William H. Willimon - "Failure" Easter Service (April 3, 1988)
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| - | The gospel for this Easter Sunday | 0:11 |
| is from the Gospel of John. | 0:14 | |
| Now on the first day of the week, | 0:18 | |
| Mary Magdalene came to the tomb early | 0:21 | |
| while it was still dark | 0:25 | |
| and saw that the stone had been taken away from the tomb. | 0:28 | |
| And so she ran and went to Simon Peter | 0:35 | |
| and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, | 0:38 | |
| and she said to them, | 0:43 | |
| "They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, | 0:47 | |
| "and we do not know where they have laid Him." | 0:50 | |
| Peter then came out with the other disciple, | 0:53 | |
| and they went toward the tomb. | 0:55 | |
| They both ran, but the other disciple outran Peter | 0:58 | |
| and reached the tomb first. | 1:03 | |
| And stooping to look in, | 1:05 | |
| he saw the linen clothes lying there, | 1:06 | |
| but he did not go in. | 1:09 | |
| And then Simon Peter came following him | 1:11 | |
| and went into the tomb, | 1:15 | |
| and he saw the linen clothes lying | 1:17 | |
| and the napkin which had been at his head, | 1:20 | |
| not lying with the linen cloths | 1:23 | |
| but rolled up by its own place. | 1:24 | |
| And then the other disciple | 1:29 | |
| who reached the tomb first also went in, | 1:30 | |
| and he saw, and he believed. | 1:32 | |
| For as yet they did not know the scripture | 1:36 | |
| that he must rise from the dead. | 1:39 | |
| And the disciples went back to their homes. | 1:44 | |
| Before any of you mention it to me, | 1:51 | |
| I want you to know that I did not write this sermon, | 1:53 | |
| or I did not think up the title of it | 1:58 | |
| after last night's basketball game. | 2:00 | |
| My text for this morning is Psalm 118. | 2:06 | |
| If I had written a sermon after the game, | 2:11 | |
| I would have taken as my text Psalm 37, | 2:13 | |
| oh Lord, why do the wicked prosper? | 2:16 | |
| (congregation laughs) | 2:19 | |
| So that out of the way, | 2:25 | |
| well, the game was over. | 2:28 | |
| The stadium was now emptied of cheering fans. | 2:30 | |
| It was a forlorn place of crushed popcorn boxes | 2:36 | |
| and empty drink cups and trampled programs. | 2:40 | |
| And the coach entered an even more silent locker room. | 2:45 | |
| Helmets piled up over in the corner. | 2:50 | |
| Jerseys piled in a wash bin. | 2:52 | |
| And the coach said, | 2:56 | |
| I want you guys to know | 2:59 | |
| that I am real proud of you, real proud. | 3:00 | |
| We didn't win the game, | 3:05 | |
| but I really believe that we impressed a lot | 3:06 | |
| of people today. | 3:09 | |
| I think this was a kind of moral victory. | 3:13 | |
| Later, as they were leaving the stadium, | 3:19 | |
| the second string tackle turned | 3:22 | |
| to the quarterback and asked, | 3:24 | |
| what's a moral victory? | 3:28 | |
| The quarterback said, | 3:31 | |
| well, it's the kind of thing coaches tell you | 3:33 | |
| when they don't want you so feel so bad. | 3:36 | |
| It's what the coach says | 3:39 | |
| when he thinks may be his last season. | 3:40 | |
| I tell you, if you can't fool a 17-year-old | 3:46 | |
| about failure, who can you fool? | 3:51 | |
| I know when the scores are put up at the 6:30 sportscast, | 3:56 | |
| they put up the numbers, | 4:00 | |
| and those with the largest numbers are called winners | 4:01 | |
| and those with the lowest numbers, losers. | 4:07 | |
| I don't recall a sportscaster ever speaking | 4:11 | |
| of a moral victory. | 4:14 | |
| Oh, they'll tell you anything | 4:18 | |
| to get you to go out on another Saturday afternoon | 4:19 | |
| and bash your heads together. | 4:22 | |
| Moral victory. | 4:25 | |
| The score really didn't show what happened in the game. | 4:28 | |
| If we had only made that first down | 4:33 | |
| back in the third quarter. | 4:36 | |
| No, Vince Lombardi was right. | 4:40 | |
| Show me a guy who really believes all that stuff | 4:45 | |
| about failure not being failure and losing not being losing, | 4:48 | |
| and I'll show you someone | 4:52 | |
| who's played too long without a helmet. | 4:53 | |
| A coach remains a coach only | 4:57 | |
| when the win-loss record tallies in his favor. | 4:59 | |
| Failure. | 5:05 | |
| The corporate president stands up before the stockholders | 5:07 | |
| and presents them with a drooping sales graph, and he says, | 5:10 | |
| well, we lost six million this year, | 5:16 | |
| but we're calling it a moral victory. | 5:19 | |
| It was a year of character-building for our company. | 5:23 | |
| A year later, there's someone else's name | 5:28 | |
| on the door out front. | 5:31 | |
| I sit on the university's commencement committee. | 5:34 | |
| And to my knowledge, we have never nominated anyone | 5:38 | |
| to speak to our graduates at commencement | 5:42 | |
| who is known for being a failure. | 5:46 | |
| We look for the people who are achievers | 5:51 | |
| and doers and movers and succeeders | 5:53 | |
| because we know that our graduates | 5:57 | |
| do not wanna hear a commencement address | 5:59 | |
| on the reasons why my last three marriages ended in divorce. | 6:01 | |
| They do not want to hear a talk | 6:08 | |
| on the day I was asked to clean out my desk | 6:09 | |
| and turn in the key to the executive washroom. | 6:12 | |
| And yet I bet our graduates know | 6:18 | |
| that there's a lot more of life lived that way | 6:23 | |
| than in the tents of victory. | 6:29 | |
| Now I don't know whether they teach people | 6:33 | |
| in the Fuqua School how to go bankrupt gracefully. | 6:35 | |
| I don't think they teach in the biology PhD program | 6:42 | |
| what to do when you've spent your whole life working | 6:45 | |
| on a cure to some virus, | 6:47 | |
| and somebody gets there three months before you do. | 6:49 | |
| I suppose the divinity school doesn't tell you what to do | 6:54 | |
| when you go to some dying little inner city church | 6:57 | |
| where the roof leaks and membership is in decline. | 7:01 | |
| But I bet you know that much | 7:07 | |
| of your life will be spent there. | 7:09 | |
| Failure. | 7:14 | |
| It's that sinking emptiness in the stomach when you look | 7:17 | |
| at the exam grades, and you follow, | 7:20 | |
| and there are your initials right there on the bottom, | 7:23 | |
| that breathless expectation | 7:29 | |
| as the numbers are being tallied, | 7:31 | |
| and you realize that the numbers | 7:32 | |
| will not tally in your favor. | 7:35 | |
| It's that time when the doctor comes in | 7:43 | |
| from the operating room, and he takes off the surgical mask, | 7:45 | |
| and you say, how did the operation go? | 7:49 | |
| And you can read the words on his face before he speaks. | 7:54 | |
| I see I don't have to ask, do I? | 7:58 | |
| It is the packing up | 8:05 | |
| and moving from the one house to separate apartments. | 8:09 | |
| And the last thing you pack is that book of wedding pictures | 8:14 | |
| that you know will never be opened again | 8:19 | |
| because this book of joy has now become a book | 8:21 | |
| of failure. | 8:27 | |
| It's the morning after the election | 8:31 | |
| and looking at those unused boxes of campaign buttons | 8:34 | |
| and bumper stickers and balloons not needed. | 8:38 | |
| I wanna thank all of you who have been with us | 8:43 | |
| through this election. | 8:47 | |
| We didn't win, but I really think that we made our point, | 8:49 | |
| and we really got a lot of good discussion of the issues. | 8:52 | |
| And I really think if this had lasted just a couple | 8:57 | |
| of weeks longer, we might have turned this thing around. | 9:00 | |
| And I know that someday, we'll all look back on this | 9:03 | |
| as a significant experience in our lives. | 9:08 | |
| Failure, defeat. | 9:14 | |
| And what to do with defeat? | 9:18 | |
| It could be one of the most important questions we ask | 9:24 | |
| in our lives, what to do with defeat. | 9:28 | |
| One modern response is rationalization. | 9:34 | |
| It was a moral victory. | 9:38 | |
| I can still remember as a young pastor | 9:40 | |
| going into a home where her husband had just suddenly died, | 9:43 | |
| and she met me at the door, and she said to me, | 9:48 | |
| "I don't want any cheap preacher talk | 9:54 | |
| "about he's gone to a better place, | 9:56 | |
| "or he's better off now. | 9:58 | |
| "I don't want it." | 10:01 | |
| She knew. | 10:04 | |
| He was gone. | 10:06 | |
| It was over. | 10:08 | |
| She wasn't up to any of this preacher talk. | 10:12 | |
| Today in the face of failure, | 10:17 | |
| a typically modern response is to claim no knowledge of it. | 10:19 | |
| I'm sorry, Senator, | 10:23 | |
| I really don't remember exactly what I said at the time. | 10:24 | |
| Let Ollie take the heat. | 10:31 | |
| I didn't know anything about it. | 10:32 | |
| And he said, "It was this woman whom thou gavest me. | 10:37 | |
| "She's the one that gave me the fruit and bid me to eat." | 10:42 | |
| And Eve said, "It was the serpent whom thou created. | 10:46 | |
| "He gave me the fruit and bid me to eat." | 10:50 | |
| This is not new. | 10:55 | |
| What to do with defeat. | 10:59 | |
| It's in the Bible. | 11:02 | |
| It's in a story as old as the Exodus, | 11:04 | |
| a story told about Moses, | 11:08 | |
| the first great leader of Israel. | 11:11 | |
| God comes to Moses in a burning bush | 11:16 | |
| and says I want you to lead my people | 11:20 | |
| out of slavery into freedom. | 11:24 | |
| And Moses said, | 11:28 | |
| Lord, are you sure you've got the right address? | 11:31 | |
| I'm not good on my feet. | 11:34 | |
| I don't do well speaking before a crowd. | 11:36 | |
| Moses wasn't being humble. | 11:41 | |
| He was being realistic about the possibilities for success. | 11:43 | |
| Because you find out in life | 11:50 | |
| sometimes it's better not to try to achieve too much | 11:52 | |
| lest you fail. | 11:57 | |
| And there are many who believe that life is better | 12:01 | |
| as a kind of string of insignificant successes | 12:06 | |
| rather than one great, big ugly failure. | 12:11 | |
| You go speak, says God. | 12:18 | |
| I'll tell you what to say. | 12:21 | |
| I'll show you what to do. | 12:24 | |
| Moses goes to the pharaoh. | 12:25 | |
| Thus says the Lord God of Israel, let my people go. | 12:27 | |
| As it turns out, everybody got word | 12:31 | |
| about the exodus but pharaoh. | 12:33 | |
| He says to his advisers, | 12:36 | |
| do I know the Lord God of Israel? | 12:38 | |
| I don't believe so. | 12:40 | |
| Not recognized over here. | 12:41 | |
| Each time Moses is refused. | 12:45 | |
| The pharaoh responds not with liberation | 12:48 | |
| but by increasing the workload of the Hebrew slaves, | 12:52 | |
| and this makes the people murmur against Moses. | 12:56 | |
| And they said, if it hadn't been for you, | 12:59 | |
| Things are worse off now than they were before. | 13:03 | |
| Pharaoh is going to kill us. | 13:06 | |
| And Moses turns his own frustration | 13:10 | |
| and resentment towards God himself. | 13:13 | |
| Oh, Lord God, | 13:16 | |
| why have you done evil to these people? | 13:20 | |
| That's a harsh words to say to God. | 13:26 | |
| But when it comes down to it, | 13:29 | |
| when you've really experienced failure, | 13:30 | |
| who else is there to blame? | 13:32 | |
| Oh God, why did you even put ideas | 13:35 | |
| of freedom into our heads? | 13:38 | |
| We got uppity. | 13:39 | |
| We should have been more content. | 13:41 | |
| Religion, the opiate of the people. | 13:44 | |
| Make them happy being slaves. | 13:46 | |
| Why did you ever put this notion into our minds? | 13:49 | |
| Moses has failed, therefore God has failed. | 13:53 | |
| My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? | 13:57 | |
| That's in the Bible too. | 14:00 | |
| But God responds by saying to Moses, | 14:05 | |
| you go back over there. | 14:08 | |
| I've got something else in mind. | 14:09 | |
| Wait till to the pharaoh sees this. | 14:10 | |
| And Moses goes back. | 14:13 | |
| He fails. | 14:15 | |
| God says, go back this time. | 14:16 | |
| Try this. | 14:18 | |
| Again and again, he fails until finally God comes up | 14:20 | |
| with something so radical, so drastic and terrible. | 14:24 | |
| Something new, resourceful is needed. | 14:29 | |
| God comes up with the Passover, | 14:32 | |
| which our Jewish brothers | 14:34 | |
| and sisters celebrate this very weekend. | 14:35 | |
| And so the story tells us | 14:41 | |
| that our God is a resourceful, persistent God | 14:43 | |
| who isn't stumped by failure. | 14:47 | |
| And the Hebrew children pass over from slavery to freedom. | 14:52 | |
| And yet as you probably know, | 14:58 | |
| that is not the end of the story. | 15:00 | |
| They get out in the wilderness. | 15:01 | |
| When they get in the wilderness, they grow hungry, | 15:05 | |
| and they murmur against Moses and God, | 15:07 | |
| and they say we were better off as slaves in Egypt. | 15:10 | |
| At least there, we got three good meals a day | 15:14 | |
| so we could work. | 15:16 | |
| We're going to starve out here. | 15:18 | |
| And God comes up with the bread from heaven, | 15:19 | |
| water from the rock. | 15:22 | |
| But then Moses goes up | 15:26 | |
| on the mountain to get the commandments, | 15:27 | |
| and while he's up there, where are the people? | 15:29 | |
| Down in the valley making an idol for themselves. | 15:32 | |
| We will have another God, they say. | 15:35 | |
| And Moses says to God, | 15:39 | |
| if I were you, I would wash my hands of this people, | 15:42 | |
| this stiff-necked people. | 15:47 | |
| Some kind of gratitude this is | 15:50 | |
| for delivering them from slavery. | 15:52 | |
| They're down there bowing before a golden calf. | 15:54 | |
| But God tells Moses, you go back down in the valley, | 15:58 | |
| and you say to this stiff-necked people. | 16:01 | |
| And Moses dies, and God picks another leader | 16:06 | |
| to bring the people into the Promised Land. | 16:10 | |
| But I tell you the Promised Land, | 16:12 | |
| still failure is confronted. | 16:14 | |
| One leader after another comes up before Israel, | 16:17 | |
| Joshua, and then the judges, and then Samuel. | 16:21 | |
| And if you know the story, it's a story of setbacks | 16:24 | |
| and failures and disappointments, | 16:27 | |
| and finally God comes up with a radical new plan for Israel. | 16:29 | |
| A king will be selected, the greatest one in Israel, | 16:36 | |
| King David, anointed to bring peace | 16:40 | |
| and justice to all the land. | 16:43 | |
| David, King David, is God's own chosen instrument. | 16:46 | |
| Yet if you know that story, | 16:53 | |
| David also fails with his adultery with Bathsheba | 16:56 | |
| and his murder of Bathsheba's wife, Uriah. | 17:02 | |
| And if David, God's own hero, his anointed one has failed, | 17:07 | |
| what hope is there? | 17:13 | |
| And you would think maybe at this point | 17:16 | |
| God would wash His hands and say enough, enough. | 17:17 | |
| But then God comes up with yet a new plan. | 17:24 | |
| There is another Moses. | 17:29 | |
| There is a new king | 17:33 | |
| coming out of the House of David, | 17:36 | |
| a new prince bringing with Him hope for all the world. | 17:39 | |
| Under the reign of Jesus of Nazareth, | 17:46 | |
| all the world will experience peace and goodwill. | 17:49 | |
| And at His birth, there is a birth of hope for the world. | 17:54 | |
| And yet at His birth, from the very first, | 18:00 | |
| there is still failure. | 18:03 | |
| In the screaming of the mothers | 18:07 | |
| of slain innocent children | 18:10 | |
| whom Herod massacred at His birth, | 18:13 | |
| the taunts of the hometown synagogue at Nazareth, | 18:16 | |
| the scoffing of the Bible scholars at the temple, | 18:21 | |
| the screams of the mob in Jerusalem, | 18:26 | |
| this new king David meets failure. | 18:29 | |
| It gathers like storm clouds over His whole ministry. | 18:36 | |
| He preaches. | 18:39 | |
| He says, "Blessed is he who takes no offense in me." | 18:40 | |
| And yet from the first, many were offended. | 18:46 | |
| And He preached away more people than He won. | 18:48 | |
| I remind you that it was just a few months ago | 18:54 | |
| when we gathered here. | 18:56 | |
| And we felt hope surge within us | 19:00 | |
| as we listened to the angels' songs | 19:02 | |
| about God's renewed determination to deliver us | 19:06 | |
| from evil and war and the things that beset us. | 19:10 | |
| But how quickly those angels' songs were overwhelmed | 19:16 | |
| by the screams of the crowd, | 19:19 | |
| overwhelmed by the facts of failure | 19:24 | |
| to have peace on earth. | 19:28 | |
| It was a short journey, wasn't it? | 19:32 | |
| From the singing of the angels at Christmas | 19:35 | |
| to the shouts of the mob on Good Friday. | 19:40 | |
| Were we really so surprised, therefore, to stand on Friday | 19:48 | |
| on a lonely windswept hill where this Son of David, | 19:54 | |
| this new Moses, this king, | 19:58 | |
| this liberator, this savior was killed? | 20:00 | |
| Were we really surprised? | 20:06 | |
| We knew the story. | 20:08 | |
| We killed Him | 20:12 | |
| just as we had killed all of God's prophets before Him. | 20:15 | |
| We had become so adept at extinguishing hope, | 20:20 | |
| that it was all over by mid-afternoon, | 20:25 | |
| and we went home, and we rested. | 20:27 | |
| Just as the people had wanted to kill Moses before him, | 20:33 | |
| they killed this would-be liberator. | 20:36 | |
| So much for God's plan. | 20:42 | |
| So much for the angels' songs. | 20:45 | |
| So much for hope | 20:49 | |
| because the greatest failure | 20:53 | |
| of all are not just our failures | 20:55 | |
| but when God fails. | 20:59 | |
| And if God fails, what hope is there? | 21:02 | |
| And so as He hangs there on that cross, | 21:07 | |
| He stands for us as a symbol of all the closed doors | 21:09 | |
| and all the broken promises and the dashed dreams | 21:14 | |
| and the brick walls | 21:18 | |
| and the dead ends that we must experience | 21:19 | |
| in life in our failures and defeats. | 21:22 | |
| And you could hear death laugh | 21:25 | |
| as they sealed His tomb shut with a great stone. | 21:28 | |
| So let us not mock the Good Friday tragedy | 21:37 | |
| with a bunch of preacher talk about moral victory. | 21:43 | |
| Don't give me any empty consolation | 21:48 | |
| that He will live on in our memories. | 21:51 | |
| There's no nourishment in that. | 21:56 | |
| Could we be honest enough to call death death, | 22:00 | |
| defeat defeat, failure failure? | 22:03 | |
| And who would blame God | 22:09 | |
| if now in this last failure, | 22:12 | |
| in the death of His very own beloved son, | 22:16 | |
| God should at last be done with us | 22:20 | |
| and go? | 22:24 | |
| Who would accuse? | 22:26 | |
| Now on the Sabbath, | 22:34 | |
| toward the first day of the week, | 22:37 | |
| while it was still dark, | 22:41 | |
| Mary Magdalene came to the tomb early | 22:44 | |
| and saw that the stone had been taken away | 22:49 | |
| from the tomb. | 22:55 | |
| (organ music) | 23:00 |
