The Wonder of It All

Sermon

There is something greater than honor and shame.

That would have been an interesting thing for Joseph to have heard in the minutes or days before the angel’s dreamtime visit, in the weeks or months before their families negotiated the betrothal between Joseph and Mary. Joseph’s whole world was structured around bringing honor and not bringing shame. It was how the village functioned; it was how the religious law was lived out. To undo that system would lead to civic and moral chaos.

The power of the honor-shame culture into which Jesus was born is underlying all the events of Jesus’ birth as Matthew describes them. Women brought honor to the family and the village when they bore sons to their wedded husbands; they brought shame when they became pregnant out of wedlock. Men brought honor by following the law, by being fathers to sons, and by not bringing shame upon anyone else.

If the honor-shame culture were a Jenga tower, then this story about the birth of Jesus is like someone removing that key block and the whole thing tumbling to the floor. Mary, a betrothed but unmarried fourteen year old, is in a precarious position and is utterly dependent on Joseph. Joseph, too, walks a tightrope. If he marries Mary, he will live with her disgrace and will raise a son that is not his. If he divorces her publicly – that is, undoes the betrothal –he will bring public shame to Mary and thus to himself as well.

So he plans to do the only thing that he can to save face and to save Mary – he will undo the betrothal quietly, and maybe Mary will go stay with a relative for a while, and maybe Joseph’s family will find him another girl to marry, and that will be that.

They were so vulnerable, Mary and Joseph. They were so vulnerable to the clear demands of their culture, demands for honor, demands to punish shame. Mary had no say and Joseph had no choice. Or so it seemed.

It might seem that honor and shame don’t really play a part in our own culture until one scratches the surface just a little bit. While we tend to dwell on guilt more than shame, shame is alive and present.

When I was a freshman in college, I was walking across the quad one day when a young man yelled out some unseen window, “Lose some weight.” I don’t know what he hoped to accomplish by that – to feel big, to point out the obvious, or to shame me into taking off a few pounds. All that did was make want to hide – it created shame for me, but it did not produce any motivation.

There have been terrible stories in the news about children being shamed in the school cafeteria for owing money for their lunches. At one school in Minnesota, more than one child whose account was in arrears reached the end of the cafeteria line only to have their hot lunch dumped out and be given a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

Can you even imagine how those children felt – as if owing money was their own fault? As if dumping out a tray full of good, hot food accomplished anything? As if that child would run home and demand of her mom or dad to pay up or else?

Shame is a cruel motivator. It’s also a pretty ineffective one these days – shame tears down rather than builds up. It benefits neither the shamer nor the shamee, yet it happens all the time. A person will go out of her way to embarrass someone; an acquaintance makes a point of illuminating your flaws, and you start to blush and you look around to see how many people heard and you want to hide for a good long time.

What once may have held a society together now is simply another loose thread of a fraying social fabric. We could ponder the shame of impeachment, the shame of being denied a hot school lunch, or the shame of not looking “right,” not being in the “right” kind of relationship, not having the “right” stuff.

In most human hearts there is a little voice that tells us that we will be better or more if someone else is worse or less, and when we’re in a bad place, we listen to that voice. We can be both the one who is shaming another and the one who is shamed. And neither of those people is who we are called to be.

There is something greater than shame and greater even than honor.

Joseph learned that in the grace that infuses this story. In his plan to dismiss Mary quietly and not bring attention to her unexpected pregnancy, Joseph acts honorably and according to the law. But God had other things in mind.

“Do not be afraid, Joseph,” the messenger of God says. Do not be afraid of shame! Do not be afraid for Mary! Do not be afraid of what the neighbors will say, hard as that may be. God has bigger plans. God has higher expectations than honor and shame.

When you read through the Bible, you start to realize that there are some pretty scraggly folks who show up and end up being the servants of God. Even in the days of Sarah and Abraham, in the days of Moses and Miriam, in the days of the unabashedly flawed King David, when there was no honor-shame structure there was still a sense that God demanded loyalty not only to God but also to the law of God. And when all these people made mistakes, erred, sinned, God did not say, “That’s it – I’m done with you. Begone!” God was faithful.

It is an interesting exercise, though maybe a fruitless one, to try to figure what is of human origin and what is of God’s design. It seems to me that a society organized by honor and shame is something of human design. I don’t mean to put that down completely, because in many ways, it works, and it protects the vulnerable – until it doesn’t. 

While Joseph might have spared shaming Mary by dismissing her quietly, there was still her future to consider. Her parents could have turned her out. The people in the village could have taken her to the outskirts of town and stoned her to death, ending not only her life but the life of her child. As I said, honor-shame works until it doesn’t.

But there is something greater than honor and shame, and it’s not power, and it’s not being right. God upends that. God makes a shameful thing happen and redeems it and in so doing, removes the power of shame and even removes the power of honor.

And it all works because of Joseph’s response. In his great poem For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio, W. H. Auden acknowledges Joseph’s part.
“To choose what is difficult all one’s days
As if it were easy; that is faith. Joseph, praise.”

There is something greater than honor and shame, and it is not power, it is not being right, it’s not even faith. It is love. That is what is at the heart of the Christmas story, and what God desires for us as we follow this Christ.

Last weekend Gregg and I went to an open house for Portland Homeless Family Solutions to see their new facility, Family Village, before it opened to families and was no longer available for tours. It’s a great story that involves a ten-year moonshot of a plan that came together in six months with great fundraising, great lenders, and great partners in the community.

PHFS took over a building that was originally a Russian Orthodox Church, which then became the site of Teen and Adult Challenge, a recovery center, and probably had a few other identities over the years. When PHFS was able to buy the property, it included an apartment building with eight apartments to provide shelter for sixteen families and this old church. 

The organization has studied deeply the reality and psychology and trauma of homelessness, so the new space was designed with all that in mind. As we toured the space – the kitchen and dining room, the bedrooms, the family center with a computer space and a library space, and a loft with a foosball table, I kept tearing up and was thinking, “Someone cares. Someone cares about these families in crisis, about these children who will live with the trauma of poverty and homelessness. Someone has made something beautiful for strangers they will never meet.”

If a Mary lived today and found herself unexpectedly pregnant, or found herself a single mother turned out by her family and abandoned by her husband, there would be a place that would take her in. In places like this new Family Village, honor and shame have no say. I would say that love is present there – love for these people who are so vulnerable, love for strangers that might give them that leg up that they need, love that is the best healer.

This last year a wonderful man named Jean Vanier died. He was a Catholic, a theologian, philosopher, and humanitarian, and is best known for founding L’Arche, an organization for adults with developmental disabilities and those who worked with them. He probably knew a thing or two about shame, about watching those who were different being shamed for that difference.

He also knew a thing or two about love, and I appreciate these words of his. “To love someone is not first of all to do things for them, but to reveal to them their beauty and value, to say to them through our attitude, ‘You are beautiful. You are important. I trust you. You can trust yourself.’”

That was one of the things Jesus said, again and again, in parables, in actions, in prayer, to those around him and to us. He was constantly upending honor and shame, and not just in words but more in deeds he showed the primacy of love – his love for us, God’s love for us, and the love we are called to show each other.

So my Christmas wish for all of you is that you know this love. You will know shame, if you haven’t already. Maybe you have known honor too. And that’s not a bad thing. But love – that is the greatest of all.

For more information about Portland Homeless Family Solutions, visit their website at http://www.pdxhfs.org