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[Music] The Sacrament of Failure, a message by Dr. Bruce W. Thielman. Permit me to share with you from the Gospel according to Matthew, chapter 10, beginning at the verse numbered 5. These twelve, that is the disciples, these twelve, Jesus sent out with the following instructions.

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Do not go among the Gentiles or enter any town of the Samaritans. Go rather to the lost sheep of Israel. As you go, preach this message. The kingdom of heaven is near.

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Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse those who have leprosy, drive out demons. Freely you have received, freely give. Do not take along any gold or silver or copper in your belts. Take no bag for the journey or extra tunic or sandals or a staff, for the worker is worth his keep.

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Whatever town or village you enter, search for some worthy person there and stay at his house until you leave. As you enter the home, give it your greeting. If the home is deserving, let your peace rest on it. If it is not, let your peace return to you.

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If anyone will not welcome you or listen to your words, shake the dust off your feet when you leave that home or town. I tell you the truth, it will be more bearable for Sodom and Gomorrah on the day of judgment than for that town. I am sending you out like sheep among wolves. Therefore be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves.

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But be on your guard against men. They will hand you over to the local councils and flog you in their synagogues. On my account you will be brought before governors and kings as witnesses to them and to the Gentiles. But when they arrest you, do not worry about what to say or how to say it. At that time you will be given what to say.

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For it will not be you speaking, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you. And may the same God that inspired these words incline our hearts to their understanding. Pray with me. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

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Amen. We have before us tonight one of the most touching scenes in all of Scripture. Jesus is sending out the twelve disciples. And as he does so, he gives them parting instructions.

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Instructions which are gentle and caring and eminently practical. He says, "Don't go too far. You're not ready to take on the Gentiles and the Samaritans yet. Keep the message brief. The kingdom of heaven is at hand. Be helpful. Make no charge for your services. You receive from me freely, so give freely.

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Travel light, no extra baggage, and don't take a lot of cash. When you come to a place, find some nice folks and stay with them. A person is known by the company he keeps. Mind your manners. Bless those whom you encounter.

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Always be on your guard, for you will be like innocent sheep in the midst of a world of wolves. And keep your wits about you. And if you get into a situation where you do not know what to say, well, in that place, think of the things that we have shared together, and God will give you utterance."

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And then this one other word. Jesus says, "When you fail, shake the dust of the place where you have failed off your feet, and then go on." Now all of these instructions are worthy of our study. But the one I would focus on tonight is this last, this wise and wonderful word about failure.

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I would call this instruction of Jesus a sacrament of failure. When someone is initiated into the faith, we perform a sacrament with water. When we remember our Lord's loving sacrifice on our behalf, we do so with a sacrament of bread and of wine. Here Jesus gives us a sacrament of failure.

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He says, "When you fail, shake the dust of that place off your feet, and then go on." Now the first thing that this sacrament says to us is that Jesus frees us to fail. He says that we are not to be tyrannized by perfectionistic ideas. He says not to win is not a sin.

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Have you ever seen a losing team? Perhaps they've lost a whole series of games in a row, or maybe they're coming to the end of the season, they're in the home stretch and great pressure is upon them, and they fumble and stumble and are so awkward, it looks like they're giving the game to the opposition on a silver platter.

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We've all seen that sad spectacle. Well, people can become just like that. Individuals can lose or fail in a number of circumstances, and they come to see themselves as worthless, hopeless, of no value, born losers.

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Jesus says to these people, "You have skills and talents and gifts. Great abilities have been given you by my Father, but do not be tyrannized by your expectations with regard to these things. Everybody blows it once in a while.

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No one is a winner all the time. I expect you sometimes to fail, and I accept that failing. When you fail," Jesus says, "when you fail," not if you fail, but when you fail, "shake the dust off your feet and go on."

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Whenever I think of this sacrament of failure, I think of the experience of Peter. You remember how at the Last Supper he promised to Jesus that he would never deny Him, and within a few very short hours he had done it three times. And he was so overwhelmed with a sense of his own failure having done that,

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that the scriptures say that he went out into the night and wept bitterly. But then remember how Jesus and Peter met after our Lord's resurrection. Do you recall what Jesus said to Peter then? "Peter, feed my sheep. Feed my lambs."

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Now with that word of acceptance and encouragement, Jesus was turning Peter's back on his failure, and he was sending him off into a new future. He was saying to Peter, "You failed. What else is new? Forward march." You see, failing to Jesus doesn't mean that you are a failure,

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but rather that you've experienced a failure. It does not mean that you have accomplished nothing. It means that you have learned something. It does not mean that you are a fool.

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It means that you've had some faith. To Christ, your failing does not mean that you are disgraced, but that you were willing to try. Not that you don't have it, but that you will have to go by another way.

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Failing to Him does not mean that you are inferior, but just that you aren't perfect. Not that you've wasted your life, but that you now have a reason to start again. Not that you should give up, but that you should try harder. Not that you will never make it, but just that it will take a little longer.

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Not that you are a loser, but that you are a researcher in the laboratory of life, and one of your experiments has gone wrong. When I think of researchers, one of the people I immediately think of is Dr. Lewis Thomas. Dr. Thomas is the president of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Research Institute in New York City.

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He's also a very distinguished writer. His collection of essays, "The Medusa and the Snail," won the National Book Award last year. In one of those essays, Dr. Thomas points out that animals are almost infallible in their behavior. You very rarely, for example, see an awkward or a maladroit cat.

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Dogs don't often make mistakes, except when they're mimicking their masters. Fish are absolutely flawless in their performance. Ants and honeybees do exactly what they're supposed to do in just the way they're supposed to do it. Now, if our minds, if our brains were as limited as these animals,

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if we were consigned to doing those simple things in simple ways, we would perform them just as infallibly as these creatures. But as a matter of fact, our brains are clusters of neurons that are so advanced that we can sometimes go off into the blue and make wrong turns and go down dead ends and make mistakes.

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We have within us a capacity for freedom and adventure and experiment that is far beyond that which is given to the animals. And precisely because we have this freedom to fail, we have advanced beyond the animal order. Dr. Thomas says, "When someone screws up in the laboratory,"

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and that phrase is his own inelegant choice of words, "When someone screws up in the laboratory," he says, "many times we discover that they in that act snatch something we had no vision of before, and they bring great blessings out of their blunders."

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You know, I would take this whole concept a step farther. My understanding of the evolutionary hypothesis is such that I understand that that tiniest miracle of God, the DNA molecule, in all of its perfection is so made by God that occasionally it goes wrong.

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Occasionally it deviates from that which is expected. Occasionally, beyond our understanding, but not God's, it does what we don't think it's supposed to do. And in that moment of mutation, the whole evolutionary process has advanced.

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If those mistakes or failures of that molecule had not occurred, we would still be an anaerobic bacterial form of life living in some algal mat somewhere. But precisely because those failures do occur, we humans have advanced in time as we have advanced.

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We say, "To err is human," but we don't really like to admit that. What I'm suggesting tonight is that our failures and our errors are what have brought us to the place where we are. And Jesus says this to us.

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He says, "I do not expect you not to fail. Be free to fail. But when you fail, understand that it is not necessary then to punish yourself." I think of a young man who grew up in the West and who wanted to be a painter. He did rather well for one without formal training, but he decided he needed to study art.

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So he went to New York City, and with a friend they took a very simple one-room, cold-water apartment. It was very hard for them to earn enough money to keep body and soul together while they took art classes. One night his friend said to him, "Look, you're good-looking. Why don't you go to one of these modeling agencies or drama schools,

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pick up something along the dramatic line. Perhaps you could get some bit parts or some modeling jobs, and with that money pay for your education." "Oh," he said, "I could never do that.

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I've never even been in a junior high school or high school or college play." "Well," his friend said, "that's all right. What difference does it make? You can only fail." Well, as he thought about that, "Yes, all I could do was fail, and that wouldn't cost me anything.

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After all, my principal interest is in painting as an art, not in theater. This is a sideline. I might as well give it a try." So he went to the Institute of Dramatic Art and Drama in New York City, and in his first class he was given an assignment by the professor.

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"Act out some poem that you know." Well, he only knew one poet, Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven." And so he started to act out the poem. "No," the professor said, "let yourself go.

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All you can do is fail." Now, that was the second time in this episode where someone had said that to him, and he recognized it was true. "Why not let loose?"

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So he swooped around the room with arms spread, and he lunged at the audience and he screamed out the words, "Nevermore! Nevermore!" And he said later that it was the most magnificently free feeling he had ever known in all of his life. Such a thrill, in fact, that he put away his paints,

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and as far as I know, has never taken them up again. But his career in drama is well known to all of us. His name is Robert Redford. What happened was he discovered that being free to fail gave him magnificent and new opportunity.

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Christ expects us to fail and accepts us in our failure. And what is more, he goes on to tell us how to deal with our failure. In the very first church I served, there was a wonderful lady by the name of Grace Fraser. She married a research chemist who was a very brilliant man, extremely successful.

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But she was a farm girl in background, and no matter how sophisticated their family became, she remained very rustic in her ways and in her speech. She also was a marvelously calm person, always great tranquility of spirit. I was very interested in this, being a fret-filled young pastor,

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so I said to her one day, "Mrs. Fraser, how is it that you are always so cool and collected?" Well, very modestly, of course, she denied that this was so, but when I pressed her, she came out with this sentence. She said, "Well, I guess it's just this.

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When I shut the gate, I shut the gate." Now, what she meant by that was this. After going through some circumstance or situation, win, lose, or draw, when it was over, she was done with it.

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She closed the gate on it. She did not carry it with her, and that's just what Jesus says to us about failure. When you're in a failing situation, shake the dust off your feet and move on. Shut the gate.

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Now, most of us don't do that. We have a tendency to chew on our failures. We masticate our mistakes. We gum them over and over again, and by doing so, we insult our own intelligence.

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If some matter comes before us and we work on it and arrive at a decision, that decision is almost irrevocably final. It does us no good whatever to retry the case over and over again to go through some interior appellate process.

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What we ought to do is just shut the gate. Back in 1926, the Congress of the United States authorized a great auction in Washington, D.C. They were going to auction off all of the patent models which had been sent to Washington across the years.

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Many people had sent models of things that they wanted to patent, and these things had not finally been successful, and as a result, the models were left there, and they decided to auction off these items. There were more than 150,000 of them.

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And people came from all over to laugh at these things. And some of them were pretty funny. There was an illuminated cat to scare mice away at night. There was a device that you could use that would both churn butter and rock your baby's cradle at the same time.

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One of the most interesting was a pipe. At night when you would go to sleep, you would put one end in your mouth and the other end in your ear. That was so that if you snored, you would wake yourself up first. Well, many people were amused by these patents.

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But the man who arranged and conducted the auction was a very sensitive man, and he recognized that behind many of these laughable items, there was a lot of hard work and a lot of hoping and dreaming. So he wrote a book about the experience.

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He called it "150,000 Broken Dreams." What is most amazing to me about the book, however, is this. As you go through it, you discover that many of these people who came up with these rather laughable failures

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went on to later produce inventions of great significance to our entire society. In other words, they might have failed, but they failed forward. That's the secret. Now, that phrase "failing forward" is not original with me.

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It came from a man named Charles Kettering, who was chief of research for General Motors for many years. He's the fellow who invented the self-starter and the Duco paint finish and high-octane gasoline. Many people consider him to be our greatest inventor after Thomas Edison. He said that in the course of all of his research and experimentation, he had failed countless times.

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But he tried always to fail forward. He said, "I never surrender leadership in my life to my failures." That's the important thing to hold on to, and that's what Jesus says. "Shake the dust off and then go on. Fail forward."

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Do you remember that great scene in the Old Testament when the children of Israel were escaping from Egypt and the Egyptians were pursuing them, and the children of Israel were being led by a pillar of cloud in which the presence of God was made manifest to them? There was one point when the Egyptians had almost caught up with the Israelites.

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At that point, the pillar of cloud that had been leading the Israelites went from in front of them to a position behind them. It stood between the pursuers and the pursued. Now, generations later, when the Israelites were escaping from the Babylonians and were fearful that the Babylonians would overtake them just as the Egyptians almost did,

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one of the prophets of God, speaking under the inspiration of God's Holy Spirit, said this, "I, the Lord thy God, shall be thy rear guard." Now, we often think of God going ahead of us. We need to remember that God is also behind us,

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that if we'll close the gate, he will stand there and guard that gate, keeping the failures of yesterday from intruding into our lives today. My friend, it takes a lot of faith to begin something, but it also takes a lot of faith to end it. It takes a lot of faith to start a journey, but it also takes a lot of faith to terminate it.

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It takes faith to open a gate. It also takes faith to close it. We have a lot of celebrations about the beginning of things. We celebrate inaugurations and dedications. We even call graduation from college "commencement," which is a time of beginning.

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We need more celebrations on how to close things, because Jesus calls us here in the passage to the recognition of the importance of closing things. He says, "Look, sometimes things are going to go wrong. Sometimes you're going to be locked into a no-win situation.

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Don't slink away like a dog dragging your tail, weighted down by the burden of your guilt. Face the thing. Cut the thing. Slam the gate on the thing. I expect those failures. I accept those failures. But shake the dust off. Fail forward. March on."

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I believe I'm far within the mark when I say that if some of those now hearing my voice would only learn to trust the Lord as their rear guard, as the one who can help them close the gate on their yesterdays, if they could only learn that, they would be able to start their tomorrows

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with a dynamism and a power which now they only dream about. I read just this last week a list of the names of people who have won Nobel Prizes for literature across the years. And there were so many names that I never heard of.

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Carducci, Lacksness, Heidenstam, Spittler. Then I read a list of the names of people who had been nominated for the Nobel Prize for literature and did not win. These are Nobel losers. Leo Tolstoy, Henrik Ibsen, Joseph Conrad, Marcel Proust,

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Mark Twain, Bertolt Brecht, Sigmund Freud, Somerset Maugham. The list goes on and on. These people failed. But they went on, you see, shaking the dust of failure away to write some of the most magnificent pages in literature.

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There is not a paragraph from your past which can finally stop you from writing wonderful chapters in your future. If only you'll shut the gate and leave it shut. Please turn your cassette to the other side.

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If you do that, you have a special opportunity to experience the power of God in your life. An opportunity that is unique to those who have failed and then shut the gate. You see, people who have learned to be free to fail

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and who have learned that they can go on after their failures, those people are willing to put more risk into their religion. It was T.E. Lawrence who said that finally you can divide people into two groups, daydreamers and nightdreamers.

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Nightdreamers are those who dream in the dusty recesses of their minds and with the coming of the dawn, the dream is gone. But daydreamers are those who dream with their eyes wide open, who see the possibilities in their dreaming.

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They are the great innovators in history. They are the ones who truly accomplish. We live in a culture which is very success-oriented. We want always to succeed.

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We admire people who always succeed. We applaud people who succeed even when they succeed by doing the same thing over and over and over and over again. And we're a little bit suspicious of the innovator,

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of the someone who comes along with an altogether new and different and perhaps dangerous idea. But those people are the people who claim tomorrow. They have risk in their living

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and they have that risk when they think as Jesus thinks. He says, "Be free to fail, then learn from failure. Fail forward, march on," and they're ready to march. This last January when I was in New York with our theater and theology course,

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I sat down and talked for a while with Ted Kalem, who is the theater critic for Time magazine and who always gives one of the lectures in our course. And he was lamenting the fact that there is so much that is old,

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repetitious on the American stage today. "We are not," he said, "in an innovative period." Look at how many revivals that have been on Broadway in just the last few years. Plays of long ago being repeated,

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"Oklahoma," "Brigadoon," "Camelot," "Little Foxes," "King and I," "Hello, Dolly." Now, why is it that these plays are being done again? Kalem said, "It's because those who are going to invest money in these shows want to invest in sure things."

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The only sure things are the things from yesterday. The only things of which you can be certain are the things that have already happened. When you start talking about the future, you talk about that which is not sure. But it is into that future that the great adventurers go.

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And the greatest adventurers are those who are not afraid of failing because they realize they can learn from their failure that it will not finally stop them and that they can go on. The Jesus thinkers.

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James Bryant Knopf, the president of Harvard University, put it in a single sentence. He said, "Behold the turtle. He only makes progress when he sticks his neck out." Benjamin Franklin put it another way. He said, "Those people who try many things make many mistakes,

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but they do not make the biggest mistake of all, which is to try nothing." Let me give you one illustration of that, and I'm done. On October 19, 1899, a young high school boy by the name of Bobby Goddard climbed up into a cherry tree on the farm where he lived up in Massachusetts.

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He was out of school because he had a bellyache and also because his mother was very ill. While he was up in that tree looking up at the heavens, he got an idea that he had never had before. That idea was this.

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Wouldn't it be wonderful if we earthlings could travel to other planets? When he got down out of that tree, he got down a different young man from the one who had gone up into it. He became possessed by that dream, so possessed that he went home and wrote in his journal

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that from that day on he would every year celebrate the anniversary of his going into that cherry tree and thinking that thought, and he did. Every year on October 19 after that, he would go back to that cherry tree, or if he could not go there, he would think about that experience.

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And in the intervening times, he gave himself to the pursuit of that dream. Now, there were others who had thought of that thought before. The most noted was the Russian Tsiolkovsky. But Bobby Goddard had a capacity to fail and then to fail forward,

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to dream and even when his dreams were defeated, to go on. He got his doctorate in physics and in astronomy. He went on and became very interested in science fiction. He wrote an essay when he was still very young called "On the Habitability of Other Planets."

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When it was shown to other people, they laughed at it. He began to work with rocket fuels, both liquid and solid. He became a friend of Charles Abbott, who was the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, and also of Ellery Hale, who was a most noted astronomer in America at that time.

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But he went far beyond them in his dreaming and in his failing and in the ridicule that was heaped upon him. He talked about things like sending people into space riding on the noses of his rockets. He talked about sending probes to nearby planets.

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He suggested that we send a probe within a thousand miles of Mars and have cameras on board that could take pictures of objects that were so small they could be measured in a few feet or at the most yards. He went on to talk about the interstellar speeds that objects in space would know.

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He proposed once that we fill a rocket with magnesium flares and shoot it to the moon and when the flash occurred on the moon, measure the time to see how long it took to get there. And people laughed at it. The New York Times editorially condemned him.

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They called him the "moon man." They said that he evidently was unaware of the fact that a jet engine would not work in space since space was a vacuum and there was nothing there against which the power of the jet could push. You see, the New York Times in its august wisdom had not yet heard of Newton's third law of motion.

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Well, 77 years after Bobby Goddard climbed up into that cherry tree, on October 19, 1976, the world's scientific community gathered together at the Robert H. Goddard Space Institute, which is the principal space research agency for our National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

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And on the very day when they gathered there, we had two functioning orbiters circling Mars within a thousand miles and two functioning landers moving on the surface of Mars. And his dreams, so often failures, so often ridicule, were coming true. As you read his journals, you cannot help but be impressed with the technological genius that's there.

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But you're also grasped by the psychological and spiritual insight that's there. For in one of those journals, Robert Goddard wrote this simple sentence, "God pity a one-dream man." And what I come into this pulpit for tonight, the gospel, the good news for today is

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that God pities all the world's dreamers. The one-dream people and the two-dream people and the three-dream people, all the world's dreamers. He says to them, through the lips of his own son, "Go ye. Yes, as you go, sometimes you will fail. But I expect that, and I will accept that, and you ought to accept it too.

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But close the gate. Shake the dust of the failure away. Fail always moving forward. Go on. There are new worlds out there for you to conquer." How good of God to give us such a sacrament. Let us pray.

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Oh God, when we're knocked flat by our failures, flat on our backs, help us to know that when we're flat on our backs, it's easier for us to look up and to see you and to be reminded that when we fail, you don't call us failures. You call us adventurers. Dust us off. Set us on our feet.

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And send us on again to this world and others for the sake of Jesus, the Christ, our Lord. Amen. [BLANK_AUDIO]