years. As it turns out, both have done well for themselves and are the leaders of two large tribes. It becomes evident that as they lead their nomadic families across the land, there is going to be a meeting. As the two tribes near one another, Jacob readies his family for the idea that he may be killed by his brother and then goes out in front of the tribe to meet Esau.

As the story goes, Jacob himself “went on ahead . . . bowing himself to the ground seven times, until he came near his brother. But Esau ran to meet him, and embraced him, and fell on his neck and kissed him, and they wept.” And Jacob tried to beg his forgiveness, tried to offer himself, and his wealth, anything that could pay back the wrong he had done. “But Esau said, ‘I have enough, my brother; keep what you have for yourself’” (Genesis 33:3–4, 9).

In an unexpected twist, before Jacob can even apologize, it is Esau, the one who had been betrayed, who takes his younger brother in his arms, begins to weep, and tells him that all has been forgiven. Even when Jacob offers to give Esau a share of his wealth as repayment, Esau refuses. It is clear that at some point, Esau figured out how to let go of his shame.

Brene Brown makes a distinction between guilt and shame. Guilt, she says, can be OK, even helpful. Guilt means saying, “I made a mistake.” And that kind of thinking can lead us to apologize and to transform our lives. Shame is different. Shame is the feeling that “I am a mistake.” Shame is what happens when our past mistakes or even just misfortunes become so much a part of who we are that we cannot rebuild our lives.

I’d like to invite you to consider tonight, as we come together at this table, that this is a place to deal with our shame and our brokenness and move forward. Here at this table, we meet Christ, who is vulnerable and forgiving. Like an extension of what Esau represents, here in bread and wine, Christ is broken and poured out so that we can be made whole again. Shame need not follow or define you any longer. This is the place for forgiveness. This is the place for new life. Amen.