SUCCESS AND FAILURE
IN
In our first reading today we heard that impressive account of Isaiah’s vision of heaven and his call to go and preach God’s word.
“Here I am;
send me”, says Isaiah. But it’s a strange sort of call that he receives. He is
told in advance that his mission won’t be successful; what God promises him is
failure:
Go and say to
this people:
“Keep
listening, but do not comprehend;
keep looking, but do not understand.”
It’s a strange and puzzling passage, and surprisingly enough it is picked up and quoted several times in the New Testament. It is used to explain why the preaching of God’s word is not always successful.
Then, in today’s Gospel, we have the story of the miraculous catch of fish. After working on their own all night and catching nothing, Peter, James and John are urged by Jesus to try again, and this time they haul in a huge catch of fish, so much so that their boats begin to sink.
The story ends by Jesus commissioning these new disciples to start out on a new career as “fishers of people”. Like Isaiah, they are sent out to preach God’s word, but unlike him they are promised success; their fishing expedition for people will produce remarkable results, or at least it will if they go about it in the right way.
All this is
very relevant to what we have been saying recently about the need for
broadening in the life of our own church here in
As Jesus’s disciples, we have been sent out on a fishing expedition, and that is why it is important to find ways of contacting people. Our faith is not just a private possession, to be kept to ourselves; it is something we have to share.
But are we to expect success or failure in the mission of the church today? Today’s readings seem to send out mixed messages.
Certainly the message of the church often seems to fall on deaf ears these days, many people in our society seem to be quite resistant to it, and we may often feel that we have quite a lot in common with Isaiah whose message was on the whole not understood.
But at the same time there are people and places where the message of the gospel really gets through and achieves results.
The answer seems to be that the results of the Church’s preaching are patchy: sometimes strikingly successful, sometimes frankly disappointing.
Which is exactly what we ought to expect. Sometimes Jesus’s own preaching pulled in great crowds and he was a huge success. And at other times he and his message were rejected. In the end indeed it was more like failure than success: He came to his own, and his own received him not, as John summed it up. So it’s worth remembering that the results of Jesus’s own mission were distinctly patchy too.
When, as
quite often seems to be the case in European society today, the results of the
Church’s mission are not particularly successful, the question we find
ourselves asking is this:
- is that our
fault?
- or is it the “fault” (if fault is the right word) of our hearers, of those around us?
Is it because we are not going about our mission in the right way (like the unsuccessful night’s fishing)? Or is it because there are things in our society and culture that make people unreceptive to the Christian message (what you might call an Isaiah situation)?
The answer is that it can be either one or the other, and usually no doubt a bit of both.
It’s a matter of both transmission and reception.
If the
Christian gospel is to get through to people, and to change their lives:
- it has to be faithfully, accurately and effectively
transmitted; but also:
- there has to be a readiness, an openness, to receive it.
When the message doesn’t seem to get through, it may be a
transmission problem or a reception problem.
Transmission is our business, and we can do something to overcome our transmission problems. That is why we are talking not only about broadening our church life, but also about deepening it; that is to say, growing spiritually, learning more about our faith – not just for our own private spiritual health, but so as to be better prepared for the fishing expedition to which we are called.
So we must go to some trouble to get clearer about our message and to transmit it clearly. And yet, however well we do it, we cannot necessarily expect that it will be widely received.
That will vary with historical and cultural circumstances, and it is certainly arguable that our own society is pretty well innoculated against the Christian message. In other words, there are reception problems as well as transmission problems.
So what does all this add up to? I have been saying that sometimes mission is successful, sometimes it is not. And that, if it not very successful, this may be our own fault as transmitters, or it may be the “fault” of our hearers, the receivers. What, in our situation, are we to make of that perhaps rather confusing message?
Well, I think the overall message is that we should not worry unduly about success or failure. In our society, so much geared as it is to quantifiable performance targets and indicators, we do get too hung up about success and failure.
We forget that our commission is simply to preach the gospel faithfully as best we are able, and then in a sense to let go, to relax, not to seek to control, but to leave the outcome in God’s hands.
We shall be judged not by results, but by our efforts, by our honesty and our sincerity.
And when we
see, as we often do, that the Church’s impact in our society is rather limited,
- we must
resist the temptation just to fall back on what one might call the Isaiah
excuse, and simply blame everything on our hearers, because this can easily be
a form of complacency.
- Certainly,
therefore, we do need to ask some searching questions about whether we are
really managing to convey the heart of the gospel message, and whether we are
doing it in a way that speaks to people of our time.
- But at the same time we should not feel unduly discouraged, we should not feel that we are failures, and above all we should not give up.
We are to preach the gospel in season and out of season, whether they hear or they don’t hear.
Whether our efforts meet with success or failure, we are to persevere, to endure to the end. And we can only persevere, we can only cope with apparent failure, if we really and truly do believe that the ultimate outcome is in God’s hands, not ours.
Sermon by the Reverend John
Murray,
Anglican Chaplaincy,
Year C, Proper 1:
Isaiah 6.1-13
Luke 5.1-11