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Sunday, March 14, 2010

Failure
Fourth in the Series: Where is God When It Hurts?

By Rev. Jerry Herships

Luke 24: 17-21

¹⁷And he said to them, “What are you discussing with each other while you walk along?” They stood still, looking sad. ¹⁸Then one of them, whose name was Cleopas, answered him, “Are you the only stranger in Jerusalem who does not know the things that have taken place there in these days?” ¹⁹He asked them, “What things?” They replied, “The things about Jesus of Nazareth, who was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people, ²⁰and how our chief priests and leaders handed him over to be condemned to death and crucified him. ²¹But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel. Yes, and besides all this, it is now the third day since these things took place.

One of the ways I prepare for these talks is to read things from a wide variety of places. I will often do this reading while working out at the gym. I know I will get at least 4-5 hours of reading in that way AND it takes my mind off doing something that I don’t particularly enjoy doing….if you are one of those people that loves to workout…gets that “runners high”…well….good for you. That isn’t me. 

This week I am reading a book about the move from ambition to meaning in our life. It talks about how we often will let other people’s opinions of us decide how WE feel about ourselves. One of the ways we “keep score” to win someone’s popular opinion of us is to have more. More of everything…more stuff, more money, more accomplishments. Part of me thinks, are we really that shallow a people?  

As I was thinking this I glanced at the Vanity Fair I had brought with me to read while I worked out.  The cover has Michael Douglas and is titled, It’s Still About Greed and … Money – so much for the high ground. Society tells us the measuring sticks are out there and if you don’t hit a certain mark…you failed.

Failure. Wow. I feel like I have a deep, deep understanding of this topic. Hollywood teaches you very fast that there are going to be winners and losers and, without question, there are going to be more losers than winners. They tell you that at commercial auditions, those auditions where you are trying to sell Kleenex or laundry detergent, the average actor will audition between 60 -70 times before he or she can expect to land a part. Keep in mind this is not to get a sitcom or a movie. This is to hock power tools for Sears. For every person who gets a commercial…dozens and dozens of people fail.

The regular job market is not that different these days. For every job out there, there are sometimes hundreds of applicants. I know very smart, very competent, very business savvy people who have been out of work for months. It is enough to wear down our healthy self-esteem and make us feel at times like failures.

We sometimes don’t even need to leave the house to feel this way. Has anyone ever been on a diet?  Ever workout like crazy and eat all the right things and then get on the scale and realize you didn’t lose a pound? Or worse…you GAINED weight? Been there, done that.

So with all this potential failure in our lives, what are we to do? We can try to spin it positively like Oscar Wilde and say that experience is simply the name we give our mistakes. Or we can take more of a pessimistic stance like Samuel Goldwyn who said, “You’ve got to take the bitter with the sour.” I think I’ll go with the Oscar Wilde, but in our darkest hour, where do we turn? Well, as you can probably guess, my suggestion would be God.

It is not like there are no examples in the Bible of people who have failed …or at least been perceived as failures. We need to be careful not to make too quick a judgment when we read the Bible…or look in the mirror, about who is and isn’t a failure.

Actually the Bible has a number of people who failed in a number of ways. Adultery, murder, pride, greed, deception…and that’s just in Genesis! I think the first thing to remember is that no matter how much these people screwed up; no matter how lousy their character, no matter how much they “failed” in the way they lived their lives…God still loves them. We are reminded of Paul’s words that nothing can get between us and God’s love. We can do NOTHING to separate us from God’s love. God knows some of the folks in the Bible tried. Nothing worked. We are stuck with God’s love.

Another thing we need to remember is that some of the things that we use to measure success and failure, God could care less about. Most of the things that we many times tend to value, God could not give two widows mites for. God does not value our fame or what is in our money clips or the title on our business cards…or even if we have business cards. They are all things of this world and the more we continue to put too much value on them the more we will look to the scoreboard, feel like we are losing and label ourselves a failure.  

Perspectives are an interesting thing. I went to the Global Rich List, www.globalrichlist.com, website the other day. It reminds us that we so often compare ourselves to others, but they are usually the others who are doing better than we are. I punched in my salary…just south of $49k and hit the button called “show me the money.”  It told me that at 48,800, I am in the top 1% richest people in the world. Huh?  Judging from what the world tells me…I’ve always felt like I should be doing better, that I have almost been, dare I say it, a failure.  

Who and what we compare ourselves to can affect how we view ourselves. Michael Jordan is one of the greatest basketball players of all times and yet he has said that he has missed more than 9,000 shots in his career. He said he has lost almost 300 games. Walt Disney’s first animation studio went bankrupt. Are they successes or failures? We need to be careful what measuring stick we use to make our assessments of ourselves and others.

Another thing is to be careful we don’t put a period where God has put a comma….(yes I’ve had that on a magnet on my refrigerator.) But it’s true. Too often we think just because something is not NOW, we think it is not EVER.

That brings us to our Bible reading. The story we are reading about tonight is the story of the Walk to Emmaus. The village of Emmaus is still unidentified. Some scholars say it is about seven miles from Jerusalem and others say it is as far away as nineteen miles. What is important is what we hear the disciples say to Jesus and their mood.  

Verse 17 tells us Jesus asks what appears to be the innocent question, “So, What ya talkin’ ‘bout?”  That verse goes on to say, “they stood still looking sad.” YA THINK?!?!? This has got to be one of the worst days of their lives. The Disciples decided years before to drop whatever it was they were doing…fishing in the family business with their dad, collecting taxes, trying to overthrow Rome. Instead they decided to take a chance on this guy, this guy that they had given up EVERYTHING FOR.  Everything. They left their jobs, their families, and their future. They put their total trust in him. And, for what? It is sometimes easy for us to forget what a moment in time like this must have felt like because we can flip to the end of the story and see that it has a happy ending, but at this point in time the disciples can’t see how the story ends.

They felt that Jesus was it. He was the power that could change the world. And he failed. Remember that the power that was in Jesus is in each and every one of us. And that power NEVER fails. Just because you feel you have failed does not mean you’ve had a power failure. God’s power never goes away.  

In verse 21 we see them saying, “we had HOPED that he was the one to redeem Israel.” Implied in this verse is the idea that they are thinking, “…but we were wrong.” At this point in the story, they feel that not only are they failures, but Jesus was, too. They think it is the end of the story.  

But we know different. Don’t we do that with our own stories?  Don’t we put a period where God has put a comma?  No matter where we are in our story…we still don’t know how the story ends! The irony of this story is that how they think the story is going and how it is actually going is right in front of their eyes. They think that Jesus has failed and gone and yet….JESUS IS RIGHT THERE WITH THEM. It is the same way with us. Even though we might feel like we have failed…JESUS IS RIGHT HERE WITH US.

 Sometimes I think it is our own expectations that are our biggest enemies. It’s when our actual life doesn’t match up with the ideal of our life that we start to think we are less than. When life doesn’t live out the script that we wrote for it, we often start to think we are failures. I realized that for years, I didn’t let God help me write the rough draft of my life. Without God as your script partner, the odds of your life being a hit go way down. When we let God help us write our life story, we focus more on the now and the moment we are in. When we do this, act two takes care of itself.  

I have spent so much of my life worrying about how “this now” is going to effect “that later.” In the process, many times it ruined the now, which in turn, ruined the later that I had set up for myself. I EXPECTED these things now to lead to my ideal and when they didn’t, I thought: failure. We have to cease expectations and live more in the moment. When we do, tomorrows are much more likely to take care of themselves. 

How will your story end? Remember that your definition of failure is probably very different that God’s. Remember that whether you “fail” or not, it has absolutely no effect on God’s love for you. Remember that you are still in the middle of your story and when you stop focusing so much on how it will end and focus instead, on being in the moment, the odds of your story having a happy ending go way up. Remember it is impossible for you to have a power failure when you tap into God’s power and let God help you write the script.

How will your story end?

You will just have to keep reading and living your story, knowing that God walks right along beside you and because of that you need to know that the story is not over and that it is going to have an amazing ending.