William H. Willimon - "Our Failure, God's Success" 11:00 am (April 22, 2001)
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| - | There is a predictable Duke dilemma. | 0:06 |
| One observes it most often, | 0:12 | |
| most predictably among Duke freshman. | 0:15 | |
| That bright high school senior | 0:21 | |
| who has been tops in soccer | 0:24 | |
| and psychology | 0:26 | |
| and student government | 0:27 | |
| and swing, | 0:29 | |
| matriculates at Duke | 0:31 | |
| and becomes a first year student | 0:33 | |
| who for the first time in her life is second | 0:37 | |
| or worse. | 0:43 | |
| Every year when we gather in here | 0:46 | |
| for the opening convocation | 0:48 | |
| and the Director of Admissions | 0:52 | |
| always notes that among you today | 0:54 | |
| they are 280 valedictorians | 0:57 | |
| and I always wanna stand up and say, | 1:02 | |
| now that means that all of you | 1:04 | |
| cannot be a valedictorian while you're here, | 1:07 | |
| somebody's gotta be second. | 1:10 | |
| "I never really wanted anything in my life I couldn't get", | 1:13 | |
| he said, after he was cut from the swimming team. | 1:17 | |
| I'm saying that until that predictable | 1:24 | |
| freshman year experience, | 1:27 | |
| he had really never failed. | 1:31 | |
| Well, get ready I tell them at commencement, | 1:35 | |
| life is a lot like that. | 1:38 | |
| Second or worse | 1:40 | |
| or in the words of the immortal Mick Jagger, | 1:44 | |
| "You can't always get what you want." | 1:47 | |
| This is a sermon I always preach on the Sunday before exams. | 1:52 | |
| Anybody who attempts great things | 1:58 | |
| at a great place like Duke may fail. | 2:01 | |
| Take marriage, | 2:08 | |
| I ridicule them for waiting forever | 2:10 | |
| to put their money down on another human being | 2:12 | |
| and get married. | 2:15 | |
| They postpone marriage into their late 30s. | 2:16 | |
| But who can condemn the first generation of divorce | 2:21 | |
| for running a bit scared? | 2:25 | |
| Marriage, they have noted | 2:28 | |
| is a wild risk prone to failure. | 2:31 | |
| I think that's the reason why many times | 2:36 | |
| they request 50 hours of pre-marital counseling from me | 2:38 | |
| before the knot is tied. | 2:43 | |
| And I wish I had some magic key to marital success. | 2:47 | |
| No, there is no surefire way, | 2:53 | |
| to link your life to another | 2:58 | |
| is to expose yourself to the possibility, | 3:02 | |
| some say the statistical probability of failure. | 3:05 | |
| You show me somebody who can honestly look back on his life | 3:12 | |
| and boast of a series of unbroken, unqualified successes. | 3:17 | |
| I'll show you somebody who has aimed too low. | 3:24 | |
| Who in life has lowered the bar? | 3:28 | |
| Whose dreams have all been so modest | 3:32 | |
| that they've always come true? | 3:35 | |
| That life which stays secure in safe harbors, | 3:39 | |
| that never ventures out on the open sea, | 3:42 | |
| that life always succeeds. | 3:46 | |
| I asked a sophomore, | 3:52 | |
| we were talking about our favorite perennial topic, | 3:53 | |
| alcohol policy, | 3:57 | |
| I asked this sophomore, | 3:59 | |
| "Now why do you drink so much on Saturday evenings? | 4:00 | |
| "You're 19, what could you have to forget? | 4:04 | |
| "I'm 50, I got a reason to over drink on Saturday evenings." | 4:08 | |
| (laughter) | 4:11 | |
| And yet the fact that so many do over drink | 4:14 | |
| suggests that even at 19, | 4:16 | |
| there are people that have got a lot of failure | 4:18 | |
| to try chemically to forget. | 4:23 | |
| I think that most of the counseling | 4:28 | |
| done by most of my fellow pastors | 4:31 | |
| is care, guidance, comfort, | 4:34 | |
| amid the predictable pain | 4:39 | |
| that inevitably follows failure. | 4:42 | |
| Any life lived as it ought | 4:47 | |
| is gonna be just full of failure. | 4:52 | |
| I once thought as a young preacher, | 4:58 | |
| that eventually with enough experience | 5:00 | |
| I would get over the Sunday morning jitters. | 5:03 | |
| I would gradually, I would grow confident and secure, | 5:06 | |
| I would always know how to make a sermon work. | 5:09 | |
| But it got worse, | 5:14 | |
| Sabbath gastrointestinal distress. | 5:16 | |
| It gets worse | 5:20 | |
| because over a lifetime of preaching, | 5:22 | |
| you find all the ways it is possible | 5:25 | |
| to fall flat on your face, | 5:27 | |
| to fail, | 5:31 | |
| but I tell you this, | 5:34 | |
| in the kind of world we've got, | 5:36 | |
| failure has gotten worse. | 5:39 | |
| Failures, always so predictably a part of human finitude, | 5:45 | |
| have gotten worse | 5:51 | |
| because now in modernity, | 5:53 | |
| we have this hermetically sealed, | 5:56 | |
| closed clock work cause effect universe, | 5:58 | |
| where everything is so blooming predictable. | 6:03 | |
| You do this, you get that. | 6:06 | |
| You follow the 10 habits of highly effective people, | 6:10 | |
| you'll be effective. | 6:15 | |
| What happens here in this world | 6:17 | |
| happens exclusively through our wise effort. | 6:20 | |
| There is no meaning that is not exclusively self-derived. | 6:25 | |
| Your life is solely a self-fabrication, | 6:30 | |
| a self-creation. | 6:35 | |
| The great goal of the modern world, | 6:38 | |
| though we didn't know it at the time, | 6:41 | |
| the great purpose of modern systems of knowledge, | 6:44 | |
| such as one finds in the university, | 6:47 | |
| is to render a world that is closed | 6:50 | |
| to any action other than our action. | 6:54 | |
| An atheistic cosmos without fear of being surprised, | 6:59 | |
| secure from any external intrusions, | 7:04 | |
| it's what modernity wanted | 7:08 | |
| and thank you social sciences, | 7:10 | |
| it's what modernity got. | 7:12 | |
| The point I'm making is | 7:15 | |
| that now you see our failures are exclusively our own. | 7:16 | |
| If we are to take complete credit for the world, | 7:22 | |
| then we're going to have to take the blame too. | 7:26 | |
| Oh there once was a day when a person in deep trouble, | 7:30 | |
| who in life failed, could cry out, | 7:33 | |
| "My God, why did you let this happen to me?" | 7:37 | |
| But today in our world, | 7:42 | |
| in a godless world, | 7:45 | |
| that person is merely evading personal responsibility. | 7:48 | |
| Why now that things have not worked out as you planned, | 7:53 | |
| why do you go screaming at god? | 7:58 | |
| Since the world is self-made, | 8:01 | |
| so are our failures. | 8:05 | |
| At the end of our rope | 8:09 | |
| in this kind of vacant universe, | 8:11 | |
| we're at a true dead end, | 8:14 | |
| since there's no other rope | 8:19 | |
| but our rope | 8:21 | |
| and nobody to take the rap but us. | 8:24 | |
| Oh we praddle about that we are the captains of our faith, | 8:29 | |
| the masters of our souls, | 8:35 | |
| but in our more honest moments. | 8:38 | |
| I got a friend who was in an old hotel | 8:42 | |
| and he was in the shower that night | 8:46 | |
| and with that morning all the lights in the hotel went out, | 8:48 | |
| there's no window in the bathroom of the hotel. | 8:52 | |
| My friend said for the next 10 minutes, | 8:57 | |
| he engaged in a frantic search for his glasses. | 9:00 | |
| (laughter) | 9:06 | |
| That's kinda sad, that's kinda us, | 9:09 | |
| fumbling around in the dark | 9:14 | |
| and yet what are we to do? | 9:19 | |
| When what are we to do in the dark? | 9:22 | |
| Since there is no light to be had | 9:27 | |
| other than by our vision, | 9:29 | |
| there is no vision, there is no hope, | 9:33 | |
| there is no forgiveness, | 9:35 | |
| there's no way other than our way, | 9:38 | |
| nothing that is not exclusively self-derived, | 9:42 | |
| I mean what are we to do? | 9:46 | |
| In a closed world where there is no surprise | 9:49 | |
| and no real newness and no actions other than our own, | 9:52 | |
| there's well, there is no forgiveness | 9:57 | |
| and no real reprieve from relentless failure, | 10:00 | |
| everything just gets fixed and final. | 10:05 | |
| While we talk about progress, | 10:12 | |
| we're getting better and better everyday in every way, | 10:17 | |
| better living through chemistry | 10:21 | |
| but when it gets down to it, | 10:24 | |
| all of that is just fumbling in the dark for our glasses. | 10:27 | |
| C. S. Lewis was once asked by someone, | 10:34 | |
| why are all the atheists | 10:38 | |
| that I know such really good people? | 10:40 | |
| And Lewis responded, "Well, they have to be, | 10:44 | |
| "they don't believe in a god who forgives, | 10:48 | |
| "they actually have to get it right the first time around." | 10:51 | |
| (laughter) | 10:55 | |
| Oh those of you who are young, | 10:58 | |
| I tell you, you better get accustomed to a lot of failure | 11:02 | |
| and I'm not just talking about organic chemistry either. | 11:04 | |
| For there's, | 11:09 | |
| there's a lot of that, | 11:12 | |
| but in a world without a living god | 11:15 | |
| who moves and reaches in | 11:18 | |
| and intrudes and makes a way, | 11:20 | |
| well our frailty is deadly. | 11:26 | |
| Was in the Cleveland Airport, | 11:33 | |
| I'm going through there, there's this big billboard | 11:35 | |
| and it says in large letters, | 11:38 | |
| "You've got the whole world in your hands." | 11:40 | |
| Mastercard. | 11:44 | |
| (laughter) | 11:46 | |
| This is in Cleveland. | 11:48 | |
| I asked this student this fall, | 11:53 | |
| "How come you didn't vote in the Presidential Election? | 11:55 | |
| "A lot of us work so you people could get to vote." | 11:58 | |
| And he said to me, | 12:03 | |
| "I think I've just given up hope | 12:06 | |
| "that anybody can fundamentally change anything." | 12:08 | |
| Well, we'll talk about failure. | 12:19 | |
| His 12 best friends having forsaken him, | 12:26 | |
| they fled into the dark. | 12:30 | |
| When the going got rough in the darkness, | 12:33 | |
| despite their declarations of loyalty | 12:35 | |
| when they were all around the table on Thursday, | 12:37 | |
| they fled. | 12:41 | |
| Judas was not the only betrayer. | 12:44 | |
| Here were the 12 closest friends | 12:47 | |
| who had been with him every step of the way, | 12:49 | |
| heard all of his words, | 12:51 | |
| witnessed all of his mighty wonders, | 12:52 | |
| when the time came for them to show what they were made of, | 12:56 | |
| they did, | 12:59 | |
| they fled, | 13:02 | |
| they failed. | 13:04 | |
| The cruelty of the Romans | 13:07 | |
| are for whom crucifixion was a particularly | 13:09 | |
| fond means of law and order. | 13:11 | |
| The fickleness of the mob crying, "Crucify him!" | 13:14 | |
| I tell you which of the Good Friday failures | 13:19 | |
| cut the deepest. | 13:22 | |
| It was that of his own disciples. | 13:26 | |
| Words worse than the mobs, crucify him, | 13:30 | |
| were the words that Matthew records, | 13:36 | |
| they all forsook him and fled. | 13:39 | |
| You talk about failure. | 13:45 | |
| And you talk about failure as finality. | 13:48 | |
| All his disciples fully expected this was the end. | 13:53 | |
| They fully expected that their failure | 13:58 | |
| would be the end of Jesus's story. | 14:00 | |
| After all, it's up to us to do right, | 14:04 | |
| to make right, | 14:08 | |
| or it won't be right. | 14:09 | |
| It's all in our hands, it's all up to us. | 14:12 | |
| And look what a mess we made. | 14:18 | |
| Oh in those nights you could write over | 14:23 | |
| all the millennia of human history, | 14:25 | |
| failure. | 14:29 | |
| But then at dawn the women went in the darkness to the tomb, | 14:33 | |
| light shown from a place of darkness, | 14:40 | |
| the whole earth heaved, | 14:44 | |
| surprise, | 14:47 | |
| our verdict upon Jesus was not to be the last word, | 14:49 | |
| God was not going to let us write the last chapter | 14:55 | |
| of the story. | 14:59 | |
| There is a power loose, | 15:01 | |
| uncontained, unrestrained, | 15:04 | |
| God is not going to be stumped by us or our sin. | 15:08 | |
| The world is not going to be fixed by our failure. | 15:13 | |
| As Paul said, "He is going to defeat every enemy, | 15:18 | |
| "the last enemy to be defeated is death." | 15:23 | |
| In fact, Christ has been raised from the dead, | 15:27 | |
| the future is more open than you imagine. | 15:32 | |
| Well, last Sunday we gathered here | 15:40 | |
| in the Chapel to services, | 15:42 | |
| and we had a grand service, | 15:44 | |
| we had rented musicians, we had a special anthem, | 15:46 | |
| we had the sermon, we had the scripture, the prayer, | 15:49 | |
| all that, the lilies. | 15:51 | |
| But if you ask me | 15:54 | |
| to define Easter in just one sentence, | 15:57 | |
| today I would say, | 16:05 | |
| despite our sin, | 16:09 | |
| our betrayal, and finitude, and failure, | 16:12 | |
| thank God it is not all left up to us. | 16:16 |