The Mess of Success

This past Sunday I was charged with the task of preaching one of the final messages of our Lenten sermon series: Breaking the Chains. I found the task to challenging, especially considering the title that was chosen for me: Breaking the Chains of Attachment to Success. The text came from Matthew's gospel account of Jesus' entry to Jerusalem.

This theme caused me to do more introspection than I normally do. I would not be in the position that I'm in at my age if I didn't know how to lead things with measures of success. Our society encourages success. Our churches do too. People like to see things going well, programs that work, and outcomes to measure so that in the end of the year they can say: "We've been successful!"

So, in many ways the sermon spoke to me as I wrote it as much as I hoped it would the congregation. The challenge I gave focused on seeking Jesus' Triumphal Entry not as the moment of judgment about this life, but as the beginning of a week which would end at the cross- a symbol of self-sacrificing love.

When I'm writing a sermon, I'm always grateful for any insight or feedback I receive from colleagues or anyone who will listen to what on my mind during the process. I find that my interaction with the text in conversation with other people allows a sermon to find life. Without talking to other people about what I'm thinking while writing, I fear my thoughts just wouldn't make any sense.

For this reason, I was happy to receive some thoughts to chew on from Dietrich Bonhoeffer's book: Ethics this week. My co-worker brought this book to my attention with a bookmark in the chapter about "The Successful Man." I found Bonhoeffer's words on the topic of success to be quite insightful, even for this modern time.

Because the exact quotes didn't make it into my sermon, I'd thought I'd share some of them with you. Disclaimer: while I don't really like the idea that of either you are successful or unsuccessful (because I think at any given time most of us have areas in our life when we feel both ways), I think Bonhoeffer makes an interesting claim in the passage below about how the cross speaks to our desire for sucess.

"Christ confronts all thinking in terms of success and failure with the man who is under God's sentence, no matter whether he be successful or unsuccessful. . . . In the cross of Christ, God confronts the successful man with the sancification of pain, sorrow, humility, failure, poverty, loneliness and despair. God's acceptance of the the cross is his judgment on the successful man. But the unsuccessful man must recognize that what enables him to stand before God is not his lack of success and such, but solely the willing acceptance of the sentence passed on him by divine love. It was precisely the cross of Christ, the failure of Christ in the world, which led to His success in history" (79)

Happy Holy Week my blog friends!