THE SUCCESS OF FAILURE
John 20:1-18
[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.]
I want to begin this morning by re-capping the sermon from last Sunday, Palm Sunday, which was entitled The Failure of Success. One of the points that I was trying to make in that sermon was this: that if we are lucky, at some point in our lives we might begin to understand success, what our culture prizes so highly, in a different way. We might begin to see that success--what we thought was success--is not as satisfying as we had imagined it.
One of the stories that I told in that sermon was that of Bill Buckner. I'm sure Boston Red Sox fans know that name well, because Red Sox fans laid squarely on the shoulders of Bill Buckner the loss of the 1986 World Series. Bill Buckner, an aging veteran, let a ball go through his knees…committed the losing error of game six, and is credited with losing the '86 World Series for the Boston Red Sox. One of the most vilified men in sports history. 1986. Now fast-forward to 2004, when of course, the Red Sox finally did break the curse of the Bambino and win the World Series that year. And in their victory celebration at Fenway Park, after that momentous event, the first name to appear on the Diamond Vision in that ceremony, to a standing ovation of the crowd? None other than Bill Buckner. That moment of victory brought to you by another moment of utter defeat on October 25, 1986. Defeat made victory possible…at least in that moment.
Today, Easter Sunday, we celebrate the heart of the Christian mystery: that out of death came resurrection. But here's how I'm going to articulate that mystery, that Easter truth we celebrate today. I'm going to steal a line from one of my colleagues sitting right over there--Tom Baker, our beloved Parish Associate, who in a previous sermon offered a line that I think summarizes so well the mystery and paradox of the gospel. Tom said, in his sermon of maybe a year and a half ago…he said, "This is the gospel: We win by losing."
We win by losing. I think that would be a great bumper sticker for the Christian faith. Because today we celebrate the success of failure. Christian faith--what we celebrate today--is about the notion that it took a defeat to know victory transformed. It took a cross to know the redemption of an empty tomb. We win by losing. The Christian life is about experiencing a success that we might never have known had it not been for the transformation of our failure. This faith that we hold dear is about trusting that God is able to take your defeat and failure and transform it into a whole different understanding of what success is about.
But now the challenge for us is this: we have to embrace our losing. We have to die in order to rise. Meister Eckhart, the medieval Christian mystic--I'm paraphrasing him--but I think he once said a line something like this: "Why don't you go ahead and die, so you can get on with your life?" I love that line. Because you gotta die, in order to know resurrection. And what looks to the world like failure--a cross--God somehow transforms into success. We win by losing.
Now I can't pass up an opportunity on Easter to inject a little Dante into the conversation. So, you're not getting away today without a little bit of my favorite poet, Dante. In the poem The Divine Comedy Dante, who wrote the poem, is also the main character in the poem. Dante the pilgrim has the typical mid-life crisis. He gets lost in some woods. And the exact line in the poem is this: it says, "I found myself lost." You get it? I found myself…lost. That's the heart of the Christian mystery: the only way we can find ourselves is by losing ourselves. So Dante becomes lost in this dark wood, and he literally falls into a pit--the pit of Hell. Perhaps we're all familiar with Dante's Inferno, yes? And he has to go all the way through Hell to the very bottom of it, which isn't fire, its actually ice, and Satan is frozen in the middle of a lake there--a kind of ridiculous portrait of evil. And Dante realizes the only way past Satan is through Satan--down the backside of Satan--and so Dante goes through that way, and finds himself in Purgatory, when he catches a glimpse of Heaven. And it's there that he realizes that what he thought was going down is really going up, from the point of view of Heaven.
We find ourselves by losing ourselves. We go up by going down. We win by losing.
A friend of mine, when he was asking about what I was going to say in my sermon today, the theme for the sermon I was trying to work on…he said, "Oh, that reminds me of the Foreman-Holyfield fight of '91." Now I'm not much of a boxing fan, but this guy told the story of the Foreman-Holyfield fight in 1991. And George Foreman--if you know anything about his story he was a really obnoxious guy, by his own admission, early in life, very aggressive and violent. And then he had a conversion experience. He had a Christian conversion experience later in his life, late in his career. And he started a comeback--he attempted a comeback way late in his career, and he fought in 1991 Evander Holyfield, then the heavyweight champion of the world. And at the press conference, which is so often a testosterone-soaked opportunity to talk trash to your opponent--get everybody whipped up--Foreman refused to do that. He spoke kindly of his opponent. He charmed everyone in the press conference--even Evander Holyfield, who said at the end, "I kind of hate to hurt him."
But hurt him he did, in that fight. And Foreman knew he was going to lose, and he lost indeed, but he lost with courage. And everybody who knew the story of George Foreman knew that he had really won that fight. We win by losing.
I somehow feel called to touch upon a touchy subject this morning, also. It's appropriate to touch upon it, I think, because it's the fifth year anniversary of the beginning of the war in Iraq. It's important that we reflect upon that very important national event--reflect upon it theologically. And I realize that we may all have very different understandings about what happened in Iraq, different perspectives about whether we have failed in that war, and what that might mean, to have failed. I respect that we have a variety of opinions about that. But this is the question that I want to ask and commend to us, perhaps for conversation around our Easter supper table: How might we experience success--a success that we might never have expected--had we not failed in Iraq…however we might understand failure to be? And how might a national conversation, perhaps informed by a good dose of what we might call Christian humility and self-examination, change failure in Iraq into a transformed understanding of success? How might we be willing to embrace losing, in order to know a victory transformed? How might we die in order to rise? Because we win by losing. How might we apply that in Iraq? How might you apply that in your own life?
I want to end this morning by telling a very simple story to illustrate the very simple truth I'm trying to speak of. And maybe it's at my expense, but it illustrates my point well, I think. The night before I was going to go off to college, I had packed everything in my lemon yellow Pontiac Sunbird--it was ready to go. I was going to drive myself--I couldn't quite imagine my parents going with me to drop me off. That would have been a very scary thing. Anyway, I was ready to go. And the night before, we were at our family reunion--we used to spend a week every year at our family reunion, at Madison-on-the-Lake, Ohio. We're very close with our family. So, a week every year with my aunts and uncles and cousins.
I was one of the youngest among my cousins. And as they were growing up, I would always be jealous of them, because as they got to drinking age they would go to the tavern, the Wagon Wheel, and have fun--and I could never go with them. But that night, the night before I left for college, I was 18, which was the legal drinking age in Ohio back then. And I remember my cousin handing me a cold Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. You know, I'd tasted beer before, but I'd never had a full one. And it tasted good. I knew I liked it, but it tasted really good. And I thought, since that tasted good, the next one that my cousin handed me would taste good too, and it did, it tasted good, but that wasn't as much the point, you see? All was well with God and my cousins and the world. And I thought, well, the first two tasted good, then the third one definitely is going to taste good, as well. And so I had that third one…that's, I think the last one that I had…I'm not quite sure. But I remember lying down on the couch on the first floor of that old house, chock full with my cousins and aunts and uncles, and I remember the room spinning, and you know, trying to--I did do that thing where you put your foot down on the floor to try and make the room stop spinning. Didn't succeed.
And I don't need to go into detail about what happened that night. But my father was with me, and he knew the mistake that I had made. He knew my failure--my stupidity. And the next day was, in some ways, the worst day of my life. You know? My head and my stomach--but worst of all, being ashamed--my father knowing about what I had done.
And I'll never forget waking up that morning, and seeing my father, sitting in an Adirondack chair, looking out at Lake Erie. And he had a mug of coffee on the big armrest of that chair, and next to it was another Adirondack chair, empty, and a cup of coffee on the big armrest. And I came upon that scene and I knew--I didn't say anything, of course, I just sat down. As I said, in some ways it was the worst day of my life, but in some ways it was the best day of my life. Because sitting next to my Dad, drinking that coffee…he said nothing to judge me, to condemn me. He didn't even try to offer me a fatherly "Good Moral Lesson." He just listened, and loved me, and forgave me. And so the worst day of my life was in many ways the best day, because I knew the love of my father in that failure. For it's in losing that we win.
How is it that God is turning your failure into a transformed understanding of what success really is? A success that may indeed look to the world, to everybody else, like a failure. How strange that God took the cross--the cruelest invention of its time, and turned it into a symbol of hope and love and peace and reconciliation. How blessed, what this days teaches us. That failure has succeeded. That defeat has won. That death has been swallowed up in victory and Christ is trampling down Death by death. Alleluia. Amen.
March 23, 2008
Easter SundayThe Reverend Jeffrey A. Vamos
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