Ecclesia Princeton
Ecclesia Princeton
Community of Truth: Scripts - Ian Graham
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Our culture offers various narratives by which to live by. Cultural scripts of achievement, shame and doom are identified and contrasted with the script of Jesus’ life and resurrection.
Good morning friends. It's good to be with you today. My name is Ian. I'm part of the staff here at Ecclesia. If you're new here, welcome. I hope that you have felt welcomed, essentially as if God himself were welcoming you. I know that's a grand ambition, but that's our hope. Is that you feel like, hey, this was a good thing. I came today and we're so glad you're here.
Speaker 1:A couple things If you have a little kid, they make noise and we love that here, okay, so I just want to set the temperature in the room. Nobody's worried about that, and so don't feel the parental pressure that we all feel. When your child is crying You're like, oh gosh, I gotta silence them. It's okay. They worship here too, and we're grateful for that. And if you're here all the time, so good to see you. Some of you are back from summer break and so it's good to see you again. If you were here last week I wasn't, and so honored to be here.
Speaker 1:We got to take our kids to an Oklahoma University football game, which I have to tell you like I knew. I knew it was going to blow their minds and so I was very excited about that and Cordy and I were kind of talking. It's like they have no idea. So you come up through the tunnel and there are literally 90,000 people in this stadium and our kids have never seen anything like that at scale. I was like just a preview of heaven, dude, just a slight preview. You know, if you've never been to heaven but you've been to Oklahoma, this is like a joke for, like, such old people. But here's what I'm saying Thank you to our team for allowing us to be away, and if I haven't got a chance to meet you, it'd be a joy to say hello.
Speaker 1:We every fall kind of started a new teaching series, and so we are beginning that today, and the series that we are entering into is called the Community of Truth. The series that we are entering into is called the Community of Truth. There's a lot wrapped up in that very pithy statement, but basically saying that there is not only a truth that we can wrap our lives around, that we can come to encounter, but that it is engaged in the face of others and with other people. And so we'll be looking at the story that Jesus invites us to be caretakers of, to be partakers of, and how do we, in seeing what Jesus has done for us, illuminate some of the half-truths that we live out of, some of the lies, the distortions that we so easily gravitate towards, that we so easily default into, and how do we see them for what they are, as not quite full life and not the fullness that Jesus has come to offer us. And so, today, what I simply want to do is look at a couple of the scripts that our culture gives us and says this is living, and to say to that hmm, maybe, maybe there's more.
Speaker 1:Cnn recently reported on a Hong Kong firm accountant meeting with what he thought was the CFO and the entire board of the company that he worked for. And the CFO and the entire board of the company that he was working for were also in the company's boardroom on a video call. And so the accountant was like this checks out, this is great. So he's talking to whom he presumes are his superiors, and they say to this accountant hey, we need you to wire the equivalent of $25 million into this account. And again, going off the information that he has CFO board boardroom, he's like sure thing, good as done, boss. And then he does it, only to subsequently find out that all of it was fake, every last bit of it, ai. On a video call, using deep fake technology, hackers had positioned themselves as the CFO, the board, and recreated the boardroom and got this guy, this poor soul, to wire $25 million. Now, if you're not familiar with deep fake technology, because our culture was already so awesome at discerning what is true, we decided we needed some sort of nuclear weapon to really make it difficult for us, and so deepfake technology mimics the voice inflections, motions of people that they have video of. Now we are live streaming our service. We do a podcast every week. So if you ever get a call from me asking for money, it's not me. I'm just going to say that now. Even if you see me on video, it's not me. But it's very troubling the kind of world that we are entering into, because it's so hard to tell what is real and theorists are already looking at what is on the horizon and saying we're in big trouble and that's their conclusion. Like that's your expert opinion. Okay, thank you.
Speaker 1:There's a man named Brian Johnson, a former member of the Church of Latter-day Saints and a tech entrepreneur. He sold a PayPal-like startup to PayPal for $800 million and, as it so often goes with people who achieve the pinnacle, sitting on his pile of money like Scrooge McDuck. He's like what is the purpose of life? And he found himself just binge eating late at night to sort of chur that, which ailed him. So every night he's like I gotta do something, there's gotta be more to this. And so he grew tired of the way he was feeling from eating all the junk food and decided that he was going to run every single health decision that he made, from when to sleep to what to eat, through a series of algorithms and software. Johnson has a software that he's created and a team of over 30 medical specialists who monitor his organ functions and optimize his decisions. I mean, this guy spends more money on his body than LeBron James.
Speaker 1:Now, out of Johnson's techno-positive approach to health, out of Johnson's techno-positive approach to health, he's developed a vision and a philosophy of the future. Similarly, brian Johnson has delved into tech enough to look at AI and say this is terrifying. Ai is going to take over the world. The only response that humanity has is to try to not die, and his ambition is called the don't die movement, and every decision that he makes, run through this algorithm, through the software, is with the intention of not dying. He says that he has the body, at in his mid-40s, of an 18 year old. Who can say? Who can say Whose body at 18? My question. But to his mind, thus far he has been successful.
Speaker 1:Now I don't want to sound like a grump here today, but I do have bad news for Brian. He's going to die and I am fairly reticent to make overarching pronouncements, but I'm very confident in this one. He is going to die and all the people following him are also going to die. And it's the story that he's created out of what amounts to his anxiety about death. It's quite convoluted, but it's actually kind of admirable in its scope and its ambition. But he's going to die.
Speaker 1:But Johnson's story that he's living out is animating nearly every single one of his decisions. And from our vantage point, even though we can caricature Brian and if he were in the room he could caveat it, that'd be fine but we can just look at the basic facts here Every decision that he is making is animated by this story. And so we see these two stories and we see in the first one that sometimes we're just going off of the information that we have. Right, it may be false, it may be wrong, but we think it's right and we're going for it. The second version of this is we have created a story that's going to dictate literally every step, and there's a power in that right. We can respect the discipline, even if we're standing on the edge of some sort of delusion here, right.
Speaker 1:And so today, what I want to do is simply look at a few scripts that are present in our culture, and I love the image of scripts, because a script in the hands of a great actor becomes something more, and I think this is what Jesus gives to us a script for living and then an empowerment by the Holy Spirit and a call to become fully alive. We essentially, are called by God to become great actors, and he's trying to say if you follow these words, blessed is the one who does not walk in the way of the wicked or sit in the counsel of the ungodly, but rather delights in the law of the Lord. If you walk in this way, you will become a blessing, you will become something more than you are right now, and so I love this concept of scripts and looking at some that are presented to us in our culture as versions of living. I've called them scripts of self-belonging, and the definition boils down to this Jesus says you are not your own and that is good news. Our culture has some version of saying yeah, you actually belong to yourself, it's all on you, and that may be, in fact, bad news. All right, so let's look at a couple of scripts of self-belonging. The first, the most American and perhaps the most Princetonian of our scripts for today, the achievement script.
Speaker 1:We talk a lot about holy ambition around here and I never want to diminish or discourage holy ambition because beautiful things happen. When people, almost in the version of Brian Johnson, say I'm going to allow every step of my life to be ordered by Jesus, things happen and we want to live that way. But there's a different version of ambition that often shows up. It's not the version that Jesus invites to. We see holy ambition most beautifully expressed by John the Baptist he must increase and I must decrease and that sort of ambition in the harness of God's sanctifying power, his presence. When we give our heart, soul, mind and strength, our allegiance to Jesus, he does amazing things. But there's a different kind of ambition that often will color itself in religious language and we often default to living by. It's an ambition that doesn't start from a place of grace, a place of belonging, but rather a place of striving, that we have to build something for ourselves that, in no uncertain terms, we are our own, we belong to ourselves and we have to express that identity. We have to build that identity and the path to expressing the identity that we've built culturally becomes success. Have a successful, lucrative career, for some of us. Have a successful marriage and family. Become successful at being seen and being known by others. Successful at being seen and being known by others, for many of us in here, our lives have been marked by the anxious striving from one achievement to the next, always moving.
Speaker 1:I remember early on in our time at Princeton, I went to a school called Oral Roberts, which you know, on the academic ratings is just a little lower than Princeton, it's maybe on. Which you know, on the academic ratings is just a little lower than Princeton, it's maybe on the list, you know, if you just keep scrolling. So I was trying to understand, like, what is it like to be a Princeton student? Because I don't know and one of the first young women who was a part of our church, one of the first students to walk through the door and many of you are students and welcome. You are, in no uncertain ways, the product of her just having the courage to say I'm going to go to this new place in a movie theater and show up. And one of the first questions I asked was like what's it like being a Princeton student? She's like it's hard. She's like.
Speaker 1:I was used to school being hard academically, but once I started trying to get into Princeton I realized that I not only had to be excellent academically but also socially, and by that meaning socially at every layer of my life. I had to be in all the clubs, not just be in the clubs but lead the clubs. I had to be a great friend, had to be kind of known and popular. And so she's expressing this kind of multifaceted cross pressure that she experiences at all times and I was like, wow, that's a lot, that's a heavy burden, and Jesus carries those kinds of burdens and you can definitely put that down. But for some of you who are students, you can relate to that. For others of us, we are not Princeton students but we carry around an immense weight of responsibility. You lead a business, you have people whose livelihoods are in some way you're responsible for You're carrying that around right, or in some way you have bought into the story that you have to take the reins and take control of life so that everything will be okay.
Speaker 1:For many of us in here, perhaps you're far past your student days, maybe you're further down the road in life and there have been crossroads that have come and gone. Our lives, as it turns out, as I'm finding every year, grow more limited as you grow older. It doesn't mean that they grow lesser, but they do grow more limited. Choices that you made 10 years ago begin to define your life, and those streets you may never come to again. And yet this question can nag and lingers of us what are you going to make of yourself? What can you contribute? How will you show people that you matter? How will you be successful?
Speaker 1:The philosopher Byun Chul Han identifies our society as a burnout society. Now I'm going to commend this book to you. It is literally called the Burnout Society, and I would rarely do this for a couple reasons. First of all, philosophers, and I would rarely do this for a couple reasons. First of all, philosophers famously terrible writers, not awesome, and I say that with no shade, but they know it. Second, famously long-winded Now, no judgment up here for people that are long-winded. However, this is short and clear and very well written.
Speaker 1:Byun Chul Han calls our society a burnout society. He says our society is not one where rules, limits and roles govern what's possible. We weren't born into some version of a caste system or some role that was defined for us before we ever stepped foot. We are told and most of it's kind of true you can make a life for yourself, you can build something, but it's not a culture where nothing is possible. It's a culture where anything is possible and that in its own way, in removing limits and making anything available to us, has its own anxiety that's attached to it, where we seek for foothold, something to grab onto. Where do I start? Hans says that we are enticed in this setup to become entrepreneurs of ourselves, or, in the words of the current tech platforms, to build a brand. Think about what a brand was originally used for. Branding throughout history has been about ownership, from the darkest depths of the evil of slavery to marking which cows belong to which rancher. And in our culture, the implicit suggestion is that you can be whatever you want. You can live whatever life you want to live and you can show everybody how awesome it is through social media. The poet Mary Oliver asked us the poignant question what are you going to do with your one wild and precious life? And our culture asks the question how are you going to monetize your one wild and precious life?
Speaker 1:Chilhan writes this it is not the imperative only to belong to oneself, but the pressure to achieve that causes exhaustive depression. Now he's not using depression in a clinical sense, as we would suffer and many of us do as individuals. He's using it in a collective sense, and we see some glimpses of this in sociological reporting, especially around the subject of what it means to be a man. Right now, if you look into especially, richard Reeves talks about the problem with boys talking about these things that were historically true, that have now been shaken, and so what does it mean? A lot of men are looking for what it means to be a healthy version of a man. So that's the kind of depression that he's referencing here.
Speaker 1:He says, seen in this light, burnout syndrome does not express the exhaustive self so much as the exhaustive, burnt out soul. And for so many of us we are told, if we don't produce something that we are nothing and we're going to see. Even our culture, though it often imbibes and lives by this half-truth, lie, distortion, whatever you want to call it has some ready-made answers to kind of oh, it's actually not that, but not ready-made answers that fully rise to the level of flourishing that Jesus of Nazareth offers us. So achievement is one of the scripts that we so easily live out of, and we can often see the script that we are living out of in our tense moments. When things go wrong. How do you respond? What do you turn to? Do you say I have to make it okay, so it will be okay when you fail? Do you believe the assessment that that failure says about one shrivel and shard of your life? Do you take it as all-encompassing, as a definitive statement about who you are? Again, the script that we are living out of will often determine the way that we live. The other side of our achievement culture brings us to our next cultural script of self-belonging that being shame. What happens when we don't achieve, when we don't measure up, when we don't get the life that we've always wanted?
Speaker 1:You've seen the movie the Social Network? We see how the young Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook. Okay. So Facebook, for those of you who are young, is a social media platform that old people are on, so you don't worry about that. But Facebook was the grandfather of Instagram and TikTok, and so you got it. But the movie the Social Network describes how Facebook was started, and it literally was started because Mark Zuckerberg was failing at dating and he wanted to lash out at the women on campus and started a network that ranked women based on his perceived attractiveness. And so again, the origin story often has a lot to say about the ongoing story.
Speaker 1:The origin story of social media, in no uncertain terms, is shame, the fundamental architecture. Now these conglomerate, all-encompassing technologies have metastasized with our own internal narrators. Guess what? Shame wasn't invented when social media was invented. We were already quite adept at shaming ourselves and one another long before we got a technology to put that into hyperdrive. But now, when we're sitting there scrolling, oftentimes, there's this interaction that's taking place Wow, their life looks pretty great, huh, I wonder why. Mine's not so great, huh, their life's pretty shiny. They have a. Mine's not so great, huh, their life's pretty shiny. They have a lot of time for vacation. That's amazing. Good for them. Maybe I should click on their coupon code. I wonder why they have so much vacation time. Those of us who aren't as steeped in the online world, well done to you.
Speaker 1:Shame is often that cruel voice. You don't need technology to shame, to join in the chorus of shame, that cruel voice that tells us you'll always be like this. Things will never change. That thing that you did, that choice, that you made that mistake, that regret that still defines you. You can never be healed. Things fell apart in your life because of you. For many of us, shame defines our lives in ways that we could never even begin to imagine.
Speaker 1:Kurt Thompson is an interpersonal neurobiologist. He writes extensively about the effects of shame, especially as he has observed them in counseling settings, and also writes about the theological implications of shame in really beautiful ways. He has a book called the Soul of Shame that I again commend to you because it's beautiful writing. But I'm going to read to you a longer quote because I think it first captures some of the neural things that are happening when shame is sort of taking over. But I think also, as he's describing some of the more technical aspects of what's happening, you'll just be like yeah, I know what that feels like. All right, so let's check it out.
Speaker 1:For instance, when I experience shame, Thompson writes, I find it virtually impossible to turn my attention to something other than what I am feeling. I can become overwhelmed with the activity of my brainstem the no-clutch phenomenon and my PFC, my prefrontal cortex, goes offline. I'm not able to think coherently in my logical thought processes, which usually help me make good choices, are unavailable to regulate my right brain, from which all the emotion is pouring. So you see, in the present, there's like a paralysis that begins to take over. Many of us have experienced this right, like shame begins to take over, it begins to become the dominant voice and we almost feel like we can't function. Shame begins to take over, it begins to become the dominant voice and we almost feel like we can't function. Furthermore, that's the present.
Speaker 1:My memory is inundated with old, implicit network activity, recollections of other times I have felt this and I'm unable to marshal the necessary memories of strength and confidence I desperately need at the moment. Shame is overtaking me. I then begin to construct a narrative that predicts a bleak and pessimistic future. So we see, we go to the past first. Shame begins to rewrite the past, but not in the beautiful redemptive way that we usually associate with that Shame is rewriting the past in such a way that nothing good has ever come our way. God has never come through in the past. He's never saved me from my circumstances that I have gone through in the past, and now I begin to construct out of that memory, out of this present, a view of the future that is hopeless and gloomy I desperately need at the moment. Shame has overtaken me. I begin to construct a narrative that predicts a bleak and pessimistic future. I'm unable to tell the whole story, certainly not one in which I'm loved by God unconditionally and life in the end will be okay.
Speaker 1:My state of mind is fully disrupted, and transitioning back to one of coherence and peacefulness requires enormous effort. I can only see myself as being intolerable to others, and this is the other thing that shame does. Shame then gets projected, it leaks, and so when we are encountering these cycles of shame, then we assume that, the way we are feeling about ourselves internally, everybody else feels about us, and they simply tolerate us. Everybody else feels about us and they simply tolerate us. The process of disintegration follows a predictable, inevitable trajectory, one that begins with separation and ends in the hell of utter isolation. Shame is simply another way of belonging to ourselves, because it tells us that our internal narrator is reliable, that it's telling us the truth about who we are and that everybody else sees us the way that we talk to ourselves. And so then it becomes about relationships. It becomes about the web of networks that we are encountering because we assume that those people feel the way that we feel within ourselves, because we assume that those people feel the way that we feel within ourselves the last script of self-belonging.
Speaker 1:I don't know about you, but I'm easily troubled and burdened by the sorrow, suffering and grief that I see in the news. I find it overwhelming. And now the medium through which I receive this news is like a ping-p table of like literally the saddest or most serious things you've ever heard in your life, like in one moment. And then you scroll down a little more and it's like this is the funniest thing I've ever seen. And what do I do with this? Like there should be a social media app that's like this is all very serious stuff, and then you can scroll over to the other one. Here's the serious stuff. And then you can scroll over to the other one here's the playful stuff, but we just get it all just bunched up together, right Reading stories of what is becoming of the climate, what is becoming of institutions, what challenges my children will face with the proliferation of AI, as we've talked about the bioethic questions of the future which I can't even begin to conceptualize. It's all very, very heavy.
Speaker 1:We live in an age that is heavy in the knowledge the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and very light on the tree of life, and I find that in our day, especially in the realms of politics and discussions around the climate, there's a collective hopelessness and hyper fixfixation on these areas. Are your perceived political opponents going to irreversibly unravel American democracy? I don't know. Is the ocean irreversibly warming and filled with micro-macroplastics? It would seem scientists are suggesting that. What does all this mean? I don't know. Does all this feel very heavy and very scary to me? Yes, that I'm aware of. The options that present themselves in the face of this heaviness are either total escapism Does all this feel too heavy? Here's some great memes for you to engage with that will lighten the burden. Shop online, watch some sports the world is too heavy for you to bear. Have a treat. Or it's total enmeshment, and I've seen this in people too. You have to get in the fight, be on the right side of history, do something for the climate Often I find lacking.
Speaker 1:In the midst of the doom and gloom that we so easily subscribe to in these sorts of conversations is an acknowledgement of the sovereignty and the midst of the doom and gloom that we so easily subscribe to in these sorts of conversations is an acknowledgement of the sovereignty and the grace of God. It doesn't give us carte blanche just to put our feet up and be like, oh, it'll all be okay, but it does acknowledge that all of it doesn't rise and fall on each of us as individuals, and this is so often the illusion that we are presented with with all this is that we then have equal agency, and just because you have information does not mean you have agency, and so often what we should do with information is bring it to the one who does have agency, who is sovereign, who is Lord over all. This is called prayer, but as Christians, we revert to this sort of graceless religion that says okay, this is the way the world is, we have to fix it, and Jesus is the one who's been at work fixing it all along. There's this beautiful summary of the life of Jesus at the beginning of Acts. Acts serves as a part two to Luke's gospel and Acts 1 begins not at the moment where Luke 24 ended but goes back just slightly and looks at the events of Luke 24 from a slightly different vantage point. It should never escape our notice. I know I say this to you a lot because it is so truly wondrous and it's so truly special, and it also so clearly articulates the way that God is trying to make himself known. How does Jesus convey what if the resurrection is true and we'll just venture that as a premise from it if the resurrection is true, then it is truly the most important, the most beautiful, the most world-changing news that the world has ever seen, the most beautiful, the most world-changing news that the world has ever seen.
Speaker 1:So, with that taken into account, how does Jesus choose to convey that information to the world? Does he stroll into the halls of the Sanhedrin all the people that convicted him of blasphemy and say you know, you guys killed me because I was claiming to be the son of God. How the tables have turned. Huh, look at me, I'm back. Like this is a story we would write right A little justice, delicious, right? He doesn't do that. He doesn't go to Pilate's house and knock on Pilate's door. Hey, remember, remember when you were slightly feeling like you should let me go. You should have let me go. He doesn't do that. Jesus has access to mass media, like the massest media that has ever been right, like literally could appear in the sky or just in the room and be like hey guys, I'm God, you should worship me. He doesn't do any of that.
Speaker 1:How does Jesus convey what is the most beautiful, the most important, the most world-changing news that the world has ever known? The same way that he conveyed it during his earthly life Sharing meals with his friends, teaching about the kingdom of God, showing them the signs and the wonder of his suffering. So we see this, at this interchange point between Jesus' resurrection and his ascension, in places like Luke and Acts. Let's read in Luke 24, verse 36. While they were talking about this, jesus himself stood among them and said to them Peace, be with you.
Speaker 1:We see this often that Jesus will come through the locked doors of the disciples. Disciples are hiding in fear because it was very common practice when there was a failed messianic figure, not only for the leader to be killed and humiliated, but for all his followers to be rounded up and they're hiding in rooms like they came for Jesus. They're coming for us, and so they're scared, and Jesus just walks right through their locked doors. Peace to you, hello. Verse 37 says they were startled and terrified and thought they were seeing a ghost. A reasonable response, he said to them why are you frightened? I don't know if he's laughing when he says this why do doubts arise in your hearts? Look at my hands and my feet. See that it is I myself. Touch me and see, for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see, I have. And when he'd said this, he showed them his hands and his feet.
Speaker 1:John's gospel says he shows them his scars. Dr Diane Langberg says that Jesus will be the only one bearing scars in heaven, scars that have bought the world's redemption, worn forevermore on the Son of God. When he'd said this, he showed them his hands and his feet. Yet for all their joy, they were still disbelieving and wondering. So we see this vacillation between outright terror, a little bit of terror, some joy, some disbelief.
Speaker 1:All these things are converging in the disciples in this moment and they are like what is happening here and Jesus says do you have anything to eat? Sure, jesus, here's some fish and he eats some fish. Right, and just another little subtle example that this is not some not physical, not real body that Jesus is working with here. This resurrected body not only can it walk through walls but it can eat fish. And if you've seen the very adept cultural and theological statement called Casper, the friendly ghost from the 1990s, you know that when ghosts eat food it goes right through them, right. So when Jesus eats food as the resurrected Christ, the Son of God, it doesn't go right through him. He's proving to them that his body is very much alive and very much real, but it's sort of trans-real, it transcends our physics. Jesus can walk through walls. You can hold out hope that you can fly in heaven. That's another sermon. They gave him a piece of broiled fish and he took it and he ate it in their presence.
Speaker 1:Jesus' proclamation of the gospel of the resurrection is a continuation of his proclamation of the gospel of the incarnation, continuation of the gospel of the crucifixion. He teaches his friends that he calls brothers, sisters, called disciples, and they are entrusted with this good news. He doesn't apply mass media. He says you will be my witnesses in Judea and Samaria, all to the ends of the earth. This is what Jesus does and it says everything about the sort of faith that he's calling us into. You see, a mass media of faith, a faith at scale doesn't look us in the face and say I know you, I love you, I have pursued you.
Speaker 1:We go to Acts 1, which is a continuation of where we are in Luke 24. Acts 1, verse 3, after his suffering, he presented himself alive to them by many convincing proofs appearing to them during 40 days and speaking about the kingdom of God. And it's in this short little verse I just want to look at. There's a very subtle but very powerful interchange that's happening Our cultural scripts being traded in for something so much better. You see, those cultural scripts we looked at of achievement, of shame, of doom. We all have baked in answers to them. We've looked at a couple of them, but I just want to put up a couple slides for you.
Speaker 1:First, to our cultural concept of achievement. There is a counter-cultural claim, even within our broader culture, that says okay, it's not just about what you can do, what you can make you matter, you have self-worth. But even that becomes a product and a project of conjuring it within yourself, convincing yourself that you matter, declaring to others that you matter, protecting your peace, saying I have worth and I have value. And we see how this is a half-truth, a distortion. Not because you don't matter. You do, but you matter far more than you've ever imagined. You do, but you matter far more than you've ever imagined.
Speaker 1:The endless expression of your worth is Jesus' suffering. Acts 1, verse 3,. After his suffering, jesus is declaring to you that you have a worth that you couldn't even begin to fathom, that you would feel embarrassed by even claiming for yourself. But Jesus says this is who I say you are. It's not about your achievement, it's not about what you can produce. It's about what I have done for you. And so Jesus offers us a better answer that we don't have to somehow produce within ourselves, but is a gift of grace that he has pronounced upon each one of us once and for all, that, just as you were made in the image of a joyful creator, you have been redeemed in the image of the one who pursued you at the cost of his very self, giving of himself totally and fully for you. That is the expression of your worth and it is immense. As CS Lewis says, if we could see each other with the way that God sees us, and especially the trajectory we were on, we would be tempted to fall down in worship at the image of God that is present in each one of us. Yeah, you matter, but it's not some way you have to say I matter. It's God saying you have no idea.
Speaker 1:Second shame Again, we go back and we say, yes, this internal narrator is telling the truth. It's also telling me what other people think about me. Jesus shows us what he thinks about us and it's so subtle, but I think it's so beautiful. Again, jesus could have commandeered soldiers into his army and said all right, guys, I'm resurrected. Now go. He spends 40 days with them.
Speaker 1:If shame is relational, ultimately it is healed by these kinds of relationships where God comes to us and he sits with us. And you see, even in Luke 24, on the road to Emmaus, these two disciples are just. They're so overcome by their grief at what they perceive has happened to Jesus on the cross. They don't know about the resurrection yet and Jesus is walking with them before they even know it. And they're just articulating their grief. They're saying we thought Jesus was the one and now we don't know what to do. And Jesus is like oh really, tell me more about that.
Speaker 1:Huh, jesus undoes our shame with friendship. He tells us the truth about who we are. And he not only undoes our shame with his friendship, with his steadfast presence, he undoes it by detoxifying it with his body and his blood. He takes our sin upon his shoulders. So anything that we could rightfully be ashamed about, jesus says well, I've already paid for that, I've already overcome that. And so is there anything else? Is there anything outside the scope of my endless love? No, then, you have nothing to be ashamed of. He is a Father who has lavished His love upon us and our story.
Speaker 1:That so easily subscribes to the doom and gloom. It's not that the world is not heavy or hard, nobody's denying that. But our call is to be witnesses. Our call is to be witnesses to a kingdom that has come and is coming, and for most of us, we have to account for the agency we've been given. We can live very, very heavy lives if we assume the responsibility for everything that happens in the world. But good news, ecclesia, you don't have to do that Jesus has shown us what his kingdom looks like and that calls us to interpretation, that calls us to wisdom, that calls us to living out of the power of his spirit. When he says blessed are the poor in Luke's gospel, that means we have to take him at his word. Yes, there may be people in our midst that are undocumented from the standpoint of our government, but we have documents that say otherwise. In places like Deuteronomy Say honor the foreigner in your midst, feed them from your table. And so, yes, we discern these things. We are not always sure what is to come, we're not always sure how that we can move and resist and do all these things, but we are called to be witnesses of a kingdom that has come. Isaiah says I see the Lord lifted up, high and lofty, and yet he dwells with the poor and the lowly. This is our call to embrace this story and to be embraced by it. I'm gonna invite the worship team forward.
Speaker 1:I wonder if you could just take a moment to reflect. When we talk about this sort of achievement script, how many of you feel this is true of you deep in your bones, that you are only worthy to extent, to the extent that you are successful, that you contribute something that all the problems in your life are on your shoulders to solve, that you have to find answers for your provision. In your anxious moments, what do you lean on? Do you frenzy and power up and try to find a will and a way? Because I'm here to reiterate the good news that we've already glimpsed that you are not worthy because of anything that you can achieve, anything that you can merit any good that you can do. You are worthy because you are not worthy because of anything that you can achieve, anything that you can merit any good that you can do. You are worthy because you are not your own. You were bought with a price. You belong to God. He created you. He has come for you. He has pursued you beyond anything you could ever imagine.
Speaker 1:I wonder, for those of you who say that shame gains a place of prominence in your own life daily, if you just take a moment to reflect what it looks like to live out of that poison. Well, the hard thing for us is we actually do bear guilt, but guilt and shame are qualitatively different things. Guilt says I have done something bad. Shame says there's something fundamentally wrong with me that can't be repaired. Guess what? We were guilty, and while we were God's enemies, in the words of Romans 5, he died for us. So any guilt that we have incurred he has overcome. There's nothing outside the scope of his saving love. There's not a sin that you have committed or will commit that he hasn't paid for. There's only the ways that we try to hide in shame. We've been doing it from the very beginning.
Speaker 1:The first activity in Genesis 3, after the man and the woman take from the tree that God has forbidden them to eat from, is to hide themselves, cloak themselves with figs and leaves, and we see the end of that chapter. God's like you know, after he pronounces all these things that will come to be, he says the figs and leaves are not even going gonna do for an hour. Here's some skins. I'm gonna clothe you, I'm gonna protect you. There's grace even in the midst of your failure. And so we only keep giving shame its power by trying to stay in the dark. We delude ourselves by that.
Speaker 1:Jesus is saying there's no shame, and the story of doom is met with the story of Jesus' very self. His proclamation behold, I make all things new. That doesn't absolve us of responsibility or a call to caretake, but we can entrust ourselves to a future that is held in the hands of the God who made the world, who loves it, who is sustaining it, who will ultimately bring it to its full redemption, where love will be the distance between us, where we will encounter the world transfigured by the grace and the glory of God. It's a better story than we're often offered. It's a story that Jesus has given to you than we're often offered. It's a story that Jesus has given to you, a story that we reenact each week as we come, as we worship, as we listen, as we encounter the presence of God at the table, as we invite the Holy Spirit to come.
Speaker 1:And in just this moment, right now, I'm just gonna ask that the Holy Spirit would minister to you in His gentle way To transpose some of the things I've said into the key of your life and to say, god, if I'm living out of a sense of achievement or I'm trying to own and just like, sit with this shame that I can't quite figure out what to do with that, jesus would gently lift that from your heart right now, anding himself true, faithful and good. So we pray come, holy Spirit, god, would you minister to dear sons and daughters here in this place, god, we so often start with behavior. We so often start with trying to modulate what we do. God, lord, you are starting with our very hearts, lord. You are building a throne in the center of our lives and asking us out of that rule and that reign to change the things that we do. So meet us here.
Speaker 1:God. Be the king of our hearts. Lord, help us to give ourselves anew to your goodness and to your here. God Be the king of our hearts, lord, help us to give ourselves anew to your goodness and to your grace. God, absolve us of the pressure and the endless toil that is bricks without straw that is trying to achieve and show that we matter and show our worth. God, show us the worth that you see us with God and rid us of the shame the shame, lord, that so often forms a barrier from our side, between us and you.
Speaker 1:Lord, show us how you have eradicated that barrier. That barrier is a one way mirror, lord. You see us, god, and we see you, lord, now in a as though in a mirror, dimly, god, but we will see in full because you are making all things new. Lord, we ask that your presence would be here, healing, guiding, convicting, comforting. Lord Jesus, we ask these things in your name, in the beautiful name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. We pray Amen, al-kasia. Our team's going to lead us in a song of response. Invite you just to continue to pay attention to what the Holy Spirit might be nurturing and nudging in your life as we sing together. In just a few moments we'll come to the table. Let's worship together.