May 15, 2009 | Editor’s note: Faith & Leadership offers sermons that shed light on issues of Christian leadership. This sermon was preached at the Duke University baccalaureate on May 8, 2009.

Ruth 1, John 6:66-8

I’m thinking right now of young man who left college 10 years ago. He went into consulting work on the East Coast. He spent a bit of time on Wall Street, and had a spell out West learning how companies work. Three or four years ago he and a couple of others set up their own company. It was tough at first but soon it became quite a success. He had a chance to sell it to his original employer but it meant too much to him to sell so soon. That company was his life, his identity, his pride, his joy. January just past it all went wrong. The company slid into bankruptcy like a sandcastle engulfed by the incoming tide. The young man saw his dream disappear and his security, prestige, and self-esteem melt away with it. Four months later, to my knowledge, his mother and sister have yet to find a way even gently to refer to the subject with him. His life is shrouded in silence and dominated by the f-word: failure.

Here we are, celebrating the great feat of entrepreneurship at the heart of our culture -- that’s to say taking someone else’s money and someone else’s ideas and turning them into a degree. You don’t get into Duke without a bulging resume -- and for many people life at Duke is about continuing to cram the suitcase full of experiences and journeys and conversations and projects. But lurking behind the gothic pillars lies a shadowy voice whispering the word we don’t mention: failure. The terrifying prospect that after four years of rehearsal at Duke we’ll go out on the stage of the big wide world and find that the auditorium is empty. Everyone out there simultaneously got a call from their bank manager and suddenly left the theatre.

Of course we have sophisticated strategies for calling failure something else. We call it broadening our experience. We call it a learning curve. We call it a blind alley. We mutter things like “If it doesn’t kill you, it’ll make you stronger.” We quote Kipling and say “If you meet with Triumph and Disaster, And treat those two impostors just the same” -- even though we know that’s nonsense and triumph and disaster are not impostors at all, they’re in fact as real as anything we can imagine.

Another approach is to adjust our sights and aim so low that we can’t fail. When a person appears to be lazy it’s often a mask for a fear of failure. Being lazy means you can go on saying “Just you watch me when I go” -- in other words, if I really did try, I really would succeed. The Irish humorist Oscar Wilde said “There’s only one thing worse than not getting what you want -- and that’s getting it.” In the film “Chariots of Fire,” Harold Abrahams is a young Jewish man with a fantastic ability to run. He has to overcome various kinds of prejudice, but he nonetheless spends years preparing for the 100 meters at the 1924 Olympics in Paris. There’s a poignant scene shortly after he’s won the race. Abrahams is sitting in the changing room, nursing his precious gold medal. His teammates crash into the room to congratulate him; but his trainer holds them back. Looking at the static, oblivious figure of Abrahams, the trainer says to the teammates, “Hold on, wait, stand back, give him a bit more time and space. You don’t know how difficult it is to win.”

What I take him to mean is, even when we do achieve our ambition, we then have to face the rest of our days, and realize how small our life projects really are. Failure protects us in some ways, because we can remain obsessed by our unfulfilled goal. We only notice its insignificance if and when we attain it. It’s difficult to win, because then the striving is over and all the fantasies truly threaten to unravel. I’ve had the privilege to know a few Nobel Prize winners. You’d think they’d be a proud and arrogant bunch, but they’re quite the opposite. They tend to mumble self-effacingly about only getting the award because it was a bad year. It’s as if genuine achievement is even more humbling than failure, because it makes you realize how small you really are.

We’ve just read together two profound and moving stories of failure. The first comes from the book of Ruth. Naomi has a husband and two sons, and both sons take wives from outside the land of Israel. But Naomi’s husband and two sons all die, and she says to her two daughters-in-law, “Our situation is hopeless -- go back to your own people.” One daughter-in-law heads home, but the other, Ruth, clings to Naomi and says, “Don’t press me to leave you. Where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God.” It’s a heartbreaking scene, in which Ruth, in the face of poverty and possible death, says that, for her, there’s something that means more than self-preservation and survival. That something is loyalty and love. In showing such steadfast love against all expectations, she shows us the face of God in a way we might never have seen it if she’d been lucky and successful.