Covered From Accusation

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. And the story of Job is not just a story about misfortune, but about disgrace and loss of honor and status. And his friends come and even pound on him even more to try to say, you must have done something wrong. And yet it's a story about shame and honor as well, where Job did nothing wrong. It's kind of amazing, isn't it? So sometimes shame is when you do something and you feel ashamed of it. And other times it's when something is done to you and you can feel shame too. So we're talking about that kind of shame today, I think, from our text. Shame is not a topic you probably have heard too much in a church, in the West at least, in the last hundred years. But boy, shame is all over the place. It really is. And it's in the Bible, like we saw last week from Genesis 3 on. So last week we talked about it there. But the last decade or so in the United States, shame has become a topic mainly through the work of someone named Renee Brown, which I used and quoted her last week just a bit. Her TED Talk on shame and vulnerability has been watched over 40 million times. How many of you have watched it, by the way? It's good. It really is good. And she is from a Christian perspective. Now, in the talk, she doesn't really talk about her faith there, but she is a Christian and a member of a church. And I think she's learned about that over time. Now, what's fascinating about all this is in 2015, so not quite as old as 1997, I didn't realize 1997 was like ancient of days now. I'm sorry, James. I am just so old that 1997 seems current yet. Do you know what I mean? It is current. You were too. You were not even thought about. Yeah. I won't say how old I was. So I had already been a pastor for 10 years at that point in time. Wow. Okay, so let's get back. So in 2015, Pam Stuckey wrote an op-ed piece in the Huffington Post, and she talked about the fact that she was amazed at, well, she was talking about Renee Brown and what revolution it is that she made a change here. She uses a metaphor. And she found an article in the Business Insider that she was amazed at, the title of which was No One Could See the Color Blue Until Modern Times. And she goes like, what? So she writes, no one could see blue? How could that be? The article states ancient languages didn't have a word for blue. Not Greek, not Chinese, not Japanese, not Hebrew. And without a word for the color, there is evidence that they may not have seen it at all. And the article poses a question. Do you really see something if you don't have a word for it? So then Pam Stuckey goes on in this article, and she uses that metaphor of they didn't see blue because they didn't have a word for it to how we don't see shame because we haven't used that word much at all. She writes, when I read Renee Brown's books, watch her videos, and witness how the people around me react to Renee, has to say in some ways it feels like Renee has done the equivalent of introducing our modern society to the color blue. Her research and work have given us a new vocabulary, a way to talk with each other about the ideas and feelings and fears we've all had, but haven't quite known how to articulate. It's like we've all had a sense of the concepts Renee studies, specifically shame, vulnerability, and courage, but never before have we had the words to fully express what we've been feeling or to share with each other our experiences. Now, like I said, in the West, maybe we don't know what shame is, but our culture is a minority culture in a lot of ways in most of the world, and much of the Bible was written in an honor and shame culture, and where group dynamics were more important than the individual. And so I think Renee's done us a great service. I also believe she's just rediscovering what's been there all along, but like not having a word for it, we haven't seen it. And what is the it? We're going to redefine this again. So Ed Welch writes in his book Shame Interrupted, shame is the deep sense that you are unacceptable because of something you did, something done to you, or something associated with you. You feel exposed and humiliated. So notice in that definition, sometimes it's something you do and you feel ashamed of, but sometimes it's something done to you, and sometimes it's something you're associated with, people label you with, and it sticks. So today we're actually painting a picture of shame from the prophet Zechariah, probably a book you have hardly read. He is apocalyptic, which is he has these symbolic dreams and visions throughout his book that are sometimes hard to interpret. This one is an easier one, Zechariah chapter 3, and in it we find this priest named Joshua, not the same Joshua from the book called Joshua. This is about 800, I think, years later, after the people of Israel come back to Jerusalem from Babylon. They've been humiliated ...