William H. Willimon - "Our Failure, God's Success" 9:00 am (April 22, 2001)

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-	By the way, during the Offertory Anthem	0:10
	all of our graduating seniors in the choir	0:14
	are going to be singing solos in that anthem.	0:17
	We bid them farewell this Sunday with our love.	0:21
	Well I want you alumni to know that	0:28
	it is a predictable Duke dilemma.	0:30
	You see it most predictably among Duke freshmen,	0:35
	or as we prefer to call them here	0:42
	at politically correct Duke, ignorant	0:44
	and uninformed first year students.	0:46
	That bright high school senior	0:51
	who has been tops in soccer and psychology	0:54
	and student government and swing, matriculates at Duke	0:57
	and becomes the first year student,	1:03
	who is for the first time in life second	1:05
	or even worse.	1:11
	He said to me, "I have never wanted anything	1:14
	that I couldn't get".	1:19
	He said this to me sadly after having been cut	1:22
	from the swimming team.	1:26
	You see, until that predictable freshmen year experience	1:29
	he had never fully failed.	1:34
	Well get ready, I tell them at commencement.	1:39
	Life is a lot like that.	1:42
	Second or worse, or in the words	1:46
	of the immortal Mick Jagger, you can't	1:49
	always get what you want.	1:52
	This is a sermon I always preach on this Sunday,	1:56
	the Sunday before final exams. (audience laughing)	1:58
	Anybody who attempts great things	2:02
	at a great place like Duke, may fail.	2:05
	Take marriage for instance, I ridicule them	2:12
	for waiting forever to put their money down	2:16
	on another human being and get on with it.	2:19
	They postpone marriage into their late '30s.	2:22
	But who can condemn the first generation of divorce	2:27
	for running scared?	2:32
	Marriage, they have noted, is a wild risk.	2:34
	It is prone to failure.	2:40
	I think that's the reason why many of them demand 50 hours	2:43
	of premarital counseling from me	2:47
	before their knot is tied.	2:50
	I wish I had some magic key to hand them,	2:54
	some sure fire steps to matrimonial success.	2:57
	But no, no, to link your life	3:02
	to another human being	3:07
	is to expose yourself to the possibility,	3:11
	some say the statistical probability, of failure.	3:16
	You show me somebody who can look back	3:22
	on his or her life and boast of a series	3:24
	of unqualified successes and I'll show	3:27
	you somebody whose aimed too low,	3:32
	who in life lowered the bar, whose dreams	3:35
	have been so modest that they always came true.	3:39
	That life which stays secure in safe harbors,	3:45
	it never tests the open sea, is a life	3:49
	that never fails.	3:54
	I asked this sophomore during one	3:58
	of our perennial discussions of our favorite subject	4:01
	the alcohol policy, I asked this sophomore,	4:04
	"Why do you drink so much on Saturday nights?	4:07
	You're only 19.	4:12
	How many failures could you have had at 19?	4:15
	I'm 50, I've got a reason to over drink	4:18
	on Saturday nights".	4:21
	But I tell you the fact that so many do over drink,	4:26
	that so many need a little chemical help	4:29
	to make it through the night suggests	4:33
	to me that even at 19 there is failure.	4:35
	I think that most of the counseling	4:41
	done by most pastors I know is the care,	4:43
	the guidance, the comfort amid the predictable pain	4:48
	that is occasioned by failure.	4:54
	Any life lived as it ought is gonna have	4:58
	a lotta failure by your 20th reunion.	5:02
	Oh I once thought when I was a young preacher	5:08
	that eventually my Sunday morning jitters would subside.	5:12
	I would gradually grow confident, sure, certain	5:17
	of what I could absolutely make happen in a sermon.	5:22
	But my Sunday morning Sabbath jitters got worse	5:28
	because an experienced, mature preacher	5:32
	is just simply somebody who has had	5:35
	a lot of Sundays to fall flat on your face, to fail.	5:38
	But curiously I believe that failure	5:47
	has gotten worse.	5:52
	Because of the world that we have wrought.	5:57
	Our failure, once a typical part of human finitude,	6:00
	failure has gotten to be worse because now	6:07
	we live in this hermetically sealed, closed,	6:12
	clockwork world of cause, effect, predictability,	6:15
	where everything can be explained	6:21
	and for 9.95 plus postage you can get	6:24
	some book that will tell you absolutely	6:26
	how to live your life as a success.	6:29
	The six habits or 10 habits of something	6:32
	of highly effective people.	6:36
	We got this world now where everything	6:39
	that happens, that happens here,	6:42
	happens because of us.	6:45
	There is no meaning in life that	6:48
	is not exclusively self-derived.	6:50
	Your life is solely your self creation.	6:55
	You are a self fabrication.	7:00
	The great goal of modernity, though we did	7:04
	not know it at the time, the great goal	7:07
	of modern systems of knowledge such	7:11
	as one finds at the modern university	7:13
	is to render a world that is closed,	7:16
	closed to any action other than our own.	7:21
	In an atheistic cosmos.	7:26
	What we've got is a world where nobody	7:31
	has to worry about being surprised.	7:33
	This is what modernity wanted and thank you social sciences,	7:37
	this is the world we got.	7:40
	What I'm saying is that now in the modern world	7:43
	our failures are exclusively our own.	7:47
	If we're going to take complete credit for the world,	7:53
	then we're going to have to take the blame too.	7:57
	A person in trouble, a person who in life has failed,	8:01
	once upon a time could cry out, why God	8:07
	did you let this happen to me.	8:10
	But today in a godless world	8:13
	that person is merely evading responsibility.	8:19
	Why now that things have not worked out as you planned,	8:23
	why would you scream at God?	8:27
	Since the world is self-made, not only your successes	8:30
	but also your failures are self-induced.	8:35
	At the end of our rope in a vacant universe	8:40
	we're at a true dead end.	8:45
	Since there's no other rope to come	8:49
	to the end of but our rope.	8:52
	And there's no one now to take the rap but us.	8:56
	We're kind of sad as we strut around	9:03
	with our Promethean claims of omnipotence.	9:07
	A friend of mine was spending a night	9:12
	in an old hotel and he was in the shower that night	9:13
	and suddenly all the lights in the hotel went off	9:17
	and he was there in this hotel bathroom,	9:21
	no windows, completely dark.	9:24
	He said for the next 10 minutes	9:28
	I frantically searched for my glasses.	9:31
	It is really sad in the deep dark,	9:42
	fumbling for our, what are we supposed to do though	9:46
	when it's dark and there's no light to be had,	9:49
	there is no vision, there is no hope	9:54
	other than that which is exclusively self-derived.	9:59
	In a closed world where there is little surprise	10:04
	and no real newness and no forgiveness	10:08
	and no actions other than our own,	10:11
	there is no reprieve from the relentless failure.	10:14
	Everything is just fixed.	10:20
	An so, in this kind of world the failure gets	10:24
	to be very final.	10:27
	We make our claims for better living through chemistry.	10:32
	We sing the Beatles You Got to Admit	10:36
	It's Getting Better All the Time,	10:38
	now become a commercial.	10:40
	All of this is just a kind of fumbling	10:42
	in the dark for our glasses.	10:44
	C.S. Lewis was once asked by someone,	10:48
	why are all the atheists I know	10:53
	such really good people.	10:56
	C.S. Lewis replied, "Well they have	10:59
	to be don't they, because they don't believe	11:02
	in a God who forgives	11:05
	so they gotta get it right the first time."	11:09
	I tell them you who are young, you better	11:17
	get accustomed to failure.	11:20
	I'm not just talking about your grades in Organic	11:22
	this semester.	11:24
	Because there's not only lots of failure in life,	11:26
	but in a world without a loving God	11:33
	and a living God, there is a finality	11:36
	to our failure that is deadly.	11:40
	Walking through the Cleveland airport	11:47
	I saw this big billboard and it proclaimed	11:50
	you've got the whole world in your hands,	11:53
	Mastercard.	11:58
	I asked this student, I said, "Why in the world	12:04
	didn't you vote in the presidential election?	12:07
	Some of us worked hard to get the vote for 18 year olds."	12:09
	He said to me, "I think I've just given up hope	12:15
	that anybody, no matter how talented or able,	12:21
	that anybody can fundamentally change anything	12:24
	for the better."	12:29
	If it's all in our hands, if it's all left up to us,	12:32
	there's gonna be a lot of failure.	12:37
	Well you talk about failure,	12:44
	his 12 best friends	12:48
	having forsaken him and fled into the darkness	12:52
	when the going got rough, his 12 best friends	12:56
	despite their declarations of loyalty,	13:00
	Judas was not the only betrayer.	13:05
	Here were the ones who were with him every step of the way,	13:10
	who heard all of his teaching, who witnessed	13:14
	all of us wonders.	13:16
	But when the time came for his 12 best friends	13:19
	to show what they were made of,	13:22
	well they did.	13:26
	They failed.	13:28
	The cruelty of the Romans, for whom crucifixion	13:31
	was a particularly fond means of law and order,	13:35
	the fickleness of the mob crying one day	13:39
	Hosanna King and the next day crucify him,	13:44
	I'll tell you which of all the good Friday failures	13:48
	cut the deepest.	13:51
	It is that of his own disciples.	13:54
	Words, words worse than the mobs crucify him	13:58
	are the words that Matthew records,	14:02
	and they all forsook him and they fled.	14:06
	You talk about failure.	14:12
	You talk about failure's finality,	14:16
	all of his disciples, fully expected	14:20
	that their failure would be the last word,	14:24
	the end of the story.	14:27
	After all, have we not said it is up to us	14:30
	to make the story come out right or it won't.	14:34
	It's up to us to make history work out or it won't.	14:37
	It's all in our hands.	14:43
	Look at the mess we made.	14:47
	That week you could just write over all	14:52
	the millennia of human history, failure.	14:55
	But then at dawn women went to the tomb,	15:03
	a light shone from the place of darkness and death.	15:07
	Surprise, our verdict upon Jesus was not	15:12
	the last word.	15:18
	Surprise, there is this power let loose,	15:20
	uncontained, unrestrained, God is not stumped by us	15:24
	or our failure.	15:31
	As Paul put it so well, if for this life only	15:34
	we have hoped, then we are most of all	15:38
	to be pitied, for as in Adam die,	15:41
	so in Christ shall all be made alive.	15:45
	Look at all our failures, but if there	15:50
	is a God who loves to raise the dead,	15:54
	if there is a God that will not be stumped	15:57
	by our sin, if there is a God just determined	15:59
	to write the last chapter of our lives,	16:03
	well then there's hope.	16:09
	Last Sunday we had a couple of big services here.	16:13
	We had a lot of music.	16:17
	We had some rented musicians.	16:18
	We had a sermon.	16:19
	We had the prayer.	16:20
	But in all that, if you asked me	16:24
	to try to define the significance of Easter	16:25
	in one sentence I guess it would be this,	16:30
	despite our sin and our betrayal	16:37
	our finitude and our failure,	16:40
	thank God it is not all left up to us.	16:45
	(religious music)	16:59

Item Info

Title:

William H. Willimon - "Our Failure, God's Success" 9:00 am (April 22, 2001)

Description:

Sermon start time: 00:10. Sermon end time: 16:50.
It’s inevitable that failures exist in human lives, but the good news of Easter informs us that death caused by human sin and failure does not have the last word; the fate of the world is not left to humanity, but to God. (Abstract created by Duke Divinity School staff.)
Key quotation: “Look at all our failures, but if there is a God who loves to raise the dead, if there is a God that will not be stumped by our sin, if there is a God just determined to write the last chapter of our lives, well then there’s hope.”

Permalink:

https://idn.duke.edu/ark:/87924/r4wp9tn0w

Date:

April 22, 2001

Speaker:

Willimon, William H.

Liturgical Calendar:

Easter

Biblical Book:

John

Chapter and Verse:

John 20:19-31

Subject:

Contributor:

Duke University. Chapel

Identifier:

UA.17.01.0003 CS-1063
ref10283_2x5
uachapelsermaud
duke:320666
dcrau001707
ark:/87924/r4wp9tn0w
6758c31b-4d4d-415c-b959-d0c46f9a5e0e

Digital Collection:

Duke Chapel Recordings

Source Collection:

Duke University Chapel recordings, 1954-2005

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Language:

English

Location:

United States
North Carolina
Durham (N.C.)

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Provenance:

The Duke University Chapel Recordings were transferred to the Duke University Archives beginning in 1970.

Rights:

Limited Re-Use

CC BY-NC 4.0

Rights Note:

This recording may contain 3rd party materials, such as music or readings that are therefore not covered by the Creative Commons license indicated here. For more information see https://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/research/citations-and-permissions.

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William H. Willimon - "Our Failure, God's Success" 9:00 am (April 22, 2001)

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1. William H. Willimon - "Our Failure, God's Success" 11:00 am (April 22, 2001)

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