No Shame

Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
12.23.07; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: Matthew 1:18-24

I’m not sure that there’s even such a thing as shame any more in America.

I’m talking about actions or decisions that tear at the fabric of our society. Shame is a social thing, something that experienced when a person has close connections with the people around them. But I’m not sure that those connections even exist in our culture any more. With our emphasis on personal freedom and individuality, you do what you do, without linkage to any other people.

In many ways, that’s a good thing. Sometimes what everyone around you expects you to do...is wrong. Being ashamed of yourself and of who you are is profoundly counterproductive, and a society that is constantly judging and hammering down it’s members can be a crushingly oppressive place to live.

But somewhere between the good of the many and the good of the one there has to be a balance. Our society seems to have utterly forgotten about the idea that sometimes there are things you do or say that you should feel genuinely embarrassed about. I’m not talking about those moments when you make yourself look epically, America’s Funniest Home Videos stupid, like stalling out and falling off your motorcycle at a stoplight in front of a carload of attractive young women, or showing up at a church event and having your children throw themselves through windows. Not that those things have ever happened to me.

I’m talking about taking actions that are so utterly self-serving, so completely and blindly oblivious of the well being of anyone but yourself. You couldn’t care less about the consequences. What consequences? You’re living in a universe that revolves so totally around the wonder that is You that even the thought that there might be more at stake than your own blessed ego doesn’t even cross your mind.

The best example of that blindness to shame that I’ve seen in a long, long while was served up this last week by corporate America, by the executives that run Circuit City. I used to shop at my nearby Circuit City all the time. The prices were competitive, and the Best Buy that had been built just three hundred yards away has a parking lot that deserves a mention in Dante’s vision of Hell. But back in March of this year, as sales began to slump a bit, the leaders of Circuit City made a decision that caused me to personally commit to never shopping there again. In fact, I take every Circuit City ad circular I get and recycle it without even looking at it. Why?

To cut costs, they fired all of their most experienced long-term salespeople, over three thousand men and women. It wasn’t that those salespersons weren’t doing their jobs. It was that they’d made a career out of sales, and that they...having worked at Circuit City for years, had gotten small raises every year for their commitment and performance.
So for their dedication and professionalism...they got canned, and were replaced with new, inexperienced workers for much less pay. Experience and dedication weren’t important. After that decision, for some reason sales crumbled and their stock price tanked. The story doesn’t end there, though.

This week, the same group of Circuit City executive leadership decided that the most important thing for the business was to insure that they have an experienced, long-term executive leadership team. So they decided to award themselves huge bonuses if they continued to work there through 2011. Every senior vice president would get a $600,000 cash payment. Every executive vice president would get a $1 million bonus. They’d already promised their CEO a $2.9 million bonus if he stuck around.

If I tried to engage in this sort of brazen hypocrisy, I think I’d blush so hard my face would explode. But apparently, a sense of honor is not a part of the corporate culture at Circuit City.

That wasn’t the case 2,000 years ago in Judah. Hebrew society in the first century was deeply defined by family and tribal blood honor. Adhering to the social codes of that society wasn’t just a matter of personal embarrassment. It was a matter of life and death. That’s just what Joseph was struggling with in the Gospel message this morning. His young bride-to-be was pregnant...and he wasn’t the father. Back in Deuteronomy 22:23-24, the penalty for getting knocked up out of wedlock was pretty clear. The woman was to be stoned to death.

By the time of Jesus, the Pharisees...the early precursors of today’s rabbis...had tried to make this a little less brutal, but if a husband-to-be wanted to press the issue, you could be pretty much assured that the woman would become socially ostracized for the rest of her life as a shame to her promised husband and to her own family. She and her child would likely become impoverished, isolated beggars, with no place in the culture around them. It would guarantee them a life of misery and struggle. If the husband-to-be pressed the issue, that is.

Joseph, who was a righteous man in all the right ways, wasn’t about to do that. He didn’t want her hurt or shamed, and was ready to call it off gently and quietly. In a society where dishonor could mean death or ruin, it was the gracious thing to do. But God had other plans.

Joseph was called to act in a way that went far beyond the graciousness he had already expressed. By choosing to act upon the angelic message he heard in his dream, Joseph completely shattered the expectations of his culture. He redefined honor. He took it deeper than his culture could comprehend.

In being faithful to what God was calling him to do, Joseph was showing us one of the most important things that our faith does for us. When we base our actions in trust in God, and not in the dominant values of our culture, we are able to step beyond the biases and flaws that too often corrupt our lives together in this world.

We’re able to defy expectations that betray the essential foundation of selfless, open-souled love that defined what Jesus lived and taught. We’re able to step out of the prisons of oppression or egotism, and to participate in the love that God is.

Though Joseph’s society called him to obey it’s standards of honor and shame, he saw that the love of God commanded him to act in ways that went far deeper. He accepted his wife, and he accepted the child that was growing inside her, and in doing so he played a vital role in a story that we’re all living out as Christians.

Though we’re living out that story in a radically different American society, each of us are asked to do much the same thing in our own lives. As Christians, we’re called to defy the hypocrisy and greed that can so often turn us away from the reality of human need around us. As Christians, we’re called to break from that me-first, getting-all-we-can ethic that defines life in a corporate consumer culture. Instead, we’re to embody the love that was made flesh in that little child.

There’s no shame in that.