Fail. Magnificently.

I googled, “how many Sundays are there in a year?” And the answer, obviously, fluctuates from year to year, but the number typically hovers around 52. I multiplied 52 by the number of years I’ve been a released minister at West Hills Friends, which is about eleven and a half years, and the number comes out to 598. Taking into consideration, vacation, and some time off after my children were born, I’d say that I have been in worship 550 times. 

And today will be the last Sunday with all of you before I leave for eight weeks on my sabbatical. When the dates for my sabbatical were settled on, I knew this Sunday would be special. This week, as we came down from the highs of Christmas, I knew I had a message to write, and I felt this pressure to say something important before I depart. 

I found it hard to write under this pressure. Writing a message for this community, in a Quaker context, really isn’t about what I want to say, but what God wants to say through my story and experience. Whether or not something feels important to me, well, that shouldn’t be a consideration (if I am doing it right). 

But it does feel strange that I won’t be here worshipping with all of you for the next eight weeks. Of course, my role in this community falls under the category of a “job” and there are elements of the work that feel that way. But what is most true is that besides my partner and two children, you are the central community in my life. You have shared in our joys and our struggles, you have supported us financially, especially when times have been rough, and you have taught and guided me in my journey as a minister. And we have come close to each of you, hearing your stories, and being with you in the hard and scary places too. 

Stepping away for eight weeks means that I will likely be disoriented for a good portion of it, especially because of the centrality you all have in my life. 

Today feels like an occasion to think back to the start of my life with you. As I did that this week, a memory continued emerging. I was sitting in Village Coffee, in Multnomah Village, the typical meeting spot for my then colleague Mike Huber and me. I was maybe a few weeks into my role at West Hills when Mike said something so incredibly disorienting to me. He said, “Mark, I want you to fail magnificently.” 

I know I have talked about this moment before, but I’m thinking about it again as I prepare to step away from this community for an extended period of time. A few years into my life at West Hills Mike reminded me of that disorienting line and said, “I don’t think you failed magnificently.” And my internal reaction was relief, which I don’t think was what Mike was hoping for. 

Mike knew something about me, likely from the day I was interviewed. I play it safe. My caution has been a coping mechanism born the day that I discovered my father was having an affair and left my family in ruins. What happened in the weeks and months following was an eleven-year-old boy trying his best to make life normal, and happy again for his two younger brothers and shattered mother. I did a great job of it. I realized that the more solid and put together I was, the less mess there was to clean up. I also realized that keeping the peace, and keeping everyone happy made my life easier. I became really good at this. 

So when Mike encouraged me to fail magnificently I thought he must be joking. But when he didn’t repay my nervous laughter with a belly laugh I knew he was serious. After leaving the cafe I thought, “Okay, well, what he really was giving me permission to do is to do what I want to do!” And what I wanted to do was make all of you happy with me, and so I did that. 

Of course, what Mike was really telling me to do was to try something so audacious and adventurous that failure would be a sign of growth and experimentation, and learning. He was telling me not to play it safe. 

Of course, I have failed, many times at West Hills. I have screwed up a bunch. Sadly, I know that some of those screw-ups have caused permanent damage to some of our relationships. I think about those moments every day, often many times a day. There are people out in the world who I know aren’t happy with me and to be honest, that eats at me. 

All the more disorienting is that my decision to play it safe didn’t protect me from those experiences. Go figure. Like so many coping mechanisms, we trust them to keep us safe, and when they don’t, well, almost everything comes unraveled at that point. What’s more, when my playing it safe approach failed me, and I realized I had caused another person pain, I was so disoriented that my response to that hurt was hurried and often caused even more pain. 

And instead of realizing my misplaced faith in the impossible goal of playing it safe, I doubled down. There were even times when I wondered if I should no longer be a pastor, maybe I should choose an emotionally safer vocation. Dreams of becoming a hermit, a cabin in the middle of nowhere, withdraw. Saying it all out loud paints quite an absurd picture, huh? 

Absurd or not, it was all real. While I still dream of that cabin in the woods, maybe once my vocational years are over, I know that at the bottom of the “play it safe” spiral is loneliness. It would seem that following the coping mechanism all the way to the bottom leads us right back to the fear we were protecting ourselves from in the first place, but now just worse than it was before. 

The risk of being in a human community with other people is the exact same place where we discover both the dismay of conflict and the joy of belonging, but rarely one without the other. Perhaps it is the greatest risk of our lives to enter into the experiment of human community, including faith communities like ours. 

A few years ago I gave a message to this community that I think about often. It was about the baptism of Jesus. In Matthew 3 we read what happens as Jesus comes out of the water, “just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” 

As soon as you finish that sentence the next one reads, “Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. He fasted for forty days and forty nights…” 

I was struck by the sequence of these events. Jesus went into the dessert dripping wet with the lavish affirmation of his beloved-ness by God. I am imagining Jesus walking into 40 days and nights of fasting and temptation about his role and purpose in life with the voice of approval and satisfaction of God still ringing in his ears, his skin still soft from the River Jordan. 

When it gets down to it, my desire to play it safe is a way in which I try to claim beloved status in people’s lives. While I know that God still loves this part of me, it isn’t the reason I am beloved by God or by anyone. I am beloved just because I am. That is a truth that I extend to each of you, that you are loved apart from the tireless effort to be worthy of love. Even as I extend this truth to you, I know how it is for me to trust it. 

My hope this morning is that we give ourselves as much grace and love as we extend to those we love. I too need to remember that the power of your grace for me and my role in this community is greater than the fear of failing you. What is more, if we can remember our baptism, this soaking nature of God’s love, we can carry that into our lives as we do the risky work of being a human, of trying things and failing magnificently. Our beloved-ness is never in doubt. 

This message, which I know comes from God, is what I will carry into my sabbatical. It isn’t 40 days of fasting and temptation, but it does feel like a pivot towards a desert of sorts. My own hope is that by carrying my own beloved-ness into my time away, that I will see my calling, and purpose in ministry all the more clearly, apart from my ever-present need to satisfy and play it safe. After all, I see and am fueled by the creative potential of us, this small Quaker community, to live fully into our beloved-ness, to dream boldly, act courageously, and in the end bring about that more just, alive, colorful, hopeful, peaceful, and heaven-like world we so long for…for ourselves, and those most in need of it. 

I love each and every one of you.