There are two things we absolutely crave in our lives: predictability and spontaneity.

We crave the comfort of predictability. We work long and hard to grow life in a steady job, a certain career, a consistent source of income.  We earn degrees, save money, buy insurance, invest for retirement. We have a home, a family, a schedule, which gives structure and meaning to our days and nights. We build our lives on the secure foundation of predictability.

But conversely, we also crave spontaneity. We hunger for those unexpected moments that bring uncontained joy and unconstrained excitement to our day-to-day existence. We ache to be astonished and amazed. That is why God made sports channels.

There is nothing like the unscripted, uncut, unpredictable moment-to-moment excitement of a live sporting event — whether it is football, basketball, baseball, hockey, soccer, tennis, golf, bowling or curling. That adrenalin anticipation is why no one will be staying for “coffee hour” today. We are running home to watch the Super Bowl.

That is not such a bad thing, really. The Super Bowl brings family and friends together. It lets us eat lots of good-tasting, bad-for-you food. It is just plain fun. And as a sporting event it has absolutely no predictable outcome. Your team might win big, or your team might lose by a whisker. Bad calls, nasty weather, one momentary misstep can change everything. Even though the game is ordered by rules and stopwatches, guarded by referees and instant replays, it is still an anything-can-happen event.

Life is unfair and unpredictable. We try to tame life’s uncertainties with long-range plans and short-term check-lists. But it’s the very uncertainty of life that makes every day such fun and so frightening. It is the reason why faith drives us to utter dependence upon God’s promises, provisions and providence.

Brandon Bostick blew it. No doubt about it. His botched catch after the onside kick in the closing minutes of the Green Bay Packers vs. Seattle Seahawks game set up the Seahawks for one of the most amazing comebacks in the history of football, a team “drive to survive” that enabled the Seahawks to pull out a last-ditch, final-moment overtime win. Bostick mangled his catch. But this tight end at least went for the kicked ball. He was on site, in place, and focused on victory. It just did not happen. Once again in life, random bedlam usurped the best planning and preparation and skill.

There is not one of us who “always wins.” Failure is part and parcel of the human experience. In fact, the best fail the most. The father of our country, George Washington, lost more battles than he won. One of the most successful companies in history is Amazon. Anyone want to ask Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos about the Fire Phone? Launched with a price tag of $199, you can now buy one for 99 cents. Or check out Hebrews 11 and its “great cloud of witness,” the stories of the saints. If you look at the stories behind every “witness” in that “cloud,” it appears the cloud is a nimbus cloud not an angelic cloud, a rogue’s gallery filled with failures and foibles.

The story of Jesus is not just one long success story. He was also a man of sorrows, acquainted with failure and grief. In fact, what could paint Jesus’ true humanity more vividly than his failures? From personal experience Jesus gave us a sacrament of failure: when you flub the ball, or someone shuts a door in your face, shake yourself off, shake the dust off your feet, and keep moving on to the next doorway of opportunity.

In this week’s gospel text Jesus gets a big “win.” He’s riding high as he heals a man possessed by a demonic spirit. He wows the synagogue crowd to no end with this healing. The witnesses to this miracle, those present in the synagogue, exclaim the greatness of Jesus’ powers, and they revel in this unexpected display of the supernatural. Amazement and awe washes over them as they realize they are seeing something “new” and are witnessing in Jesus a remarkable and an unexpected form of “authority.”

This triumphant showing at the Capernaum synagogue comes at the very beginning of Jesus’ public ministry, just after he has called his first disciples. The eager readiness of these witnesses to follow Jesus’ message and mission would seem to put an immediate stamp of unqualified success on his ministry.

And yet. You know the rest of the story. When you catch the ball, and heal the sick, the crowds go crazy glad. But when you flub the ball, and fail to heal, or do the unexpected, the crowds go crazy mad.

In Mark’s gospel the beginning of Jesus’ Galilean ministry is nothing but a string of success stories. Jesus exorcises unclean spirits. He heals Simon Peter’s mother-in-law. He cleanses lepers and makes those who are paralyzed to walk again. He restores a withered hand to full mobility. Jesus even calls the sea into submission and then raises the daughter of Jairus from her deathbed. Jesus was definitely on his way to the SuperBowl.

But his successes came with consequences. When Jesus healed the man with the withered hand, he did so on the Sabbath (Mark 3:1-6), an act that made his strict Torah obedience questionable and instantly put him on the “no-fly” list for the local religious authorities: “The Pharisees went out and immediately conspired with the Herodians against him, how to destroy him” (v.6).

Jesus did what his mission called him to do — to offer hope and healing, God’s presence and compassion, when he was called upon to do it no matter what day of the week it was. But his obedience to his mission ultimately cost him everything. It cost him the “stamp of approval” of the religious authorities, instantly transforming him from an asset into a threat. It cost him the sense of astonishment and awe that had surrounded his words and works in the local synagogues. The more he succeeded, the more he failed, and the more he was viewed with suspicion and alarm.

When Jesus returned to his hometown of Nazareth, this turning tide slapped him in the face. Mark’s gospel gives us another glimpse into a Sabbath synagogue service in Mark 6:1-6. Standing in the most familiar of home territory, preaching with power and authority, the reception Jesus receives in Nazareth is anything but accepting. Instead the hometown crowd kicks Jesus’ message out of bounds: “Where did this man get all this? What is this wisdom that has been given to him? What deeds of power are being done by his hand! Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us? And they took offense at him” (vv.2-3)

Confronted with this utter rejection, Jesus “could do no deed of power there.” Jesus failed to heal facing a home-town crowd. Face to face with the unpredictability of the human species, Jesus could only be “amazed at their unbelief” (v.6). Jesus’ disciples, his followers, must have also felt the sting of this defeat. They had been riding the wave of success and popularity along with Jesus up until this encounter. Now, suddenly, they had their first real taste of the bitterness of failure and the smarting sting of rejection. At the very moment of what was expected to be Jesus’ greatest triumph, was his greatest failure.

Jesus’ reaction to this defeat was not to crawl under the porch and lick his wounds. In Mark’s gospel Jesus immediately calls together all his disciples and sends them out “two-by-two” to teach and preach in the villages of that region. In the face of an impressive failure, Jesus responds by increasing the scope and magnitude of his mission. Jesus’ disciples never get a chance to wallow in their failures because their Master has picked them up, dusted them off and sent them out, empowered with his authority, to bang on new doors and banish evil. And despite the defeat in Nazareth, the disciples go out and do exactly that. As the saying goes, they “fail forward.”

The “Mission of the Twelve” is a huge success. Jesus goes on and continues his mission, preaching the message of the kingdom, healing the sick, casting out demons, and miraculously feeding the crowds that follow him. Jesus’ human life, like each of our lives, was marked by great highs and great lows. By mountain tops of tremendous triumph and pits of deep despair.

Human life is lived out on this beautiful garden planet God created. But even before we knew that our nest was round, not flat, we have always known our garden home has huge “ups” and impressive “downs.” 

I love the story of the 85-year-old woman, inspired by George H. W. Bush’s celebration of birthdays, decided to take up sky diving. After she attended instruction classes, the day came for her first jump. Strapping on a parachute, she stood awaiting her turn to leap out of the plane. But when she looked at the ground below, she lost her nerve. Finally, she reached into her pocket, pulled out a small transmitter and radioed her instructor on the ground, "Help! I've gotten up, and I can't fall down!"

Ups. Try Mount Everest. The highest point on the planet is 3350 meters, that is 29,035 feet above sea level. Today when we fly in huge airliners we sit in pressurized, warmed cabins, with oxygen carefully circulated for us to breath, because anywhere above 15,000 feet just does not bode well for human existence. Despite the hazards of these high altitudes, what do we call those moments in our lives when we unexpectedly experience the grace of God, the greatness of joy, the wholeness of being — we call those moments “mountain-top experiences.” Short on oxygen? Maybe. But able to pump new life, and love, and commitment into us because of being lifted up to such a lofty place.

Downs. There are also impressively low places on earth, depths that make staying alive a true struggle. On land the lowest place on earth is around the Dead Sea, which lays 413 meters below sea level. Closer to home is Death Valley, California, which lays 282 feet below sea level. But “how low can we go?” The deepest part of the sea is a ripped ribbon on the bed of the Pacific Ocean called the “Mariana Trench.” It is over 1500 miles long, but only about 40 miles wide. Within that “Trench” there is a particular drop off called “The Challenger Deep,” which is the deepest known point in all the oceans. The Challenger Deep plunges down to a depth of 10,994 meters — or 36,070 feet below sea level. If Mount Everest were placed in the bottom of the Challenger Deep it would be covered by over a mile of seawater. That is the true definition of “the pits”!

Just as our human home has almost unbelievable heights and depths, so do our individual human lives. No one has to tell us that in the course of our days we are going to have “highs” and “lows.” By age five, before the first day of school, we’ve got that. But what we need to know as people of faith is that Jesus can walk with us through our experience of life’s highs and lows, that Jesus walks these lonesome valleys with us, that Jesus climbs these thin-skinned mountains with us.

Jesus enjoyed tremendous high and lows throughout his ministry. His birth was announced by angelic hosts, but then his parents had to sneak off to Egypt in the dead of night to keep him safe. They brought him back to Nazareth and raised him there under the radar of the authorities, but this hometown would utterly reject and ridicule this “home-town boy,” even try to stone him to death in an honors killing. The religious authorities in Jerusalem welcomed him, listened to his message with amazement, and even worshiped with him. But that same audience turned on him, called him a blasphemer, put a price on his head and called in the Roman authorities for a “head hunt” to get rid of him. The crowds that waved palm branches over Jesus and put robes under his pathway as he entered into Jerusalem, they were the same crowds who only days later voted for his crucifixion and stripped him of his robe.

New Zealand theologian and pastor Alan Jamieson, in his book Journeying in Faith (2009), puts it like this:

The stark reality is that each of us at some point in the journey will fail. I don’t mean a little hiccup that everyone could understand and which could be talked about politely over scones in a home-group discussion. I don’t mean the failures we admit to as modern Christians that we aren’t reading our Bibles as often as we would like, or some equally inane slip-up. I mean fail in a way we desperately want to hide. Fail in a way that we are embarrassed. When this happens, we too face the choice: either to try and hide and pretend nothing happened by putting on masks to cover our reality; simply to give up on trying to live Christian lives and walk away; or the initially very difficult and courageous option to face up to what we have done. In the end these are the only options. The biblical option is clear. The Bible doesn’t try to sanitize or sweep under the carpet people’s failures, no matter how embarrassing they might have been. It seems the Bible deals with failure in such an upfront and honest way for two reasons. First, it reminds us that the biblical characters, like us, are very ordinary people. People that we, because of their failures and weaknesses, can identify with. Second, because, the agenda of the Bible is to show how God is at work . . . (92)

Each one of you this morning is facing a week where you will “win” some and “lose” some. This week you will catch some balls and you will drop some balls. Story-tellers say that you can always have a happy ending to every story — it just depends upon where you decide to stop the story.

For those of us who follow Christ, the story never ends. The ups and downs, the soaring successes and the falling failures, are all part of the story. And the story does not have a plotline that is dedicated to making you look good. The story has a plotline dedicated to your glorifying God’s power and you are enjoying his presence.

How will you handle failure this week? How will you handle others who have failed? Do you have a theology of failure?

The central claim of Christianity is that we are accepted in our sinfulness, forgiven and understood as we are, with all our moral confusions, both of intellect and will, understood when we do not do what is right . . . God knew, understands, forgives and offers us the divine love, the divine mercy . . . that’s why it is good news and not good advice. (Richard Holloway, Dancing on the Edge: Faith in a Post-Christian Age [1967], 58).