The Danger of Self-Disclosure: Why Vulnerability Cannot Save

• Shame vs. Guilt 00:03:07 ▶️ 📄
  > The pastor distinguishes between guilt (I did bad) and shame (I am bad), noting that while guilt can be a healthy internal alarm system, destructive shame is a bondage God wants to rescue us from.
• Ceremonial Uncleanness and Social Isolation 00:07:19 ▶️ 📄
  > The pastor explains the Jewish laws regarding a woman's monthly period, detailing how they led to isolation, stigma, and the inability to participate in community or marriage.
• Desperation and Medical Failure 00:10:38 ▶️ 📄
  > The pastor describes the woman's desperation, highlighting how she spent everything on doctors and turned to fringe medical practices, only to end up worse off.
• Jesus' Empathy and Healing 00:13:29 ▶️ 📄
  > The pastor recounts the moment the woman touches Jesus' robe, emphasizing her faith and the immediate healing, followed by Jesus' public inquiry which reveals her but also validates her.
• The Woman with the Issue of Blood 00:13:29 ▶️ 📄
  > The pastor narrates the biblical account of the woman touching Jesus' robe, highlighting her faith, the cultural scandal of touching the fringe, and Jesus' response.
• Vulnerability and Shame 00:16:34 ▶️ 📄
  > The pastor defines vulnerability as 'being able to be wounded' and connects it to shame, using Brene Brown's insights to illustrate the fear associated with being open.
• Identity in Christ 00:18:10 ▶️ 📄
  > The pastor explains how Jesus calls the woman 'Daughter' to remove blame and give her a new identity as a beloved child, contrasting this with her previous state of uncleanness.
• Personal Application of Shame 00:19:15 ▶️ 📄
  > The pastor applies the story to the congregation, stating that everyone has 'shame wounds' that bleed, and urges them to step out in vulnerability to touch Jesus' robe.

• Sermon Illustration 00:00:25 ▶️ 📄
  > The pastor cites Brené Brown's TED Talk on shame, listing examples of shame such as being laid off, infertility, and domestic abuse, to illustrate the universal and painful nature of shame.
• Sermon Illustration 00:03:48 ▶️ 📄
  > The pastor uses the analogy of a hand touching a hot burner to explain how guilt functions as an internal warning system, similar to physical pain, to alert us to danger or sin.
• Sermon Illustration 00:10:00 ▶️ 📄
  > The pastor describes the historical context of first-century Palestine, noting the lack of modern hygiene (no tampons, indoor plumbing) to emphasize the physical and social horror of the bleeding woman's condition.
• Sermon Illustration 00:11:23 ▶️ 📄
  > The pastor lists historical medical quackery procedures like bloodletting and lobotomies to illustrate the desperation and potential harm the woman might have endured from fringe healers.
• Sermon Illustration 00:13:29 ▶️ 📄
  > The pastor recounts the biblical story of the woman with the issue of blood, detailing her desperate faith, the cultural significance of touching the fringe of Jesus' robe, and Jesus' compassionate response that restored her identity.
• Sermon Illustration 00:16:44 ▶️ 📄
  > The pastor cites Brene Brown's research on vulnerability, listing various examples of vulnerable moments such as asking for help, admitting fear, or waiting for medical results to illustrate the concept of being 'able to be wounded.'

• Pastoral Charge 00:20:06 ▶️ 📄
  > The congregation is commanded to actively approach Jesus with their deepest shames and vulnerabilities, confessing them openly rather than hiding.

[00:00:00] [SPEAKER SPEAKER_00]
[00:00:00] He gets the pressure, the heartbreak, the doubts we hide, and the battles we face.
[00:00:06] Through powerful moments from the life of Jesus, we'll discover someone who meets us where we are, with empathy, compassion, and understanding, because no matter your story, He gets us.

[00:00:17] [SPEAKER SPEAKER_01]
[00:00:17] Well, welcome to MEX Online Campus.
[00:00:25] You know, Brene Brown has written several best-selling books, and some of them have been probably the most well-known that put her on the map or on the subject of shame.
[00:00:36] She offered up a TED Talk, which I think really put her on the map many years ago, on this subject, which has now been viewed, I went back and double-checked, over 70 million times.
[00:00:46] She starts off every talk, every article, every chapter on shame with these three facts, and they're interesting ones.
[00:00:53] She says, we all have it, meaning shame.
[00:00:56] We're all afraid to talk about it.
[00:00:59] And then third, the less we talk about it, the more control it has over our lives.
[00:01:05] Here are some of the responses that Brown received when she asked people for personal examples of when they felt ashamed.
[00:01:13] Shame is getting laid off and having to tell my pregnant wife.
[00:01:17] Shame is having someone ask me, when are you due when I'm not pregnant?
[00:01:22] Shame is hiding the fact that I'm in recovery.
[00:01:26] Shame is raging at my kids.
[00:01:29] Shame is bankruptcy.
[00:01:32] Shame is my boss calling me an idiot in front of the client.
[00:01:36] Shame is not making partner.
[00:01:39] Shame is my husband leaving me for my next-door neighbor.
[00:01:43] Shame is my wife asking me for a divorce and telling me that she wants children, but not with me.
[00:01:51] Shame is my DUI.
[00:01:53] Shame is infertility.
[00:01:55] Shame is telling my fiancé that my dad lives in France when, in fact, he's in prison.
[00:02:01] Shame is internet porn.
[00:02:05] Shame is flunking out of school.
[00:02:08] Twice.
[00:02:10] Shame is hearing my parents fight through the walls and wondering if I'm the only one who feels this afraid.
[00:02:18] What would you add?
[00:02:19] If you had to define what shame feels like and what it looks like in your life, maybe you would add to the list what would be in many ways the darkest type of shame of all.
[00:02:31] It's the shame that you feel for what was done to you.
[00:02:35] When you're the victim, when you feel the shame of how you were victimized, instead of seeing the shame, belonging to the perpetrators, you take it out on yourself as a victim, which means your personal
[00:02:46] examples would be shame as being physically abused, shame as being sexually abused, shame as being raped, shame as being bullied. Now, it would be easy to confuse shame with other feelings that we can have. The most common is to confuse shame with guilt, but there's a big difference
[00:03:07] between those two. Here's the simplest way that I've heard the divide put. Guilt is saying, I did bad. Shame is saying, I am bad. See the difference? There's a big difference between I made a mistake, guilt, and I am a mistake, which would be shame. Guilt can be good when it's
[00:03:29] operating the way it should be. It's like an internal alarm system that how you're living and what you're doing isn't God's plan A for your life.
[00:03:39] It's almost like your body's pain system or early warning system, like a Doppler system, something you're getting ready to do something or enter into something or something's coming at you that's not good.
[00:03:48] If you reach your hand toward a hot burner, you feel the heat, right?
[00:03:52] So you pull your hand back.
[00:03:53] Guilt works through your emotions that way to let you know, hey, you're not supposed to do that.
[00:04:01] It's that internal warning system.
[00:04:03] And that can be a really healthy thing.
[00:04:05] And some shame can be good, particularly collective community shame that reinforces certain behaviors.
[00:04:13] There should be collective shame toward, for example, deadbeat dads or child predators.
[00:04:21] But when guilt evolves into destructive, self-hating shame, the sense that I didn't just do bad, but I am bad, then we're into a bondage that God desperately wants to rescue us from.
[00:04:34] And yet that's exactly where most of us are, enslaved by our shame.
[00:04:40] Not I made a mistake, but I am a mistake.
[00:04:43] Not I did bad, but I am bad.
[00:04:47] We can't seem to separate ourselves from that.
[00:04:50] But does God get that?
[00:04:53] Does he understand our shame?
[00:04:56] Does he want to help us with it or just add to it?
[00:05:00] We're in a series on how God really does get us, and we're doing it by taking a look at five different interactions Jesus had with people that show in unmistakable ways just how much God understands, how sensitive he is, how empathetic he is, how God the Son becoming
[00:05:18] the man Jesus and walking among us, engaged with the human condition in ways that will forever declare to every single one of us our one singular truth, that he gets us. And that includes getting our shame. And for a picture of that, let's turn to a story involving Jesus
[00:05:38] and a bleeding woman. And it's actually tucked into the story we looked at last week, if you were able to join us. Let me read what happened. Jesus got into the boat again and went back to
[00:05:52] the other side of the lake where a large crowd gathered around him on the shore. Then a leader of the local synagogue, whose name was Jairus, arrived. When he saw Jesus, he fell at his feet,
[00:06:02] pleading fervently with him, my little daughter is dying, he said. Please come and lay your hands on her. Heal her so she can live. Jesus went with him and all the people followed, crowding around
[00:06:13] him. A woman in the crowd had suffered for 12 years with constant bleeding. She had suffered a great deal from many doctors. And over the years, she had spent everything she had to pay them. But she had gotten no better. In fact, she had gotten worse. She had heard from Jesus. So she
[00:06:31] heard about Jesus. So she came up behind him through the crowd and touched his robe. For she thought to herself, if I can just touch his robe, I will be healed. Okay, stop there. This is a sad
[00:06:46] story. And let me say at the beginning, I am indebted to female writers who have written on this for a woman's insight into what this would have been like. So as I walk through this, don't
[00:06:59] give me a level of sensitivity and insight I don't have or that any man would. Here was her situation. Here's a woman who is plagued by an endless menstrual cycle. Not a monthly flow, but a perpetual flow. There were specific Jewish laws in place at that time. They were in place to
[00:07:19] try and protect and encourage people toward physical health and hygiene. But unfortunately, they were also used, could be used, to judge and to condemn people. According to the law, during a woman's monthly period, she was considered ceremonially unclean for seven days,
[00:07:37] and that began on the first day of her period. Anywhere she sat, anywhere that she might have lay down was also considered unclean. So essentially, when a woman had her period, she would have been put into isolation. So she wouldn't just shut down the lives of other people
[00:07:54] because if anyone were to even touch where she sat or laid, they would also be unclean. Then they would have to perform a ritual bathing and they would remain unclean for the rest of that day
[00:08:05] until the evening and wouldn't be able to function in society, work, do their job, anything. What this means is that in the culture of that day, every month a woman having her period was considered a
[00:08:17] risk to everyone around her. And according to the law, she remained in this unclean state for an additional day after her period ended. Then she was only deemed clean after presenting herself with two turtle doves or two pigeons to the priest for a ritual sacrifice.
[00:08:41] So think about this woman. She never reached that final day of her period. She never ended the time of being unclean. She never could make it to the priest. Day after day, week after week,
[00:08:57] month after month, year after year, in an ongoing state of being unclean, having to lead a hidden, shamed life. But there's even more. Much of what gave a woman her sense of well-being and her
[00:09:14] community was several generations of women working together. They would often start before dawn preparing food for the entire family. And as they worked, they would talk and they would bond and they would share their lives and their feelings and their hopes. Not this woman. She couldn't be
[00:09:32] around them and they couldn't be around her. There's even more. She couldn't have children.
[00:09:38] By law, she couldn't have even been married because she was never ceremonially clean to do so.
[00:09:44] And this had been going on for 12 years.
[00:09:48] Just think about how physically weak she had to have been just from the daily loss of blood, the smell that would have surrounded her, the constant washing and changing and isolation.
[00:10:00] One female commentator I read reflected, remember, she said, there were no tampons, there was no shower down the hall. There was no indoor plumbing to flush away the blood, no washing machine and dryer for soiled linens. This was first century Palestine. Her condition defined
[00:10:19] every second of every day of her life. No wonder she exhausted everything she had on any and every medical hope for healing. And now she was penniless and worse than ever. But even that is a part of
[00:10:33] a story that's not fleshed out, but only alluded to, but it's not hard to read between the lines.
[00:10:38] We are told that she not only had spent everything she had on doctors, but that she had suffered a great deal from many of them. We can only imagine what that would have meant.
[00:10:50] In her desperation, not finding any cure within the mainstream medical community, she turned to the fringes of the web, places where promises are made, money demanded, and then painful, even horrific procedures are performed.
[00:11:05] Surgeries, mutilations, scarring.
[00:11:09] You know, today, when you read about the most common medical quackery procedures performed by people without medical credentials on the poor and vulnerable, it's just heartbreaking.
[00:11:23] Bloodletting, drinking radioactive water, the injection of animal glands, lobotomies, tobacco smoke enemas, the injection of ammonia, on and on it goes. Who knows what horrors in the midst of her desperation this woman endured in the first century. And the result, she was worse off than before, you think? I mean,
[00:11:55] And if anything, the bleeding increased, the pain, the cramps, the weakness, everything.
[00:11:59] And then she heard, in the midst of all this, she heard about Jesus.
[00:12:03] She'd heard stories of this man, stories of power and miracles and signs and wonders, stories of the blind seeing and the lame walking and even the dead coming back to life.
[00:12:14] But how could she get to him?
[00:12:16] In her state, she couldn't go out in public.
[00:12:18] She was unclean.
[00:12:19] She was in isolation, in seclusion.
[00:12:21] If she were to try and be exposed, then her shame would be even greater than it already was.
[00:12:28] But she was desperate, beyond desperate.
[00:12:33] So she came up with a plan and people have only guessed the details, but you can imagine how she would have had to cover herself to avoid being recognized and slipped away from her home and made her way through the crowd, probably filled with anxiety, thinking, how
[00:12:48] can I expect a man of God to do anything for me when the whole way here I'm making everyone unclean along the way for God? She's probably thinking, why am I even bothering? I'm just
[00:13:00] sinning left and right, violating everything, even making this self-serving kind of effort.
[00:13:08] How can I expect to touch him and be healed? But she had nothing to lose. She was desperate.
[00:13:16] it. So she kept thinking, if only I could touch his robe. If only I can touch his robe. She found him and she did. She got there. She found her way through the crowd. She found Jesus. And then with
[00:13:29] an unbelievable faith, courage, she touched his robe. And here's what the Bible says happened next. Immediately the bleeding stopped and she could feel in her body that she had been healed of her terrible condition. Can you imagine that moment for her? Instantly liberated from the hell
[00:13:52] of her life, she could have only been ecstatic and just filled with a joy that she had never been able to know. But then her worst nightmare happened. Just as she was trying to slip away
[00:14:02] with her new healing, let's keep reading. Jesus realized at once that healing power had gone out from him, so he turned around in the crowd and asked, who touched my robe? His disciples said to him, look at this crowd pressing around you. How can you ask who touched me? But he kept on
[00:14:19] looking around to see who had done it. Okay, stop there. She'd been revealed, caught, exposed. This was not going to be a touch and run. Let me tell you about the anxiety this held for her. When it
[00:14:32] says she touched his robe, it literally means she touched the fringe of his robe, in case you're wondering. Jewish men of that day had fringes on the corners of their robes, and they put a blue
[00:14:44] cord on the fringe at each corner. The fringe was very important. It was very special.
[00:14:50] It was considered the most personal part of the wardrobe. Only a very immediate family would ever touch the fringe of a man's robe. For someone other than a wife, parent, son, or daughter, to touch it would have been culturally scandalous for that day. Now, whether she touched it on
[00:15:08] purpose, which is doubtful, or whether in the midst of the crowd pushing, she touched it and she was just reaching out to touch his robe, and she touched the fringe by accident, more likely.
[00:15:18] We don't know. So here Jesus is saying, though, who just touched the fringe of my robe? Who just violated everything culturally? Who just did that? And the crowd would have gone absolutely silent because they knew no one should have. And Jesus was calling them out. This was going to be
[00:15:36] something to watch. So this was also going from bad to worse. And then she did something remarkable. She risked everything on the character of Jesus. She risked everything that when it came to how women should be treated, viewed, and valued, even one with her shame, she bet it all that this
[00:15:55] man would be different. Let's keep reading. So then the frightened woman, trembling at the realization of what had happened to her, came and fell to her knees in front of him and told him what she had done. She came forward and she said, I touched your rope. And then she told him why
[00:16:16] she could have hidden in the dark, but instead she came out into the light. She risked everything to move toward Jesus instead of away from Jesus. And at that moment, everything was on the line.
[00:16:28] She was completely vulnerable. That's another thing we don't talk much about, isn't it?
[00:16:34] We don't just not only talk about shame. We don't talk about vulnerability because you know what vulnerable means? I want to start to define this way. Being vulnerable means able to be wounded.
[00:16:44] Isn't that what it is? Brene Brown asked people to fill in this sentence because it is tied to shame. She said, vulnerability is blank. And here are some of the replies. Vulnerability is sharing an unpopular opinion, standing up for myself, asking for help, saying no, calling a friend
[00:17:05] whose child just died. The first date after my divorce. Saying I love you first and not knowing if I'm going to be loved back. Getting fired. Waiting for the biopsy to come back. Exercising in public, especially when I don't know what I'm doing and I'm out of shape. Admitting I'm afraid.
[00:17:27] Asking for forgiveness. So how does God feel about it when we are vulnerable with him?
[00:17:33] Well, let's find out.
[00:17:35] What the Bible records next is powerful.
[00:17:38] And he said to her, Daughter, your faith has made you well.
[00:17:44] Go in peace.
[00:17:45] Your suffering is over.
[00:17:49] Soak that one in.
[00:17:51] First, did you notice what he called her?
[00:17:52] Really important.
[00:17:54] Daughter.
[00:17:55] Who could ever touch a man's robe?
[00:17:58] The fringe of his robe.
[00:17:59] Jesus instantly cleaned that up real fast and said, Well, one of my daughters could.
[00:18:06] Without one word, Jesus removed any blame from her act of faith.
[00:18:10] So not only was she healed, but she was given a new identity.
[00:18:14] You are no longer this person who was unclean.
[00:18:16] You are my beloved child, not only accepted, but intimately connected to me.
[00:18:22] You have been healed in every way.
[00:18:25] And then he said, go in peace.
[00:18:27] You know, the guilt, the shame, all the anxieties that you brought with you today, everything you feared about even getting here to me that was somehow offending God.
[00:18:35] no, you can go in peace. Your suffering is over. He knew of her suffering, suffering that no one else cared one sin about. They would have used that knowledge to discard and dishonor and mistreat
[00:18:49] and abuse. Jesus looked at her and wanted nothing but to end her suffering, restore her fully to family, to society, to purpose, and to meaning. And that is the heart of God. So what does that
[00:19:04] story have to do with you? Well, it's simple. Man or woman, there's more than one way to bleed.
[00:19:15] You're bleeding somewhere. I'll bet right now everyone bleeds with shame somewhere.
[00:19:24] Don't you want to hear Jesus' words to you? Hear him say, son, daughter, go in peace.
[00:19:33] Your suffering is over. You've come to me. It's going to be okay. We all have shame wounds that are bleeding and nothing we've done, no passage of time, no procedure, no ritual, no conversation, nothing has healed us. Whether our shame was founded on us or forced on us by someone,
[00:19:54] what they did to us or from something we might have done ourselves, we all have wounds that bleed every day and we feel unclean. So what can we do? We can do what she did. Step out in naked
[00:20:06] vulnerability and touch the robe of Jesus and lay it all at his feet. Come to Jesus and tell him everything. Because what we don't reveal can't be healed. But if we touch his robe, ask for forgiveness, ask for healing, ask for a relationship, the answer is always the same.
[00:20:26] Son, daughter, your suffering is over. For anyone, for everyone, no matter your story, no matter what brings you shame, no matter where or how you bleed, because we have a God who gets us. Father, thank you for letting us come to you with everything we are most vulnerable with
[00:21:00] and about, everything marked by deeply held shame, everything that would keep us from coming to you is exactly what you would invite us to bring to you. So thank you. Thank you for not only getting
[00:21:12] us, but doing what it took to get us. We pray that in Jesus' name. Amen.