Jesus and Our Shame | Jesus the Redeemer | Pastor Zach Weihrauch

Luke 736 through 50.

One of the Pharisees asked him to eat with him,

and he went into the Pharisees house and reclined at table.

And behold, a woman of the city who was a sinner.

When she learned he was reclining at table in the Pharisees

house, brought an alabaster flask of ointment,

and standing behind him at his feet, weeping.

She began to wear his feet with her tears and wiped them with the hair of her head,

and kissed his feet, and anointed them with ointment.

Now when the Pharisee who had invited him

saw this, he said to himself, if this man were a prophet,

he would have known who and what sort of woman

this is who is touching him, for she is a sinner.

And Jesus answering said to

him, Simon, I have something to say to you.

And he answered.

Say it, teacher.

A certain moneylender had two debtors,

100 500 denarii, and the other 50.

When they could not pay, he canceled the debt of both.

Now which of them will love him more?

Simon answered, the one,

I suppose, for whom he canceled the larger debt.

And he said to him, you have judge rightly.

Then, turning towards the woman, he said to Simon, do you see this woman?

I entered your house.

You gave me no water for my feet.

But she has wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair.

You gave me no kiss, but from the time I came here,

she has not ceased to kiss my feet.

You did not anoint my head with oil.

But she has anointed my feet with ointment.

Therefore I tell you, her sins, which are many, are forgiven.

For she loved much.

But he who is forgiven little, loves little.

And he said to her, your sins are forgiven.

Then those who were at the table with him began to say among themselves,

who is this who even forgive sins?

And he said to the woman, your faith has saved you.

Go in peace.

I want you to think, just for a second,

about the biggest mistake of your life.

The biggest regret,

the thing that you've done, that you are

the least proud of,

the moment you wish you could take back.

Then I want you to think about not just that moment

or that thing, but walking into a room

with the people who know

going back to the place where everyone understands what you did.

Where everyone you know

is thinking the same thing is whispering the same thing.

This is the marriage that ended

because of your affair.

The family finances

that are ruined because of your addiction.

The relationship that is over because of your lying and your

betrayal.

Can you imagine what it would be like

to be free of that?

I mean, I think if we're honest, we would say that that moment,

that thing we did, the rooms we can't go in, the places we don't go back to.

Those things shape us.

They shape us more than we'd like to imagine.

The weight of them shapes us more than we would like to believe.

Can you imagine what it would be like to be free of that?

To breathe without the weight of that?

Can you imagine what it would be like to go back to that place,

to be in the room with those people and not be crushed

by what they're thinking and what they're saying?

Well, that's what this week's passage is all about.

In a sermon series on Jesus as a redeemer, Jesus who sets us free.

We're talking this weekend about how he sets us

free from shame.

So if you have a Bible, why don't you take it out

and open it to Luke chapter seven?

We're going to begin in verse 36 and look at the rest of the chapter.

Take out your phone, your tablet, however you want to get there.

And hey, if you're here and you didn't bring a Bible, you maybe

aren't super familiar with the Bible. So glad that you're here.

Everything that happens this week,

and especially this, is as much for you as it is for anyone else.

So if you want to follow along by holding

something in your hands, you don't have to.

But if you want to,

there's a Bible in the pew in front of you or in the back of East Hall.

And today's reading, it's a little tricky.

It begins on 811, bottom right hand corner, and then quickly moves

to page 812, the next page.

But however you're getting to Luke chapter seven,

let me hold out an outline to you that I hope you're going to be encouraged by.

Three points.

Very simple.

They go like this. Freedom is possible.

How to get it and how to know you have it.

Freedom is possible.

How to get it and how to know that you have it.

All right, let's start with the first one.

Freedom is possible.

This story is incredible.

And if you don't have the full kind of background, the cultural moment,

it might be tough to really understand just how incredible it is.

The story takes place at the house of a man named Simon.

He is a Pharisee.

Not now.

The Pharisees were super religious guys, like the religious man's religious man.

They were the moral elite, the social elite, the spiritual elite.

You had to really want it to be a Pharisee.

You had to be willing to do the work in all three of those categories.

And so as a consequence,

they weren't just super religious, they were super judgmental.

They were better than everyone.

And you knew it and they knew it.

And so Simon, one of the Pharisees, invites Jesus

to dinner, and Jesus goes,

and while they're eating dinner now in this culture, that would have meant

there was a table in the middle of the room

and they were kind of reclining at the table.

Your chest would be towards the table

and your feet away from you as you kind of lay out at the table.

And during this dinner, a woman comes in.

Now, now, this is not just any woman that the text calls her

a woman of the city, which is a church way of saying she's a prostitute.

She's a streetwalker.

And she comes in wearing this perfume

around her neck, which is a tool of her trade.

It's like a carpenter's hammer or surgeon's scalpel.

And she goes over to Jesus's feet and she takes down her hair,

which in that culture, you never did as a woman.

And she begins to sob and and so that her tears are kind of washing

Jesus's feet, and she's using her hair to mop it up.

And then she takes

this jar of perfume and breaks it and pours it out on Jesus feet.

And everyone is watching and no one can believe it.

I mean, a religious guy's party and a prostitute comes in.

Sounds like the beginning of a really bad joke.

No one can believe what is happening.

Now, with that in your mind, let me read the story to you.

It says this.

One of the Pharisees verse 36, asked him to eat with him.

And he went into the Pharisees house and reclined at table.

And behold, a woman of the city,

who was a sinner, when she learned that he was reclining at table

in the Pharisees house, brought an alabaster flask of ointment,

and standing behind him at his feet, weeping,

she began to wet his feet with her tears, and wiped them with the hair of her head,

and kissed his feet and anointed them with the ointment.

This is a crazy story.

It's a scandalous moment.

It's so scandalous that for every guy at this party, it's

what they would have been talking about for the next couple of months.

It's an incredible story, but I can't help when I read it.

But ask one singular question.

And it is a selfish question, but maybe you can resonate.

How did this woman get so free?

How does a prostitute

walk into a religious,

judgmental, masculine party?

A room full of guys who either judge were judging her or,

I hate to admit it, were customers

a hypocritical, judgmental religious room full of men?

How does a prostitute get to the place in life

where she can walk in, walk through their whispers, through their stares,

through their judgment, and basically fall apart

in their presence, and then debase herself by using her hair

and tears and perfume, which screams I'm a prostitute to wash Jesus's feet.

I read this story and if I'm honest,

I'm jealous.

How did she get so free?

Well, here's the first point I want to make.

It's not a dramatic one.

It's not a big one, but it's a, I hope, a poignant one.

And that is if this woman,

this prostitute, can walk into this party

with that kind of freedom,

then freedom is possible for you.

If this woman can walk into this party totally free,

then I really believe it must be true that for you and I, we can go back

to that moment, back to that place, back to those people, and breathe

free.

Freedom is possible.

But of course, that begs the question, doesn't it?

And that's my second point.

Well, how do you get it?

How do you give it the freedom as possible?

How do you get it?

Well, you need to know that this story has three main characters.

The first, of course, is Jesus.

The second is the woman who's the prostitute, and the third is Simon,

whose house they're at, whose party it is.

And Jesus is going to compare Simon and this woman throughout the story.

He actually compares them to two debtors, one who owes 50 and one who owes 500.

And the key part of the story is that although one owes, about a month's wages

and one owes a, year of wages, neither one of them can pay.

And that way they're the exact same.

The whole point of this story is to speak to both of them.

That's because the two of them, the prostitute and the Simon, represent

the two human ways of dealing with shame.

Let me show you what I mean.

I want you to just envision for a second with me a swimming pool.

I know, you know, swimming pools.

The place where we're obviously never going to go again

because it's going to snow and be cold forever.

But back when we used to have sunshine

and go to the pool, I want you to envision a swimming pool.

And the water of the swimming pool is your guilt

and my shame.

A swimming pool full of guilt.

A swimming pool full of shame. Two ways of dealing with it.

The first is you can drown in it.

That's the woman.

You can be the kind of person

where everybody knows you're guilty.

Everybody knows what you did.

This is when your marriage is over

and everyone knows it's because you had an affair.

Everybody knows

it's when you lost your job,

and everybody knows it's because you can't stop drinking

for drowning.

They're soaked in guilt and shame, even if they could somehow

get out of the pool and walk around, there'd be water everywhere.

They they're dripping.

And you can reach a point in life where all that's true of you are your mistakes.

All that anyone knows

about your cares to understand about you is everything that you've done.

You can drown in shame.

The second way of dealing with it, though, is like being on a float

in the middle of the pool.

That's what Simon is doing.

This woman comes in and she she washes Jesus feet and Simon says,

well, Jesus must not be who he says that he is, because if he

if he was, he would know who this woman is.

And if he knew who this woman was, he wouldn't let her touch him.

You see, Simon isn't in his guilt and shame.

He's floating on the top on a float called comparison.

And his philosophy is pretty simple.

I might have done some things I'm not proud of,

but as long as I'm better than her, I'm okay.

Floaters find every reason they can

to believe that their goodness outweighs their badness.

Let me illustrate this with a story.

This week I'm sitting at dinner with my family,

which is a little bit like going to the circus

and my wife Amy and I and our five kids, and then we finish dinner

and we're clearing our our plates, going to the kitchen.

And my eight year old son Graham decides that it would just be hilarious

to take the bottle of Cajun seasoning off the table

and dump it over his six year old sister's head.

Now he thought the lid was on.

It turns out it wasn't.

So the seasoning goes all over her

and gets in her eyes and it's spicy seasoning.

And she's a six year old girl, so she sees this not just as a painful

experience, but an opportunity to get her brother in trouble so she loses it.

I mean, she really leans in.

She's saying like, dad, don't worry, I remember what you look like in my mind.

You know, I'll never see you again. But,

I mean, she's just falling apart.

And then Graham's losing it,

and I'm yelling and Amy's yelling, and it's just awful.

And so Graham gets into his room and eventually

I get assigned the responsibility of going up to his room to talk to him.

And so as I go up the stairs, I'm working on my monologue.

You may not know this, but I happen to communicate for a living,

so I'm feeling really good about the speech I've prepared for my son.

You know, I'm going to say things like, hey, I know you didn't mean to do this,

but this is why we don't do stupid things, right?

Because, you know, they didn't design that bottle of seasoning as a weapon.

So you and I've got this whole speech prepared.

I open his door, I sit on his bed, I

throw my arm around him, and I give him the best ever parenting speech.

And he responds.

He looks at me and he talks for ten minutes,

and all he did for ten minutes was make excuses.

Well, how did I know the lid wasn't on?

Who, dad?

Who didn't put the lid on?

That's the question you should be asking.

Ten minutes of excuses.

Because in his mind, he had to float above the surface of his guilt.

He's so terrified of being the kind

of person who dumped seasoning on the head of his sister.

He's so terrified of what might be waiting for him in the water that he has

floating on excuses to stay dry.

Tell me you can't identify with that.

So the truth is, you're at church on a Sunday

at 10:00 in the morning, there's this really cool thing called brunch.

You might not have heard of it.

If you're at church at 10:00 on a Sunday, you're probably a floater.

But you see, the thing is about floaters and downers

is that they seem different, but both of them are stuck in the pool.

Don't you want to get out?

See, what this story is really about

is how to get out of the pool.

And the woman does that.

Simon does not.

By the way, he's floating at the end of the story.

It's the woman who hears Jesus say later on in the story you are forgiven.

It's the woman who gets free will.

That begs the question, then how do you get free?

And the answer you

you will be really glad to hear only involves three very simple steps.

Look at what the woman does.

First, she picks up her shame.

When she leaves the house, she decides to grab her

bottle of perfume, which would have been a single shot of perfume. Not.

Not the way you and I might think of a bottle with a spray top.

It was just a little jar that held one shot of perfume, and,

And a prostitute would wear it around their neck

so that when you contracted their services,

they could break the bottle, pour it over their body and smell good.

She picks up that bottle when she leaves the house

because she isn't just going to the dinner party.

She isn't just going to Jesus.

She's going to take her shame.

See if you're a floater.

That's the hardest step.

No more excuses, no more blame

shifting, no more focusing on what everyone else did.

She picks up her bottle.

Now. No little girl dreams of being a prostitute.

So you and I know if that's where this woman is,

she has been sinned against just as much as she has done the sinning.

You know that, and I know that.

But the step to freedom isn't talking about what they did.

The step to freedom is picking up your shame and wearing it

around your neck.

Second, so that you can take it to Jesus,

not just picking it up, but taking it to Jesus.

She is taking that perfume for a particular reason.

She gets in that dinner party and she takes the single

obvious implement of her trade.

The thing that screams I'm a prostitute!

And she breaks it over Jesus.

She takes her shame and puts it on Jesus.

Which is exactly what the message of Jesus is all about.

Jesus came to die

to get people out of the pool.

This woman pours her perfume on Jesus so that he can metaphorically,

if not literally, go to the cross, smell

like a prostitute.

Which is appropriate because on the cross,

Jesus becomes the prostitute.

He becomes our shame.

He becomes the person who did that thing, who told that lie,

who committed that betrayal.

He becomes the addict.

Listen, you have to understand this.

You don't pick up your shame to drown under it.

You don't pick up your shame to beat yourself up over it.

You pick up your shame to pour it out on to Jesus.

So that he can die for it.

And then third, and if you're a drown or

this is the hardest part, she leaves it with him.

This perfume.

You can't put the jar back together once it's broken.

You can't put the perfume back in the bottle.

You see, if you're a drown or the call of Jesus is to give your affair to him,

let him go to the cross and be the guy who ruined his family.

Let him go to the cross and be the woman who couldn't stop drinking.

But he says, when you pour it out on me, I will pay for it.

And don't you pick it back up again.

Isn't the story he tells about two debtors

whose debts were paid?

You see, we think the way out of

the pool is through death, just forever, to be marred by

what we've done or by floating around on the pool of my religion.

Look how good I am.

Look at how much I give. Look at how much I serve.

I can't really be that bad.

At least I'm not like them.

And Jesus says floaters and drownings are the same.

They never get out of the pool.

Do you want out?

Then pick it up.

Take it to Jesus

and leave it with him.

How do you know if you're ready for that?

How do you know if you've done that?

How do you know if you really are free,

or if you're just floating around on the float of religion?

Well, that's my third point.

Not just freedom is possible

and how to get it, but how do you know you got it?

Jesus tells Simon.

Look at what he says. Beginning in verse 41.

He says, A certain money lender has two debtors,

100 500 denarii, and the other 50.

And when they could not pay, cancel the debt of both.

Now which of them will love him more?

And Simon answered, the one, I suppose, for whom he canceled the larger debt.

And he said to him, you have judged rightly.

And then, turning toward the woman, he said to Simon, do you see this woman?

I entered your house.

You gave me no water for my feet.

But she has wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair.

You gave me no kiss,

but from the time I came in, she is not ceased to kiss my feet.

You did not anoint my head with oil, but she has anointed my feet with ointment.

Therefore I tell you, her sins which are many, are forgiven.

You see, Jesus says, it is possible to be a dinner with God and miss him.

And if it's possible to be at dinner with God and miss him, don't

you think it's possible to be at church at 10:00 on a Sunday and miss him?

You see the way to know that you've experienced freedom.

Jesus says, is affection for Jesus.

And of course, how could it not be?

Were you not drowning under your guilt and your shame?

And he pulled you out?

Were you not floating around in a pool telling yourself

that you were better than everybody else, knowing the whole time

all you were really doing was staring down at the water?

Were you not trapped?

And he rescued you?

Listen, some of you guys are becoming Christians, and you don't even realize.

That's how it happens sometimes

all of a sudden you can't help but join in in the singing.

And you're going, oh my goodness, I love Jesus. Why?

Because I used to be a downer.

I used to be a floater.

I used to be enslaved to my sin and my shame and my guilt.

And then I realized he would take it.

I could leave it with him, and he died for it.

Friends, the evidence that you have experience

the freedom of God, the evidence that you're forgiven, the evidence

that eternity is waiting for you is affection for Jesus.

Which is why it grieves me that some of us are so cold

and sterile in a worship service.

And men, I'm

mostly talking to you.

You know, we're becoming a church that challenges men.

You guys have responded to that incredibly well.

So let me lean into that and say this.

It breaks my heart.

How many

men don't engage in the worship of Jesus in a church service doesn't break my heart

because I want you to sing more.

That's not my point, and I know.

Listen, I know I'm excitable.

I know that

if you ever came to a football game I was coaching,

you would see just how excitable when I chip in on the golf course.

Doesn't happen very often, but when it does,

I turn my wedge into a pony and ride it around the golf course.

Okay, I'm excitable. I get that.

You don't have to be like me, but if I see you doing this

and your mouse not moving on a Sunday, let me ask you, is that how you are?

Your son's little League game?

Is that how you are?

Fourth quarter of a Browns game.

Because you see a coldness.

Yeah.

Touché.

Coldness

towards Jesus

doesn't make me mad at you.

It makes my heart breaks for you.

Because it just might be indicative of the fact

that you are still drowning or floating.

Brother.

Sister in Christ, did you come in today full of affection for Jesus?

Because if not, I'll tell you why.

It's not because you're the worst, not because you're evil.

It's because you are drowning or floating.

And the only way out is through him.

So three questions to end.

Do you want to be free?

Are you willing to get wet?

And are you ready to sing?

Let me pray for us, father God,

this story would be awesome if it was just about the prostitute.

It'd be awesome in hard, but awesome

if it was just about Simon because half the room would appreciate it either way.

But you and your incredible kindness, love drownings and floaters both.

So you put us both in the story.

God, in your infinite grace to the power of your Holy Spirit.

Will you reach down even now

and pull us out of the pool?

We don't want to drown. We don't want to float.

We just want out.

We want to be free.

We want to breathe fresh air.

Do that for us.

In the name of Jesus we pray. Amen.