Preached on Wednesday, February 28, 2018; the 3rd Wednesday of Lent
Scripture readings: Psalm
51; Matthew 26:69-75
I don’t know if you’ve
ever felt like a failure before?
It really isn’t very hard
to do.
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| Walking along Columbia River at Desert Aire, WA February 2018 |
But it’s about the very worst
thing that you can admit to, in this twenty-first-century-America of ours.
Failure is a hard
experience to get through and if you try to explain to others what you’re
feeling, you’ll probably get told one of two things. You may be told that
you’re wrong. On the other hand, you might get told that the only failure is
the one who thinks that he or she is a failure. Well neither brands of advice
are very encouraging or helpful. In our own time and place in history, even the
church misses the point of failure.
This is a Bible. It’s
God’s word: God’s story; God’s message to you and me. It says exactly what God
wants it to say for God’s own very specific reasons. God wants to show himself
and God wants to speak himself to each one of us to give each of us the knowledge
and the true understanding of God, and the knowledge and the true understanding
of ourselves.
It’s so hard for each one
of us to truly understand God and to truly understand ourselves. And we’re not
so likely to be interested in truly understanding other people because
(although we may sometimes want to help other people) we usually want to blame
other people, or judge them.
God’s happens to be keen
on us not going that direction, so God doesn’t waste his time or his word
helping us to understand other people. So, God hasn’t designed his word to tell
you about me, or to tell me about you.
God wants to speak
directly to you about your own life, and your own need. He doesn’t do this in
order to make you think that your life is all about yourself. God Doesn’t like
that either. God simply wants to crack through our own stony brains.
God wants to let you and
me know, without giving us any room for escape, exactly who we are. And, so,
God has filled his word with failures.
Given a garden full of
options, Adam and Eve made the one choice that they were told not to make.
Noah, the only truly righteous human being on earth became a drunk after the
flood. Abraham, who is the source of all God’s people of Faith, (whether
Jewish, or Christian, or whatever) didn’t have enough faith to keep him from
lying about his wife being his wife. The story of failure goes on and on.
In the New Testament,
Jesus (who is God in the flesh) is continually scolding his disciples about
their failures of faith. He scolded their failure to let the children come to
him. Jesus scolded their failure to trust that if he asks them to feed a crowd using
only a few morsels, that he himself will make it possible. They found that
trust as hard the second time they fed the crowds as they did the first time. Even
after the resurrection and Pentecost, they often didn’t get things right.
The Bible is a book about
failures and it’s about the God who loves failures and never leaves them and
never gives up on them. The Bible is about the God who never leaves the
failures alone until he fixes them and recreates them, or until they come into
his presence for the final great new creation.
Maybe you have never been
a failure; but, if you ever have been, then, this book is for you; and the God
of this book is for you. And the God of this book is the God of the Gospel,
which means God’s Good News for you. The greatest wisdom in this world comes
from knowing this truth.
Jesus was in a room of the
High Priest’s big house, getting slapped, and punched, and spat upon because of
the new creation he was bringing to Peter, and to us, and to the world. We read
about Peter denying that he even knew who Jesus was, even though, when Jesus
asked his disciples to tell him who he was, Peter was the only one who could put
it into words: “you are the Christ, the Son of the Living God”. (Matthew 16:16)
In a few minutes Peter
would run out of the gate of the High Priest’s house weeping hot, bitter tears
of failure.
Peter wasn’t the worst.
Judas sold Jesus for thirty silver coins. The other disciples had already run
away to hide. Peter denied Jesus with his words, but the others denied Jesus by
their absence.
John tells us about one
disciple who went with Peter to the trial of Jesus. The one other disciple left
on the scene got Peter into the house because the High Priest and his staff
knew this disciple and his family. This one disciple was the one that John
tells us “Jesus loved”: not because he was special, but because John felt too
loved even to give his identity away when he did the right thing.
The nameless disciple,
named John, was the bravest of them all because the Priest and the staff
already knew that he was a disciple of Jesus, and so (if he did get in trouble because
of following Jesus) going to the High Priest’s house could make things any worse.
So, he was there to watch Peter’s failure happen.
John could have named himself
here, to make himself look good. But I don’t believe that he thought of himself
as a success, and so he hid his name from us. Practically the only one in the
Bible who isn’t a failure doesn’t want us to know it. And we’re really only
guessing when we claim that we know that he was John.
This Book, and this God
who shows himself to us in Jesus, knows who you are, and what you will do, and
what you will say, before you do or say it or even think about it. Before he
sent Judas off to do his work, Jesus said, “One of you will betray me.”
(Matthew 26:21) When the Passover meal was done, he said to all the rest, “This
very night you will all fall away on account of me.” (Matthew 26:31) To Peter
who claimed that he would never fall away, Jesus said, “I tell you the truth,
this very night before the rooster crows, you will deny me three times.”
(Matthew 26:34)
Jesus knows our every
weakness. Jesus knows all of our failures before we do.
Jesus also knows that what
he will do for them (and for us), on the cross and in the resurrection, will
make all of us into new people who will follow, and even be willing to fail, in
order to keep right on following and taking up our crosses with Jesus.
Jesus hinted at this when
he said, “But after I have risen, I will go ahead of you into Galilee.”
(Matthew 26:32) He knew that they would keep on following, even when they had seen
the worst. Jesus knew that they would keep on following, even at the risk of failure.
Those who go ahead on the
road of the cross, or the road of the love of Jesus, and keep on this road for
love of the world and their neighbor, knowing that they will fail, and knowing
that failure won’t keep them from succeeding: those are truly the people of
Jesus.
Jesus died as a tortured
and cruelly executed criminal. People would curse his memory. People would
curse his followers. People may curse us. What looked like a curse in the form
of a cross was and is, really, an infinite love that is stronger than any sin,
stronger than all evil combined, stronger than Hell and all its forces,
stronger than death, stronger than the universe.
The cross and the
resurrection of Jesus turn failure into victory and salvation. Carry that on
your back. Carry that in your heart. Do it, and you may change lives even because
you fail.
True forgiveness is
infinitely greater than the words that say, “You are forgiven”. Forgiveness is
power, and healing, and life. The blood of the cross is stronger than any
failure and Jesus calls to us to come to his cross and be forgiven. Come to the
cross and be healed. Stop living by what you think of yourself. Start living in
the life that comes from that cross. It’s new every day, every moment.
When I was twenty I wrote
a poem a little bit about this. I’ve made some changes. But here’s how it goes.
“IF I SEEM TO FAIL”
Lord, if I seem a fool, disaster-prone,
And powerless to hold true to your will,
To keep that faithful path you’ve given me,
Inherit all the joy that I’m assured
Can be mine if I’m faithful to the end;
If I, in folly, trip along the way,
Fall face down in the dust along the road
And seem, to all the world, cut off from you;
By my sad failure severed from the prize;
Yet, Lord, I pray that, by some mystery,
Your humbleness would take my vanity,
Transforming it to something like your cross,
Which fooled the world by looking like defeat,
And yet redemption brought. You seemed a fool…
Make me a fool for you.
Dennis Evans, written in spring 1973, revised.
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