for in Christ
Jesus you are all children of God through faith.
--Galatians 3:26 NRSV
At the end of my sermon this past Sunday, I stated
something to the effect that tonight in the Super Bowl someone is going to mess
up in front of millions of viewers. What will determine whether that mess up is
a failure or not will be whether that player learns from it and turns it into a
success.
I had no idea that my words would be more than prophetic.
I had no idea that I would be talking about the entire Chiefs’ team, coaching
staff and even the people the Chiefs’ pay to squirt Gatorade in players’
mouths! It was a Super Bowl meltdown of epic proportions. The team that played
the best all season long played their worst in the Super Bowl. Along with
millions of Chiefs fans, I was shocked, not because the Chiefs lost, but that
they lost in such a spectacular fashion.
Yes, the Chiefs got blown out in the Super Bowl—by Tom
Brady and Gronk to add insult to injury!—but what will determine whether it was
a failure or not will depend upon what they do in the future. Will they learn
from their mistakes and be better next season or will they repeat their same
mistakes next year? Is this loss something they improve from or will it be the
beginning of a downward slide of losing more games, blaming others, refusing
to take responsibility (it was the refs’ penalty calls!), and shame.
As a minister, I’m never above using popular culture
as a means to make spiritual points. I think the lens of sports is a great way
to talk about the human condition. A big part of the reason our culture loves
sports so much is because it touches on deeper truths about who we are and what
we want to be. Is there something we can learn about what failure means from the
Chiefs’ loss at the Super Bowl?
What is failure?
All of us think we know what failure is and what it looks like, but failure is
an intensely subjective label and condition. In a masterful Nike commercial titled “Failure,”
video of Michael Jordan walking into an arena is overlaid with audio of Jordan
saying the following words:
"I missed more than 9,000
shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I've been
trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and
over again in my life and that is why I succeed."
Thomas Edison
said, “Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they
were to success when they gave up.” So, failure is not really a failure, unless
one doesn’t use that failure to learn, to improve and to ultimately succeed. As
Brene Brown notes, “Failure is an imperfect
word because, if you take the time and have the patience to learn from your
failures, then they aren’t failures any longer—they’re lessons.”
Can a
Christian Be a Failure? The reason books
on leadership, self-help, philosophy, business and yes, religion, have so much
to say on turning failure into success, I believe, is they touch on a universal
truth about human life: we succeed by failing. For whatever reason, God created
us to learn our deepest and most important lessons in life through failure. We
learn how to walk by a whole lot of falling down. We learn how to talk by a
whole lot of mispronunciation. We learn how to do pretty much everything by
doing it wrong a bunch of times before we learn how to more or less do it
right. Yes, all of us have gifts, talents and abilities we are born with that
affect how well we are able to do some things and not others, but all of us
must learn to do most things through failure. If we understand this key
concept, then failures are no longer failures but necessary steps in our
education of what it means to be human.
The problem
is that we confuse failures as behavior with failures as identity. Our society labels
people as failures or successes in every arbitrary way possible. I drew heavily
from social science researcher and writer Brene Brown in my sermon on Sunday.
She writes a lot about the concept of shame. Her distinction between shame and
guilt was a godsend for me. She says, “Guilt says, “I screwed up.” but Shame
says, “I am a screw up.” The difference between the two is huge. Spiritually
speaking, I grew up thinking these two things were the same thing. When I
learned about the Christian concept of “sin” and the idea each of us is guilty
of the ways we hurt ourselves, others, the earth and God, I took that to mean “God
believes I am a screw up.” In other words, “God says I am a failure.”
The truth of
the Gospel is that God doesn’t view any of us as a failure. Oh sure, God knows
our weaknesses, our mistakes, our wrongheaded attempts to control the universe
as if we were God, our actions that cause harm to everyone and everything, in
other words our failures, but God looks at us with love and declares, in spite
of all these things, that we are beloved children of God. Period.
No matter
how we blow it, our identity as beloved children of God does not change. We may
feel we are failures, but in God’s eyes we are never failures. So, the answer
to “can a Christian be a failure?” is emphatically, one hundred percent, no.
As
Christians, we worship Jesus Christ, whom by all worldly standards was a
failure. The crowds he attracted left him because his teaching was too
difficult. His closest followers did not understand him and abandoned him when
they needed him most. He was arrested, mocked, beaten, imprisoned, tortured,
and executed. By every measure, he was a failure. Yet, we believe what
historians cannot prove that God raised Jesus from death and exalted him to the
highest position in the universe. As people who revere his story and claim
to be following in the footsteps of Jesus, where did we ever et the idea that
we had to be perfect or that life would be easy or that we wouldn’t have any
failures? More importantly, why do we believe we are failures, when Jesus
demonstrates that God works with a different understanding of the word than
everyone else in the universe?
Whether we
are an NFL player who loses the Super Bowl or just an ordinary person watching
it on TV, failures are actions of people, failures are not people. From a
Christian perspective, even when we believe we are failures, we are not
failures at all, because that is not who God says we are. This
truth is impossible for many of us to believe much less live as truth.
Grace and
Peace,
Chase
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