A Fail & Failure
The Ven. John Motis
2 Lent; 2-25-2024.
Laura and I are fans of Science Fiction Movies. For me the best ones are those that have just enough real possibilities in them.
How many of you remember the 1998 movie, “Armageddon”? It had a cast of stars, including Bruce Willis, Billy Bob Thornton and Ben Affleck. The movie was a commercial success, grossing $553.7 million. Big money back in 1998.
The movie begins with a scene showing a massive meteor shower destroying the orbiting Space Shuttle Atlantis, before entering the atmosphere and bombarding major cities. It is then discovered that a massive asteroid the size of Texas will impact Earth in 18 days, potentially wiping out all life on Earth. NASA devises a plan to have a deep hole drilled into the asteroid, into which they will insert and detonate a nuclear bomb to destroy the asteroid, saving life on earth.
They recruit Harry Stamper (Bruce Willis), a third-generation oil driller and owner of his own oil drilling company. Harry agrees to help, but on the condition that he brings his own team to do the drilling. He picks his best employes for the job: his best friend and right-hand man, geologists, and drillers. Ben Affleck (AJ) is among the group of drillers, (who by the way is dating Harry’s daughter Grace despite Harry’s objections). Before leaving, Grace accepts A.J.’s marriage proposal, much to Harry’s reluctant dismay; she later has her father promise to return home safe with her fiancé.
Following the destruction of Shanghai by another meteor strike, word of the massive asteroid became public to the world. Both shuttles take off without incident and dock with the Russian Space Station Mir to take on fuel, during fueling, a leaky pipeline ignites the fuel pod on fire. A.J. is barely able to reboard the space shuttle before the space station is destroyed. Approaching the asteroid, shuttle Independence is damaged by debris and crashes, killing all on board except A.J. and 2 others. They embark in the shuttle’s Armadillo to find the others. (26 miles from the intended landing spot.) Drilling is going much slower than expected at it is unlikely that the team will reach the depth necessary to destroy the asteroid before “Zero Barrier”, the point after detonating the rock will not save Earth. The President decides to detonate the bomb from Earth immediately, which will cause total mission failure. Harry and shuttle commander Sharpe have a vicious argument but agree to defuse the bomb and work together after Harry promises Sharp that he will accomplish the mission. They make progress on drilling, but a missed gas pocket causes an explosion, destroying their work. Just as Harry, NASA, and the world believe the mission to be a failure, A.J. and the others arrive in their Armadillo.
A.J. succeeds in drilling the hole to the required depth, the bomb is inserted in the hole, but a rock storm destroys the remote detonator, forcing someone to stay behind and manually detonate the bomb. They draw straws; the responsibility falls on A.J. Harry takes A.J. down on the asteroid’s surface, but disconnects A.J.’s air hose, forcing him into the shuttle’s air lock and tells A.J. that he is the son Harry never had, and he would be proud to have him marry Grace.
No, you promised that you would come home, there must be another way was Grace’s tearful response when Harry tells her the news.
Harry is able to detonate the bomb just before Zero Barrier, saving the planet. The astronauts land of Earth safely. Grace and A.J. are married, with the portraits of Harry and the others lost on the mission present in memoriam. Tears and applause; the stuff great movies are made of...
As I look back at the movie, I lose count of all the failures! The president and I expect many others had given up and were ready to call the whole thing a failure. Harry and the crew were not! Even many, many fails would not define them as failures!
Perhaps, using this movie as an illustration may be a bit of a reach; however, I think this is the message God has for us. When we have faith: Just because we have some fails, we are not failures!
Scripture is loaded with examples of people who are deeply flawed and have a history of failure; for some, failure is where their story will end and that is how they will be remembered forever: Judas, Saul, Lot’s wife, Pharoah and his army, Adam and Eve, David “A Man After God’s Own Heart” & Bathsheba.
There are others where despite, their fails, God, still used them; we know and remember them as heroes of our faith. Sometimes after moments of greatness, failure will show up. There are times in scripture when it seems God’s promises are taking too long to come to pass. These are times leading to a failure because, we might think that God needs our help?
In our scripture today, we have Abraham, Sarah and Peter, heroes despite their failures. People that are deeply flawed, however faithful. Not to be defined by their failures.
Abraham, the father of the faithful, provides us with profound lessons through his unwavering faith. He believed in God’s Promises: When God assured Abraham that his descendants would be as numerous as the stars, Abraham believed without hesitation, even when it didn’t seem possible. When the years had passed and no heir, could God be wanting them to help? Could the promised heir be the child of a slave woman? We also remember that Abraham gave Sarah to Abimelek King of Gerar when he called her his sister when he was afraid.
Fails that didn’t define Abraham because God had other plans.
Abraham showed his faith by leaving his family and his possessions to follow God’s calling. He did this without even knowing where he was going. Don’t we all want the details? How many of us, I wonder, have enough faith to go without knowing the details? Abraham and Sarah did. Then we have what I believe to be Abraham’s shining moment: when he had the faith to sacrifice his son Isaac because the Lord told him to. How could he be the father of many nations when God told him to sacrifice the heir? Even without the answer, Abraham had faith! God changed his name from Abram to Abraham and Sari to Sarah as a symbol of His covenant relationship with them. She would bear a son, I will bless her, and she will give rise to nations; kings of people shall come from her.
We catch up with Jesus, Peter, and the disciples shortly after Peter’s great moment. The moment when Peter identified Jesus as” the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” Jesus replied, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock, I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it”. Thus, Simon Peter was the first one to say openly that Jesus was the Christ, the son of God, and Jesus blessed him mightily for that high moment of recognition known as “The Great Confession.”
Simon’s new name was a symbol for the fact that Jesus sensed hidden potential in him and was willing to set in motion a process of transformation. Simon was not stable like a rock when he met Jesus. He was mostly a man of much promise, or a diamond in the rough. Jesus had the extraordinary intuition to envision the grand person Simon Peter would become. Don’t we all sometimes need the support of someone else’s faith in us? Our spirits rise and fall, and there are days when we do not feel that we have much worth. Jesus had told his new disciples that they would be transformed from catchers of fish for nourishment of people’s bodies to blessing and healing people in ways that they could not imagine. Jesus wouldn’t leave them were they were.
Simon Peter was obviously a man of extremes, given to swinging from one position to its opposite, with volatile impulsivity. He was full of enthusiasm and vigor, but frequently went beyond appropriate limits and wisdom.
From today’s Gospel: “Jesus began to teach his disciples that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. But turning and looking at His disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.” The last night of Jesus’ life, “You will never wash my feet.” Then Peter’s denial of Jesus on Good Friday. Certainly, plenty of great fails, don’t you think? Some might even be seen as catastrophic. However, these fails didn’t define the Peter that Jesus knew! It is likely that the only reason we have the story of Simon Peter’s denials in our Gospel canon is that he had the humility to tell it himself. Peter must have shared how his horrid shame was overcome by mercy, when he failed the One who would never fail him. He probably witnessed to others about the endless blessings of Jesus and told how he felt when Jesus sent for him by name, even after he had betrayed him. Imagine Peter getting a far-off look in his eyes and adding, “Someday I’ll stand in the judgement hall of God, and, in that moment, he will do for me what I failed to do for him in his hour of greatest need. There will come to my ears the sound of my best friend’s voice saying, “Yes, I do know him, Father, he is one of us.”
Sometimes in a job interview the candidate is asked, “Tell me about a time you failed.” How do we answer that question? We don’t want to tell too much and give the prospective employer reason for doubt. The consensus says that we should respond to the question in a way that will highlight our resilience and commitment to learning and progress, then the interviewer will likely remember how you prevailed, not how you failed.
So, I ask all of us. Think about a time you failed. What happened? Who knew about your failure? Was it a colossal one where lots of people saw it? Or was it a private one that only you and God knew about? Then what happened? Was it a failure that you could fix? It is my prayer that it hasn’t defined you! Father Tom used to say, “the only way to humility was through humiliation.” For me, I know that a stumble is on the way when I become a little too confident and proud. A little wine spilled on the Altar linen or a stumble reading the Gospel. But there is one more: Bishop Holcomb asked me to serve as his Chaplain at the most recent Diocesan Convention. Right at the end of the service just before the Blessing, I knew that he would need his Crozier (shepherd’s staff), it sits on a small stand with a fancy brass latch. When I released the latch, the Crozier came out and hit me right in the forehead, knocked my glasses off, after it bounced off my head, it landed between my arms and came to rest on my shoulder. So very fortunate that it didn’t hit the floor. I still don’t know if anyone saw it happen!
Do you know that Thomas Edison the inventor of the light bulb said, “I never failed, I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” Michael Jordan – one of the greatest basketball players was cut from his high school team? In an interview with Nike, Michael Jordan said that he had missed more than 9,000 shots, lost more than 300 games and 26 times missed the winning shot.
I have had plenty of failures in my life. Some known only by God and me. Others where I hurt someone I care about deeply. I have sacrificed my family for work. I have said things that I deeply regret. Made choices that I knew that I shouldn’t have. I have had those times when the Holy Spirt prompted me to call or reach out to someone and I didn’t, only to find out later that it’s now too late. Perhaps times that I disappointed Jesus.
Fortunately, God has given me an opportunity to fix some of them, I have apologized to my children, and I have a real relationship with them. My grandchildren know me even though they sometimes call me grumpy butt. All in all, I think they prefer Ya Ya, and they tolerate me. However, they come running to me with a hug. Different than the old days when their parents were young, they all went running when I came home.
As I have grown older, and more mature, my hope is that I will have less and less “I wish I would have moments.”
Fortunately, we serve a God who sees past our failures, and He won’t leave us there unless we choose it. Our failures don’t mean that we are failures.
Failure is when we quit. We can quit on God, but He will never quit on us.
Just because we fail doesn’t mean that we are less loved by God!
Thanks be to God, Amen