failure – Big Circumstance

Jeremiah 31:31-34

It’s that time of year when sign-ups to health clubs and gyms breed like rabbits. Yet in a few months’ time, many of the direct debits will still be going out from bank accounts, but a lot of the new fitness enthusiasts of January will have given up. The thought of ‘New year, new me’ will lie in tatters. Another set of New Year’s Resolutions will have failed.

Maybe that’s why I haven’t bothered with such resolutions for many years. I feel sure I’ll fail.

So much of life is made up of failures – cheerful thought, I know! – be they failures of good intentions or that much larger feeling that our lives themselves are a total failure. Not one of us is without our failures.

But on this first Sunday of the New Year, when we renew our covenant with God, and we traditionally become sombre and serious, wondering whether we can keep the solemn and intimidating promises we make, I want to preach Good News.

In my draft order of service, I simply called this sermon ‘The New Covenant.’ But now I want to give it a different title: ‘Good News For Failures.’ I want you to have a sense of hope from our reading in Jeremiah.

Yes, I know many people have Jeremiah down as a depressing and depressive prophet of doom. But if you read him closely, he preaches short-term doom but long-term hope. And that’s why we can have a theme of ‘Good News For Failures.’

I have two pieces of Good News from Jeremiah for Failures:

Firstly, God’s New Covenant means Failures Are Not Forgotten:

³¹‘The days are coming,’ declares the Lord,
    ‘when I will make a new covenant
with the people of Israel
    and with the people of Judah.
³²It will not be like the covenant
    I made with their ancestors
when I took them by the hand
    to lead them out of Egypt,
because they broke my covenant,
    though I was a husband to them,’
declares the Lord.

Jeremiah has preached doom to Israel. He warned them that if they did not turn from their sins the king of Babylon would come and conquer them and take them into exile. They didn’t listen. They thought they could find political solutions to their troubles without changing their ways while continuing to sin.

It didn’t work. The Babylonian army turned up. At this point, a first tranche of Israel has been marched off into Babylon. They are away from the land, which was so central to their religion, because it had been promised to them by God. If they are away from their own land, then surely they are forgotten and rejected by God for ever.

Yet Jeremiah comes with this word and others that looks forward to the future. God has not finished with his people. They may have broken the old covenant, but he will make a new covenant.

And of course, that is what the coming of Jesus at Christmas is about. If you re-read the nativity stories you will see how many of the promises don’t simply look forward to Christianity and the Church (which is the way we often read them) but are promises to Israel. God has not forgotten and rejected his people. His own Son is bringing the promised new covenant.

Now we Gentile believers are grafted onto the vine which is the People of God, and so we too are inheritors of this same promise. When we fail, God has not forgotten us.

If we come to this Covenant Service this morning conscious of how much we have not lived up to our promise a year ago, we come to a God of grace who in Jesus Christ offers us yet another new beginning. Just as we confess our sins every Sunday morning together and receive assurance of forgiveness, so too year on year at this service we shall confess our sins before we renew the covenant and again receive God’s promise of a fresh start.

Every now and again, I come across people in church who believe that God cannot continue forgiving them. A few will even say they think they have committed ‘The unforgivable sin.’ However, Jesus said the unforgivable sin was blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, and if someone is sensitive to their sin then believe me that usually indicates they are also sensitive to the Holy Spirit.

No: to everyone who fails, I believe God invites us to look at Jesus on the Cross and see his arms stretched out wide – so wide they embrace the world, including us.

Those who are excluded from his embrace are those who exclude themselves not simply by sinning but by refusing to accept they have sinned, perhaps painting their sin as righteousness (often self-righteousness), and thinking they have no need to repent.

But to those of us who are acutely aware of our need to repent, God says, I have not forgotten you. I have not rejected you. Come back. You will find I am already waiting for you.

Secondly, God’s New Covenant Means Failures Have New Hope:

³³‘This is the covenant that I will make with the people of Israel
    after that time,’ declares the Lord.
‘I will put my law in their minds
    and write it on their hearts.
I will be their God,
    and they will be my people.
³⁴No longer will they teach their neighbour,
    or say to one another, “Know the Lord,”
because they will all know me,
    from the least of them to the greatest,’
declares the Lord.
‘For I will forgive their wickedness
    and will remember their sins no more.’

Neatly for me, this gives me a chance to link back to my sermon for the Fourth Sunday of Advent, when I looked at the relationship between Jesus and Moses. To recap part of it:

In the Old Testament, people were not saved by the Law but by grace. Keeping the Law did not save people, rather it was a response to having been saved. We can see this by the fact that God only gave Moses the Law for Israel after he had delivered them from Egypt.

Nevertheless, it was external to the people. It showed God’s righteousness, but it did not convey the power to obey it. On the other hand, the Christmas promise is that Jesus is Emmanuel, God with us, and when Jesus returns to the Father that changes to the Holy Spirit, God within us.

Now link that with what Jeremiah records God as saying here. The external Law will be replaced in the New Covenant with everyone knowing the Lord. In other words, the New Covenant promises God’s indwelling of every disciple.

Not only that, we do not have to depend on priests to mediate between us and God – again, because everyone will know the Lord.

We don’t have to struggle to know God, we don’t have to struggle to know his law, and we are also enabled with divine power to do his will.

Yes, we shall still fail from time to time, and God in his mercy will forgive us and lift us up. But we shall also find God’s own strength when we truly want to obey his will.

The Old Covenant was good – it was very good – but the New Covenant is like that moment when you are driving in your car, gently accelerating, but then the turbo cuts in, and whoosh!

The New Covenant contains not only the Old Covenant promises of forgiveness, but the additional promises of God’s presence and power with us. This is God’s side of the bargain. This is his generous, grace-filled offer to every disciple of the Messiah.

So when we come to renew our promises today, I want us to realise that we are not coming to a severe God who is ready to stoke the flames of Hell the moment we let him down. He is the God of mercy and love who has provided everything we need through the Cross of Christ. Forgiveness comes there. The restoration of our relationship with God comes there. The gift of the Spirit follows.

If we remember that this is the nature of our God who calls us to reaffirm our covenant with him, then perhaps we shall be more ready to make those challenging promises.

After all, we’re not making a New Year’s Resolution, we’re responding to God’s grace.

All sorts of jobs have particular pressures today. My work as a minister certainly has. There is all sorts of pressure against whatever might be regarded as failure:

* In the light of numerical church decline, many churches are looking for a hero to ride over the horizon and come to their rescue. I have seen Methodist profiles where circuits explicitly seek a minister ‘with a proven record of church growth’.

* In a culture where we are increasingly regarded as employees in principle, even if not (yet?) legally – appraisals and reviews, ‘letters of understanding’ about new appointments – people think they can have their say, and if they don’t think ministers are meeting their expectations – whether they are reasonable or not – they turn the screw.

* It is seen in other professions. Politicians think they can harvest extra votes by more quickly dismissing ‘failing’ teachers.

* Alongside the above reasons, there are cases where a minister has behaved in a manner unbecoming of their calling, and the church authorities have glossed it over.

* The opposite has happened: a congregation has been allowed to get away with bullying its minister, and the church hierarchy has been more interested in preserving a fictional facade of niceness that a wounded minister limps off elsewhere, or maybe is lost to the ministry.

* As implied in the last point, there is a culture of ‘pretend’, if not of outright dishonesty, that pervades too many churches, which makes it difficult for people, ministers especially, to be open and vulnerable about their fears.

In the light of all this and more, an American pastor called J R Briggs organised a conference last year called the Epic Fail Pastors’ Conference, and he’s doing the same again this year. It’s in the USA, so my expenses won’t quite stretch, so I won’t be there (although apparently last year one delegate flew from Australia). They are deliberately not meeting in a flash convention centre in a fashionable city. They aren’t announcing any big names. Much of the schedule is taken up with ‘time together’.

I nearly typed that I wished them a ‘successful’ conference, but that would open up an interesting conversation about what truly constitutes success. But I do wish all the participants healing, hope and peace.

Failure. Now there’s a word for this blog lately. Nothing except links since 5th December. There are reasons, but best not mentioned publicly. Even my pre-Christmas sermons are not here. In some cases, I wrote one and changed to an old one on the spur of the moment.

Anyhow, by way of dipping my toe gently back in the water, a couple at church gave us a beautiful book for Christmas. Lion And Lamb: The Relentless Tenderness Of Jesus by Brennan Manning. I’ve been savouring chapter 4, ‘The Affluent Poor’. It’s the chapter that contains the words

we were created from the clay of the earth and the kiss of God’s mouth (p 55)

that Julie Miller read, recounted to Emmylou Harris, and which became Emmylou’s remarkable song about God’s longing for humans, ‘Here I Am‘, on her CD ‘Stumble Into Grace‘:

But it’s a passage three pages later that has stayed with me. Here goes:

Children have no past. They abandon themselves to the reality of the present moment. The one who is childlike is not surprised that he often stumbles. He picks himself up again without discouragement, each time more determined to get where he’s going.

I saw that in action last week. As compensation for not having a summer holiday this year due to our August move, we took them to Lapland UK. Part of the experience was half an hour’s ice skating. I say ice skating, the surface was synthetic in order to reduce the carbon footprint of the event. Rebekah has ice skated once or twice before, with older friends. Mark – this was his first time. Usually he displays my cautious traits, but he went on the ice without hesitation. Five times he fell down. Five times he got up and continued, sometimes with the help of his sister.

They say that failure is not falling, failure is only when we do not get back up after falling. Brennan Manning is someone who knows about that. Despite his faith, he ended up an alcoholic. But God lifted him up and gave him a wonderful appreciation of grace and ‘the fierce love’ of Jesus.

In the summer of 2009, I felt like not getting up again. I was close to quitting the ministry, or at least coming out of it for a few years. I couldn’t say anything about it here on the blog, and I still wouldn’t go public about the causes. I’ll only say that moral failure wasn’t involved – just to prove that at heart I’m probably a Pharisee. It was other people, notably my Chair of District, who helped me to my feet again, and enabled me to find a more fruitful place.

Thank God for the people he uses to lift us up when we fall.

What do you make of this quote? Is it faith or just the power of positive thinking?

India missions leader P G Vargis wrote recently:

“Put yourself in a growth environment. Certain fish grow according to the size of the environment. Put them in a small aquarium and they remain small. It is said that if you put a baby shark in a small aquarium of 6 inches the shark will grow to that size only. Release it into the ocean and it will grow to their intended size. And you are the same! If you spend your time with the wrong crowd in the wrong place doing the wrong things, you will never experience growth.

“I do not criticize other servants of God. So I do not associate with those who criticize others. I believe in success and so I do not sit with those who always talk about failure, attacks and persecution. I associate with people who talk about opportunity, success, result, victory, peace, growth and mega churches. And I let these qualities rub off onto me as I also try to do this to them.”

From the Web Evangelism Bulletin.

Tag: failure

Covenant Service: Good News For Failures (Jeremiah 31:31-34)

Hope For ‘Failing’ Pastors

Brennan Manning On Failure

Thoughts From P G Vardis

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