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 |
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