Have You No Shame?

Luke 11:1-8

He was praying in a certain place, and after he had finished, one of his disciples said to him, ‘Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.’ He said to them, ‘When you pray, say:
Father, hallowed be your name.
   Your kingdom come.
   Give us each day our daily bread.
   And forgive us our sins,
     for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.
   And do not bring us to the time of trial.’

And he said to them, ‘Suppose one of you has a friend, and you go to him at midnight and say to him, “Friend, lend me three loaves of bread; for a friend of mine has arrived, and I have nothing to set before him.” And he answers from within, “Do not bother me; the door has already been locked, and my children are with me in bed; I cannot get up and give you anything.” I tell you, even though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, at least because of his persistence he will get up and give him whatever he needs.

I was inspired to start my Summer sermon series on the parables with this parable because of two questions from the Ask the Pastor services—the first one from Tom, about prayer and prayers being answered or not; and the second from Dexter, and his question about the Lord’s prayer. This parable that Sue just read, the Parable of the Friend at Midnight, begins after Luke’s version of Jesus teaching the Lord’s prayer.  The disciples ask Jesus how they should pray, he gives them a specific prayer, and then he tells this kind of strange, kind of funny story about a friend who sneaks up to his friend’s window at midnight begging him for a loaf of bread.

In my research of this parable, I discovered that this is well known to be one of the more confusing and confounding parables. If you type “The Parable of the Friend at Midnight” into Google, you might get different headings like, “the importance of persistence in prayer,” or “perseverance in prayer.” And when you consider those and you read the last part of our passage today, “…because of his persistence he will get up and give him whatever he needs,” we would assume that Jesus is saying, all you have to do is ask and ask and ask and ask and you’ll get what you want. But let me tell you—rarely are the parables that easy. Jesus speaks in parables for a reason—he wants us to think and interpret and find nuance and gray area. He wants us to learn how to think creatively and differently in order to live our best lives and make this world a better place.

So the biggest thing that we have to understand here is that the word “persistence” is the wrong translation. The most accurate translation is shamelessness. “…because of his [shamelessness] he will get up and give him whatever he needs.” Doesn’t seem as positive anymore, does it? When we think of being shameless, we think of someone who doesn’t care about social norms, someone who doesn’t care about how they’re perceived, someone who’s might be loud, boisterous, or insensitive to other people or insensitive to their surroundings. And according to most scholars, the word ‘shameless’ did, indeed, always have a negative connotation. To make the story even more confusing, let’s re-read this last part in full: “…even though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, at least because of his [shamelessness] he will get up and give him whatever he needs.”

So lots of masculine pronouns there, and at no point is it clear or obvious which of these two characters those pronouns are referring to—the friend on the outside or the friend on the inside. Some theologians believe the shamelessness is actually that of the friend on the inside, because it’s shameless that one wouldn’t be hospitable to a friend, even when it comes to a strange request at a strange time; most theologians do seem to believe that it is the strange request of the friend outside the home that is shameless. But there’s truly no consensus. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized—maybe it doesn’t matter which one is which in this last verse. Maybe this verse is purposely ambiguous because this notion of shamelessness is mean to speak to both the man inside and the one out.

And one argument that I found to be very convincing was this—at no point does the friend on the outside repeat himself. At no point does the friend on the inside relent. There’s really no persistence at all in this story. In fact, if we look at Matthew chapter 6, verse 7, when Jesus is giving a different type of instruction on prayer, he says, “When you are praying, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do; for they think they will be heard because of their many words.” Jesus seems to be arguing against persistence in prayer here. And in our story for today, Jesus simply implies that eventually the friend will change his mind, whether it’s due to his own shamelessness or to his friend’s, and give this friend the loaf of bread that he asks for. So with all the unknowns and uncertainties and translation issues in this— what could this parable possibly be saying to us today?

So one of the things that Chris and I first bonded over when we were dating was how much we hated dressing up for Halloween. We both agreed we felt so silly dressed up in costumes in public, and in that moment, I thought, “he’s the one.”

But whenever I talk about things like these, this strange and irrational embarrassment I feel about stuff like this, I joke about how I’m just full of too much puritanical New England shame to be comfortable making a fool of myself in any way. And in thinking of this, I realized, it couldn’t hurt to be a little more shameless sometimes. I know I’ve missed out on different opportunities in life and missed out on some fun times because of this fear of embarrassment and excess of shame I seem to have inherited. And so the more I thought of it, the more I realized, we would all probably do well, especially here in the very reserved area of New England, to let go of some of that shame that holds us back. Because that shame could be holding us back from a good time on Halloween! Or more seriously, it could be holding us back from asking for help, or from helping others.  

I’ve absolutely put off asking for help because of embarrassment or shame. I talked a couple weeks ago in our ‘Ask the Pastor’ service about my learning disorder and the shame and insecurity that came along with that, especially before the age of 25 when I was finally diagnosed. I was always afraid that when something didn’t click, when I didn’t understand something the first time, asking for clarification or admitting I was confused would label me dumb; I would assume people would no longer respect me. It really slowed me down in my education and my vocation—not the learning disorder, that ultimately, I don’t believe is what slowed me down, but rather that fear, that feeling of shame that people would think less of me for asking for help.

Now, as I touched on in my note on Thursday, Jesus talks in parables and riddles because he wants to make us think differently, and think creatively so we can do these brand new things he calls us to do. Jesus was put on this earth to turn everything upside down—and so in this passage, I can’t help but wonder if he’s trying to subvert the ancient idea of shamelessness by making people think differently about it—by putting a positive spin on shamelessness. In the case of the friend asking for bread, he would eventually get his midnight bread because he didn’t let the norms of his day stop him from asking for something he needed. Or in the case of the friend inside, his shamelessness comes in the fact that he, apparently, eventually does the right thing even though he initially doesn’t want to—though, as an aside here, especially has someone with an almost one-year-old, if someone came tapping on my window and threatened to wake Frankie up, my initial reaction would probably also be, ‘go away, you’ll wake up the baby,’ but I digress—the point is, is that shamelessness is looked upon as a positive thing, in a roundabout way here. And you know, I could have really used that different perspective growing up and I was too scared to ask questions or to ask for help. I could have used a bit more shamelessness. I could have used the knowledge that being worried about what people will think of you will only dig you deeper into a hole of self-doubt and regret.

I really do wonder if this fear of shame combined with a lack of grace in our society is holding many of us back from learning and growing. I’ve noticed in my time on the internet that there’s a real hostility when it comes to people asking questions about various topics—about queerness and queer terms, about race-related things— it’s all kind of related to call-out culture. I’ve seen people asking totally normal questions about new terminology or only to be scolded for not knowing the answers. And I remember reading something a classmate from Hampshire wrote a while back—they were teaching at a community college—that their students were afraid to ask questions about some of these more controversial topics for fear of ridicule. In an op-ed from the New York Times a couple years ago, activist Loretta Ross writes that this type of hostile activism can “make people fearful of being targeted. People avoid meaningful conversations when hypervigilant perfectionists point out apparent mistakes, feeding the cannibalistic maw of cancel culture.” She goes on to explain that we should be calling people in, rather than out—calling them into the conversation with compassion.

So when this friend at midnight goes to his friend’s house desperately begging for three loaves of bread, the friend inside could have easily shamed him, scolded him for waking him and his children up; could have made him the talk of the town the next day, spread word about how rude and thoughtless he was—but instead, Jesus implies that he ultimate does the right thing, and calls him into his house and gives him what he needs.

This parable is known as a light to heavy parable—the idea of this type of parable is that you give an earthly example of something and you’re supposed to imagine how much greater a divine version would be. So in this case, if even an annoyed friend woken up from a deep sleep is eventually willing to do you favor, just imagine what God is capable of doing. And so with this in mind, Jesus is saying, who cares about shame? Who cares about what people’s self-righteousness or momentary frustration? Don’t be scared of asking for help, don’t be scared of petitioning for something you need, especially when it comes to God—the God who lives us unconditionally, the God who hears our every prayer from the deeply personal, private ones to the communal ones, when we ask for our daily bread, which we will do later on today, and which we will very much receive today, during Communion. Now, will our prayers be answered the way we want or the way we expect? That’s a whole other topic—but the point is not to let our pride get in the way of asking for help and of communing with God.

And in our everyday lives, we would do so much better to not take pleasure in this culture of shame we live in. We would do so much better to give people the grace they need when they ask to borrow something at an inconvenient time; when they ask about someone’s pronouns in good faith, when they’re curious or confused about a dicey topic, not out of insensitivity or bigotry, but out of genuine curiosity. We can show people that they don’t need to be afraid to feel shame when they ask a question. Even if we’re initially annoyed like man inside, we can take a deep breath and realize that maybe the fact that this person is asking this question at all, despite the fear of being scoffed at or turned away or shamed, they really want to learn, that they really need what they’re asking for—and we can put away our negative notions of shame and the self-righteous pleasure this society takes in making fun of people for asking for help or asking questions.

So this parable could be saying… a lot of different things depending on what translations or interpretations we apply to it. It’s wildly ambiguous. But more than anything it says that God is always listening with an unjudgmental ear and that we shouldn’t be afraid to pray and to ask for what we or what this world may need; and that we should mirror this same dynamic of nonjudgmental grace and righteous shamelessness with those around us, always. Amen.