“The Promise of Failure” by Pastor Nate
Growing up I always got yelled at on Sunday morning for taking my shoes off in the pew. My “church shoes” weren’t that comfortable so as soon as my family arrived in our assigned pew, I’d take them off and go through the entire church service in stocking feet. My mother was appalled. There seemed to be this unwritten rule that church was a place where you had to look absolutely 100% put together.
Maybe it’s because the church is thought of as a holy place, or maybe it’s because we think God watches us more closely at church, but more so than a lot of places, the church seems to be the place where people are very concerned with how they come across.
It’s so sad though because in our efforts to look really put together I think we often miss the point. Because in my mind, the church should be the place where everyone is loved, church should be the place where everyone is accepted and supported, not a place where we gossip and put each other down and whisper behind each other’s backs and do whatever we can to hide all our faults.
In fact, as I read the scriptures I hear a message about the importance of failure.
Jesus once observed how everyone was jockeying for the best seat at the table and he said “take the lowest seat at the banquet”. This simple instruction was actually flying in the face of the entire social structure of Jesus’ day. And I think those words are just as important today as they were 2000 years ago.
What would happen if willingly took the lowest seat at the table? What if we embraced humility and event failure and learned to see failure as a sign of promise and a source of wisdom rather than something to cover up and avoid? What if, rather than trying to hide our faults, rather than trying to always look put together– what if we just were honestly and openly ourselves. Wouldn’t that change…. everything?
This is what Jesus wants for us. This is what Jesus invites us to do; he invites us to completely disregard the social systems we have that tell us “failure is not an option” instead Jesus invites us to see the ways that failure can make us unique, and the ways that failure can bring about all sorts of new possibilities.
After all, Jesus failed; at first glance, it seems as if the cross is the greatest failure of all. Jesus was the Messiah, he was supposed to come and overthrow the Roman empire and take back the Promised Land for the Israelites. But instead, the Romans captured and publicly executed him on the cross.
I’m sure at first, most people saw the cross as Jesus’ ultimate failure. But as Christians we know that there is promise in failure; as Christians, we believe God that takes failure and turns it into new life.
