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Following his service as Prime Minister of Great Britain during the dark days of World War II, Winston Churchill was invited to speak at Harrow, his boyhood grammar school, from which he had been graduated some seventy years before. As he stood at the lectern, looking out at his young audience, he said, "Young men, never give up! Never give up! Never! Never! Never!" With that he sat down. The audience was stunned. The message was so brief. Yet, in this succinct message, the man who had kept England going in such difficult times was stating the philosophy of perseverance that had led to victory. It is a characteristic that we admire, and which we have been taught to emulate. But does it pertain to every situation we may encounter?

I heard about a woman golfer who finished last in the Shawnee Invitation for Ladies in Pennsylvania some years ago. When she teed off the sixteenth hole, her drive went directly into a nearby river. She gamely set out in a rowboat to play the ball. When she finally succeeded in stroking it out of the water, it landed in a dense woods. From there she drove the ball into the rough, then into a sand trap, then back into the rough. Two hours later she arrived on the green, having taken 166 strokes on a four-stroke hole. She had perseverance, but was it a virtue?

W. C. Fields once said, "If at first you don't succeed, then quit. There's no use in being a fool about it." I think that the reality is somewhere between the two.

In the passages we are looking at from the Gospel according to Mark, there are some useful lessons to be learned about failure.

The first thing I learn from these verses is to accept the fact that sometimes we are going to fail. Some people give the impression that failure is unacceptable. They make it hard for us to live with failure when it happens. Some years ago there was a story about a student at the University of Michigan who, having failed his courses, climbed into the attic of a church and stayed there for many months. He didn't want his parents to know about his failure. At night he would come down into the church in Ann Arbor to get clothing from the church rummage sales and food from church supper leftovers. He suffered terribly from loneliness. Eventually he was discovered, and experienced acceptance from the church. Somewhere he had gotten the notion that is all too prevalent in society that failure is unacceptable.

When Jesus went back to his hometown of Nazareth, he stood up to teach in the synagogue, but the townspeople were offended that this one who had grown up among them should presume to teach them anything. "Isn't this the carpenter?" they said. "Don't we know his family? What does he know about anything?" I've heard it said that an expert is someone who is forty miles from home who shows slides. Jesus was at home and had no slides. Familiarity with Jesus and his background made the hometown folks contemptuous. We read that Jesus could do no deeds of power there because of their unbelief. It was a noble effort, but Jesus experienced failure.

I think that we have to make peace with the possibility of failure, because there are times that we are going to meet up with it. I like the attitude of Harry Truman. When a reporter asked him if he were afraid of making mistakes, he answered: "No. If I were, I could never make a decision. I have to make a decision every day, and I know that fifty percent of them will be wrong. But then, that leaves me fifty percent right, and that's batting 500." "How do you handle the fifty percent wrong?" asked the reporter. Truman replied, "I laugh at them, and at myself, and so does Bess."

I once saw a banner hanging in a church sanctuary that gave me much comfort. It said, "You Are Free Today To Fail." We have to accept the possibility that we may fail, and learn to accept the grace that makes it possible to go on.

A second thing these verses say to me is that our failure is not always our responsibility. Jesus called his disciples together and sent them out two by two to extend his ministry. But he told them right up front that they might not be accepted. "If they refuse to hear you," he told them, "then shake off the dust that is on your feet as a testimony against them." In Jesus' day it was a sacred duty to be hospitable. The village was to offer hospitality to strangers. The Jewish law said that the dust of a Gentile and of a heathen country was defiled, and that when a Jew entered Palestine from another country, he must shake off every particle of dust of the heathen land. Jesus was telling his disciples that when they were not accepted by a town, they should treat that town as a Jew would treat Gentiles.

What I understand Jesus to be saying is that those who are his disciples are to do the best they can to extend his ministry, but that it is not always in our power to succeed. A man called in to one of those late-night radio talk shows. He achingly told about his inability to establish a relationship with his two adult daughters. He and his wife had divorced after 21 years of marriage, and he claimed that the minds of his daughters had been poisoned against him unfairly by his former wife. He said that his life was meaningless without their love. The only contact with them had been at their respective weddings, where he was asked to foot the bills and was given the honor of giving them away. However, before and since, the daughters had not wished to see him, and whenever he tried to establish contact by telephone, they were verbally abusive and hostile. The advice of the radio host was that all he could do was to wait and hope that the girls would one day accept his overtures. There are times when we do what we can, and after that it is out of our hands.

A member of a local church tells how a woman with psychological problems began to attend her church. The pastor and congregation determined to love her into health and happiness. All of their attempts met with failure. When the woman was admitted to the state hospital, many members of the congregation sent cards expressing their concern. The hospitalized woman sent back the cards with criticisms and rejections written on them. When one member of the congregation was asked what she would do next, she responded, "The only truly loving thing there is to do. I'm going to accept her rejection of me." We may fail in what we set out to do, but it does not mean that we are failures. We are simply recognizing that success is not always in our hands.

A third thing I learn from this passage is that when we experience failure, we are to move on. Jesus told his disciples that when they experienced failure in one place, they were to leave.

Sometimes, the best thing we can do is to move on to another place. Lawrence Welk began life in a Dakota farmhouse with sod floor and walls. He was one of eight children born to parents of German ancestry. They were farmers, and expected Lawrence to take up farming as well. From his earliest years, Lawrence was interested in music. His father played the accordian for the family's amusement. When he was a teenager, Lawrence bought a cheap accordian, but it soon fell apart. He saw a more expensive one, and proposed to his father that he would work on the farm for four years without pay if he could have that accordian. The deal was made.

After years of practice, he rented the local opera house and tried to sell tickets for a concert, but it was a dismal failure. No one thought that the local farmboy could be very entertaining. He tried unsuccessfully several times later, but few tickets sold. Even his own family wouldn't come to hear him play. His father told him that music was all right as a pastime, but not as a life work.

Lawrence decided that he would have to leave home to find a place where his music would be accepted. His father warned him that he wouldn't last six weeks, but on his twenty-first birthday, Lawrence left his hometown to test his dream. It was only then that he found success as a maker of music.

Sometimes the best thing we can do is to move on to another field. Paul Harvey tells the story of Joe, who was born into a family of Sicilian immigrants, a family who had a 300-year history as fishermen. Joe's dad was a fisherman. His brothers were fishermen. But Joe was made sick by the smell of raw fish and the motion of a rocking boat. In a family where the only acceptable way to earn a living was by fishing, Joe was a failure. His dad used to refer to his son as "good for nothing." Joe believed his dad. He believed that his attempts at other types of work were an admission of failure, but he just couldn't stand the smell of the fishing business. One thing that Joe could do was to play baseball. Giving up a field where he could not succeed, Joe DiMaggio moved to another field and became one of the great successes of baseball.

Sometimes the best thing we can do is to learn from our failures and try a different approach from the one we've been following. Thomas Edison claimed that he probably had more failures than anyone ever did, yet we do not remember him as a failure. He patented 1,093 inventions in his lifetime, that would lead one to believe that he couldn't have had too many failures. The truth is that he failed quite frequently. But he didn't look on them as failures. When something didn't work he would say, "Now we know one more thing that doesn't work. We're that much closer to finding one that will."

What all of this says to me is that failure is a part of life, but God can redeem even failure and work it into the pattern that God is weaving. Jesus failed to turn the world or even his own people to his understanding of God and God's place in our lives. His enemies seized him and killed him. But God was able to use even Jesus' apparent failure -- his crucifixion -- as a way to capture our attention, and to woo us toward reliance on God's grace. If God could use such an apparent failure to accomplish his purposes, what may God yet do in those areas where we have failed? We may lose some battles, but God is able to use them to win the "war."