By Reverend Laurie DeMott

If you have, this sermon is for you, but even if you haven't, this sermon is still for you because one day you may stumble in a most magnificent way and at that time you will wonder if the Bible has anything to say to you to help you climb out of the awful pit you have dug for yourself.

But even if you have never failed that badly and even if you do manage to live the rest of your life without ever messing up royally, this sermon is for you as well because throughout our lives we will encounter other people who have failed, who have fallen, who have made olympian sized mistakes, and we will need to know what to make of these people and what our faith says about coping with the human capacity to create such a real wreck out of our lives.

I am preaching a series of sermons based on television reality shows and this week I want to look at a show that sets out to deliberately cause failures of massive proportion. It's called "Wipeout."

For those of you who have never seen the show, I invite you to imagine a large obstacle course in which the obstacles are constantly moving. All of the normal sorts of hindrances -- hurdles, stairs, tunnels, and what not -- are motarized and always changing so instead of, for example, running up a stairs to get to the next part of the course, a contestant might have to run up steps that are collasping under him as he goes, or she may have to climb along a wall with panels that suddenly swing outward to knock her off her path. If this were not challenging enough, the entire course is placed over an artificial lake so any false move jetisons the contestant into the water, or sometimes into a pool of goopy mud. In one episode I watched, the contestants were catapaulted over the water, pelted by hotdogs and condiments as they jumped across blocks, doused by firehoses, pummeled by a wall of spring-loaded boxing gloves, flung from the arms of huge spinning gears, and bounced off mushroom shaped cones like human pinballs. The motivation for accepting such abuse is the $50,000 that goes to the winner of each episode but the obstacle course is so difficult that the winner is not the person who successfully navigates the course, because no one successfully navigates the course. Every contestant falls at some point in the contest and so the winner is simply the person who manages to get back up the fastest to stumble, slip, or even crawl to the end. And the appeal of the show is the magnificence with which some of the contestants mess up. Only one person will win the $50,000 but every contestant has the opportunity to achieve immortality on Youtube as millions of viewers watch them cartwheel into the mud over and over again in glorious slow motion.

If the producers of "Wipeout" had chosen to film a battalion of Marines climbing over walls and running rope courses in a display of impressive athleticism, we might watch for a few moments before switching the channel to "Law and Order" but the creators of "Wipeout" know that it is the stream of failures that hold our attention. It is the spectacle of watching one contestant after another tumbling into defeat by the rigors of the course and it is precisely that assurance of failure that makes the tenacity of the eventual winner even more remarkable. What kind of person, we wonder, could endure such humiliation over and over again and yet still be able to perservere? What gives someone the strength to stand back up after a particularly disastorous fall and move forward again?

There is a fable that tells the story of several frogs who are hopping through the woods when suddenly two of them fall into a deep pit. The other frogs run to the hole's edge, peer down into its dark depth, and cry out, "There is no hope. It's too deep -- you're as good as dead!" The two frogs in the pit ignore the comments and try to jump out, flinging themselves upward with all of their might, but the pessimists at the top continue to shout, "Give up! You can't do it! It's too deep." Finally, one of the frogs accepts the verdict of the others and huddles at the bottom of the pit where he dies of exhaustion and heartbreak, but the other frog continues to jump as hard as he can. The more the frogs at the top yell at him to give up, the more effort he puts into his leaps until finally, in a miracle of perseverance, he catches the lip of the pit and pulls himself out to safety. It turns out that the second frog is deaf, and the whole time the others had been yelling at him to accept defeat, he thought they had been yelling their encouragement.

What gives some people the ability to pick themselves back up after a fall? Many inventors and entrepeneurs have an internal cheerleader that keeps them forging ahead in spite of their failures but for most of us, it is not an internal voice that gives us strength; it is an external one. It is the voices of friends telling us they believe in us; it is the voice of family willing to forgive us, and it the voice of Christ saying, "I will raise you up if you just take my hand." I suspect that for the contestants of the show "Wipeout", their motivation to persevere is not as much the prospect of winning fifty thousand dollars as it is knowing that the eyes of thousands of viewers are on them and that somewhere out there in that audience are friends and family cheering them on.

Paul reminds the church at Corinth that we as Christians should be those cheerleaders for one another. Rather than condemning the sinner, we should encourage their redemption. Rather than shouting, "Give it up. You can't possibly do it," we should be telling one another, "I believe in you. I know that you can overcome the past." Paul's own words of support to the Corinthian church rang true to their ears because he himself was proof that someone could fall mightily and still get up and go on. He knew what he was talking about when he said, "We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed." Paul himself rose up from the dust of his sin against Christ to become a new person in Christ. If Paul could make it out of the pit, then certainly the people of the church at Corinth had hope. Certainly you and I have hope.

If you have failed -- whether it was a small mistake that caused you to trip up momentarily or a colossal wrong that hurt others and tore at your very soul -- you, too, should hear in these words of Paul that there is hope for you still. You should hear in the voices of these fellow people of faith that no sin is so great that it can separate you from the love of God and our love for you in Christ. There is always redemption ahead; there is always the possibility of new life awaiting.

The writer Clovis Chappell, says, "No failure need ever be final... The only disaster that is without remedy is to quit trying.... Simon Peter's life might have ended as tragically as that of Judas [Iscariot]'s had he not dared to start anew. The life of Judas might have ended triumphantly -- indeed, he might have been the most amazing miracle of the New Testament -- had he only dared to make a new start. The most painful wound this traitor inflicted upon his Lord was not his kiss of betrayal but his failure to trust him enough to make a new start."

And so, the church should be a community that forgives us in our failures, reminds us of Christ's continuing presence, and encourages us to get back on our feet and try again. But I believe there is an even deeper message that we can declare that goes beyond the motivational speakers, that goes deeper than mere cheerleading; a message that is uniquely Christian in its redemptive power.

On the episode of "Wipeout" I watched last week, one of the four contestants who had made it into the final round, actually did give up. After successfully navigating a number of obstacles, the contestant had arrived at a giant Tilt-a-Whirl: a spinning disk, filled with foam the consistency of shaving cream. The foam not only made the tilt-a-whirl extremely slippery; it also frequently blinded the contestant as he struggled to run across to the exit on the other side. Time and time again, the man tried to cross from one side of the whirling disk to the other, but time and time again, he would fall down and the disk would whirl him back to his starting point, until exhausted and unable to see a way out, he gave up. The other three contestants had encountered similar problems on the tilt-a-whirl but all three figured out what never occurred to this man -- the only way across the whirling disk was not forward but backwards. You had to grab onto its sides and let it carry you backwards, and then up and over the top, until it deposited you on the other side.

Paul ends his words of encouragement to the Corinthians by saying, "For we who live are always being given over to death for Jesus' sake, so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh." At the center of our redemption, Paul says, is the figure of the cross. There is in its testimony of death and resurrection the powerful declaration that sometimes our only hope for new life lies in facing first the death of our old selves. Sometimes the only way forward is to let go of our attempt to continue on the path we have been doggedly pursuing and look for an entirely new way, a new self, a new life. You know the fact is that sometimes our failures have been so hurtful that the old relationships simply cannot be continued. We have broken trusts that can't be repaired. We have left wounds that will never completely heal. Or sometimes our failure has eliminated options -- the embezzlement puts us in jail, the broken vows lead to a divorce. After these sorts of falls, picking ourselves up and trying to doggedly go on as if nothing has changed leads only to more destruction and failure until, exhausted from the effort, we have nothing left in us except to lay down and quit.

No matter how much it hurts to face the fact, there are times when our failures, or the failures of others, will mean that we cannot simply return to the old way of doing things as if the mistakes had never happened. Whatever life we are to have after we have picked ourselves up will have to look completely different; it will have to be something new. Sometimes the only way to move on is through the shadow of the cross where we encounter the pain of having to let go of everything that is familiar, where we must let our old selves die. But the gospel promises that beyond the cross lies resurrection. Beyond the death lies new life. Like the contestant in the tilt-a-whirl, if we can just stop stubbornly trying to forge ahead on that old dead end trail and take hold of the hand of Christ, God will turn us around, lift us up, and carry us into a new place of new possibilities. It won't be the same life; but God promises it can be a good life with new love, new dreams, and surprising joy.

Let us always encourage one another and remind each other that all things can be made new, In Christ there will always be hope and life beyond the failure, beyond the fall. There will always be for us new life beyond the cross.