Love, Honour & Shame

If you haven't looked into the theme of "honour and shame" in the culture of the Bible before, this sermon might be interesting. In many ways the culture in biblical times was so different from ours, but in other ways not that different at all. The following is based on a text about paying taxes from Romans 13:7-8... which might still be on people's minds at this time of year. All the best, Rishi

When Honour and Shame Encounter Love

The portion of today’s readings that I would like us to focus in on this morning is the first two verses from the Romans passage that we just read. These verses were written by St. Paul, to a small group of people in ancient Rome, who were living in very difficult circumstances. In verses 7 and 8 of Romans chapter 13, Paul says to them:

[7] “Pay to all what is due them—taxes to whom taxes are due; other revenues to whom other revenues are due; respect to whom respect is due; honor to whom honor is due... [8] “Owe no one anything, except to love; because if you love, you fulfill every obligation.”

When we hear these words from the mouth of Paul, to us it might sound like the kind of advice that we sometimes give to young people, so they will grow up to be kind to their neighbors, pay their bills, and so on. It doesn't seem too earthshattering at all.

But to people living in the ancient Roman Empire— these words of St. Paul’s might have had a very different meaning, especially if, like the early Christians, they were not in the mainstream of society.

The people Paul was writing to in Rome lived in a world that biblical scholars call an “honor and shame society,” where the pursuit of honor and the warding off of shame were the number 1 values. To have honor in that world meant to be esteemed in the eyes of others. To have shame meant to be worthless in the eyes of others, and that was a fate worse than death…. These dynamics were what made the Roman Empire “tick.”

In Rome, one of the greatest factors that made you ‘honorable’ in the eyes of others was how many people were in your debt… how many people owed you favors of one kind or another.

You see, Rome was essentially a two-class society – there were the “haves” and the “have nots.” And how it worked, was that the “haves,” the most powerful people in society would become what they called “patrons” -- they would offer protection and other favors to the “have nots.” Of course, there was a price. If you accepted the patron's help in this way, you were obligated to become the patron's “client,” … and in that world to be a “client” of a “patron” meant that you pledged to take the patron’s side in all matters, no matter what. Your life became a kind of “blank check” for your patron.

The most powerful of all the patrons were the wealthiest males from the upper class… They had the resources to offer the favors that people needed to survive. So they were in the best position to develop a very large “clientele.” A powerful patron could have a virtual army of these so called “clients.” And the larger the “client group” that a patron had, the more honorable he was in the eyes of the ancient world.

Once you became a “client,” you and your family were no longer on your own in society; you belonged to the patron’s group. But if you said or did anything that reflected poorly on your patron, (like buying your grain from someone who wasn't giving a commission to your patron), you were seen as taking away honor and bringing shame to the patron and all his clients. And that was very dangerous. Because the whole patronage could then legitimately turn on you, like an angry tribe, for having taken away their honor.

Unless a shameful act could be hidden, or somehow fixed, it had to be avenged, and that could mean anything from being shunned in public to being imprisoned, tortured, or even executed … The shame had to be gotten rid of. The honor of the patron and his loyal followers had to be restored.

So, in this kind of society, everyone in the patron’s group begins to “police” everyone else… and so the need for control over one’s actions and one’s tongue is very great… because no one wants to face the dangerous consequences of being shamed by the group. So, you can imagine how all of this leads to a very efficient, orderly society………….at least on the surface…

This same honor-and-shame dynamic was at work from the smallest unit in society – the family, all the way up to the Empire as a whole. The father (pater familias), was the head of the family, just as the Patron ruled over his clients, and Caesar ruled over the Empire. The higher up you were in the hierarchy, the more honor, and wealth, and power you acquired. You got to wear the special togas (that were a symbol of power); you got the special seats in the theatre, and the special invitations to private banquets; you were given exclusive access to desirable occupations, such as political offices, and so on. And the great wealth of the Empire was controlled by these men at the top. They devised a system of taxation, which, along with the Patron-Client system maintained the large gap between the rich and the poor, and effectively kept them in power.

You learn very quickly in this kind of society that what happens to you in life doesn’t necessarily have to do with your actual guilt or merit as an individual person… but only with whether or not you are perceived by those above and around you as causing them honor or shame. So you become very vigilant, you work very hard to keep up the right appearances, never letting down your guard, because someone might be watching.

This whole honor-and-shame mentality infected religion in the Ancient Mediterranean world as well, so that people came to understand the Mystery we call “God,” as though “HE” were some kind of enormous demanding PATRON-in-the-sky, who would zap you with lightning if you stepped out of line and failed to give HIM the honor HE was due.

So, the people who St. Paul is speaking to in these two verses… lived every day under the thick cloud of this honor and shame system… They were accustomed to nothing good happening to them, unless it had a big “You owe me!” attached to it. Life for them had grown to be more a matter of the ego than the heart, more a matter of keeping score, putting your best foot forward, hiding your vulnerability, making the big guys look good, and so on.

But now they had an even bigger problem…

They had had an encounter with the limitlessness of Divine Love, through their experience of Jesus… and they were now understanding, at a gut level, that they were precious and deeplyloved, as they are, with no strings attached…

and because of this religious experience, they were suddenly seeing like never before how absurd and spiritually toxic their society was… Calling “honorable” what in reality was corrupt… Calling “shameful” what in reality was innocent, and even virtuous… Manipulating the common people into building and maintaining the very system that makes their lives so miserable…

This was a real problem, from the Roman point of view – because the love that these people were experiencing was so powerful love that they were losing their fear… And fear is what kept the wheels of honor-and-shame turning, fear kept everyone pledging allegiance… toeing the line... siding with whatever the “powers that be” wanted. Fear is what kept the whole system going. And so, if the common people were to lose their fear, the Empire could lose its edge…

I imagine that if I were accustomed to life in such a fearful context, and all-of-a-sudden I encountered a radical love that was free and eternal…… I might very well, in my excitement, say “to hell with this society… I’m not playing this game anymore…”

So, Paul, as a senior spiritual teacher, is faced with quite a dilemma. He sees the beauty of the spiritual transformation that is going on in the lives of these people he’s writing to… But he also sees the great danger of becoming a non-conformist in ancient Rome… He’s overjoyed that they’re waking up spiritually… But he alsorealizes that if they don’t handle themselves wisely in relation to the 'powers that be' , they could be in big trouble very quickly. (Remember Paul was a Roman citizen; and he knew first-hand what public beatings and prison life were like.) So what does Paul do? He tells them:

“Hey guys… slow down… I know you’re excited about discovering the limitless love of God in Christ… So am I… But don’t stop paying your taxes… don’t stop paying your rent… and if you owe someone honor, give them the honor that you owe them…” and so forth.

Notice that Paul doesn’t say a word here about whether the taxes are being used for the common good… or whether the rent is reasonable… or whether the patron they owe honor to actually lives honorably himself… or other such social justice questions.

Now, in our world, we raise questions like these all of the time. For example, if you watched any news this week, you probably saw the trial of the mayor of Detroit, who is facing lots of such questions right now about how honorably he actually lives, and about how he’s been spending taxpayers dollars. And it’s wonderful that, at least this time, this mayor is not going to get away with abusing his power. When I see that, something inside of me says “yes!”. But Paul took a different approach to the “powers that be” back in Ancient Rome.

And we might well wonder if he took the right approach: “Did he judge and decide correctly?” “Shouldn’t he have been more passionately against the obvious injustices of the Empire? And shouldn’t he have been less concerned about offending the ‘powers that be’? ”

I’m really not sure. Those are questions for each of us to reflect on… but we have to keep in mind that ancient Rome was not 21^st century Canada… What might be a very good moral judgment today, in our context, might have been a very poor one in Paul’s context. And vice versa…

But perhaps the real key is that… Paul doesn’t just tell them “don’t make waves.” He doesn’t just say “when in Rome, do as the Romans.” We see the great wisdom of Paul in this letter, because what he does is... he tries to help this group of people to reconstruct their whole understanding of society by connecting it up with their experience of Divine Love. He tries to give them a radical new way of coping spiritually with this very toxic environment that they were living in. And so after he tells them “pay your taxes, honor the powers that be” and so on, he goes on to say: “Owe no one anything, except to love; because if you love, you fulfill every obligation.”

I think that in these few words, Paul was finding a way to communicate to them that… The real key to coping with this toxic environment they found themselves in was to transcend those toxic, honor-and-shame dynamics in their own experience, through the power of Divine Love.

It’s as though Paul was saying to them: “Yes, your lives are being radically transformed by the experience of divine love. Yes, you can stand with confidence in the presence of the Divine and not be threatened or ashamed or obligated to prove your worth. And yes, you do need to stay focused on the spiritual reality that you have discovered in Christ. But… you also need to bring all of these wonderful spiritual treasures into your day-to-day lives in Rome. You need to remain conscious of that Divine Love, so that you won’t be triggered by this crazy-making society into doing something that could really endanger your lives. I think he was teaching them that, “As you’re making your way through life in the Empire, you need to stay ‘in the zone,’ as the athletes say. You need to stay in that dynamic place in the heart, where we experience the transforming power of Divine Love. Because when we consciously abide within that transforming presence of Christ, that Love guides us, and it flows through us to those we encounter, people who may never have experienced what it is like to be free from anxiety about honor-and-shame.

Wise advice, I think. Perhaps a better way to “make a difference” in that world than refusing to pay their taxes, or refusing to honor their unjust patrons, and so on.

Of course, we live in a very different world. We have a lot more “wiggle room” in our society than the average person did in ancient Rome. We can often speak up, without adverse consequences, when things are not the way they should be… in our families, our workplaces, our churches, our governments. In some ways, we have more options to “make a difference” in our world for the better.

But even though we are more fortunate than our spiritual ancestors were in that respect, I sometimes wonder if we are as conscious as they were of the transforming power of Divine Love.

We have more freedom to speak out against things that should not be. But is our experience of Christ so rich and deep that it’s continually transforming how we understand and relate to ourselves… and to others?

I really don’t know if such a continuous level of communion with God is possible to realize in this life, but it’s always struck me as a good aspiration. Paul never attained it, he tells us, but he seems to always have been aspiring in that direction. For him it seemed it was the only cure for our human predicament, no matter what the nature of our society.

In the end, however similar or different we are from our ancestors in Ancient Rome, I think it’s fairly safe to say that what St. Paul saw as the cure for Rome is the same cure that we need today (personally, culturally, globally).

The cure is consciousness of that Love which is deeper than both honor and shame… consciousness of that Love which has no strings attached to it… consciousness of the Christ who lives within us…

Whether the context is Ancient Rome, or Modern London, Ontario, or whatever worlds we may find ourselves inhabiting in the future… I’m quite sure that nothing matters more than That.

Comments

Arminius

Posted on: 05/10/2009 10:39

Hi rishi:

Here in Canada, we (white society) are the conquerers and patrons, and the indigenous people are our clients.

We, the European culture of Canada, have become the patron culture of Canada's aboriginal culture. Although we profess to love them with Christian love, this love, more often than not, is(was) patronizing, denigrating and condescending, imposing on our aboriginal sisters and brothers the shame, fear and guilt of being inferior, of being second class citizens in their own land.

This, of course, is now changing, and our aboriginal sisters and brother are gradually overcoming the effects of conquest, patronization and colonization, but they will not really feel equal until and unless we honour them and their culture as valid, good, and right. Unless we learn to genuinely respect and admire them and their great culture, which, after all, is the first and host culture of this land, and for this reason alone deserves first honours among equals.

All My Relations,

WaterBuoy

Posted on: 05/11/2009 09:19

Nice echo Herman,

I like to think of the Paul of Rome as the shadow of fear they have cast over the pride and shame of the world ... we haven't near got over that, even though our famed, or defamed story tells us 366 times not to fear, just live in reverence of the significant other.

Just look at how our authorities do that. Do role models as Romans take a long time to wear away at mankind to get to the soul of the thingy?

Hib-ruce taught the wisdom of de'the, Romans and Europeans in general ... fear. When you are at the bottom tier of the whole pyramid do you get all the fertilizer and know when it is time to go?

Roman types hate that for they lose all the cheap labour and canon fodder for their hasty wars. It is a Plageurism straight from the Roman myth where 600,000 Hebrews went to the desert in a Dark Age of another time ... aborigianl "word" ... would m'n corrupt such a story? Fall out of heaven! The story goes on and on as the fires are fed with chaff ... hollow minds ... the Os of Love without a thought ... Light humours, plasma, or whine in canon ... that's the pits but we don't know how to treat such stories as Hermeun-etics ... we don't know the meaning of "name" as Marnie said in another string.

Giggles from the demiurge!