Strange Faith: Failure on August 23 from Luke 10:1-12

One of the things I am very good at is failure. I have failed more times than you can shake a stick at, whatever that means, certainly several dozen times and probably many more than that.

And let’s be honest, so have some of you! Failure is ubiquitous and more than that failure is also one of the most powerful experiences of our lives.

It can make you stronger, wiser, and more resilient, or it can make you unwilling to experiment, angry, and even bitter.

Failure can show us where we are in the learning process, how quickly we can adapt, and how flexible we are; or it can be a rude awakening to our inabilities and incompetence, something that we may feel we must hide or bluster by.

Failure can be as simple as forgetting our lunch bag on the way to the car on the way to work, or leaving that coffee cup or briefcase or cell phone on the car roof as we drive off.

Or it can be as devastating as a bankruptcy or a divorce or even a death.

How we understand failure, what we do about it, and how we choose to feel about it can make us the most amazingly flexible and growing people on the planet, or it can give us a case of rigor mortis, stiff, unyielding, and dead.

When I was in the process of preparing for ministry one psychologist, I met with had me, and all the ministry candidates, make a list of all the major failures in our life we could remember up to that point. Typing Class, yes, I am that old. Getting cut from the High School football team. And asking that girl to the prom!

In a conversation about the list, the psychologist admitted as not the failures themselves, but rather was a pattern as to how we handled failure.

Did we immediately quit whatever thing we were working on, unable to handle the grief, or did we, possible not in all instances, come back and start again, and perhaps see that failure was actually an opportunity to do what we had set out to do differently, better, maybe even with a new open attitude that would take in some helpful criticism.

In the world of business there is a mantra that business should “fail fast” at the new things they are doing. The idea is that if a business tries something new, they should go all out and crash early, so they can stop, learn important lessons, recalibrate, and then head out again, and … not waste money on a plan or program that doesn’t work.

I read yesterday that Taco Bell is thinking of putting two drive in lanes at their restaurants, admitting that drive in business is the future. Doesn’t MacDonald’s already have two lanes?

And there is even a school of thought that suggests that we should teach kids how to fail fast? Why. Because often children are taught that failure is bad, so if you fail you should stop trying.

Lots of us know students who having bombed the first test in a class and instead of thinking, “wow, that’s great, now I know what I need to learn better or more about,” instead throw their hands up in the air and guit. Embarrassed or frustrated by their perception of what failure means, they decide it is just not worth it.

The mission is aborted.

Yet entrepreneurs all over the world tell of how they failed at a dozen businesses before they found, as it were, the “secret sauce”. They didn’t and then did, they couldn’t and then could. And the most important ingredient was not giving up. Learn from your mistakes and try again in a new way!

Failure is not the end, it is the beginning of something new. Just like with COVID. Yes, some things will stop and they may not come back. But that doesn’t mean that new things can’t begin. We need to learn from what has happened and get started again in a new way.

I heard this week that dozens of churches are already planning their online Christmas services. They don’t believe we will be meeting in person, so they are planning to have the most amazing online Christmas services ever recorded! Failure is not an option!

Which is exactly what Jesus tells his followers! Aborting the mission is a no go. You must persist!

So Jesus sends out 72 of them (symbolic in Luke’s gospel or the whole known world’s nations) to all over Israel to tell about the Kingdom of God being present and then healing folks.

It would be exciting and scary!

And there would be great stories to tell of what had happened as they went from village to village, with people healed, new communities of faith starting all over the place, and faith renewed and re-energized.

But… there would also be failure!

They would bring their “A” game and still be rejected. They would bring the stories of Jesus the Messiah and folks would still say, “not for me”!

Have you ever failed?

What did you do? Brush yourself off, get back up and get back at it? Or give up?

I remember in 6th grade being promoted to the highest-level English class out of six in my school, because I was so good at reading and writing and taking the tests. The class was studying grammar, ugh. I took the first test and failed. I went home and convinced my parents that the class was too tough and I need to go back to the level five class.

I can happily recount many times that I have failed and then dropped out. But even in spite of that, I have learned something.

Like when I dropped Hebrew 2 before I failed it, and took it again with a different teacher, teaching a very different way, and ended the semester with a B+. Fail fast, so you can start again.

One of our church values is: “you can try anything once. If it works keep doing it. If it doesn’t stop and we’ll try something else!”

Jesus tells his disciples before they even head out the door on their preaching and healing mission that failure is likely! And then he proscribes a remedy. One friend even calls it a sacrament instituted by Jesus like baptism and the Lord’s supper.

The sacrament of failure.

Jesus says, “If the folks you go to don’t want to listen, shake the dust of your shoes as a sign to them of their failure to jump into the kingdom of God, and walk away to a village that wants what you are offering!

“Don’t fret, don’t worry, don’t keep trying to fix it. Walk away. Either that village will hear the good news on another day or they won’t, but they are no longer yours to worry about.

“Don’t consider it a failure so much as an opportunity to find a community that is ready to meet the Savior and Lord of all.”

And think about this, what an incredible gift he gives them! He tells them that if on their mission things go bad (and they will, he assures them) don’t give up; instead, learn and move on.

Shake off the dust and move on. Learn the lessons and move on. See the problems, the mistakes, the bad assumptions, change the plan and move on!

Don’t mourn! Don’t lose sleep! Don’t keep going back and hitting your head against a brick wall, move on! Remember, that God has got this, and you aren’t God!

You are an apostle, one sent to bring good news. Do that, and leave the failures back in the dust where they belong, because God has amazing things for you to do just ahead.

Failure?

It is always possible.

But never ever let it define you, because you my friend are a child of the King!

And all God’s people said, Amen!