Building with Shame

Transcript is automatically produced. Errors may be present.

My name’s Alex. I’m one of the pastors here. If you’re visiting, it’s great to have you here. I had an Easter to forget all of my family got sick and I’m here and they’re here and that’s wonderful. For those of you that prayed for me last week, that I would not get sick. Thank you. It worked. For those of you that prophesied doom, especially to the people that said you’ll be throwing up by Tuesday, ha, I didn’t and I will not forget.

We are in a week. I love weeks where we begin something new. Yeah. I just love the possibilities there. Love the idea that we’re treading into new territory, but we’re also a church that kind of tries to take seriously this idea that there’s a calendar, a liturgical calendar that some really wise and smart people came up with.

Maybe, 1600 odd years ago and we try to follow that as well. So we’re leaving a season. We’re leaving a season of Easter. I sometimes say this, Easter is the season we celebrate God for us. Jesus did something that still matters today. We are in a new week. The passage reads On the first day of the week, some women went to the tomb, and when they got there, they could not find the body of the Lord Jesus.

Somewhere in that story, 2000 years ago in Jesus resurrection, everything. Changed for you and for me. It’s a brand new story. It was a story that wasn’t seen coming. The earliest disciples constantly didn’t believe Jesus when he said his story would look like death and resurrection, and was surprised still when it turned out that way.

And we live in the light of that Easter. And we make this movement now to this season of Pentecost. In six weeks from today. We’ll celebrate that with baptisms and gelato. We’ll literally take people and gelato. Yes, it’s very good gelato as well. I think. You should have cheered more for baptisms, but it’s just me nitpicking.

I wanna be part of a faith that takes a dunk tank and turns it into a spiritual activity. That’s a fun place to be. And so we’ll baptize people to celebrate their entry into this Jesus story. If you’ve never done that before, if this is a new story for you then maybe that’s. The invite already, you’ll hear about it more over the next six, six weeks.

But the invite that we have is to publicly declare that faith. Jesus left us a couple of sacraments to follow. One was communion, to remember him in the bread and the wine, but the other was this public baptism that says, I said yes to Jesus That Pentecost season while Easter is the season of God for us, it might be marked this way.

It’s when we celebrate God within us. The startling truth of Pentecost was this, that the God of the universe is a follower of Jesus dwells within you is transforming you. That you actually can’t get any closer to God than you are right now because he lives within you like extraordinary good news that comes out of this Easter and Pentecost.

Season, but that’s not today. That’s in a few weeks in the gap in between we’re gonna be navigating this idea of the things we build. And are they good? There’s a few kind of instigators for me of this series. The first one was that I had this kind of curiosity question as we come to the end of this series we’ll do the final chapter.

Of Revelation, the one we skipped, where we look at the city that were promised God will one day build on earth. But it started to make me curious about the city’s humans have built throughout history, how that started in this book called Genesis and Weaves its way through our thousands of years of history.

But it was added to another question, which maybe brings it down to more of an individual level. Like it’s good to know. That history but I was curious like how does that speak to us as individuals? So what we did is we went back and looked at those cities and we asked a question like this, like what was it that kind of warped those cities?

What was it that kind of took them off track? And how we might, we see some of those tendencies in our lives because we all build things, as we see will see you. You may not be involved in building a city. But you might build a relationship, you might build a family, an organization, a business, all sorts of things we leave our fingerprints on.

And our character depends, like what they look like depends on our character and perhaps the struggles we have. So let’s start here, like back. In the origin story before we get ahead of ourselves the earliest idea of genesis’s God is created. The Hebrew begins the, in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

Now the earth was formless. An empty darkness was over the surface O of the deep, and the spirit of God was hovering over the waters. For those of you that like to nerd out on little scriptural elements with me, this is just one for you to look at in your own time. In Hebrew, the word formless and empty or void, they’re rhyming words.

This was an oral text. Originally it was something that was shared verbally and so it’s supposed to stick in your mind when they match. Darkness was over the deep in the spirit of God was hovering over the waters and God said, let there be light. And there was light. God saw the light was good, and he separated light from darkness.

God saw that the light was good and he separated light from darkness. God is a creator. In the beginning I. God is a creator of all things, especially of humans who are shown to be a superior being not superior in the sense that nothing else matters. That would to be, to take the Bible like way off track.

Actually all of creation matters, all of scriptures, a celebration of this world and a redeeming of this world. But especially it was said that when man was made, it was very good. And there was evening, the sixth day. God in scripture is a creator who creates good things. And when we find the text where we see humans created, we read these words.

So God created mankind in his own image. That’s the you can uniqueness of humans. The Imago day, you somewhere in your core. Whatever life looks like right now. Every human being you’ve ever encountered, whatever they look like right now, somewhere perhaps hidden really well in some people, perhaps hidden really well in some of us is an image bearer of God.

When we lose that, we lose some of that sanctity. God made mankind and he made them in his image, and so he made them to be creative. Two, you are a creator. You are the only species that will wake up and say, you know what? We’re gonna decorate and we’re gonna make sure the winds are valances, match the couch.

And we’re gonna change that around every now and again, but we’re gonna constantly refresh. We’re gonna make gene skinny. Now we’re gonna make them flared, and then we’ll make them skinny again, and then we’ll make them baggy again, and then we’ll rotate between those things. We are unlike every species.

Because a bird may make a nest, but that’s functional. But we are creative and all of our experience of life pushes us in that creative area. This is a 1990s living room. It’s creative. Sure. Bad but creative. It’s no wonder that the generation that created this moved to something that looks like this.

It’s we’re all reacting to what we’ve experienced. The heartbeat of Genesis early is that God made man and he made a creative, God made us creative. I. A couple of kind of wise authors that have seen that in the world. This is, oh, actually, let’s get here. First the question of whether it’s good to be creative and some of the question about what cities look like is explored in the brilliant Doug Douglas Adams novel Hitchhikers Guide for the Galaxy.

He points out this distinction between humans and other animals. For instance, he says, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was the more intelligent than Dolphins because he had achieved so much the wheel. Perhaps our greatest creation, New York wars and so on, whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time.

But conversely, the Dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man for precisely the same reasons. And yet. The idea of simply mucking around in the ocean as good as it sounds to start with loses some of the beautiful purpose we’ve been given in life. You have been made with a purpose.

Elizabeth Gilbert says this, if you’re alive, you’re a creative person. You and I and everyone you know are descendants from tens of thousands of years of makers, decorators, tinkerers, storytellers, dancers, explorers, fiddlers drummers, builders, growers, problem solvers, and embellishes. These are our common ancestors.

That’s our history. And if you’ve never done something like that with your hands, you’ve made a family. You’ve made friendships, you’ve made businesses, you’ve made organizations, and on. Maya Angelou said this, you can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have. We are reflected in the things that we build.

And that hits that curiosity for me of how do we bring who we are? And how does it affect our families, perhaps our marriages, perhaps our organizations, our friendships, our housemates? How does all of our inner workings, how does it imprint on the stuff that we make? And so each week we’ll take some of those things, some positive and some negative and try and rework some of our story.

And the first week begins here. It begins with a common story of shame. There are a whole bunch of writers wise theologians, psychiatrists, that have suggested this. Shame is a universal story. I. We feel it from an early age. I have a distinct memory of being asked by my parents to lend my brother my clothes.

We’d been out splashing around in a river, being the kind of human equivalent of dolphins, just enjoying life. And he had got all his clothes wet and then thrown them into the stream and they drifted off downstream. And so my parents said, okay, we’re gonna give some of. You are close to your brother so he doesn’t have to walk home naked.

The downside being at a small age, I walked back to the car in just my underpants and I fell early on that sense of just, no, this is wrong. People are staring and I’m deeply uncomfortable. Carl Young said this, shame as we look at it, is a soul eating emotion. We know what it feels like just we can feel it viscerally, even if we’re not experiencing it right now.

And we see it most clearly in the story of our first ancestors. Our first ancestors, you might say gardeners, but they built a family. The thing that they gave their lives to was this first. Family. In Genesis chapter two, we read the Lord God took the man Adam and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.

Best research suggests that the Garden of Eden looked like this, looks like this 12th hole of Augusta, the most beautiful place on earth, and he gave him some instructions. You are free to eat from any tree at the garden, but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. For when you eat from it, you will certainly die.

And here’s the condition that Adam and Eve live with. This is what life looks like for them. Imagine this if you can, if you will, in the midst of our struggle, perhaps with shame, Adam and his wife were both naked and they felt no shame. They never experienced in this moment what it is to fear that another person is looking at you to feel that sense of vulnerability.

They lived in complete comfort with their surroundings and the people that they did. Life with. And then we see the story change. And I know this story is familiar to so many of you. Even this idea linked to it might be familiar, but remember when you’re preaching, you don’t preach to a lake, you preach to a river.

We change kind of people all the time. We add people. And so this is a foundational story I would suggest. So if you know it, you know how important it is. Genesis chapter one. Now the serpent. Later in the book of Revelation attached to this character, the devil was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made.

He said to the woman, did God really say you must not eat from the tree in the garden? This creator that so far has shown himself to be completely benevolent and good and generous is questioned. Is he really good and generous? Is he not withholding something from you? It’s a question that most have experienced as children and they experience it seems as adults.

Am I really just being denied everything that would make life better? Verse two verse two and three. The woman said to the serpent, we may eat fruit from the trees in the garden. But God did say you must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden and you must not touch it or you will die.

A little deviation from the truth. God didn’t say anything about touching it. Apparently they could touch it as much as they liked. They simply couldn’t eat it, and now a promise you will not certainly die. The serpent said to the woman, for God knows that when you eat it, your eyes will be opened. And you will be like, God, the promise of this serpent is this.

Your eyes will be opened, and he’s right. They will be. Verse six and seven. When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye and desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ated and she gave some to her husband who was with her. And he ate it. Then the eyes of both of them were opened and they realized that they were naked, so they sued sowed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.

Their eyes were open simply to their own nakedness, their own of vulnerability, their own sense of been vulnerable to the world around them. Compare that to the first idea. Adam and his wife were both naked and they felt no shame. They moved from an environment that has no shame, no sense of vulnerability to one where that is distinct.

The eyes of them were both opened and they realized that they. Were naked. And so they do what people do in that situation. They cover up Sana. This brilliant commentator in the Torah commentary series says this, their eyes were open just as the serpent promised. Ironically, they were only open to their own nakedness and shame is the consequence that has emerged from this one moment in history.

Shame is the consequence of this action. And then we read the conclusion that we’ll come back to in just a moment. Genesis three, eight and nine say this, and then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in a constant relationship with God, a constant interaction.

Suddenly they have a moment where that interaction is uncomfortable and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called to the man. Where are you know? ’cause we come back to it. Super important. The first humans hid from God behind trees because of shame. The Lord called to the man, where are you?

He answered, I heard you in the garden. And I was afraid because I was naked. So I hid. I think actually the Hebrew word is more like ashamed than afraid. And he said, who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from? This is this first story that kind of is central to all of our experience of the world, particularly in this idea of shame.

Here’s the truth of Genesis. In Genesis, the story quickly turns to shame. It’s like what? Page two. Of the scriptures you open it. Page one creation, page two. The story turns to shame and it seems according to a lot of wise psychologists, that the same is true for us in Genesis. The story turns quickly to shame in our lives.

The story turns quickly to shame. We experience it early on through all sorts of different mechanisms. I have a video. That I have full permission to show. And so I had to pay to show this video. I have a daughter that is interested in making money off my sermons, and so she, she got I think $5 out of this.

I think it was worth it. This, I think, is a little visual of shame and perhaps a more humorous level.

Oh, what’s going on here?

So this is my oldest daughter, Elena, when she was about I think about three years old. She loved to grab stuff out of the cupboard she loved, especially just raw oats. Again, a little shade just shows how little treats we had in the house at that age. We were good parents and and so she she snuck out with ’em to the deck, and she, the moment she’s called, what’s her reaction?

It’s I gotta hide this. It’s not actually that she was going to get in trouble necessarily. She doesn’t know that she doesn’t have that information, but something tells her, get out of here, hide. It’s the same reaction. I. Yes, actually as Adam and Eve in the story we just read, there’s something about the experience of shame even at an early age that tells you I don’t want to be seen.

I actually want to slip into the background and actually, according to a wise people. Many of us when we uncover it, have stories early in our lives that resemble shame stories. Now we have some people in the room that are psychologists, counselors. They’re far more equipped to talk about this than I am.

So I’m gonna try not to embarrass myself, and I’m gonna primarily rely on telling some of my stories in the hope that they give you a chance to own your stories. I’m cheating a little ’cause I feel like some of these stories I’m gonna tell are stories that are somewhat resolved, whereas I’m sure there’s deep shame stories that go unresolved.

Somewhere in my life. My first experience that I can remember centering around shame was being at school with some friends. I had been told by visiting the dentist that I had to have one of those old fashioned like nineties braces. Do you remember the ones that had the whole headpiece that went over the back of your head and made you stand out to everybody in the world?

I was worried about it, and so I remember saying to a friend of mine, I’m probably gonna have to have this treatment. I was looking for someone that would tell me, you are okay. That’s normal. I understand. The reaction I got was this. I’m not being your friend anymore. Then it told me really early on that like how you were received by the world was very dependent on whether you looked the right way or acted the right way.

Suddenly, I had this sense that I would be stared at eviscerated shame for simply something that was a medical procedure. It even made me wonder whether it was worth it to have braces. Maybe I should just accept my place in the big book of British Smiles and, I should just keep the teeth of my homeland.

I experienced shame in new ways as I got older. My first experience of shame, for real, was when I was about 12 years old. I stole pornography from a corner shop. I shop around the corner from my parents’ house. For some reason, I decided to take it to school with me, which kind of puts a lie to the idea that my parents had that, that I was a bright child.

It seems I was a remarkably stupid child. Some friends of mine deciding that they deciding it would be fun, decided to tell the teacher what I had in my bag. I remember hiding behind the building. I remember the teacher coming around to find me. I remember the deep desire not to be seen, but there was no place to hide.

I remember her sending me to the head of the school who told me that he was gonna phone my parents. I remember the walk home to my, oh, so Christian parents. I remember lying to them with the classic eternal lie. An older boy told me to do it. Somebody put it in my bag. Something like that. I remember trying to look excited when she told me that the head of school had phoned and that he was gonna do a special assembly where he was gonna talk to the whole school about this subject.

I. I remember feeling like there was no place to hide because I knew everybody in the school would be staring at one person. I remember those moments that are also childlike, but also adult-like. They suddenly bridge the gap between childhood and adult and the moments where I first experienced that sense of oh, this is what shame feels like.

This is what it feels like to have a deep desire to be seen by nobody. Perhaps you have a story like that. Perhaps there’s a say that you can remember your own moments where suddenly it was very apparent that people were staring at you for some reason. You felt like they were staring, but felt almost like they wanted to turn away, that it was almost painful for them to look at you.

Shame has that tendency, it seems it’s both painful to feel for the person who’s feeling it, but actually it’s rejected. By people that care about them, by their desire to turn away. The truth is that we don’t want to know shame stories. Shame stories are awkward. It’s easier to try and keep them hidden, easier to be silent.

And yet, here’s what it seems like happens with shame stories, that when we hold onto them, we actually end up forcing them onto others. I think there’s this idea that when we live in shame, we force it unto others. Shame has a way of making its incipient root through families. I. In marriages, in organizational structures, across businesses, across all sorts of lines where we feel like it should not encroach.

We feel like it’s just a story for ourselves, and yet, often shame stories are stories that get passed unto others really quickly. A love this quote from Pete Zaro who says this, and Jesus may be in your heart, but grandpa is in your bones. You have stories that have passed through your family history and have ways of finding you shaming other ways?

It became apparent to me was part of my family story. I was always expected to have the best grades. I was told things as many students are like, oh, you’re so bride. If only you applied yourself. You have a straight A mind, but a C plus attitude, all those sorts of things. But it was really apparent in my family that good grades were just the standard, just accepted.

Even good grades were not really praised, just simply just you achieved the minimum. I. When I look at it, I see simply that my dad was longing for me to have more opportunities. He was the one that pushed the good grades idea. He wanted me to have opportunities He felt like he hadn’t had. He’d worked the same job because it paid well, simply providing for his family of seven, just being faithful.

And yet he had his story too. He was a straight A student except for French. He came home as a kid with a grade book that had all A’s and one F for French, a grading error in which the whole class got an F, including the kid from France telling you that something was probably wrong with the system. He handed it to his dad, and his dad looked at him and said, what happened to the French?

There was no praise of anything good, simply an acknowledgement that something was off. Something was wrong. But my grandfather he had his own story as well. It is just a kind of simple way in which we saw that story of like performance and requirements move itself through our family history, our family bloodline.

Sometimes we think we can just leave that story behind. Simply blame the people and before us, but I’m not sure that actually works. Shame stories tend to turn up in all sorts of places. This is Nancy Berg Altberg, who noticed it in her parenting after raging at her kids one day. She said this, A good person does not unleash anger on defenseless children.

If you come over to my house and have a cup of juice, if you spew your juice, I won’t yell at you, but I do at my children. The horror of sin and the pain that in inflicts the hurt, the brokenness, the damage is sometimes irreparable. She notices ways in which some of that anger, that resentment, that shame, it pushes itself on those that are smallest, on those that are most innocent.

Shame navigates its way through parenting when we feel like we’re just not enough and probably affects women more than men. There’s probably ways in which stories of mom guilt, the feeling of the need to work, and yet the feeling that they should be home all the time is probably located more in one gender than another.

Even in the Adam and Eve story, there’s different ways that shame encroaches on them. For Adam, he feels this sense of somebody else has failed and yet he’s condemned as well. For Eve, she feels the sense that all of the blame is put on her somewhere that story is misaligned. Some wise person once said that Adam rejoices in the fact he’ll always be able to blame Eve.

Where Eve rejoices in the fact that Adam will always need her some way. They find ways to pass the shame story on. Rosaria Butterfield talks about a story in which her church goes through a crisis. Two men in the church are are found guilty of particular sexual sins. In the same week, one goes to jail.

And accepts his guilt. The other continues to protest his intimate into his innocence and eventually leaves his sick and faithful wife. She talks about the fact that telling those same stories to the community on the same week was like a grand slam of shame for us all. But she notes one thing. Those two men that were guilty of these things were the most outspoken against the church’s outreach to the L-G-B-T-Q community.

It wasn’t the conservative position that mattered. Lots of the church held conservative views, but these were two men that spoke about people in that community as though they were subhuman less than human, that used demeaning language consistently. Seems like we find all sorts of places to hide our shame stories, all sorts of ways to push them on to other people.

Kurt Thompson, who has a brilliant book called The Soul of Shame, says this, shame is a primary means to prevent us from being a light bearing community of Jesus. Followers who work to create space for others who wish to join us to do shame, therefore, is not simply an unfortunate, random emotional event.

It’s both a source and result of evil’s active assault and God’s creation. Shame finds its way in all sorts of places in the church. And it seems like somewhere this idea is true. As much as we work to hide it, shame cannot be hidden. When it’s hidden, it’s simply, it festers inside. It’s like a sore, a wound that isn’t fully closed, that needs in fact to be healed before life can continue.

We try to hide it away in our family trees. Try to push it onto other people. And yet if somewhere that’s our story healing work, it seems has to take place. And I think, here’s the hard part from everything I’ve read over time, not just this week, this is what I suspect. Healing shame seems to begin with vulnerability.

As hard as that can be to step into. Brene Brown says this, if we can share our story with someone who responds with empathy and understanding shame simply can’t survive. Kurt Thompson again says Healing shame requires being vulnerable with other people in embodied actions. There is no other way, but shame will as we will see, attempt to convince us otherwise.

Shame will convince us if we simply. Cover it up, everything will turn out fine. In fact, it doesn’t turn out fine. It hides again in those family trees, in those relationships in all sorts of places. My own shame eventually healed through this mechanism. After finding a place where I felt like I’d hit the absolute low, felt like my young faith was on the point of deteriorating, felt a wash of guilt in my early twenties.

As the story of 12 years old of addiction continued onto the years of young adulthood, I finally found space for what our Catholic brothers would probably call confession and what we might call finding someone else who can take the role of Jesus in conversation. I. I finally went to a youth pastor that I worked for at this point in my life, I was doing all sorts of things for God.

I was preaching to people regularly. I was volunteering in all sorts of ways. I was leading an outreach ministry to young kids in our area. I felt like I was doing the stuff, but still this nagging sense as John Oberg says, that everything wasn’t okay. Wouldn’t leave me alone and my constant place of addiction just left me feeling like the same failures would come back time and time again.

And so I finally sat down with a friend, a youth pastor, someone I worked for. When I walked in, it felt like a firing, felt like a court martial, felt perhaps like an execution. It felt like this was just the beginning of a terrible end. I’ve forgotten in the long years since what he said, but I’ve never forgotten how he acted.

I’ve never forgotten his graciousness, his reminder that I was going to be okay, his encouragement that I was on the right track, that I was following Jesus, and yet still there were places in my life that needed to be healed. I. I’ve never forgotten the joy with which he stood up after an hour and simply said, don’t you have a ministry to run.

I don’t want you to be late. I expected him to tell me I was worthless, unusable by God, and yet what he told me was the opposite was that God was active in my story. What he told me was the heartbeat of Genesis chapter three. It was this core truth which I, if you remember anything, I don’t want you to forget.

God does not run away from runaways. He runs towards them In our broken places of shame, in our pain, our hurt in all the ways that were broken. The God of the universe beautifully runs towards people like you and I. Even when we’re not sure that anyone can bear to look at us, he doesn’t just look. He runs.

Hebrews chapter 12 says this. And let us run with per perseverance the race marked out for us. Fixing our eyes on Jesus. The pioneer and perfecter of faith for the joy set before him endured the cross scorning his shame. Sco scorning it, shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. Consider him who endured such opposition from sinners so that you will not grow weary and lose heart.

It’s that middle verse that stands out to me for the joy set before him. He endured the cross scorning its shame. Our first ancestors in the midst of their shame, hid behind a tree. The God of the universe in his deep love for us, hunger upon a tree naked, ashamed, despised that went through it for us.

This is the God who does not run away from runaways. He runs towards them.

Jesus for my friends here, for me, shame is this insipid thing. It’s not attached to a concrete sense of guilt for an action. It’s tied to this sense that we might be worthless, unlovable, not easily looked upon by others. The natural. Move from that is to suggest that you can’t stand to look at us either.

Thank you that you didn’t move away from shame. You move towards it. Your invite to us is to come out of hiding and walk out from behind the tree. We so often find refuge in walk out of the hiding spots we’ve created for our shame and our family stories. In the long years of history in our own sense of justification.

Thank you for your invite. God who runs towards runaways. Amen.