Mistaken
Sermon at Pilgrim Congregational
Church
Jeff Jarvis
We all make mistakes… don’t we? And when we do mess up, don’t
we say by way of excuse, “We’re only human”? We’re not perfect. We’re not God. God doesn’t make mistakes… does he?
Well, I used to think he didn’t – until I started teaching
These past few weeks, I’ve had the privilege of teaching our preteen
students. (That is why you had not seen me in uniform in the choir before last
week… And yes, that is certainly why the choir was sounding so much better
until then....) I want to highly recommend taking a turn teaching our children.
It has been a great experience. I’ll admit that I was nervous about facing the
silent stares of youth. But, as you know, our kids are smart and charming and
talking with them for a brief time each week is a real joy.
And though the job brings no pay, it does bring a fringe
benefit: Teaching has taught me, too. Both from preparing for the lessons and
from listening to the students, I learned some important answers to questions I
happened to be asking myself, questions on the very topic I planned to address
this morning: That is, questions about mistakes.
I decided to talk about mistakes the next time Ginnie hornswoggled
me into giving a sermon way back in February, when I saw Mel Gibson’s film, The
Passion of The Christ. I won’t subject you to a movie review but I should tell
you that I did not much like the movie because I don’t accept Gibson’s use of
unremitting violence to make his point or his view of God as the vengeful judge.
I also was troubled that there was essentially no message of grace and
redemption – which, I would have thought, was the point. I am not saying that the
millions who saw and appreciated the film are wrong about it. But like any
attempt at art, it speaks to some and not to others. And like any discussion of
religion, there are many perspectives -- and there are far more questions than
answers.
But seeing the movie did bring me back to a most fundamental
question – and now to a most shocking confession from a member of your church.
It’s even more shocking coming from a member of the Dianconate, from someone
who’s teaching your children in church school, from a former religion major,
from the brother of a minister, from someone who has the audacity to stand up
here today. That confession:
I never understood the crucifixion.
I actually wondered whether I was living a lie as a Christian
if I could not understand the foundational event of Christianity. This was more
than a matter of missing church school one Sunday. This was an essential lack
of understanding on my part.
I could not understand how God would permit or expect such a
deed as this: the tortured death of his own son. But more important, I could
not understand how the crucifixion led to its message, to our faith’s belief in
eternal life and God’s grace. I could not make that connection. Oh, I tried.
But I failed.
I especially could not understand this through the God of Gibson’s
eyes: a God who would demand vengeance and sacrifice – even of his son – for
man’s sins, for breaking the laws God himself had handed down. How could this
be a God of grace?
But then I suddenly started to think about all this from a new
perspective. I may be wrong about this but I came to wonder whether the real
message of the crucifixion is this:
We can make any mistake and God will forgive us. We can make
even the gravest imaginable mistake – we, mankind, can murder God’s own son –
and still, God will forgive us and life will go on, even eternally.
We are that free.
I came to see the crucifixion, then, as the greatest mistake possible.
Our mistake.
Now that may be obvious to you. Or it may be obviously wrong
to you. But for me, this finally started to make some sense.
So I started thinking about mistakes.
And it so happened that when I picked up the church school
curriculum, I found that the first lesson was about Adam and Eve and their colossal
mistakes. God told them not to eat the fruit of that tree… but they did. And we
know what happened next: Eve was condemned to suffer pain in childbirth. Adam
had to toil in the earth to eat: “By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread
until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken,” God told him,
“you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” And that serpent was condemned to
eat that dust. Yes, they made a mistake: the first one and a big one.
The church school curriculum is very good at reminding us
that our real purpose is to relate the Bible to the lives of the children.
That’s good for us teachers, too, because it forces us to look at these stories
we know so well through new lenses, to consider their meaning in new light.
In the case of Adam and Eve, the curriculum emphasizes three
fundamental lessons:
First, mistakes have consequences. Children hear that all the
time, of course, from us and from their teachers … and, if they really messed
up, from their assistant principals. Here they were hearing it from the Bible:
Mistakes have consequences. Cause and effect is a law of life and of nature and
of God. So in class, we talked about what happens when we make a mistake. We may
get punished. We may simply lose an opportunity to get something we wanted.
Mistakes matter.
But the second lesson is that even after making a mistake and
suffering the consequences, life goes on. So, we mess up. It happens. We’re
human. It is not – as it very well could have been for Adam and Eve – the end
of the world. The important thing, we tell our children, is to learn from the
mistake and not make it again and to be better for it.
The third and most important lesson of Adam and Eve is, of
course, that we have the freedom to make mistakes. In the end, having that
freedom –at the risk making mistakes and with the fear of the consequences that
result – is better than living even in Eden. So in class, we talked about
Two weeks later, what should we end up studying in church
school but the story of Noah. Of course, you know this story as well: Man was
messing up, making mistakes so grievous in God’s eyes that he decided to
destroy every living thing. Except there was this one good man, Noah, and God
assigned him to save a bit of life.
As we read this story in class, I came to see it, too, in a
new light: This is really a story about God making a mistake, isn’t it? Here’s
the dénouement in Genesis:
“The Lord saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in
the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only
evil continually. And the Lord was sorry that he had made humankind on the
earth and it grieved him to his heart. And so the Lord said, ‘I will blot out
from the earth the human beings I have created – people together with animals
and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them.’
”
Now that is what I call an admission of a mistake. It did not
take very long at all for us to blow it. Noah was the first person born after
the death of Adam and so in the time it took for one man, the original man, to
live and die, God’s view of his creation fell from “it was good” to “oh,
nevermind.”
But as we talked in class, I saw that view was wrong. God’s
real mistake was not in making mankind – but in almost destroying mankind.
After Noah saved humanity and animals of every sort, he found land and roasted animals
on a fire and the smell rose to become a heavenly scent and this pleased God.
And God saw that it would have been wrong to destroy this life. God vowed not
to do it again. The happy ending from Genesis that you heard read this morning:
“The Lord said in his heart, ‘I will never again curse the
ground because of humankind, for the inclination of the human heart is evil
from youth; nor will I ever again destroy every living creature as I have done.
As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and
winter, day and night, shall not cease.’ ”
And the progression from Adam and Eve through Noah and
Abraham and the laws of Moses intended to deal with our mistakes and up through
Jesus and the Crucifixion and the Resurrection became clear to me, sitting in
Even God makes mistakes.
Even God learns from mistakes.
God forgives mistakes, whether they are Eve’s or Adam’s or
the ancient Romans’ … or ours.
And so, God expects us to admit and forgive our mistakes and
those of others.
I’ve spent the last few Sundays trying to relate these things
to the lives of our children. But, of course, it relates to our lives every
day.
Let’s start with an object lesson we’ve all heard a lot about
lately. Let’s start with Dan Rather.
As you know, Mr. Rather aired a report about President Bush’s
military service that was based in good measure on what were purported to be
newly uncovered documents from the ‘70s. But only a few hours later, a bunch of
webloggers online retyped those memos in modern Microsoft Word and revealed them
to be likely and clumsy forgeries. Mr. Rather immediately complained about a
“counterattack” by “partisan political operatives” (otherwise known as …
voters). He was sure he had not made a mistake.
But what he should have said to those webloggers who
questioned and corrected him was, “thank you.” He should have seen that these webloggers
could help him get to the truth. After all, truth is supposed to be the chief
product of his business (and mine), isn’t it? How much better it would have
been if he’d conceded from the first that he could be wrong, that he is only
human… that yes, even he, even Dan Rather, can make a mistake.
Ah, but that’s just the problem, isn’t it: Pride got in the way.
It got in the way for 12 days. Mr. Rather doesn’t want to admit he’s human
because he thinks of himself as an institution, a paragon of journalism. But he
made a mistake – most likely, an honest mistake. He just couldn’t bring himself
to admit that.
We hate to make mistakes but we hate more admitting them.
Journalism is hardly alone in this. Mistakes are certainly an
issue in politics, too.
Note recent efforts to get President Bush to talk about his
mistakes. He was asked at a press conference to name some mistakes he has made
and learned from and he was as flummoxed as I’ve ever seen him – and I’ve seen
him flummoxed. At one of the debates, he was asked the same question and, once
more, had no answer. But then again, that’s understandable, for we are not accustomed
to admitting mistakes in this culture. He surely feared having any admission of
a mistake waved in front of him at every opportunity on every campaign
commercial.
Sen. Kerry has been little better at talking about his
mistakes. Bill Clinton certainly took too long to admit that he was human and
made mistakes. Yet once he finally did confess, voters forgave him. They
re-elected him. Look, too, at our governor, Jim McGreevey: Before it was public,
he came out and admitted a mistake and that threw water on the firestorm that otherwise
surely would have erupted.
On a more momentous matter, I greatly admire how British
Prime Minister Tony Blair handled the question of weapons of mass destruction
in
In business, too, we see that admitting a mistake upfront is
far better than having it uncovered. For when you don’t fess up, a simple
mistake can turn into a big lie. That’s true in public life. It’s true in
private life. Every one of us could stand up right now and give examples like
these of mistakes we’ve made and problems we’ve had admitting them and lessons
we’ve learned in the end.
And so how should we learn from the mistakes of ours and of others?
First, we have to admit that we are human and that we can be
wrong. Not to do that is a form of hubris and pride, as if to say that we’re
too good to make mistakes. But the second time we make a mistake is not equal
to the first, it’s much worse. For we should have known better the next time.
That’s why so often it’s not the crime that gets you in real trouble, it’s the
coverup. Ask Richard Nixon or Dan Rather or Bill Clinton or Martha Stewart…
Second, we have to learn from our mistakes. If we did not allow
ourselves to be wrong, we would never try anything new, we would never
discover, we would never learn. Imagine if scientists were frightened of
errors. Thomas Edison never would have invented the light bulb. Mistakes are a
key to knowledge. Isn’t that the real lesson of Adam and Eve? The tree of
knowledge is the tree of mistakes.
Third, we have to realize that others will forgive us our
mistakes just as God forgives us. That, in many ways, is the hardest lesson. Fear
is what keeps us from admitting an error, isn’t it? But think back: Every time
you’ve messed up with your wife or husband or parents or child or with a friend
or a colleague at work or a member here, if you admitted the error and begged
their pardon, didn’t they give you that pardon?
And finally, we need to remind ourselves to return the favor:
When others make mistakes, there’s no use and no good in rubbing their noses in
it, for that will only force them to hide their mistake the next time and no
one is better off for that. In church school, we’ve also been studying the
Lord’s Prayer and what it means. This is the part about trespassing and
forgiving trespasses.
And so I must admit a mistake to you: I really did spend
years worrying about not understanding the meaning of the crucifixion (and I’m
certainly not finished worrying yet). I could have gone to
We must make mistakes. After all, we’re only human.
Amen.