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Sunday, March 07, 2010
Failure
Third in the Series: Where is God When It Hurts?
By Rev. Dr. Harvey C. Martz
Mark 10:35-40 New Revised Standard Version
35 James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came forward to him and said to him, "Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you." 36 And he said to them, "What is it you want me to do for you?" 37 And they said to him, "Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory." 38 But Jesus said to them, "You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?" 39 They replied, "We are able." Then Jesus said to them, "The cup that I drink you will drink; and with the baptism with which I am baptized, you will be baptized; 40 but to sit at my right hand or at my left is not mine to grant, but it is for those for whom it has been prepared."
When Jerry Herships and I began to plan this series of Lenten sermons on “Where is God When it Hurts,” we talked together about some of our own experiences of burnout and loss and failure. I told about a couple of failure experiences and he talked about his as well.
The first one I shared was about my stuttering. When I was in high school, I was somewhat shy and I stuttered. I was able to be involved in some leadership activities in my youth group and in the order of DeMolay, a Masonic affiliated group for young men. I was involved faithfully in my church youth group and in some plays through that youth group, but I was a kind of anomaly-a dramatist who stuttered!
I remember being involved in one church drama in a leading role and stuttering my way through part of one speech. That must have been really painful for the people in the audience because we know how we feel when someone has that handicap. We know what the person is about to say and we just want to help them finish the word or the sentence!
For some reason, my stuttering was not such a problem during my university career, and as student body president, and student government president my senior year, I was able to speak fairly effectively the many times I needed to.
But for me, my stuttering turned out to be, not so much a speech issue, but a confidence issue because when I went on to seminary at SMU and was in class with some very bright people, the stuttering returned and there were times I just could not get a word out of my mouth - my speech was frozen. I embarrassed myself several times in my Hebrew language class by not being able to speak when my turn came to conjugate the verb. As we went around the room, person by person, I knew the right answer, but could not get the word to come out.
In class I embarrassed myself in front of one of the foremost Wesley specialists and theologians in the world by not being able to even say my name when he called the class role.
I am sure I was seen by the professors and staff as somewhat of a problem-a potential preacher who stuttered, so they sent me to the SMU speech pathology department to get some help.
It turned out that what really helped was the confidence building, full year of internship, that we spent in Bozeman Montana where I was a campus minister for a year. I had some new experiences that helped me gain God given confidence and affirmed that I could fill some new and risky roles about which I was unsure.
I came back to seminary with a sharpened focus, and for the first time during that senior year of seminary, was able to stand up and read scripture in the chapel service in front of all the professors who had intimidated me before. It sounds unusual for one of your pastors to tell a story about being a stutterer, but those failure stories have gone into being who I am.
Jerry Herships told about the years when he was in Los Angeles in the entertainment business and how he and others would go to many, many auditions for nightclub gigs or parts in commercials and how they had to be prepared to fail to get a part about 99 times out of 100. They just knew that most of the auditions were not going to be a fit, that is, they were going to fail.
I’ve told you the story about my first possible role at being pastor in charge after serving as associate minister for three years. I was about to go on my own, and there was, I thought, the perfect job opening at an ecumenical church, Columbine Parish, right close in Littleton. If I got that assignment Judy would be able to keep on teaching high school English at Littleton High School. We were both about 28 years old with no children-and life would just be great.
I interviewed and failed to get the job. I thought I was the better candidate, but the interview committee did not think so. Then we were assigned to a church in Colorado Springs where it was a great match, a better match, and we had 22 wonderful years there reaching lots of people and involving them in a new life in Jesus Christ. That role prepared us well for being able to be here at St Andrew.
All of us have failed at some things and perhaps in life as well. You have asked God to help you use those failures to learn and grow and to help you be a deeper and wiser human being.
All of us in this room have failed but we are not failures. We are good people who are a mixture of successes and failures. We may have failed at relationships, at learning opportunities, at work, and all of us have experienced failure. We may be experiencing failure right now and if you are, you are not alone.
It may be difficult to know and believe that you are not alone, but it is true. Sometimes in a large suburban church people can come to worship and think, Wow, these other people must really have their lives all together. They sure look good on the outside, and I know what struggles I am having, so I probably don’t belong here.
None of that is true. In my first couple of years here in this congregation, one of our most active members told me his story about his business challenges. As a small business owner, it had been a very challenging time the previous couple of years, and he was not sure for a while that his business would survive although he had been very effective until that recession. He told me that he would look around at the church coffee hour and see other people who really seemed, on the exterior, to have it all together. He would ask his friends over coffee how they were doing and they would say they were just absolutely great. He felt even more discouraged because he was in a struggle.
He took a risk one Sunday morning at coffee. When a friend asked how he was doing, he did not give the typical answer that things were just terrific. He was vulnerable. He said he was not doing well, that he did not know if his business would survive the economic downturn at that time, and that he was not sleeping well. He was really concerned about failing.
You can guess what happened. His friend’s mask came off as well and his friend began to share the struggles and doubts going on in his life. The original member began to see that all these other people did not have things together any more than he did! He saw that church was not a place to just pretend that all is perfect, but a place to say that we are all a mix of successes and failures, faith and doubt, and certainty and struggle. He saw that when we get beyond our façade of, “all is well,” we can admit our needs and then we can be helpful to each other and we can let God be helpful to us.
Let me ask an unusual question: Did Jesus fail at anything? We have so easily lost the humanity of Jesus. It is critical that we recapture that human side of Jesus of Nazareth that is so apparent in the Gospel of Mark. Mark is the first gospel ever written and is the shortest gospel. It might take a couple of hours to read through Mark’s gospel, but it will be a splendid spiritual exercise for you these next few days of Lent. It will help you to get a new image of the humanity of Jesus.
The story we just heard from Mark is a story about failure. Jesus has spent three years with this band of brothers, his twelve closest friends, and they have had a chance to really get to know him well. They have seen him heal people, they have seen him welcome children, seen him confront the hypocrisy and arrogance of the religious bureaucrats, seen him take time for prayer, and they have seen him get tired and angry with them!
They are on their way now, after three years of itinerating around a small area of Galilee, to the big city of Jerusalem where he will confront the authorities and he will cause a crisis, and he will be executed.
Of these twelve friends, there are three whom Jesus is closer to than the others. They are the three who go to the top of the mountain where they have a vision of Jesus with Moses and Elijah. They are the three that he chooses to take with him on his loneliest night on earth when he prays in the Garden of Gethsemane. Who are those three closest friends? Peter, James, and John.
In today’s story Jesus is walking along the trail with James and John and they tell him that they still don’t get who he is. They still believe that he is coming as a political, warrior messiah like King David was, and they say that when he becomes king of Israel, they want to be his secretary of state and secretary of defense. They have been with him for three years and failed to understand what he is about!! And, if we really believe that Jesus was a human being, can it be that he also has failed as teacher and mentor to help them fully understand what this whole three years with him has been about
Did Jesus ever fail at anything? What does this Bible story say? Or what does the Bible story in Mark a couple of chapters earlier tell us? It says that when Jesus came to the town of Bethsaida, where Peter and his brother are from, (Peter’s brother’s name is Andrew-St. Andrew), some people brought a blind man to Jesus. Jesus took him outside the village, put saliva on the man’s eyes and tried to heal the man’s blindness, and Jesus failed. He asked the man if he could see and the man said he could see a little but the people he saw looked like trees. So Jesus tried again, and that time it worked.
All of us have failed at some things and will fail at other things and we may be failing right now at some things. Let me offer you a couple of current stories to remind us that when we have failed, we are in a lot of good company, and then we will close with one more Bible story.
By the way, you can find hundreds of inspirational quotes about failure by just Googling, “failure quotes.” There you will find people like Thomas Edison, inventor of the light bulb, after 10,000 attempts, who said that in all those 10,000 attempts he had not really failed, he had just found 10,000 ways that wouldn’t work, and he kept on trying.
Business writer Harvey McKay tells in his book, We Got Fired, about J. K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter books. J. K. Rowling got fired from some secretarial jobs because she was found writing some creative stories on her computer at work. She got a little severance and then took time to write Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
Michael Jordan says, I have missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I have lost almost 300 games.
Twenty six times I have been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I have failed over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.
Jim Collins says in his latest book, How the Mighty Fall: And Why Some Companies Never Give In: companies and organizations and people begin to fail when they focus on hubris-excessive pride-born out of their initial success. This came after his hugely successful, From Good to Great.
Hubris is a Greek word that also shows up in the Bible and is used in the proverb, Pride always goes before a fall-or a failure.
Here is one more Bible story of the person who, perhaps, fails the worst. He is one of the three of Jesus’ favorite friends. His name is Peter, and on that lonely Thursday night in the upper room at the Passover meal, when Jesus predicts his arrest and tells them that all of them will run away and abandon him to save themselves, Peter says: “The others might do that, Lord, but I would never do that. I will stand by you to the bitter end.” Does he? No, he fails, and he is devastated when he realizes what he has done. But after his horrible failure, Jesus gives him another chance, just as Christ does with us. We will look at that story closely next week.