In some mysterious way, the continuing possibility of failure is what makes games worth playing. And life worth living? Self-help writer Susan Jeffers commented that if you were magically offered the chance to know exactly how the rest of your life would unfold, you’d be a fool to accept, even if what you learned was 100% positive. Afterwards, living that life would feel like a kind of death: Game Over [Oliver Burkeman, The Guardian, Saturday 30 March 2013].
That is probably a very off-beat way of commencing a sermon based on today’s Gospel reading about ancient seating arrangements. And before I try to link it in with what I plan to say, I want to emphasise that Susan Jeffers’ statement is something you already know as true. You and I have been in situations where we undertook a task that might not have succeeded: failure had been a real prospect. And achieving in the face of failure is life’s very sweet success story.
In the last quarter of 2009 Terry Robson, a free-lance journalist who co-edits the WellBeing magazine and is a frequent presenter with the ABC Talking Health program, wrote to a number of Australians who worked with people in crisis. I was one of those he contacted. He asked first about how I dealt with other’s people’s sense of failure and then how I handled my own. These questions touched many of the forgotten wounds deep within me. Here is part of my reply:
Failure, as I see it, is also energy for creativity and moving forward. I am not abandoned; I am a person with resources and companions. Long ago I gave up believing in an interventionist God and yet I know that I am not the master of my fate. Whatever I understand by the word God is in part summed up by contact with another where love and justice awaken each to the other’s possibilities. I learn to look the other person in the eye and see there the soul and spirit of the same life-force that also engages me. Whatever has impelled me to this, it is a possibility for creativity … As my lips shape the word ‘God’, my gaze embraces the man or woman who has just entered my personal space. I learn to see my face in the face of that other and at once to catch a glimpse of the divine life that links us to each other. Embracing ‘otherness’ is the essence of creativity (quoted from a personal interview).
As we turn to the Gospel reading, ‘catch a glimpse of the divine life that links us to each other’. We have experienced the emptiness of being unnoticed in a crowded room. We have lost a lifetime relationship and wondered if love would be restored. We were dismissed as a failure as a child and wondered if life had any purpose. And then hope stepped in and we learnt to see ourselves, and those around us, differently. That glimpse of possibility was like life after a death, an awakening from a nightmare, an uplift after a devastation.
Luke had this theme firmly in view when, in his chapter 9, he quoted Jesus as saying you have to lose your life before you can save it (verse 24). He carried that urgency through chapter 13 where he noted Jesus’ comment that ‘the first’ must become ‘last’ and again here in chapter 14 verse 10, that ‘the humble will be exalted’.
All this is more than a story about ‘self-interest’ (as perhaps suggested in verses 12-14) or that ‘humility’ has its own reward. It recognises that the life-force in us brings with it ‘a possibility for creativity’. As I write and say this, I know there is no simple answer to life’s catastrophes so I don’t want here to offer Jesus’ words as some platitude for successful living.
At this point in the preparation of the address I read the booklet Mental Illness and Suicide: A Family Guide to Facing and Reducing the Risks, produced by the World Federation for Mental Health. There are devastations in all our lives that drive us to despair – and there are no simple answers.
All we can do is to respond to life’s tragedies, and failures, without pretension. Perhaps the Serenity Prayer in its original form could be more regularly on our lips:
God, give me grace to accept with serenity
the things that cannot be changed,
Courage to change the things
which should be changed,
and the Wisdom to distinguish
the one from the other.
Living one day at a time,
Enjoying one moment at a time,
Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace,
Taking, as Jesus did,
This sinful world as it is,
Not as I would have it,
Trusting that You will make all things right,
If I surrender to Your will,
So that I may be reasonably happy in this life,
And supremely happy with You forever in the next.
[Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971)
When Jesus long ago sat with his social equals, the conversation was not about toll collectors and sinners – society’s lost and degraded. There was no downward glance at the less fortunate and no pretence of token generosity. This dinner hour was a time for friendship and communal sharing. There is evidence from the text that Jesus was present as an equal. He was a man like every other person there who loved God’s word, the Torah, and sought to live by it. Generosity to the poor was the mark of piety.
We rub shoulders with our social equals every day. There, it is easy to parade our wisdom and our charity to those outside our social frame, but here, where we are best known, our failings and sometimes our meanness are too easily evident. We tread cautiously around each other’s pretences. In the context of friendship and common life, the failings we hide behind our success story can be obvious.
We meet, as we do now, and everyone is expected to play by the same rules. It is when someone interrupts our conventions that the deepest resentments follow. The text describes such an occasion where the seating arrangements of each person displayed or represented their communal role and their self-importance.
Now Luke, as we have seen on other occasions, was telling this story to the first century church. Like us they gathered around a common meal that centred on the Eucharist. Their social distinctions of master and slave, man and women, rich and poor raised constant friction (read the Epistle of James): the social hierarchy carried over to church. We may be bound by a common faith but education, social status, ethnic difference can still be barriers to communication and acceptance. We too often conceal our failings with bravado and conformity.
Let’s press the image. Our social status often hangs on how other people see us. Very naturally we want to be viewed in the best light – but sometimes at what cost? A tragic story comes to mind. In the middle years of the HIV+ crisis I took many funerals of young men – mostly young men – struck down by an AIDS related disease. The church was packed to remember and celebrate a young up and coming fashion designer. The grieving family arrived and sat noticeably distant from their son’s friends and lover. When I suggested they come together and be reconciled in a love shared, the father said bitterly he could never tell anyone in the RSL Club how his son had died. ‘Failure’ was his only whispered final word.
In the years since, I have met the same cold responses from people who feel the need to play the privilege game. They are always looking for the best seats in the house. Jesus challenged this commitment to hierarchy. There is a subtlety in the text that our reading of it will have obscured. Last week, the text was about an arthritic woman, today’s reading arises out of an account about a man with dropsy. For some strange reason those who devised the lectionary left it out – we skipped from verse 1 to verse 7 ignoring this key theme. But the whole argument in today’s reading hangs on those parallel encounters. Jesus’ response to the woman and man, as well as to the critics, was that a willingness to stand in the place of human loss transcends all the rules of social convention.
Luke was at pains to emphasise gender equality in God’s kingdom; this is a characteristic of his writing. It is a key to the way he understood Christian community. He showed us Jesus, able to look beyond the conventions and ‘catch a glimpse of the divine life that links us to each other’. He urged us to stand in the other’s shoes for a moment and to discover what life may be like from their perspective. At least, taking the lowest place may give us a better and more comprehensive view of the life. And at that place we can often see what looks like failure as an opportunity to search for a new way.
Standing at that place has some radical consequences. We stop to listen to another person, with our senses fully attuned to what they are saying. And only then do we hear a hint of what life means for them and where their search lies. You don’t rush in with advice; you have no idea where the conversation will take you. You die for that moment to your own will to dominate; to shift the image back to the text, you take the lowest seat. You sense the courage of a person who has momentarily lowered their own defences. As you lower your defence you ‘learn to see your face in the face of that other and at once to catch a glimpse of the divine life that links you to each other. Embracing ‘otherness’ is the essence of creativity’.
I wonder what that would mean for a conversation about the boundaries of religion, ethnicity and sexuality. If we lowered our defences, how better might we discover the richness in Indigenous culture or the courage of boat people? What sort of church might evolve from people more willing to listen than to parade their ideologies? We need to stop talking and thinking failure and start living courageously, with hope.
I stopped to watch the MissionBeat driver sit with a man on a bench in Hyde Park. I was close enough to hear the conversation. They were old hands at this interchange; they knew each other’s names. The man on the bench spoke about family and home lost, and the failure that had marked his days. The MissionBeat driver lent close and offered him a lift to the nearest shelter. There was more to this story than the casual observer might catch. I caught ‘a glimpse of the divine life that links us to each other’.
I sat an entire evening in the Drying-Out Centre in Darwin. Police vans came constantly with intoxicated long-grass men and women. I watched the Centre workers wash the soiled clothes of family and clan members. I didn’t hear preaching, I just saw gentle, genuine hands and caught ‘a glimpse of the divine life that links us to each other’.
Seated around the common table of life we learn:
to look the other person in the eye and see there the soul and spirit of the same life-force that also engages us. Whatever has impelled us to this, it is a possibility for creativity … As our lips shape the word ‘God’, our gaze embraces the man or woman who has just entered our personal space. We learn to see our face in the face of that other and at once to catch a glimpse of the divine life that links us to each other. Embracing ‘otherness’ is the essence of creativity.
God, give me grace to accept with serenity
the things that cannot be changed,
Courage to change the things
which should be changed,
and the Wisdom to distinguish
the one from the other.
Living one day at a time,
Enjoying one moment at a time,
Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace,
Taking, as Jesus did,
This sinful world as it is,
Not as I would have it,
Trusting that You will make all things right,
If I surrender to Your will,
So that I may be reasonably happy in this life,
And supremely happy with You forever in the next.
A Meditation Homily based on the Gospel reading for the Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Luke 14:1,7-14.
Bill Lawton
30 August 2013