The Sacrament of Failure

March 29, 1988

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Scripture: Matthew 26:69-75

For my turn in the devotional line-up this week, I’d like to try to deal with something we don’t usually spend a lot of time on in Church, at least not as much time as we probably should.... As background, let me read a Holy Week lesson. It’s a familiar one, and is found in the Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 26, verses 69-75....

I fell into conversation with a young man a while back. He was well dressed, well educated, seemingly on top of everything. But there was something obviously missing. He was defensive, right from the start of the conversation he was almost arrogantly defensive.... You could tell it was a front.... He’s been hurt too many times.

Finally, after a few false starts, he began to relax. When he convinced himself that no one was going to bite him, it all poured out, like water from a faucet.... “I’m a failure”, he said, “a failure... an absolute, total failure. Everything I touch, everything I put my hands on seems to come apart at the seams.”

Does it strike a responsive chord? I wonder if you’ve ever felt that way? I have, and I’m not going to try to fool you... I think we all have, whatever our age, whatever our background, whatever our experience, who is there, ANYWHERE, who in some way has not known and agonized over the dismal, melancholy business of HUMAN FAILURE?

Can we talk about it this Holy Week morning as we build toward Easter? This may be an appropriate time to do so.

What does the Christian Faith have to say about failure? Anything? You wouldn’t think so

sometimes when you read the honeyed, saccharine reports that come out of some church circles.... You’ve heard them, we all have, Charge Conference reports can sometimes be that way. Everything negative is glossed over, all you hear is how great things are....

But surely this is superficial, surely Christianity at its best doesn’t have to hide its head from this problem... Surely the message of the Christian Faith isn’t limited to just success, accomplishment, the positive side of life. IT BETTER NOT BE.

If it were, most of us would be cut off right at the point of our greatest need. THE TRUTH IS MOST OF US PROBABLY FAIL IN LIFE MORE OFTEN THAN WE SUCCEED.

Oh, we don’t like to talk about it. We don’t like to admit it. We cover it up as best we can, but we know, underneath, that it’s there. We talk about the wonderful new members who joined our church, but we don’t say much a bout those who visited once or twice and then went somewhere else....

We like to brag about what a good deal we got the last time we traded cars, but we don’t expound very enthusiastically about the time the TV repair man really put one over on us.

We gloat over the wonderful Sunday School lesson we taught one time back there, but it’s sort of painful to think about all those other occasions when the thing just sort of fell apart in our hands. Our failures are, to say the least, not our favorite subject of conversation. AND YET, WHO IS IMMUNE FROM THE RAVAGE AND HURT OF FAILURE?

Who, young or old, doesn’t know the experience, and live with it daily, in some are of his life, if not several? Like the “world” in Browning’s poem, it’s “with us, too much with us.”

It’s a fundamental part of the human panorama, and I don’t suppose anybody totally escapes it. Not, perhaps, that we often face total, abject disaster, maybe it’s not often that bad, but we do, over and over again, find ourselves failing, especially in the sense that we fail to reach the level of accomplishment we hoped we would when we started out.

The businessman knows this. He has a product to sell, a sure-fire, can’t-miss product, something no home should be without. He has visions of a vast financial empire with himself at the helm, barking orders to scurrying flunkies, whose main job is as he pictures it is to haul in crate after crate of money..... But somehow it doesn’t work out that way. His business never seems to live up to his dream, and he has to adjust his dream to get in touch with reality.... He knows failure.

The rookie baseball player knows failure. Here he starts out the spring training season, right about now, as the darling of the club, the rookie who has everything.... He belts a few out of the park and becomes convinced that the baseball world is his toy, that the records of Mantle and Mays and Ripkin are on the verge of tottering....

But then, spring ripens into summer...the pitchers begin to throw curve balls, and before he knows it, he’s on his way back to the minors, back once again to another season in Peoria...maybe next year. He knows failure.

And you can go right down the line.... Employers know failure... maybe more painfully than employees are sometimes aware. Children know failure... and it can stunt growth terribly. Teachers know failure, parents know failure. Husbands and wives know failure... sometimes in a poignant, excruciating kind of way.... EVERYBODY DOES.

Preachers know failure. I guess it’s not hard to convince most congregations of that. You knock yourself out all week, maybe, working on an outline, developing a theme, finding just the right illustration to wrap it up, and right at the climax, or what you thought was going to be the climax, some joker in the 2nd row goes to sleep, and maybe even snores....

I want to suggest that you don’t know what being in the minority is until you’ve blown a sermon. I mean really bombed out when you had a chance to produce something worthwhile.

Failure and the threat of failure... All of us live with it, in some form, in some fashion, and if we’re honest with ourselves, we’ll have to say that we fail more often than we care to admit. Now, you know as well as I do, sometimes this sort of thing can be extremely discouraging. It can be almost debilitating....especially when we compare it with the pattern set for us by Jesus.

One of the hymns in our Hymnal is “Dear Master, in Whose Life I see, all that I would, but fail to be....”   In the second stanza of that hymn, there is this phrase---“Oh, Thou whose deeds and dreams were one.”

He’s the only one on record about whom that could be said, the only one we know of whose ambitions and accomplishments were synonymous. ALL THE REST OF US HAVE BOGGED DOWN SOMEWHERE ALONG THE WAY IN THE MIRE OF EVERYDAY LIVING.

We unconsciously say something that cuts someone else very deeply....We fail to show up at the right time when just our very presence could have been therapeutic...

We take people for granted when they need to know very much that we love them. We think of the impact we’d like to have, the witness we’d like to make, and then contrast it to what we’ve actually done, and our failure is very much a part of our lives.

Isn’t the story of Peter’s denial terribly pertinent at this point? You can say what you want to about the Bible....a lot of people try to dismiss it as an outdated book, as an archaic collection of old-fashioned stories, BUT I SUBMIT TO YOU, how relevant, how up-to-date can you get?

Isn’t Peter’s experience there in Pilate’s courtyard the experience of all of us?

Remember?

Peter was the disciple who promised Jesus that he’d never leave Him, never turn his back on Him NO MATTER WHAT THE OTHERS DID.... “You don’t have to worry about ME”, he bragged, without ever realizing that he was bragging.... He really meant it, with all the sincerity of his impetuous nature.

That was old Simon, of whom Jesus had said, “Thou art the Rock (Petros), and on this foundation I will build my Church.” Knowing what we do about Peter, it almost makes us suspect irony.

Dr. Carl Michalson somewhere suggests that someday New Testament scholarship is going to discover that Jesus didn’t call Peter the “rock” first at Caesarea Philippi at all, but rather on that day when we tried to walk on the water. In bestowing the nickname he didn’t have in mind so much his foundational qualities as he did his sinking qualities.

But you couldn’t have convinced Peter of that. Rocklike, steady Simon, with the will of the Master first place in his heart. That’s who he was, the man you could absolutely depend on not to fail.

Then Jesus told him he would deny Him before the sun came up again, and Peter almost had a stroke. He almost had apoplexy, right there on the ground. “Are you kidding? What are you talking about, Lord?” Maybe John....I wouldn’t put it past him. Or maybe even my brother Andrew....or one of the others. But ME? You must be out of your mind.

And now here he is in the palace courtyard. He had followed there in the night, from Gethsemane. He has sneaked along after the entourage which bears the arrested Jesus in tow. He’s the only one who did follow. All the others fled in the opposite direction. The fact that he was there, just his presence, says something for his courage.

But then it happens. Somebody says, “Hey, don’t you know him?” And somebody else says, “Why, sure he knows him. I’ve seen them together. He’s a Galilean, can’t you tell by the accent? He’s one of them. And the pressure is simply too much. Can you understand? Public opinion, that hussie, that fickle mistress, overpowers the conviction of his heart, and in frustration and anger, he lashes out---- “What are you talking about? What do you mean? I’ve never seen the man before in my life.”

AND IT WAS DONE. The next few seconds must have seemed a thousand years for Peter. People talk about hell on earth.... Peter knows.... I guess not many have ever known it better.

No sooner had he said it, no sooner had it poured out of his mouth than he realized it. At least he wasn’t callous. He heard through the night the crowing of that old rooster, just as Jesus had warned him, and the true realization of what he was doing came flooding in his soul.

He was turning his back on God, He was denying, not only Christ, but the central conviction of his own life. He was betraying, really, what was most authentic in his own personality. “I never saw him before in my life.”

And the pain of that moment must have seized him and wrung him dry. The anguish, the torment, the humiliation of his own failure suddenly became a burden that was too heavy to bear..... SO HE RAN AWAY... away from people away from everybody.... He ran off into the blackness, and big, strapping man that he was, he sat down and cried like a baby.

Does it strike you, I wonder, have you ever thought about it, right then, what a close parallel there was between Peter and Judas? One had denied his Lord, the other betrayed Him....One had cut Him out, the other turned Him in.... WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE, REALLY?

Both had cast their ballot against Him at a crucial time. Both had said, “NO”, when He needed them.... Maybe Judas had done it calculatingly and Peter unwittingly... the result was the same.... THEY HAD FAILED.

And even afterward the parallel continues, because almost at once they were both overcome with remorse. While Peter was weeping bitterly at his own brand of betrayal, Judas was back at the Temple, flinging down his money, his blood money, trying desperately to call back the irrevocable.

Both of them knew the remorse and the misery their failure had brought about. And with their eyes burning and their mouths dry, they both questioned whether life really had any meaning at all.

There are those living now who can understand that. Constant failure and the drying up of hope sucks the life out of a person.

But there, I guess, the parallel of Judas and Peter ends. It was the end for Judas. He could see no ray of hope. The picture ahead was totally black. His failure was complete. If only he could have waited two more days.

Peter, on the other hand, bundled up his failures and gave them to God. This was the difference, really, the only difference that I can see. Realizing that he had failed, admitting that he had failed, confessing fully that he was unworthy in himself, he took his life, his entire life black spots and all, and threw the whole sordid mess in God’s lap.

He didn’t try to justify, he didn’t try to rationalize.... There was no sham, no pretense, no cover up.... He was what he was, and he said so, and in that act of surrender, if you please, the way was thrown open for the miracle of God’s non-judgmental acceptance.

You see, and this is the great thing... maybe the greatest thing I know... EVEN FAILURES CAN BE USED BY GOD FOR HIS PURPOSE.

How strange and how fantastically beautiful. But it’s true. Our failures, of all types, omission and commission, when they are dedicated to God, are often taken up somehow, and woven mysteriously into His great pattern for victory.

For one thing, it does something to US. It does something TO us. Admitting one’s failure and confessing it, cracks the shell of self-righteousness. It opens us up so that God’s redemptive light can shine into our dingy lives. That’s precisely what happened to Peter. That’s why his experience didn’t end in disaster as Judas’ experience did.

And what’s more, we never know when something we do which seems at the moment to flop completely, will turn out in the long run to be a seed which will grow and blossom in due season. I know I have a number of times in my ministry gotten credit for something which really was the result of somebody else’s hard work and patient cultivation long before I ever appeared on the scene.

Woodrow Wilson once said that it is better to fail in a cause that ultimately succeeds than to succeed in a cause which ultimately fails. The context of statement, of course, was the League of Nations situation in which he was embroiled, but I wonder if it doesn’t have a wider application than that. I’m sure he was right, maybe in a profounder sense than he realized, and I find comfort from it in my own life, especially when I’m tempted to become impressed with my own inexpendability.

I don’t have to be successful in everything I undertake. It’s motivation that God judges with the greatest intensity, not accomplishment. God doesn’t call us to be victorious, He calls us to be faithful, and to leave the rest to Him.

In a far greater sense than we can ever imagine, He can take our blundering, inept efforts, when we commit them into His care, and weave them somehow into the fabric of ultimate, glorious triumph.

In the meantime, until that day of triumph, comes, what are we to do with our failures?

John Oman makes a fruitful suggestion at this point. In one of his books, I think it’s Grace and Personality, he makes this striking observation.... According to the Gospel record, he says, Jesus during His ministry used at least 4 symbols.

He used bread in the Upper Room to symbolize His body. He used wine on the same occasion to symbolize His blood. He used the symbol of water to represent cleansing and purity. It’s the symbol of baptism. And, says Dr. Oman, he also used at least on one occasion, the symbol of dust.... Remember?

He sent His disciples out on a mission into the surrounding territory and he told them that when they went into a house or a town and were not received, that is, when they were rejected...when they failed.... they were to shake the dust from their feet on leaving as a testimony against them.

What does it mean? Is it mere vindictiveness. Is it simply sour grapes? Dr. Oman suggests that something far deeper may be what Jesus intended. Maybe He meant that the medium of dust should be used as a kind of sacrament, a symbol of the dedication of failure to the highest purpose of God.

Do what you can, of course. Work as hard as you can. TRY.....

But when you’ve done that, and still failed, then dedicate your failure to God, and leave it in His hands. You never know but what your immediate failure may be merely a prelude to some great new victory which God in His good time will bring to fruition.

It is better to fail in a cause that ultimately succeeds than to succeed in a cause that ultimately fails. And God is not going to fail.