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David Orendorff      Mark 10:46-52          October 25, 2009

Robert Fulghum in “It Was Fire When I Lay Down on It, [1] tells of John Pierpont:

John Pierpont died a failure.  In 1866, at age eighty-one, he came to the end of his days as a government clerk in Washington, D.C. with a long string of personal defeats abrading his spirit.

Things began well enough.  He graduated from Yale, which his grandfather had helped found, and chose education as his profession with some enthusiasm.

He was a failure at school teaching.  He was too easy on his students.  And so he turned to the legal world for training.

He was a failure as a lawyer.  He was too generous to his clients and too concerned about justice to take the cases that brought good fees.  The next career he took up was that of dry-goods merchant.

He was a failure as a businessman.  He could not charge enough for his goods to make a profit, and was too liberal with credit.  In the meantime he had been writing poetry, and though it was published, he didn’t collect enough royalties to make a living.

He was a failure as a poet.  And so he decided to become a minister, went off to Harvard Divinity School, was ordained as minister of the Hollis Street Church in Boston.  But his position for Prohibition and against slavery got him crosswise with the influential members of his congregation and he was forced to resign.

He was a failure as a minister.  Politics seemed a place where he could make some difference, and he was nominated as the Abolition party candidate for governor of Massachusetts.  He lost.  Undaunted, he ran for Congress under the banner of the Free Soil party.  He lost.

He was a failure as a politician.  The Civil War came along, and he volunteered as a chaplain of the 22nd Regiment of the Massachusetts Volunteers.  Two weeks later he quit, having found the task too much of a strain on his health.  He was seventy-six years old.  He couldn’t even make it as a chaplain.

Someone found him an obscure job in the back offices of the Treasury Department in Washington, and he finished out the last five years of his life as a menial file clerk.  He wasn’t very good at that, either.  His heart was not in it.

John Pierpont died a failure.  He had accomplished nothing he set out to do or be.  There is a small memorial stone marking his grave in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  The words in the granite read: POET, PREACHER, PHILOSOPHER, PHILANTHROPIST.

I interrupt Fulghum for a moment.  By the religious and cultural judgment of his time, Bartimaeus was also a failure.  Folks observed that he must have made God angry because God cursed him with blindness. And he was a beggar, a leech upon society.  His only hope was in strangers who might give of their small change and their little time.

Then one day Bartimaeus, the son of Timothy, cried to another son, “Son of David, Jesus, have mercy on me.”  And the other son heard the cry of his brother and gave healing compassion.  Jesus befriended the God cursed social pariah Bartimaeus with love.

Bartimaeus is no longer alone beside the road.  Where there was one, now there are two brothers facing life together.  And as disciples and strangers gather to see the miracle of mercy there is now a whole community of brothers and sisters, drawn to the love of God, drawn to share each other’s sufferings and joys.

The Bible is full of failures.  Most of the prophets were failures and often killed.  Saul of Tarsus, better known to us as Paul, was another failure.  He began his career to get rid of the Christians.  He made his best effort, but he failed, becoming that which he would destroy, becoming a Christian.

As a Christian he was likewise doomed to failure.  Many in his day never really thought of him as an apostle because he never knew Jesus in the flesh.  He founded communities of believers that fought amongst themselves, often breaking apart in bitterness.  He very nearly died on board a ship.  He took up the livelihood of a tent maker which ranked him very low because he handled the flesh of dead animals.  He was stoned and spent years in prison, finally dying an unknown and unheralded death, probably in Rome.

By all the measures of success, Paul failed.  But Paul didn’t measure success by the world’s standards.  His famous poem to love, most often read at weddings, was his measure of success.

If I speak in the languages of humanity and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.  And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.  If I give away all I have, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.[2]

The measure of our success in life is the love we give.  Everything else is just stuff we do along the way of loving.  If the stuff we do, no matter how greatly esteemed by the world, is without love, it is a failure.  And no matter how much of a failure we might appear or even feel, if we have love then it is success.  Love is why we live and love is the measure of our living.

We return to Fulghum:

From this distance in time, one might insist that he (John Pierpont) was not, in fact, a failure.  His commitments to social justice, his desire to be a loving human being, his active engagement in the great issues of his times, and his faith, in the power of the human mind - these are not failures.  And much of what he thought of as defeat became success.  Education was reformed, legal processes were improved, credit laws were changed, and, above all, slavery was abolished once and for all.

Why am I telling you this?  It’s not an uncommon story.  Many nineteenth-century reformers had similar lives - similar failures and successes.  In one very important sense, John Pierpont was not a failure.  Every year, come December, we celebrate his success.  We carry in our hearts and minds a lifelong memorial to him.

It’s a song.

Not about Jesus or angels or even Santa Claus.  It’s a terribly simple song about the simple joy of whizzing through the cold white dark of winters gloom in a sleigh pulled by one horse.  And with the company of friends, laughing and singing all the way.  No more.  No less. “Jingle Bells.”  John Pierpont wrote “Jingle Bells.”

To write a song that stands for the simplest joys, to write a song that three or four hundred million people around the world know - a song about something they’ve never done but can imagine - a song that every one of us, large and small, can hoot out the moment the chord is struck on the piano and the chord is struck in our spirit - well, that’s not failure.

One snowy afternoon in deep winter, John Pierpont penned the lines as a small gift for his family and friends and congregation.  And in doing so he left behind a permanent gift for Christmas - the best kind - not the one under the tree, but the invisible, invincible one of joy…

Thanks, John Pierpont.  Every word of the song is true.[3]

At Bear Creek and in God’s eyes there are no failures. Each of us has been blessed with a capacity and desire to love.  Each of us, no matter the current state of our career or relationships, our physical or mental health, has loved and continues to love.  Each of us, in the eyes of God and the eyes of love, is a success.

“And immediately Bartimaeus received his sight and followed Jesus on the way.”  May we too see and follow on the way.

Shalom and Amen.

[2] I Corinthians 13:1-3

[3] ibid., 17-20