The Witness of Failure--November 5, 2020
"In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty; and the hem of his robe filled the temple. Seraphs were in attendance above him; each had six wings; with two they covered their faces, and with two they covered their feet, and with two they flew. And one called to another and said: 'Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts, the whole earth is full of his glory.' The pivots on the thresholds shook at the voices of those who called, and the house was filled with smoke. And I said, 'Woe is me! I am lost, for I am man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!' Then one of the seraphs flew to me, holding a live coal that had been taken from the altar with a pair of tongs. The seraph touched my mouth with it and said: 'Now that this has touched your lips, your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out.' Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, 'Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?' And I said, 'Here am I; send me!' And he said, 'Go and say to this people: Keep listening, but do not comprehend; keep looking, but do not understand. Make the mind of this people dull, and stop their ears, and shut their eyes, so that they may not look with their eyes, and listen with their ears, and comprehend with their minds, and turn and be healed'." [Isaiah 6:1-10]
I am increasingly convinced that the sum of my calling in ministry--and maybe the calling of anybody God chooses to work through--is to fail, publicly and repeatedly. Sometimes that means trying new things and having them crash and burn, and sometimes it means trying to get the same message through to folks, over and over again, only to feel like I'm hitting my head against a brick wall doing it over and over again. I think God has called me to the ministry of failure, and the more I think about it, the more I think that's how God most often works, quite honestly.
I don't mean to suggest that I have permission to be sloppy, or that any of us have permission to try to fail at the things we attempt. This isn't Mel Brooks' The Producers, after all. But I do mean to suggest that God seems intent on working, not through the things that look like success, so much as revealing God's persistent faithfulness and enduring character precisely through human failures. And to hear the words of Isaiah, in his famous "Here am I, send me" call story, that is a feature, not a design flaw, of God's way. It is God's choice to use failure as a medium like a painter might work in oils, acrylics, or watercolor. It is how God reveals God's upside-down power and peculiar glory. And it happens in people like me... or you... or any of us.
Let me back up for a moment. A lot of folks know a tiny sliver of this Bible story--the famous voice from the heavenly throne room asking, "Who will go for us?" and Isaiah's gutsy response, "Here I am, send me." We focus on the idea of answering the call, we imagine ourselves being tapped for a divine assignment as well, and we fixate on the idea of saying our pious "Yes!" to God in some holy calling. Preachers especially eat this stuff up, and we all like to imagine our own life-stories in dramatic terms like this. We even sing beloved hymns with this story as the refrain, "Here I am, Lord... is it I, Lord? I have heard you calling in the night..." That all sounds great.
The trouble is, from the get-go, God tells the would-be prophet that he is being sent to fail. Seriously. From the beginning, Isaiah says he's been told by God that he is going to bring a message from God that the people are not going to listen to, and he is being sent to keep on telling it until the land is empty of people and his nation is a wasteland. He has been sent to bring a message that no one will like, and when he is met with resistance and rejection, Isaiah is supposed to keep bringing the same message rather than change it to something more palatable for the people or that sounds like a more successful sales pitch. He has been sent as a witness, precisely in the way his message will fail. Hmmmm... small wonder nobody writes hymns and worship songs about that part of the story, right?
But here is the secret to God's clever plans to work through failure. God reveals through our failures, first off, that God doesn't require our kinds of success to accomplish God's purposes. God doesn't rely on loud, angry shouting or intimidating bluster to persuade. God doesn't have to look successful at any given moment still to be at work in a situation. And God doesn't need to constantly prove to anybody that God is a "winner." God is perfectly content to work slowly, steadily, and steadfastly, even while the powers of the day write God off.
Second of all, God's work through failures like Isaiah's, mine, and yours, actually reveals that God is more committed to being faithful and true than to being popular and in the spotlight. It's important that the message God gives to Isaiah doesn't change, even when he is soundly rejected. When Isaiah says things like "Learn to do good, cease doing evil, do justice, rescue the oppressed, and defend orphans and widows," like in the first chapter of his book, or when he envisions a day when all nations will come streaming into the heart of his country where God will welcome them with open arms and teach them all how to lay down their weapons, like in Isaiah 2, he doesn't walk back those messages in the event that the people don't like them. Unlike every spin-doctoring politician and boastful candidate in history, God doesn't change the message that justice matters more than money, or that the vulnerable are to be specially cared for, even when it would be easier to find a winning message that would just stroke the egos of the people. When Isaiah goes with the same message over and over again to people who just don't get it, or won't listen, or think it applies to somebody else, he is actually revealing a God who won't give up on the importance of justice and mercy for all people, even when it's a hard political sell. My goodness, we need that kind of witness--and, as I think about it, that may only be possible through failure. If people love your message from the get-go, there's always the lingering question of whether you said it to make them like you or because it is true. But if Isaiah keeps speaking and the people keep covering up their ears, his witness is that God isn't just interested in what polls well, but what is true and just and loving.
And then third, God's persistence through Isaiah's failures says something about God's refusal to give up--on Isaiah, or on the people. Let that sink in for a moment. God calls and sends Isaiah, knowing that he will be run out of town over and over again, and then he'll be sent back to do it all over again, as a living witness of how God's love works. God doesn't send a warrior to impress the people with divine firepower. God doesn't send a rich king to wow them with wealth. God doesn't send anybody who looks like "winner" at all--but in fact, God chooses to reveal God's own self through the meager power of human words that most people choose not to listen to when they are spoken. That means it's not just what the prophet says that reveals something about God--it's the way the message comes. God chooses to come through the rejectable, unimpressive, unintimidating presence of a human being, speaking words to unlistening ears and to the places of power, knowing that they won't listen... and doing it anyway. God's choice to keep loving, to keep calling the people to turn, to keep insisting on justice, and to keep lifting up the needs of the vulnerable, the poor, the foreigners, and the outcasts reveals what really matters, and how God doesn't give up when when would all have bailed out long ago. God loves through the failures, and then keeps on loving. God keeps speaking, even when we don't listen, and God keeps on speaking. God insists on justice and mercy and decency, even when we sell out for crookedness and cruelty, and God keeps on insisting anyway. That, honestly, is a God worth giving our lives to.
So if you have found yourself, whether lately or for a long time, feeling like you wrestle with failing, I have good news: the best way to witness to the strange glory of the God we have is to fail. Not to avoid trying, and not to be sloppy, but to put your heart and nerve and sinew into speaking and embodying God's message of justice and mercy, and then to have it fall flat on its face, and to get up and do it all over again. It is, in the words of Rudyard Kipling, to "make a heap of all your winnings, and risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss, and lose... and start again at your beginnings, and never breathe a word about your loss." That's what God kept doing through the prophets, from Isaiah to Jeremiah to Micah to Amos, and even to Jesus himself, who kept pointing out in his teachings that the surest hallmark of a true prophet was that nobody listened to them and they got branded as holy troublemakers.
It is terribly easy to be overwhelmed these days if you have felt like you are trying your best to be a voice of goodness among a lot of voices of rottenness. And if you have been there, or are there right now, I'm sorry for the hurt of it. I'm sorry for the pain. I'm sorry for what feels like the futility of beating our collective heads against the wall and wondering why it doesn't make a difference, and why hearts you do your blessedest to reach with love and justice seem bent in on selfishness and meanness. I can't promise you any way to be more successful--in fact, if I had such a gimmick, that would be the first sign you shouldn't listen to me. What I can say is that the more I spend time in the Scriptures, the more I am convinced that what feels like failure is quite possibly God's most potent witness to a world hell-bent on looking like "winners" but which actually needs the upside down power of death and resurrection, rather than a boastful claim of victory that rings hollow before too long.
On the days you most feel like a failure, good news--you are in the company of Isaiah and all the other true prophets, of lots of faithful failures right here and now, and of Jesus himself, whose way of achieving victory looks exactly like a cross-shaped defeat.
Go, let your faithful failures be a witness today. The world needs it--whether it knows it or not.
Lord God, here we are. Send us. We are ready to fail our best for you.
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