SECRETS OF SUCCESS
Scriptures:
Philippians 2:5-11
John 14:15-17; 25-31
Can you picture him there in your mind’s eye? The savior, the messiah, that great leader of the Jews, that healer, the one who could even raise someone like Lazarus from the dead, surrounded by adoring followers, taking that trek which we often call “the triumphal entry into Jerusalem”. What a success story!
But, of course, we know how this “success story” turns out, don’t we? – five days later on that lonely hill with nails in hands and feet – those lively flowing palm branches have turned into bleeding and torn palms. Couldn’t even last a week. Some success story this is.
Sometimes I feel that our society is saturated with a success obsession. We tend to idolize the man or woman who is deemed by societal norms to be a success. Yet, at the same time, paradoxically, we relish those times when the “successful” person is found to have clay feet or has achieved their success fraudulently. Probably there’s no better current example of this syndrome than Barry Bonds. By any objective criteria his feats on the baseball field define the meaning of “success”, in baseball terms at least – all-time home runs leader, most walks lifetime, career batting average just under .300. With stats like these a shoo-in first ballot Hall-of-Famer. But of course, he isn’t. Despite his denials, the steroids controversy continues to besmirch Bonds, and for many, many people (outside of San Francisco anyway) he is the hero we love to hate. What has happened to Barry Bonds’ success?
Or from the political arena, if you followed the story this week of New York governor Eliot Spitzer (and who couldn’t have been aware of it with all the press coverage), here’s a classic example of success gone wrong. Here’s Associated Press reporter Jocelyn Noveck writing in the R-J on Monday:
“Why do otherwise smart-successful people do such risky things? For psychologists and political analysts who found themselves dissecting the Spitzer story, it was a question of the chicken or the egg: In such situations, does the risky behavior precede the powerful job? Or does something about being in power cause the behavior? Many speculated that it was a combination of the two.”
I suppose that at some level it’s very natural for every one of us to want to be defined as successes in whatever we choose to do. And of course our culture is prepared to help us along. When I did a Google search for “books with ‘success’ in the title” I got 1,570,000 hits. Or, if you go to Amazon.com and enter “success” under books, you get 136,775 results. Some of these titles include:
• 10 Steps to Financial Success
• The 100 Absolutely Unbreakable Laws of Business Success
• Everything You Need to Know to Get Started on the Road to Success
• 101 Secrets to Negotiating Success
• 101 Stupid Things Business Travelers Do to Sabotage Success
Sports are a natural arena for defining and achieving success. Most adults support having youngsters participate in sporting activities because we feel that these help teach our young people about fair play and sportsmanship. But often these sentiments come with mixed messages. David Mosser talks about an experience of his in making this point: “At one sports banquet I remember an athletic director saying in a voice that sounded like a prayer, ‘Folks, it is amazing what we can accomplish together when no one cares who gets the credit.’ It was a beautiful sentiment, and for that reason I remembered it. Nevertheless, the next hour of the banquet was spent handing out individual awards. The awards diluted everything said earlier that evening.”
Another way that coaches sometimes get at this same sentiment as that athletic director offered is with the old cliché, “There is no ‘I’ in ‘team’.” But almost as soon as this is uttered the emphasis goes back onto how well individuals can perform in order to help the team achieve its goals. In college basketball I’m an Indiana University fan, and this year’s team has been defined by its “Mr. Inside” – D.J. White – and “Mr. Outside” – Eric Gordon. When you watch an IU basketball game those two seem to be all the announcers talk about.
Now, I don’t want to be misunderstood here. There is nothing inherently wrong with wanting to live up to your potential and to seek to perform well at something you have chosen to do – like, say, basketball. The problem comes for us when a success-orientation takes over and the plaudits that go along with achieving success begin to go to our heads. Then we start to move into the dark side of what our success can bring. For Las Vegans just think about Howard Hughes and where the demons from his success drove him. Or, to take a show business personality: Elvis Pressley – the glamour and the glitter couldn’t protect him from acting out on his basest impulses.
Most likely no one in this congregation is going to have to deal with the pressures that go along with the kinds of success experienced by a Barry Bonds or an Eric Gordon or a Howard Hughes or an Elvis Presley. But to the extent that any of us have experienced what we would consider to be successes in our chosen field of work or our family life or even, say, our positions in the church, we will have had to deal with how that made us feel about ourselves – that strange admixture of pride and humility.
Despite the excesses of a Howard Hughes or an Elvis Presley, the chief danger with success is that it can lead to a kind of complacency. I have achieved this level of accomplishment, so now I can rest on my laurels. I don’t have to be quite so aware of the needs of others. The Latin word for this, which came from the Greek, is acedia – which came to be translated as sloth – one of the Seven Deadly Sins. Sloth is defined as spiritual and/or actual apathy or laziness, putting off what God asks you to do.
Hold that thought for the moment, and now let’s return to our image of Jesus as he prepares to enter Jerusalem. As our anthem just now puts it and as I talked about it with the kids, “On that day…everyone thought he would wear a crown.” This is the pinnacle of Jesus’ earthly success: he has the crowd’s adulation; he is perceived as a great miracle worker; he is seen as the One who has come to save Israel.
So what does he do? He tells the disciples to go and find a donkey – an ass, of all things -- to bear him on his trek. The symbolism could not have been lost on at least the more perceptive in those throngs. Jesus is almost figuratively thumbing his nose at all the adulation and at the idea that his “success” is based on anything other than God’s purpose for his life.
Those of you with good memories have heard me use this song lyric before, but it bears repeating in this context. About 47 years ago a musical review called “For Heaven’s Sake” was written for a North American youth event, and included in it was the satirical song, “He Was a Flop at 33”. In the song three advertising men meet in a bar and begin to sing about this man who was “a flop at 33”. Two of the verses go like this:
He was a flop at 33.
His whole career was one of failure and of loss.
But the thing that’s so distressful
Is He could have been successful,
But instead of climbing up he climbed a cross.
Oh, he was licked right from the start
When He said ‘do to others as you wish they’d do’.
For to make it you must strive
Because, of course, the fit survive,
You’ve got to do the others in or they’ll do you.
Then, in the final verse of the song the three singers point to the real irony of this way of thinking:
We’ve fought our way up to the top.
We’re all established as successful men of worth.
So the thing that puzzles me
Is why that ‘flop at 33’
Is called the one successful man to live on earth.
You know, during Jesus’ ministry on earth it would have been difficult for any of us, let alone his disciples, to have predicted that that last line would have come true. Even Jesus himself had his doubts. In Matthew’s account of the Passion, Jesus is about to be betrayed. He goes into the garden, asking his disciples to stay awake with him, and his prayer is not what we might expect from one whom we have come to know as the Son of God: “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me; yet not what I want but what you want.” “I haven’t really accomplished anything,” Jesus seems to be saying. “I am not a success. I don’t want to have to go through the agony of a crucifixion, because all it will do is confirm what the world already believes; namely, that all I have tried to do is ridiculous and irrelevant and doesn‘t have an impact on worldly powers.” And yet…and yet…Jesus continues, “Let your will be done.” Then, when he finds that his closest friends, his three key disciples, haven’t even been able to stay awake with him, it really does look like the whole thing simply hasn’t been worth the candle.
How do we measure Jesus’ success? In the very familiar passage we read from Paul’s letter to the church at Philippi – a passage which came to be known as the Christ Hymn in the early church – Paul outlines the characteristics of the Christ that made him who he was, and in so doing redefines what it means to be successful as a human being. Jesus “did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited” (this, in fact, was the third and greatest temptation in the wilderness, which Jesus resists). Jesus “emptied himself, taking the form of a slave” (or, as some translations have it, a “servant” – in other words, he became “the man for others”, finding his greatest success in giving care to other people). Jesus “humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death – even death on a cross” (his duty to fulfill God’s will, despite all the doubts that he voices in the Garden of Gethsemane, leads him to the most agonizing death that anyone can possibly imagine).
“The man for others.” This is the secret Jesus gives us to be successful. No matter what levels of accomplishment we might achieve, the true secret to our success, from Jesus standpoint, is how we have given ourselves in service to other people.
In John’s gospel – which we have been following for much of our Lenten journeys – Jesus gathers the disciples around him before the events that will lead to his entry into Jerusalem, his betrayal, his trial, and his crucifixion – in order to give them a promise – the promise of the Holy Spirit. “This,” Jesus tells them, “is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him.” In other words, all of the ways that the world has to account for success have no bearing upon the Holy Spirit when it is active in the world. That may seem like a crass judgment on the successes we feel that we have achieved in our lifetimes. But much more than this, it is a way of keeping us from being blinded by the excesses of success – of becoming prone to the temptations that engulfed the Barry Bonds, and Eliot Spitzers, and Howard Hughes, and Elvis Presleys of the world. But there is a catch – a wonderful catch – “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem asks this of us, and we gladly give our obeisance. And what do we receive in return? “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.”
To be a success as a Christian is to have the mind of Christ. And when that mind is in us we will proclaim along with Paul, no matter what Golgothas lay before us:
Therefore God also highly exalted him
and gave him the name
that is above every name,
so that at the name of Jesus
every knee should bend,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue confess
that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.
Amen
Dave Pomeroy
First Congregational Church, United Church of Christ
Las Vegas, NV
March 16, 2008