Well, I've got good news and bad news.
Depending on your perspective, we are either descending to new
depths of nerddom today, or ascending to new heights of
nerddom just depending on where you sit on this issue. 2 simple
words will will let you know what I'm talking about.
Star Trek. All right, I, I, I, I'm not like
a Star Trek universe aficionado, but I feel compelled to confess
that I know way more than anyone has a right to about Star Trek.
The Next Generation. Do you know the character Wharf?
Probably not, because you're not a nerd like I am.
Wharf is a Klingon and and he's he's, he's, he's lives and works
on the Starship Enterprise. But his home system, his home,
you know, world, the Klingon world is an honor.
Shame culture, honor means everything.
Shame is an awful thing. And there is a series of
episodes of multi episode story arc in which Wharf is publicly
shamed in the Klingon Empire because his father has been
convicted of being a traitor. His father's been dead for
years, was was accused and convicted after his death of
being a traitor. He wasn't really a traitor.
Just so you know, was a different Klingon.
That was the traitor. Watch the show.
It's really good. Trust me.
But but Wharf accepted what is called discommodation.
And the purpose of discommodation in the Klingon
Empire was if you had done something so bad that rather
than just killing you and putting you out of your misery,
you would be publicly disgraced, shamed and dishonored.
You were not permitted in Klingon society anymore.
You were. Your name would never be spoken
again. Your descendants, forever and
ever, would share in your shame and dishonor.
The whole purpose of discommodation was to shame
someone and cut them off from good, honorable society.
This commendation is not unlike what a lot of folks experience
in our world today, particularly in in the social media world.
And I'm going to talk about that in a little bit.
But we're talking today about canceling, calling things out
without canceling. It's right to call out treachery
as as a government when there's a traitor and and that traitor
behaves in such a way that costs innocent people their lives,
which is what Worf's father was accused of.
That needs to be called out. How do you call someone out for
bad behavior without canceling them, without shaming them to
such a degree that they are simply punished, cut off, cut
out forever excluded from polite and good and righteous society?
We get an example of that in the story of Tamar.
And we're going to spend one more Sunday here on Tamar next
week, obviously be looking at the resurrection of Jesus.
But I want to, I want to talk about Tamar's example here.
And, and just to go back and read that one passage again,
just as a refresher, Tamar was Judah's daughter-in-law.
Judah had three sons. Tamar was the wife that he
arranged for his oldest son, ER. The Bible says that ER did evil
in the Lord's sight and he was so evil that God just killed
him. And then by custom, law and
tradition, Tamar was given to Judah's second oldest son for to
to be his wife so that she would have the safety and security and
shelter of a family to belong to, and then she would have
children to care for her in her old age.
The Bible tells us that Onan was so evil that God killed him.
And then Judah, out of a sense of paranoid superstition, said,
well, there can't be anything wrong with my kids there does
Tamar must be cursed. She must be a jinx.
I'm not going to give, I've got one son left.
I'm not going to give her to him to be his wife because he'll end
up dying too. But he didn't wasn't honest with
Tamar about it. He said, you go home.
My youngest son, Shayla, he's too young to marry.
When he's old enough, I'll call you back from your father's
household and you can marry my son.
He had no intention of doing that.
He wasn't going to do that. Tamar realized that when Shayla
reached and then passed the age of marrying and she was never
called for. And so Tamar dressed as a
prostitute and, you know, caught Judah's attention and she got
pregnant by her father-in-law three months later.
Everyone knew she was pregnant because that's how pregnancy
works. I used that joke two weeks ago.
Never mind. And, And the word was sent back
to Judah. Your daughter-in-law, Tamar, has
been prostituting herself. And Judah said that is awful.
And he also saw this as a convenient way to get rid of a
problem. She was technically engaged to
his son and and now he could just have her killed.
And that's what he said. Bring her here.
We're going to burn her alive. On the way, Tamar sent a message
to Judah. And in that message was a
package. And the package contained a
staff and a ring. When Judah thought Tamar was a
prostitute and went in to, you know, do things with her, he
didn't have any money with him. So we left a pledge, his staff
in his ring, his ID, his driver's license, so to speak.
And she sent it back and said the father of this baby is the
one who owns these things. And Judah, Judah recognized and
said in a remarkable level of insight and maturity, said,
Tamar's more righteous than I am because I didn't do right by
her. So Tamar was put in a very bad
situation. She did what she could with what
she had to make that situation better.
It was a huge risk. It almost cost her her life.
But when the time came to call Judah out for his hypocrisy,
because that's exactly what he'd been, a hypocrite, he'd been
superstitious, he'd been a coward, he'd been a liar.
He'd been all of these things. He had a responsibility to care
for her. He was ignoring that
responsibility and she called him out for it.
But the way she did it is incredibly important.
Let's take a look at those verses again.
As she was being brought out to be burned alive, she sent a
message to her father-in-law. I am pregnant by the man who
owns these, she said. And she added to see if you
recognize who's seal and cord and staff these are.
And they were, of course, Judas. So Tamar called Judah out.
She wasn't a doormat. She wasn't a coward.
She wasn't a a, a perpetual victim saying woe is me, life is
unfair. There's nothing I can do in a
situation that was clearly stacked against her.
And when she had very where she had little to no power in terms
of political and social power, She now had leverage over Judah.
And she could have publicly shamed, disgraced and humiliated
him. She could have waited until the
whole crowd, crowd gathered to see the burning and held the
staff in the ring in the cord up in front of everybody said, hey,
anybody recognize these? Whose signet ring is this?
Oh, it's Judas. And disgraced him and humiliated
him. One might say she had a right to
do that. Judah was about to kill her in a
very publicly shaming and incredibly painful way.
But she didn't. She didn't.
She was as forceful as she needed to be, but she was as
gentle as she could be. And how she called Judah out.
Now, the simple fact was this was still shaming for Judah
because for him to do the right thing, which he did, he received
her into his household, not as his wife, but as his ward, and
gave her a place to live in safety and security and where
she had her children. They were twin boys, Perez and I
can't remember the other boy's name at the moment.
To do that meant acknowledging the situation and there was
shame in that. There was shame in that.
But, but shame is a tricky thing.
There is a, a teaching going around in, in the United States
now, maybe even larger Western culture, that all shame is
toxic, all shame is bad, that there is no good use for shame.
Notable people like Brené Brown have have been teaching that for
years. I had a counselor tell me that
once. Shame is always bad.
Shame is always toxic. Shame is always destructive.
I beg to differ with that position and opinion there.
There are cultures, many cultures, large cultures and
ancient cultures for which honor and shame are key parts of those
cultures. And you really can't have one
without the other. And, and I'm not prepared to say
that that, you know, half or more of the world's people live
in toxic culture simply because they employ shame in certain
ways and in certain, certain instances.
And certainly the Klingons are a good people, a noble race.
That was a joke too, you know, Thank you for laughing.
It's not as doesn't warm my heart as much when I have to
prompt you to laugh, but nevertheless, I do.
Yeah, I did get an applause sign the Amen corner.
Whoever was saying give him a, give him a sign.
There are two ways to use shame. I keep forgetting some of my
slides. Tamar shame Judah in a way that
didn't destroy him, but it gave him space for repentance and
restoration. Shame can destroy or shame can
restore. There's two ways to use shame
and, and, and one of the ways to use shame is a punishment.
It's punitive. Shame is used to punish and
destroy. This is the essence of cancel
culture. And by the way, when I talk
about cancer, cancer culture happens from the left and it
happens from the right. There is no particular ideology
that has cornered the market on the punitive usage of shame,
canceling, boycotting, cutting people out because what?
Whatever their hard line is, when that person crosses it and
you say there's no coming back from that, we have to just
destroy them, cut them out, make sure that they have no impact on
my myself, my family, my community, my culture.
They just need to be out. And that's what cancel culture
does when it's sorting back through, you know, social media
posts from years and decades ago.
I don't know if they're decade old.
So yeah, they're decade old social media posts.
It's been around that long now. And finding out something that
someone said or tweeted or posted on whatever platform, you
know, back in the mid teens and, and, and, and, and then using
that to cost them their job, which has happened, people
getting fired for something they posted about when they were a
teenager. That's punitive shame.
That's shame for the purpose of destruction and punishment.
That's one way to use shame. But Taylor Lau on his book
defending shame, which is a great book if you're, if you're
interested in reading more about this whole honor and shame
thing. Taylor Lau defending shame is is
a is a wonderful book and he talks about these two types of
uses of shame. One punish, destroy, punitive
use. The other is to invite to
repentance, redemption and restoration.
And this is a positive use of shame, shame that says you need
to know that I know that we know that you have done something
wrong and, and, and it's and it's wrong enough that it's
right for you to feel ashamed of what you've done.
But the purpose of being aware of that, of being ashamed is not
so we can cut you off from the family or cut you off from the
church or cut you off from the community.
The purpose of that is so you can say, I screwed up and now I
need to make it right so I can move out of this position of
shame and back into a position of honor.
This is what Tamar did to Judah. She shamed him, but she shamed
him in a way that left room for him to repent, that left room
for him to come back, that left room for him to restore the
relationships that he had broken, particularly the
relationship as his of his family to Tamar.
And he did all of those things. And it was the shame that she
opened his eyes to that motivated him to act in that
way. It was the shame that he felt
that led him to say Tamar's more righteous than I am that led him
to bring her into his household. That led to him to care for her
as his part of his family and provide a home for her sons and
his sons to grow up in. There is a positive use of shame
to invite to repentance, redemption and restoration.
I think using shame to punish and destroy is is almost
invariably a bad way to use shame.
If there's no room for repentance and restoration, then
then, then shame is just like another form of execution and
there's no coming back from it. The shame that is used and that
we see over and over again in Scripture is this shame that
makes space for repentance, redemption, and restoration.
We've looked at Tamar's example. Let's look at Jesus's example.
Jesus employed shame at times, repeated times throughout his
life and his ministry, but always never to simply punish,
never to cut people out, always to open the door to repentance
and restoration. If you're thinking about the
two, you know the path. It was actually 1 long passage
that we had read this morning. The cleansing of the temple
happened right after the triumphal entry.
Jesus came in humbly riding on a donkey and then got out of whip
and drove people out of the temple and thinking, my
goodness, that sounds punitive to me.
I'm going to talk about that because Jesus's example and how
he entered Jerusalem as a king gives us an idea.
It's a snapshot of his Kingdom, of what his kingdom's going to
be like at the heart and soul of life in the Kingdom of God, the
Kingdom of Jesus Christ. And let's take a look at that.
Jesus came as a king, but with humility, as Sheila said, riding
on a donkey, not on a War Horse. How about that?
We both made the same point there.
This year. We need an Amen.
Where's the he's? He's on the other side.
So Amen. Jesus came as a king.
He didn't come as a puppet. He didn't come as a servant.
He didn't come as a genie in the bottle to grant everybody's
wishes. He didn't come as Santa Claus.
Jesus came as a king, but he came as a king with humility,
not on a War Horse to conquer and destroy, but on a donkey
with grace and gentleness and compassion to invite people into
his Kingdom, not to force people into his Kingdom at the point of
a sword. It's the second thing we see in
Jesus. Jesus as the king arriving in
the capital city. Every king when they arrived
into the city would have a herald.
If you were a conquering king, you sent soldiers ahead to
herald the arrival of the king, with trumpets blaring and and,
and other instruments and and stirring people up.
But they were people of power. They were people of violence.
They were people of action that heralded the arrival of the king
so the king could demonstrate his strength as he was arriving
in town. But Jesus wasn't heralded by
soldiers. He was heralded by children and
and children in that day and age.
Children were incredible. Jesus had just said those things
about let the little children come to me and the Kingdom of
God is made of such as these Jesus that was new things.
People weren't thinking those things.
Now we say that we say that we don't really mean it most of the
time. I've heard lots of people
declaring how how children are much wiser than adults and, and
I always want to ask, are are they doing your taxes right?
Do you have them on your board of directors someplace?
You know, or if you get in trouble with the law, you're
going to get a four year old. No, Jesus believed this stuff
and, and Jesus had these little children who were not credible
witnesses. They were not legally test able
to testify. They could intimidate no one.
All they see they, they aggravated some folks.
We can see that because they were acting out of their place
and out of their station. But Jesus said no, no, no, no,
no, no, no. They get to do that.
If they don't, the rocks will do it.
So let's let the kids do it. But it was children, not
soldiers. Jesus said his that his
crucifixion, he could have called 10,000 angels to come and
set him free, could have called an army of angels.
He could have called an army of angels to herald his arrival as
king. But instead he let the kids do
it. Humility and grace and room for
repentance. Jesus drove out those who were
exploiting people's faith for personal gain in the temple.
That's what was happening. There was a system set up
according to Scripture whereby to, to, to give your tithe to
the temple. You can, you could bring
animals, but sometimes for sacrifices, it was, it was if
you were coming from a long way because the Jews were spread out
throughout the region. And, and if you were coming from
a long way, you couldn't bring a bunch of animals with you.
You would bring money with you and you could use that money to
buy animals. You could use that money to make
donations to the temple. But but whatever you were doing,
you had to convert that money into another kind of money.
And what was happening with the money changers is people were
coming in to worship God and the money changers were ripping them
off with the exchange rate and they were making a fortune doing
it. And it was exploitation, pure
and simple. People traveling hundreds of
miles sometimes to, to, to obey the call and command of God, to
worship in his temple, to offer the sacrifices that God
commanded them to offer. It was it was the House of God
on earth. It was the place on earth where
if you wanted to be close to God, this is the place you could
come. People were coming to draw near
to God and other people were saying, you know, they really
want to be here. I'll bet they'll pay extra for
it. It's like Disney World.
And that's what they did. They ripped them off like Disney
World and Jesus said, no, my house in quotes, Isaiah, my
house will be a House of prayer for all nations is the full
quote for people all over the world.
And you've turned it into a den of robbers.
You've turned it into a place of exploitation, an opportunity to
to get something from people rather than giving people access
to worship and to God and to faith and to life and to hope.
And that needed called out. And as I said last week, and
I've said before, I'll say again, Jesus was as gentle as he
possibly could be and as forceful as he needed to be.
And in this situation he needed to be pretty forceful.
And he took a whip and he turned over tables and he used violence
to drive people out of the temple.
Why? To clear the way for people to
come to God. The point wasn't to punish the
money changers, the point was to remove a barrier of people
having a relationship with God, of being reconciled to God.
Our notion that we have today, that the Holy Spirit is
everywhere and we can worship God anywhere, and no ground is
any more holy than any other ground because God is all that.
That was not their mindset. Their mindset was, as the temple
is God's house on earth, if you want to draw near to God, you
need to come near to the temple and do the things that God has
instruct us to do as part of our worship and the barriers that
were put in the way of that to exploit people.
Jesus said absolutely not, and he cleared the way for people to
truly come to God, including the people he drove out.
The people he drove out were welcome to repent and come back.
They weren't cut off, they weren't cast out.
They weren't destroyed, they weren't punished, they were
publicly shamed by the Son of God himself so they could see
the wrong that they were doing and have the opportunity to
repent of that wrong. Go back and read through the
gospels again and see the places where Jesus shames people, and
he does it more often than I think makes most of us
comfortable. But in every single one of those
places, he always leaves room for repentance and restoration.
It's never leave me forever. It's always see you wrong and
change. Turn to me humbly instead of
arrogantly. This is the example that we have
from Jesus. Jesus throughout his entire
ministry, He called, taught and healed rather than judging,
condemning and killing. Jesus didn't come as a
conqueror. There are religions in this
world that have spread throughout the world at the
point of a sword. Tragically and sadly at times,
that has been Christianity too, but that is not the Kingdom of
God that Jesus came to set up and that Jesus is setting up.
That Christianity is spread not at the point of the sword, but
with the weight of the cross. Because that's where Jesus was
going with all of this. Jesus himself was shamed.
He took upon himself the shame of the whole world.
We're going to talk about that more on Friday, but that's where
all of this is going. Rather than using shame to
punish others and destroy them, he took that shame upon himself
so that he could ultimately destroy shame, our shame and all
shame so that we can be free to come back to God.
We can be restored to God. We can stand before one another
with, with, without the weight of shame destroying us doesn't
mean we're never going to feel ashamed when we do bad stuff.
We ought to feel ashamed. But the shame doesn't have to
own us and control us. The shame doesn't have to
destroy us. I don't know why you.
I was one of those kids that at times I was shamed growing up.
And there were times and I was the one doing the shame, I'm
ashamed to say, but I had stuff. There were things about me
people made fun of. I had at one point really
massive overbite and people made fun of that.
I have a weird shaped sternum points out in the middle.
I've gained enough weight you don't notice it anymore.
I got made fun of for that was was would not hated going to the
pool or going to the beach because I didn't want people to
see my weirdness. People made fun of it.
I didn't like that. There's no place for that kind
of shame in the Kingdom of God where we embarrass and humiliate
people. That kind of shame maybe, maybe
not punishment, but domination. We use shame to put people in
their place and control them. Also a toxic use of shame.
But that doesn't mean shame itself is bad shame.
Shame is a gift that God has given us to help us recognize
when we have gone too far or when we have failed to go far
enough, when we have crossed a line or violated a relationship
in some way that we ought to feel bad about.
But with God, the motivation, the reason for the shame is
always to say it's not enough that you feel bad about it now
you need to repent. You need to turn away from it
and come back to me and start doing things my way.
This is the invitation that we have from Jesus.
This is the example we have from Jesus's great grandmother,
Tamar. Jesus, like Tamar, humbled
himself to invite us to repent and live up to our covenant
obligations, the obligations we have to care for the people in
this world around us, our family and our neighbors.
That question who, who? Who do I love?
Jesus? Who am I required to love?
You say love is the most important commandment.
Who am I required to love and who am I free to not?
Love was the other part of the unspoken part of that question.
You can't possibly mean everyone.
And then Jesus told that story, the Good Samaritan where the
priest and the Sunday school teacher passed the injured man
by because they didn't want to soil their hands by dealing with
an unclean person. And then they hated Samaritan
came and he helped the man and he took him to an end and he
provided with him with shelter and food and medical care to
cover all of his expenses and more.
And Jesus flipped the question from who do I have to love to
who can I love? And he said, who was the
neighbor to that man who was really his neighbor, the
Samaritan, the one that did the good thing with the person in
need, that provided the help that the person in need needed
real, practical, tangible help. And those are the covenant
obligations that we have as Jesus followers to provide help,
to provide aid, to provide assistance, to provide a love,
to provide shelter, to provide care, to guard people, spotty
soul and spirit, to guard people's dignity and honor.
All right, I got time for one more Star Trek.
Everything Jesus did was an invitation to repentance,
redemption and restoration. Everything, everything was like
that. And I, no, I keep forgetting
slide. I keep forgetting.
I get aggravated because I put slides and I forget them there.
But I'm going to read this one to you.
Our King, by word and example, calls us to a triumphalism
marked by grace and humility and sacrifice, not, and never to a
triumphalism of moral superiority, conquest, or
domination. The triumph that we have.
There's a triumph of being able to live humbly before others, of
showing others great grace, of sacrificing our self for the
sake of others, to lift them up and care for them and bear their
burdens. Not to make them behave the way
we think they ought to behave, but to love them as Jesus loved
them. Star Trek.
So Wharf had to accept this commendation.
There's another character in the Star Trek Next Generation
universe, Wesley Crusher. Wesley was the youngest person
that was a regular on the show, and he was at Starfleet Academy
doing well. By the way, Wesley was a good
student, had a lot of good qualities about him and he made
the flight team at Starfleet Academy and they were going to
perform in that graduation that year.
And as they were training, there were, I believe six of them on
the team. As they were training, there was
an accident and and one of his team mates died in the accident.
And as the investigation of the accident continued, the the
facts didn't add up. It appeared that that the the
team was doing, not doing what they said they were doing when
the accident in the crash happened, but they didn't have
enough evidence to prove it until Captain Picard, who is of
course Captain Picard, found out what was really going on.
He saw the evidence with a different eye, and he realized
that they were they were doing not the maneuvers they were
allowed to do for the final show.
They were doing a maneuver that had been banned from Starfleet
Academy years ago because lots of people died.
The last time people did it, Picard did.
I think it's one of the best episodes of television ever.
Captain Picard goes to, there's a public hearing that's
happening for all of this. And Picard goes to Wesley and he
says, I know what you did. I know what happened.
Let me make this simple for you. You tell the truth or I will.
And Wesley stood up at the hearing the next day at the last
moment, and he told the truth. And it cost him.
Wesley lived with the shame of that, the shame of helping to
contribute to the death of a classmate, the shame of lying
about it, the shame of of betraying his team mates who
were willing to continue to lie about it.
And the way Picard did that is so much like Tamar.
I almost wonder whether, you know, the writers of that
episode had her in mind. Because he went to Wesley
privately and he called him out for what he was doing.
And he let him feel the full weight of the shame, that
shameful things that he had done, the risk, the cost of life
and the lies to cover it up. He let him feel the full weight
of that, not to punish him, but to give him an opportunity to
step in and do the right thing and be honest about it and live
with the consequences. This is what Jesus does for us.
Whenever we feel shame, we don't need to be crushed by it.
We just need to know what to do with it.
We go back to God, we confess, we repent.
If we need to go to another person to make it right, we go
to that other person and we make it right.
If that involves confession and repentance, and God always
forgives, God always restores when we confess and we repent.
And that's how we call out without cancelling, as gently as
possible, as forceful as necessary, always leaving room
for repentance and restoration. In Jesus name, Amen.