THE FAILURE OF SUCCESS
Matthew 21:1-11
[Since spoken communication differs from written, some of the grammar and syntax of this transcript may seem awkward in written form. To keep integrity with the spirit of the original delivery, the transcript seeks to stay close to the exact words spoken.]
The date: October 25, 1986. That evening I was in the main commons room of Union Theological Seminary. My best friend, Dave Jones, a lifelong Red Sox fan, had reserved the room with the big screen TV to watch game six of the '86 World Series between the New York Mets and the Boston Red Sox. The score had been tied most of the game--it was a very exciting game--it went to extra innings. Tenth inning--the top of the tenth: the Red Sox scored two runs. They were one half inning away from breaking the so-called curse of the Bambino. The curse that began after the owner of the Boston Red Sox sold Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees in order to prop up a failing Broadway musical called No, No, Nanette. My friend Dave popped cork on the first bottle of a case of champagne he had bought for the occasion. Red Sox fans throughout the world could almost taste the sweet elixir of success…of winning…on their lips.That's as close a moment as I can think of in my own experience to what we might call a "Palm Sunday moment."
Today is Palm Sunday, when we remember this story that you just heard: Jesus coming into Jerusalem a winner, a hero. He was the one who was going to kick the teeth of the Romans in once and for all--give us back our country. They hailed him as a winner. And they shout out to him, "Hosanna! Save us!" It's the language of battle--the language of victory. Much of the language on the lips of the pilgrims greeting Jesus is from Psalm 118, which we read as our call to worship this morning--a psalm that might have been written for the king after he had been victorious in battle. And it describes a procession through the town of Jerusalem, a festival procession, going up to the gates of the temple. He would have knocked on the doors and said, "Open to me the gates of righteousness that I may enter in, for God has given us glorious victory."
It was a day like that. You could taste it. Winning. We were going to win, and our winning would be on the back of this guy, Jeshua, the guy from Nazareth.
We love a winner, don't we? We especially love a winner who has been a loser, you know, the underdog. Think Jesus…think Eli Manning. I'm sorry; I use all my sports metaphors on this Sunday. You know I don't use them very often, but somehow Palm Sunday lends itself to these sorts of comparisons. The underdog--like in Psalm 118, the line that goes, "The stone which the builders rejected become the chief of the corner." The rejects; the people of Israel; the losers have become winners. And we are going to win.
We love a winner. Especially a winner who's been a loser. That we live in such a culture is obvious if you watch television. One of the shows that I have never seen myself but I often seen the previews for it as I flip channels or during the commercials--it's a show, I think it's called The Biggest Loser or The World's Biggest Loser or something like that. And it's interesting--it's about people who are overweight, and some might call them, according to our culture's values, losers because they're overweight. I certainly would not make that calculation. But it's a show about winning by losing--you know, becoming a winner by losing weight and therefore conforming to our culture's ideal of beauty. What an interesting perversion of the gospel--to win by losing that way.
We like winners. We like success stories, do we not? I want to succeed. I want to be seen as successful.
We teach our children in school to be a success. But do we teach our children how to fail? A friend of mine who teaches at a local college told me this story this week, as we were actually talking about this subject for the sermon today. He spoke of a student of whom he was very fond. A student who was faced with a paper, and he couldn't do it. He just couldn't deal with failing to do the paper. So he did what I some students indeed do--he copied a paper that was quite good, and handed it in. And the professor made glowing remarks, gave it an A, and said, "I'd like to enter this into an essay contest" to this student. And the student started thinking, you know, that paper really was what I was intending to say--it's really what I wanted to say--so, he said, "Yeah, sure, enter it in the contest." And it won the contest. And then they wanted to publish it in a book of essays, and so they did. And then the next year, this same professor sat down with a student and said, "You know, you want to see what a really good essay is, just read this essay here." And that student then went to the library and checked it out, and found a duplicate, and showed it to the professor. My prayer for that student is that such was a moment when he might indeed learn what it means to fail. But it's so hard, because we so much want to succeed--all of us. Especially in this American culture in which we live. The pressure to succeed is so great sometimes.
I was reading in today's New York Times Book Review--we get it on Saturday because we subscribe to the New York Times. The essay at the back of the book review this week is called "Admission Impossible." And it's an essay reviewing several books about how hard it is these days to get into an Ivy League school--to get into Harvard and Yale. And the review is about several books that tell the story of students who go to extremes to get into those schools. And the essayist, asks the question, "Why? For what purpose?"
The author of the review writes, "I kept thinking of poor John Stuart Mill, the 18th Century British philosopher. The original early applicant, whose father home-schooled him from the age of three, teaching him Greek and Latin, and the theories of Jeremy Bentham, but not how to feel. At age 20, Mill suffered a breakdown. Already one of the most brilliant polemicists in England, he couldn't say any more what the point of it was. As he later wrote, 'The whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down.' "
If we are lucky, do we not come to a certain point in life when we assess those symbols of success that had been so important as we imagined our life unfolding, and then do we assess how we may or may not have attained them? And might we begin to think, "Is this all there is? Is this it? Success?" Sometimes what precipitates that question is a crisis. I know heavy on my heart is learning about Roberta's husband, his death. Certainly that reframes life. What is this thing that we try to work so hard to achieve, success. Maybe it's one of those big birthdays, ending with a zero, that causes us to ask that question.
The poet Alfred Lord Tennyson has written a beautiful poem called Ulysses. And as I enter this strange odyssey of middle age I find myself often thinking of that poem. Ulysses is the Latin translation of the Greek name Odysseus. Odysseus, the hero of the great Greek epic poem, the Odyssey. And of course The Odyssey is about a hero, Odysseus, who made a name for himself in the Trojan War, and the whole story is about how Odysseus is trying to get home. He has to face all kinds of obstacles to get home to his wife Penelope, who has been faithful to him despite all the odds. And finally he reaches home. And Tennyson's poem is about Odysseus after he's gotten what he wants. After he's comfortable at home, with Penelope, having become "a name." Having become a has-been. Let me quote a few lines from the poem.
I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honour'd of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades
For ever and forever when I move.
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.As Christians, we learn that we begin to know spiritual maturity, we begin to know Christ experientially, as we embrace our failures. Even if our failure is recognizing the illusion of what we thought was success. "To follow knowledge like a sinking star" of what we thought would bring our fulfillment.
To be a Christian is to find the willingness to fail--to identify ourselves with the loser. Because that's what God did--God lost; became a loser for us. Because what happens in the 10th inning of the World Series--the bottom half of the inning? Two outs; full count; winning run in scoring position; Mookie Wilson at a 3-2 count. And a slow ground ball comes toward an aged and veteran player who was playing on two bad ankles--Bill Buckner. And the ball squirts between his knees, and the Red Sox lose--and lose the World Series.
What happens this week? "Ride on, ride on in majesty. Ride on in lowly pomp to die." Jesus is a loser. He dies like so many other messianic pretenders who ticked off Rome, and was crushed like the proverbial bug. Crucified on a cross.
The question for this week--the question that arises in the Garden of Gethsemane if you care to listen to the story this week, is this: Am I strong enough to fail? And you know we might come to the realization that we're not. That success is really simple--what's really hard is failing. Because it took God to show us how to fail. Perhaps we come to realize that it takes God to reach out to us in our failure and reframe what success means. A success that does not depend on our human skill; a success that does not add another wing to the cathedral of the human ego; a success that enables us to see the faded and chipped patina of what seemed to glitter like gold.
And then it all begins. The drama of your salvation: when we feel the creak in Bill Buckner's ankles; the soft kiss of Judas; the job you lost; the death you endured; the tinny rip of the Titanic's hull reminding us of the frailty of steel and of life. And this week as we see the shadow of the cross, we realize it took God to show us how to fail. Amen.
March 16, 2008
Palm/Passion SundayThe Reverend Jeffrey A. Vamos
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