“Christ Transforming: Failure”
Grove Presbyterian Church
Sunday, June 19, 2016
Invitation to Worship
Related Poem Content Details
BY EMILY DICKINSON
Success is counted sweetest
By those who ne'er succeed.
To comprehend a nectar
Requires sorest need.
Not one of all the purple Host
Who took the Flag today
Can tell the definition
So clear of victory
As he defeated – dying –
On whose forbidden ear
The distant strains of triumph
Burst agonized and clear!
The LORD said: People of Jerusalem, when you stumble and fall, you get back up, and if you
take a wrong road, you turn around and go back. So why do you refuse to come back to me?
Why do you hold so tightly to your false gods?
--Jeremiah 8:4-5
New Testament Lesson and Reflection
Luke 12: 32-33
Christ Transforming Failure.
Well, I could use a little please. Transformation that it. Got enough of the other, thank you very
much.
Failure: sometimes our own fault. Heck: often our own fault. Sometimes the fault of forces
beyond our control. Your fault, not your fault, his fault, her fault. Usually a white water
confluence of choices and you without a life jacket.
Hardly as if you’ve never gotten a D- in life, right? Haunted by where we have failed…bring out
the hankies and the tiny violins…
So to buck up our flagging spirits, we roll out the persevering example of Lincoln and his many
failures as a wagging-the-finger moral lesson.
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Lincoln, along with all those moralistic chestnuts:
“I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.”
― Thomas A. Edison (inventor)
When the going get tough, the tough….
[Although I do prefer my version: when the going gets tough, it is time for a party]
“It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed.”
― Theodore Roosevelt (politician)
“Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.”
― Robert F. Kennedy (politician)
Yeah, yeah, yeah – got it, grandpa. Thanks for the advice.
Just what we want to hear, pontificating like those antique octogenarians on the 700 Club
dismissing Climate Change – what do they care about science? They’re going to be dead before
they have to confess their folly.
To fail – Latin for ‘to cause to fall, to trip.’
~~~
You may have heard the passage [Romans 8: 28] frequently trotted out during bad times by wellintended (albeit a tad patronizing) folks, “And we know that in all things God works for the
good of those who love him”– well, that doesn’t’ mean all things are good. Lord, no. What it
means is that there is a condition. To transform horror into good takes a lot of divine chutzpah!
Orlando and that ridiculously unmanly AR-15 wasn’t a good (despite you can get one on
discount now and has American Rifleman replaced Playboy hidden under the bed of adolescent
males? (whatever their age). The passage means instead something far deeper: how if you are a
person of faith, if we are animated, driven, inspired, sustained by the defiant love of God, we can
take anything bad, painful, tragic – murders, divorce, cancer, alligators, even semi-automatic
rifles – and in love Jesus can turn our sufferings into something we can grow from. We can
defeat it, even hate and bigotry, rather than it defeat us.
O my stars and garters. I suppose Bushmaster will now pull Jesus’ man card!
For years I have been saying that my pastor approach rejects crusades and issues and instead how
I will take people where I meet them – meaning: how despite their baggage, they are children of
God. But I lately have learnt to condition that practice: I take people where I meet them -- so
that both of us can be changed by growing closer to Jesus.
~~~
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It wasn’t as if Jesus was a stellar success.
Thank about it. He could have been a success. But noooo, he had to go and get crucified…
Success and failure: rather depends on your metrics, on how you define failure and success.
Listen: Luke 12: 32-33:
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“Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the
kingdom. 33Sell your possessions, and give alms. Make purses for yourselves that do not wear
out, an unfailing treasure in heaven, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys.
Pretty smart metric: To value what cannot be taken away from you. Jesus metrics.
~~~
Moths and thieves, thieves and moths.
Thieves and their obnoxious disregard of your property, if you’ve ever been robbed. A thief:
‘kleptes’ in Greek. Our daughter absent-mindedly placing her purse on the seat next to her in the
movie theatre, finding it gone. Credit cards, cash, keys can be taken from you.
Moths nibbling away at your clothes. Actually not destroyed by moths.
It is the larvae from the deposited eggs that eat your clothes, your animal-based materials of tasty
and especially soiled wool, fur, silk, feathers, leather making fantastic hors d’oeuvres. By the
time they become the fluttering moths in your closet, they don’t even have mouths. They’re just
interested in mating and laying more eggs behind your lapels.
Pretty damaging back in Bible day, especially since Jesus didn’t have a walk-in closet or
Macy’s. When you own one or two cloaks, you can ill afford the moth damage.
By the way, things like moths and thieves, these critters of failure destroying and corrupting,
dislike light, preferring dark.
Is what you hold dear able to be stolen from you, able to be corrupted, afraid of exposure?
So, Jesus, a failure in the eyes of the world, confounds the world.
~~~
I was approached Monday by someone who struggles with whether or not they are really a good
Christian rather than a great Christian.
I guess a good Christian is okay. I try to live my life according to the doctrine I have been
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taught.. I have always tried to forgive. And to love my enemies…Is there something wrong with
me that I feel such hatred toward people like the Orlando terrorist?? ... Yes , hatred.. The young
man who I knew to beat up his girlfriend... Yes, hatred
Am I wrong to think that the difference is a "great Christian" reacts to something like what
happened in Orlando quoting the bible and ignoring their anger. And a "good " Christian spits
at the TV, cries out, and realizes that the reason we love superheroes is that they can swoop
down and eradicate evil!??! Okay thanks for listening to me. Just needed to vent.
Well, more than venting.
This world can stink of failure.
I did my best to respond, surely no oracle of truth, but just rambling where I come from, from my
rather limited grasp of the brutal honesty of Scripture.
You never read the Psalms? Love the one about by the willows that ends with wanting the
enemy's babies smashed on walls. Psalm 137
Key texts for me are: "be angry but sin not.' and 'unless you repent" -- the second is Jesus'
gutsiest because he's been urged to rally in support of the innocent Galileans slaughtered by
Pilate in the Temple -- but Jesus refuses to rally -- instead he defies his brother Jews and tells
them they better look to themselves and their inner hatred.
Evil isn't just the other. Evil can be us.
Evil isn't the opposite of good but the distortion of good. The terrorists view themselves as
patriots, as doing good. That's where it gets demonic. War isn't good versus evil but their good
versus our good.
Good Christians rise defiantly up against that which contravenes the will of God -- and they will
suffer for it because they refuse to buy into any of the world's solutions or views.
The opposite of faith is not doubt but fear.
The absence of love is hate.
Forgiveness is not the same as approval but freedom for your own soul. You refuse to let them
rule you.
~~~
I add how proud I am of those congressional leaders who walked out at the beginning of the time
of silence, refusing to be hypocrites.
~~~
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This world can stink of failure. So can the church of Jesus Christ. It can stinketh with rot,
cowardice, inaction, self-preservation. We can find it uncomfortable, unsavory, unrewarding to
be as much of a stellar failure as was Jesus.
From P. J. O’Rourke’s book, “Baby Boom” about us Baby Boomers:
“I found Jesus,” my sister announced
“Were you,” I asked, “playing hide and seek?”
We think of our parents as conventionally religious. We’re half right. They were
conventional. But I don’t remember any adult talking about religion outside church. Not even
the church’s pastor, not even right outside church on the church steps greeting the congregation
after church, and you’d think the subject might have come up in passing.
I presume that the want, the war [WWII] and the murder of the twentieth century left our parents
with some questions about God being a nice guy. But with the resolve the Greatest Generation
so often showed they resolved not to think about it. Or so I presume. They weren’t talking.
~~~
The times they are a’changing. Visited Princeton Seminary the other week. Went looking for
the book store to wander through shelves. Found out Princeton doesn’t have a book store
anymore. Which I raised as something ironic given we were attending a Writer’s Workshop.
Here I am, trending toward stepping out of this pulpit because you deserve new leadership for a
new age, and frankly I’m been swatting lately at a lot of moths – moths of regret, moths of things
I wish I had done, regrets of those I angered, disappointed, neglected, regrets of those we
couldn’t reach, regrets those who drifted away (like more than half of our confirmation classes).
How little I knew
Those things yet to be done
The moments I let slip by
Missed opportunities
I’m not beating myself up. When you do that, when you wear the hair shirt and beat yourself up
with your mea culpas, you end up too bruised to move forward. Nor am I looking for pity,
penance, pardon.
I get it.
~~~
Opened up the daily devotional the other morning. It told the story of how Jesus was assaulted
by the crazy man rejected by his village, forced to live in the cemetery. The man was mentally
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ill, possessed, manic, frantic. Jesus heals him, transferring the man’s demons into a nearby herd
of pigs which stampeded off the cliff.
The herd belonged to the villagers.
It came to me how every healing will cost the village something.
~~~
Lives of quiet desperation. Sometimes pretty loud desperation. Sometimes screams.
Don’t have to be. Shouldn’t be. Mustn’t be. When we do, we fail God.
Faith is more than a T-shirt.
We’ve been given such a gift. This church. This faith. This soaring, demanding love of Christ.
We’ve not been called to give in or muddle along with the crowd…
Alligator cannot change alligator nature. Mountain lion cannot change lion nature. Zika
mosquito cannot change insect nature.
Humans can.
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