Wake Up, Look Up

Hello, everyone. Thanks for listening to Wake Up, Look Up, a podcast where we connect events happening in real time to the gospel of Jesus Christ. I'm Zach Weihrauch and in today's episode, we're asking the question, should Monica Lewinsky be our shame coach? This is prompted by an article I read in the Atlantic about the kind of burgeoning career of Monica Lewinsky in talking about things like shame and, uh, female empowerment. Now, if you're not familiar, maybe if you're younger than me, Monica Lewinsky is famous, or infamous, notorious for having a sexual affair with then President Clinton in the White House while he was president. She was a White House staffer, and it prompted a huge political backlash of conservatives toward President Clinton, who lied about the affair, ended up being impeached, uh, by the whole thing. It was a crazy, crazy story that really dominated my childhood. Well, now Monica Lewinsky is in the national news, prompted first by a TED Talk she did years ago and then a career kind of spawning that, talking about shame and really talking about her own struggle with reclaiming her narrative, particularly in the context of the hash MeToo movement and the power dynamic that existed between then President Clinton and a young White House staffer. She's really leaned into storytelling mediums as ways of highlighting the destructive power of shame and the need for flipping those power narratives. Now, before I talk about, uh, Ms. M. Lewinsky's view of shame, let me say this. What happened in the 90s and the Clinton White House was terrible. Uh, it was immoral. It. It was awful. President Clinton should have been held accountable. A lot of people should have been held accountable. And I in no way want to legitimize what President Clinton did or pretend there wasn't a power dynamic at play. Uh, my comments are not so much about rel. Litigating what happened in the 90s and how much blame goes to Clinton and how much blame goes to Lewinsky, and round and round we go. And more about whether or not Ms. Lewinsky deserves to be the cultural critic of shame that she purports to be, because I actually think there are a lot of really awful things in what she's saying. Let's just start here. I agree with Ms. Lewinsky that shame is not a helpful thing. Shame causes us to be stuck in our guilt, stuck in our sin. Shame has a way of kind of leading us to navel gazing. Because I did this, I will never be. I could never be. I will never get out. It's the antithesis of the gospel, because the gospel message Is that godly Sorrow, this is 2 Corinthians 7, 10, leads to repentance. In other words, the difference between shame and genuine biblical sorrow is shame makes you sit in the mud for the rest of your life. But true sorrow, think of the prodigal son here gets out of the mud and says, if I just go back to God and own what I did, maybe he will let me get out of the mud. And that's part of the problem with what Ms. Lewinsky is saying. Uh, her answer to shame is to reclaim your narrative, to say, it wasn't my fault. It was that person's fault. Why am I letting society tell me I was wrong? But that's just a kind of misdirection. Instead of dealing with the fact that Ms. Lewinsky was an adult woman who made a series of really bad decisions and saying, what I need is forgiveness. What I need is mercy. What I need is healing. She's getting out of the mud and throwing the mud onto someone else. But the Bible is calling us to be made clean. And of course, that's the problem. That's really my second point, is that our culture wants to skip sin to get to healing. But Paul tells us in the book of Romans, there is no path forward short of acknowledging our sin. Think about one John where he says, uh, if we confess our sins, he is faithful to cleanse us. But if we say we have no sin, he says, we make God out to be a liar. And that's Ms. Lewinsky's way of dealing with shame. After all, what I did, was it really my fault? Was it really that wrong? Instead of saying, what if it was my fault? At least partially, what if it was wrong? Would there be a way of dealing with my guilt? The Bible tells us to look our sin in the eye, and it also warns us that our own narrative can be misleading. Jeremiah 17:9 says, the heart is deceitful above all things. I can legitimize just about any action I undertake. I can rationalize any thought that I have. But the Bible tells me in the end, uh, that won't help me when I stand before God. Instead, what the Bible is arguing is that I can take my shame to Jesus, that he acknowledges my guilt. He'll even carry that guilt to the cross, but he can also set me free from it. Now, the story in John 8 of the woman caught in adultery is probably appropriate here. And I should say most theologians don't believe that story is in the earliest and original manuscripts of the New Testament doesn't make it evil. Just maybe not scripture, but the story makes a good point. Jesus says about the woman caught in adultery, any of you who have not sinned, let him throw the first stone. He seems to be almost acknowledging that this woman's shame is as much a product of the culture she's in as her own moral activity. At least it seems that way. Until once all the stone throwers have left, he says to her, go and sin no more. You see, the message of Jesus is a message of forgiveness. It's a message of mercy. It's a message of grace. It's an anti shame message. But not through justifying, rationalizing and blame shifting. Not through reclaiming your own narrative, but taking your sin to Jesus, letting him die on the cross for it. Raise from the dead, offer you forgiveness. Uh, and then heeding his call to go and send no more. Ms. Lewinsky's offering a path out of shame, but not really. Jesus is offering a way of being free of shame for all eternity. Hey, thanks for watching this episode of Wake Up, Look Up. If you enjoyed it, please help us get the word out by sharing it with someone you think might benefit from it. And while you're here, make sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel to get further content or even download the CCC app, where you'll find even more resources to help you grow in your faith and relationship with Jesus Christ.

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