I heard a story recently about a young man who left college ten years ago. He went into consulting work on the East Coast. He spent a bit of time on Wall Street, and had a spell out West learning how companies work. Three or four years ago he and a couple of others set up their own company. It was tough at first, but soon it became quite a success. He had a chance to sell it to his original employer, but it meant too much to him to sell so soon.
That company was his life, his identity, his pride, his joy. But it all went wrong. The company slid into bankruptcy like a sandcastle engulfed by the incoming tide. The young man saw his dream disappear and his security, prestige and self-esteem melt away with it. Four months later, his mother and sister have yet to find a way to even gently refer to the subject with him. His life is shrouded in silence and dominated by the F-word: failure.
Today we celebrate you on completing high school and you’re heading into new futures. But lurking behind the pomp of graduation lays a shadowy voice whispering the word we don’t mention: failure. But I think if were honest we all know something of failure.
One of my big failures was getting beat up in first grade. I thought I was a tough guy until somebody else came by who was a little stronger. I remember going home from school thinking what else can I do besides getting into fights?
Of course we have sophisticated strategies for calling failure something else. We call it broadening our experience. We call it a learning curve. We call it a blind alley. We mutter things like “If it doesn’t kill you, you’ll be stronger.”
The Cubs used to call it the beginning of a new season.
Two guys were walking through the jungle. All of a sudden, a tiger appeared from a distance, running toward them. One of the guys took out a pair of Nikes from his bag and started to put them on.
The other guy, with a surprised look on his face, exclaimed, “What are you doing you can’t outrun a tiger wearing those.”
His friend replied, “I don’t have to outrun it, I just have to run faster than you.”
Another approach is to adjust our sights and aim so low that we can’t fail.
When a person appears to be lazy it’s often a mask for a fear of failure.
Being lazy means you can go on saying “Just you watch me when I go” – in other words, if I really did try, I really would succeed.
The Irish humorist Oscar Wilde said “There’s only one thing worse than not getting what you want – and that’s getting it.” Steven Wright, the humorist, said, “When everything is coming your way, you’re in the wrong lane.”
In the film Chariots of Fire, Harold Abrahams is a young man with a fantastic ability to run. He has to overcome various kinds of prejudice, but he nonetheless spends years preparing for the 100 meters at the 1924 Olympics in Paris. There’s a poignant scene shortly after he’s won the race. Abrahams is sitting in the changing room, nursing his precious gold medal. His teammates crash into the room to congratulate him; but his trainer holds them back.
The trainer says to the teammates, “Hold on, wait, stand back, give him a bit more time and space. You don’t know how difficult it is to win.”
What it may mean is, even when we do achieve our ambition, we often then have to face how small our life projects really are. Failure protects us in some ways, because we can remain obsessed by our unfulfilled goal. We only notice its insignificance if and when we attain it.
It’s difficult to win, because then the striving is over and all the fantasies truly threaten to unravel you.
So people who win have to win for bigger reasons. It has to mean more than hosting up a trophy. It’s best when it is a ministry, a way of conveying a meaning to others. A way of saying look at this excellence, you can take something from this and bring it back into your work, into the way you handle your life.
Noble Prize winners tend to mumble self-effacingly about only getting the award because it was a bad year. It’s as if genuine achievement is even more humbling than failure, because it makes you realize how small the prize really is.
In John’s gospel this morning Jesus is finding that a lot of people who hung around him earlier on are now are turning away from him.
He looks at his right-hand man Peter and says. “So, are you going to go away too?” It’s as if the whole of the future of Jesus’ ministry hangs on this one question. Peter says there’s some things more important than popularity and circumstances. And that’s love and loyalty. He says “To whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life.” It’s almost like he’s saying, Jesus, even if you’ve failed, your failure is still more important than anyone else’s success.
Again, Peter shows us the face of God, because God sticks with us even when no one else does, even when it looks like there’s nothing in us that’s worth sticking with.
Why do we fear failure so much? I’m going to suggest why. Around about 150 years ago, in Western societies, belief in God’s judgment started to go out of fashion. But God’s judgment on your life is that you’re good and loved and that your past is behind you and your future is open. Now what’s it mean to stand in that judgment. You see it’s a redemptive judgment. It’s the judgment that really matters. If you or I give up on God’s judgment of your life than all sorts of other judgments become relevant, and correspondingly there becomes a thousand ways to fail.
But in different ways, religious faith is built on the insights of failure. The history of Islam begins in earnest when Mohammed the Prophet is virtually thrown out of Mecca and makes his way to Medina to look for more fertile soil for his message.
A key to understanding Judaism is to see the despair of the Jews when they were dragged into exile after the invasion of the southern kingdom by the Chaldeans. When they left Jerusalem they thought they were leaving God behind, but when they got to Babylon they discovered God was there too.
And failure is also at the heart of Christianity. After all, the symbol of Christianity is a man dying alone on a cross, rejected by the great many and abandoned by the close few. Christianity is like a 12-step program: you only get to be part of it if you’re prepared to say the terrifying words “I blew it.”
Of all the moments of self-knowledge in my own life, one of the most significant I think was at the age of about 16 when I realized I wasn’t going to be a professional violin player.
Some others I played with took another five years or so to make the same discovery. But others went on to Julliard and the Curtis Institute. I’ve always felt that coming to terms with my own ability gave me a head start because I cut five years off living in the fantasy land of pursuing something, that while I enjoyed playing, nonetheless knew I didn’t have to make it may life’s work.
A guy was lamenting the demise of the non-profit he’d been running and got into a conversation with an army commander. “Failed, did it?” said the commander, abruptly. “Your fault or someone else’s? Learn anything from it? Still lose sleep about it? Do anything differently next time?” The commander kept barking out the questions, but as each one cascaded down it felt not like criticism, but liberation because there was no shame or blame, just an exhilarating sense that life is seldom about much more than making honest mistakes. Finally the commander said, “My biggest failure was in Iraq, got a lot wrong there. Felt a fool for a long time. Funny thing is it’s only since then that I’ve really enjoyed my job. Maybe it’s because I’m no longer obsessed about meeting people’s expectations.”
If you want to learn how to live with your own failures and those of others, without resentment, you need to spend time with people dealing with long term conflict and crisis, with problems that can’t just be fixed. One such place is Northern Ireland. One pastor in Northern Ireland, reflecting on decades of disappointment and destruction and failure, gently said, “It’s better to fail in a cause that will finally succeed than to succeed in a cause that will finally fail.”
Think again about Peter’s words in John’s gospel. That’s what makes them so powerful. “It’s better to fail in a cause that will finally succeed than to succeed in a cause that will finally fail.”
Class of 2015, you’ve had four years of High School. You’ve had some successes, and there are people here today to celebrate them. And you’ve had failures, even though some of those are probably known only to yourself.
But what I want to say to you is this. When you’ve succeeded, has it been in a cause that will finally fail? And when you’ve failed, has it been in a cause that will finally succeed?
In the end the quality of your time, wherever your future takes you, will not be measured by the quantity of your successes or the extent of your achievements or your post-graduation salary or your recognitions or awards or the glorious splendor of your Facebook page.
That quality of life, will come down to this: have you committed yourself to a cause in the light of which all successes and failures will be evaluated, a cause that will indeed finally succeed because of its truth, because of its beauty, because of its goodness? If not, you’ll have no real way of knowing whether anything that lies ahead of you is really success or failure.
If you know who you are and whose you are, then you won’t be destroyed by failure or ruined by success, because you’ll know that any success of yours is just an embellishment to an already breathtaking picture, and no failure of yours can ruin a wondrous story.
The most powerful person in the world is the one who isn’t paralyzed by the fear of their own failure. Because for them it’s a minor glitch on the road toward beauty, love, joy and goodness, that always wins. My dream is that that person is you.