God's Last Words

Finishing Things
Luke 14: 25-33 (NRSV)

64 year old Donna Nyad recently finished swimming from Havana, Cuba to Florida. It took her 55 hours and was accomplished after she failed in her first 4 attempts over 30 years. Most of us would have stopped trying after the first or second attempt. 

A Chinese proverb says, “The great question is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with failure.”  

Dickens wrote: “Every failure teaches a man something, if he will but learn.” 

An airliner is flying across country, when the pilot comes on the PA to announce, "We have some bad news. One of the engines just failed and as a result, we will be delayed by 30 minutes." 

20 minutes later, the pilot returns, "we have some more bad news. Another engine just failed, and we will be delayed an additional hour."  

A few minutes later, "Sorry folks, more bad news. A third engine just failed, and so, since we will be running only on the one remaining engine, the flight will be delayed by another two hours." 

At this point, a disgruntled passenger turns to his neighbor and says, "I sure hope that last engine keeps working or else we'll be up here all night!" 

Did you know the FAA has a device for testing the strength of windshields on airplanes? They point this thing at the windshield of the aircraft and shoot a dead chicken at about the speed the aircraft normally flies at it. If the windshield doesn't break, it's likely to survive a real collision with a bird during flight. 

The British had recently built a new locomotive that could pull a train faster than any before it.  They were not sure that its windshield was strong enough so they borrowed the testing device from the FAA, reset it to approximate the maximum speed of the locomotive, loaded in the dead chicken, and fired.   

The bird went through the windshield, broke the engineer's chair, and made a major dent in the back wall of the engine cab. They were quite surprised with this result, so they asked the FAA to check the test to see if everything was done

correctly. The FAA checked everything and suggested that they might want to repeat the test using a “thawed” chicken next time.

When I was entering seminary one of the people I knew told me it was a bad idea. I asked him why he felt that way. He told me that because I was a high school dropout he didn’t think I could ever follow through successfully to finish seminary. 

His background prejudiced his judgment against me. He was a retired high school principal and educator who measured success only by graduation rates. He rejected the idea that I was bored with high school by tenth grade. He didn’t care that I had passed the GED test for Pennsylvania with a score in the top five percent of those people ever taking the test. 

I had to admit to him that in some ways I was not your “average” seminary student.

It took me a while to convince him to write a letter of recommendation (I had to show him my college and graduate school transcripts) but first he had to see if I was willing to admit I had failed the school system. I had to prove to him that I had repented and was now willing to play the school game the way it’s supposed to be played. 

You see, God requires repentance before grace: We must learn to submit ourselves to the teachings and expectations of Jesus to become His disciple. To do so is to admit that we are failures in God’s Kingdom. 

In God’s kingdom you aren’t going to just wander in, hang around, not participate in the kingdom, and still get the t-shirt and hat. It won’t just happen. The gift is free but there is a price that costs everything you own. Listen to Jesus telling us the price of His grace: 

Now large crowds were traveling with him; and he turned and said to them, “Whomever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, even life itself, cannot be my disciple.” 

“Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.”  

“For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not first sit down and estimate the cost, to see whether he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it will begin to ridicule him, saying, ‘This fellow began to build and was not able to finish.’ 

Or what king, going out to wage war against another king, will not sit down first and consider whether he is able with ten thousand to oppose the one who comes against him with twenty thousand? If he cannot, then, while the other is far away, he sends a delegation and asks for terms of peace. So therefore, none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.” 

This passage is a parable about our needing to build skills to serve in God’s kingdom – at first we may think the demands impossible and set us up to fail. We eventually learn that the sacrifices and commitment are built over time, otherwise the disciple falls away because of how difficult it is. 

Jesus calls us to serve His Kingdom on a personal level. We must commit all we are and what we do. We must live a life that upholds a biblical perspective on everything we do. It’s called a Christian or Biblical worldview. 

And we can’t act disinterested in the people around us either. 

James is walking on a downtown street one day, and he happens to see his old high school friend, Harry, a little ways up ahead."Harry, Harry, how are you?" he greets his old buddy after getting his attention. 

"Not so good," says Harry. "Why, what happened?" James asks."Well," Harry says, "I just went bankrupt and I've still got to feed my family. I don't know what I'm going to do.""Could have been worse," James replies calmly. "Could have been worse." 

A month or so later, James again encounters Harry, in a restaurant."And how are things now?" he asks."Terrible!" says Harry. "Our house burned down last night."

"Could have been worse," says James, again with little emotion, and goes about his business. 

A month later, James runs into Harry a third time."Well, how goes it?" he asks. "Oh!" says Harry. "Things just get worse and worse. It's one tragedy after another! Now my wife has left me!"Harry nods his head and gives his usual optimistic-seeming little smile, accompanied by his usual words: "could have been worse." 

This time Harry grabs James by the shoulders."Wait a minute!" he says. "I'm not  letting you off so easy this time. Three times in the past few months we've run into one another, and every time I've told you the latest disaster in my life. Every time you say the same thing--"could have been worse."This time, for God's sake, Harry, I want you to tell me -- How in Heaven's name could it have been any worse?" 

James looks at Harry with the same little wisp of a smile."Could have been worse," he says. "Could have happened to me." 

But the opposite “everything happened to me” applies as well.

Now I know some of you get tired of me getting negative and “channeling my anti-Joel Osteen” by ranting away on the evils and pratfalls of our society. You might want to close your ears if you don’t want to hear it!

Many things are blamed on the moral decline of American society as individual rights and truths are nurtured and claimed as the new standards of behavior. It seems as if people have stopped feeling shame for their own failures and sins and spend an awful lot of time blaming others instead. “I didn’t fail – you did!”

My parents failed me, my genetics are bad, my schools and teachers were bad, I was abused mentally and bullied as a child, I got the addiction gene, the fat gene, didn’t have enough money to buy the right clothes, go to the right parties, hang out with the right friends, or go to the right schools. Waa, waa!

 
It ends in personal conspiracies that prevent a person from ever having the right job, the right house, the right boyfriend or girlfriend, and so on always because of someone else.
 
The excuses and complaints become an endless spiral to what I call “hyphenated” living. People define themselves with some characteristic “label” that doesn’t celebrate a positive trait but instead condemns one to a lifelong obligation to be limited in your own mind to being just a statistic such a “recovering alcoholic” or some such.

The truth? Our society has shot itself in the foot and is destroying itself because we no longer hold the family central in our lives. If you don’t value in a family how can you be valuable to others?

The family used to be where we learned everything we needed to know about love, relationship, responsibility, and respect. And despite what some might say, the church and other community organizations had the family’s back. Society acknowledged God’s role in creating the family and held it in high regard.

Within the family each person’s role and expectation came from God’s natural order and depended on each person developing a relationship with God first and then with each other. 

With the advent of instantaneous communications, computers, cell phones, an increasing divorce rate, and other sociological factors, we are in the process of destroying the family and hence any hope we ever have of recovering from the blame game. No wonder church and social organizations are in the toilet. 

Jesus calls us to do the right things in the right ways. We can’t honor our father until we honor God. We can’t learn about how important family is until we belong to God’s family.  And even failure can teach us not to quit.  

As Christians, the most important aspect of life is to recognize that we can only succeed if we admit failure. Amen.