Christ's Seat of Shame [Trinity 17]

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 READINGS FROM HOLY SCRIPTURE:

• Proverbs 25:6-14

• Ephesians 4:1-6

• St. Luke 14:1-11

Grace, mercy, and peace will be with us, from God the Father and from Jesus Christ the Father's Son, in truth and love. (2 John)
 
Who speaks to you this morning saying,
“and he who invited you both will come and say to you, ‘Give your place to this person,’ and then you will begin with shame to take the lowest place.”
 
As we ponder this walk of shame to the lowest place today, we remember that we have heard this word “shame” in our catechism. In the 6th petition of the prayer Jesus taught us, “and lead us not into temptation”, we believe it means “that God would guard and keep us so that the devil, the world, and our sinful nature may not deceive us or mislead us into false belief, despair, and other great shame and vice.”
 
What is so wrong with shame that we need to pray against it? Well, if you’ve ever experienced shame, you wonder why I have to ask that question, but God’s Word is not only concerned with something that just makes you “feel bad”, even though “feeling bad” is a part of God’s plan to teach us not to love these things…
 
The most important danger of “shame” to pray against is heard in Daniel 12:2 when the Lord says, “And many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.”
 
With that verse, Jesus directly links shame to being sent to hell forever. Hopefully, easy to see why one would desire to pray against such a thing as shame.
 
So we pray against it, but what is it? Is it simply good table manners at a friend’s party? 
2 Corinthians 4:2 gets us on the path, “we have renounced the hidden things of shame, not walking in craftiness or deceiving by God’s Word”, says St. Paul.
 
From this, we can see that “shame” includes at least two things: “craftiness” and “deceit by God’s Word”. While in English, craftiness can be seen in a good light, it is usually not. And definitely not in the way our Lord uses it here. For in 2 Corinthians 11:3 it is of the devil, “I am afraid that as the serpent deceived Eve by his craftiness, your thoughts will be led astray from a sincere and pure devotion to Christ.”
 
So it is trickery, but not just a “trick or treat” trickery. Notice that it is directly related to devotion to Christ. Which makes the “deceiving by God’s Word” part even easier to understand. Understand, as in, this is our sin and we would use even the Word of God to get what we want. So yes, we pray against shame happening to us, but we now must also pray that we bring no shame upon others either.
 
Repent. Our sinfulness brings us to an impossible situation. Do we take our places in front of God craftily or deceitfully? Do we take the highest seat and hope He doesn’t notice, risking this satanic walk of shame? Or do we take the lowest seat, risking not being noticed and being forgotten? 
 
And guilt upon guilt, our Divine Service forces us into this situation! The Holy Spirit calls us, brings us here against our sinful will. He knows God has come in the flesh to commune with His people so this is where He gathers us. But now we have to decide where to sit, or rather, where we stand with God.
 
Do we sit in the back, basically acknowledging our shame, like good Lutherans? Or do we sit in the front and basically acknowledge our pride? For shame.
 
I will tell you, you will sit. You will sit, any place will do, and you will listen and remember. Remember Isaiah 50:6, “I gave my back to the smiters, and my cheeks to those who pull out the beard; I hid not my face from shame and spitting.”
 
Wrapped in our own world of debilitating social anxieties, we pass Jesus by, Who apparently does not hide from shame; our shame. Which means that instead of scheming, crafting, or deceiving to get what He wants from us, Jesus instead faces our shame directly, openly, and handily.
 
The walk of shame to the lowest seat is not God displacing us, it is Jesus taking our place. He is tempted by the devil and taken to the highest place. “Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. And he said to him, ‘All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.’”
 
And knowing their glory is their shame in all their corrupted sinfulness, Jesus still takes all of the kingdoms of the world and their glory, as His own, such that their glory, their shame, becomes His. Meaning all that sinful corruption that the devil tried to hide by craftiness and deceit, is exactly what Jesus was planning to conquer on His own.
 
“Their end is destruction, their god is their belly, and they glory in their shame, with minds set on earthly things”, says Philippians 3:19. As such, Jesus desires to take up His cross and in doing so, “for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising its shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God” (Heb 12:2).
 
In Christ, the glory of sin, which is shame, becomes the honor of Christ, that is His suffering and dying to overcome it in victory, for you. Jesus does not choose the place of worldly honor in your sight, but of the lowest worldly shame, becoming cursed in your place, taking your low seat of shame and making it His own.
 
Such that when you come to find a place in front of God, there is no place. You cannot take the first seat, it belongs to Christ. You cannot take the last seat, it also belongs to Christ. So what seat is left? None, right? Wrong.
 
Since all seats are Christ’s seats, our seat is Christ Himself. Covered in the blood of Christ’s righteousness, having endured our shame for us, we are raised up, “raised…up with him and seated…with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus” (Eph 2:6). For in enduring our shame on the cross, it is taken away, as far as the east is from the west. Likewise, any dishonor, real or imagined, has been wiped clean.
 
All glory is Christ’s glory. All honor is Christ’s honor. All of the giving-of-such-gifts-to-men is Christ’s joy to do. In this self-giving of God, we find godly humility and godly exaltation given to us. Humility in the face of such a merciful and loving God and exaltation in the Body and Blood of Christ.
 
Now we take our places in front of God in that boldness. Knowing our sin and confessing our shame, we offer those horrid gifts to God, because He demands our shame be upon Him. And in exchange, we are given the seat of honor. The honor of being the lowly, created creature who is assumed into the Body of God, planned from the beginning.
 
In the Divine Service, we are given to devotion to Christ. He is the One speaking and acting here, giving us the confidence that the Pharisees did not have to reply to Him. Our shame has been turned into the glory of His Word and Sacrament, on our lips and tongue, which He has given us to confess with our mouths, that He is Lord.
 
Our boldness in Christ now places us in the seat of honor where we receive Divine Service from God, that is that He gives us faith in Christ, forgives our sins, and grants us eternal life at His side. In Christ, we are no longer led to great shame and vice, but to His Table and to His righteousness. 
 
Job cries out in 23:3, “Oh, that I knew where I might find him, that I might come even to his seat!”
Jesus answers in Exodus 25:22, “And there I will meet with you and I will commune with you from above the mercy seat, from between the two cherubims which are upon the ark of the Testimony, of all things which I will give you in commandment unto the children of Israel.”
 
He is seated at the right hand of God with the earth as His footstool and yet He communes with you. On top of that, God has “raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus” (Eph 2:6) where there is no shame, ever.