Biography
John R. Claypool is theologian-in-residence, Christ Episcopal Church, San Antonio, Texas. Dr. Claypool has served churches in five southern states. Additionally, he is the recipient of several honorary degrees and has published a number of books. He has an abiding interest in pastoral care and counseling, and is in constant demand as a lecturer and speaker at churches, conferences, seminaries, and universities. [Biographical information is correct as of the broadcast date noted above.]

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          and 30 Good Minutes.

"If Only to Next Time" 
Arthur Gordon was a southern lad who went to Yale and made good. In fact, he was so outstanding in his achievement that he was awarded a Rhodes scholarship on his graduation and went for two fabled years to study at Oxford. He even got to spend an afternoon once with Rudyard Kipling, right before the great poet died.

He came back and fulfilled a long-term dream by organizing or founding an avant-garde literary journal which he hoped would be a vehicle of his own and several other young writers' careers. However, after two years it turned out that he was a better student than he was an entrepreneur and editor. In fact, through many foolish decisions, after two years the magazine folded, he found himself out of work and heavily in debt. It was his first encounter with failure.

A very significant right of passage for a bright young achiever. It turned out that he knew how to succeed; he did not know how to cope with failure. So he became very depressed, even suicidal. His family down in Savannah, Georgia, became quite disturbed about him. They were successful in getting him to an important counselor, a friend of the family, an old gentleman who practiced on Manhattan Island.

Young Gordon went and poured out to the counselor his tale of lament and woe, all the self-recrimination that he was feeling for his failure. When he finished, the old counselor said, "I think your story is very similar to several others that I've worked with. Would you be willing to spend some time and listen to some recorded stories that I've got permission from these patients to share with others? I think there is similarity between their plight and yours."

So he put on a cassette and there was a man's voice. It was a father who had made several mistakes with a son in an earlier period. He had a great deal of regret for the pain that that was now causing.

The second voice was that of a woman. She made a very poor choice of a marriage partner. She had not handled the difficulties that ensued. She too was regretting all the things that were happening.

The next voice was that of a man, a high-placed business executive, who had made some unfortunate decisions earlier, and now was having to pay for them in terms of financial loss. He too was lamenting what he had done.

When the third voice ended, the counselor said to young Gordon, "Did you pick up a theme that was common through all three of those interviews? In their own way each was looking to the past and saying 'if only, if only I bad done differently, if only I hadn't made certain mistakes.' I don't mean to brag by sharing with you that I was successful in helping all three of those people. They are today much more productive in their living. The secret to turning them around was taking them to substitute two different words for the words 'if only.' I was able to get each one of those persons to learn to say 'next time' instead of 'if only.' Think about, it, 'if only' points to that sector of experience that is largely irrevocable. There is little we can do about the past and the things we have done, and to concentrate energies on the mistakes of the past is certain to lose energy altogether. However, 'next time' points to the future, that sector of experience that is still open, still subject to be changed. Here one can do differently. I was successful in getting each of these persons to take their failures as the occasion of learning rather than the occasion of despair, and if you will work with me, I will attempt to help you do the same thing with the memories that are troubling you so."

It made sense to the bright young editor and so he agreed to do a period of therapy at the end of which he was able to say, with what he had learned from that wise old counselor that one shift from 'if only' to 'next time' was in fact the most important learning that had come to him, more important even than all he learned at Yale or all he learned at Oxford.

I think that was a very significant event in the life of the young man, and it is a truth that can be transferred to the help of every one of us. I think that what he discovered, that is learning to deal with his failures in terms of hope rather than lament, that is the creative thing to do with those experiences in life when we have done the things that we would to God we had not done, or left undone the things that we would to God we had done. Every one of us has those kinds of memories. Every one of us is carrying a sack of rocks of some kind out of the past, and learning to do what young Gordon learned to do is absolutely crucial in a creative handling of failure. It is not only that, but it lies at the heart of what the Christian gospel is able to give us the power to do.

If you think back to what you know of Jesus Christ, is there a better way to describe his impact on human beings than to say he gave the power to move from 'if only' to 'next time' in relation to failure? You find again and again his encountering failing people, and he always gave them that power to cope, that hope to rise above the things that they had been in order to become something different.

There is no place in holy scripture where this is more dramatically lived out than the passage from John 8:1-11. Jesus was teaching early one morning in the temple, and he was suddenly interrupted by a group of noisy men. They have in their midst a jostled, tousled, looking woman, and they're breathless in the accusation. They said, "Jesus, do you know what? We just caught this woman in the very act of adultery, right when it was happening, and we know what Moses said ought to be done to her. This kind of person ought to be stoned on the spot. What do you say, Jesus?"

It was really a ploy to put Jesus on the spot to get him discredited in the eyes of the religious establishment of Jerusalem. Jesus, in that moment of high conflict, did three things that smack of spiritual genius, three things in retrospect that were absolutely appropriate to that situation.

The first thing he did was not to answer their question verbally at all, but rather to stoop over and begin to write with his finger in the dust. There has been a great deal of speculation as to what he wrote and why he did this. I have my own particular hunch. My hunch is that Jesus in that moment was performing an act of considerate kindness. If you think for a moment—the actualities of that situation—that woman was probably very disheveled, maybe was not even clothed at all. She had been taken very abruptly in a very embarrassing circumstance, and as she stood in the midst of those angry men, perhaps with the shame of nakedness added to every other woe that she was experiencing, as Jesus stooped over and wrote, he diverted everybody's attention for just that moment that she needed to get herself back together, to at least take away the burden of nakedness from all else that she was experiencing.

It was a resourceful act of kindness. It was Jesus' way of saying that that person for all of her problems, still had worth, still ought to be treated with dignity and respect. Jesus gave to every human being the kind of affection that he believed was worthy to give to one who was made in the image of God. He did not see people solely in terms of what they had done. He saw back of them to who they were and where they came from. That little act of kindness, that diverting attention, that giving this woman who was being treated as an object of scorn as a tool in the hands of the manipulators, giving her that gesture of considerateness. It was something that was beautiful to behold. It is the kind of thing in reach of every one of us. You don't have to be highly educated. You don't have to be greatly sophisticated in order to find ways simply to be kind, particularly to beleaguered others. In the worst of times to do the best of things, not to add to other peoples' burdens, but somehow show them that in spite of all their difficulties, they still have worth. This is what we can do. This is what I see Jesus doing as he stooped over to write in the dirt.

But the second thing he did was also a master stroke. As they were continuing to ply him with their manipulative questions, he looks up and says calmly, "The one of you who has no sin, let that one cast the first stone."

It was an incredibly subtle diagnosis of the real dynamics of that situation. I think Jesus senses that the problem here was that these men were not comfortable with their own sexuality and they were doing something that is a time-honored strategy; that is, attempting to deal with the darkness within by attacking an object without. This is the dynamic behind all the witch hunts, these times in which we try to vent all of our frustration on someone else as if they are completely to blame.

My hunch is that these men had great uneasiness about their own sexuality and what they had done, and seeing that woman (and incidentally I must say there had to be a man because no adultery can be done alone, it was a sign of the sexism of that day that only the woman is singled out there had to be two but only the woman is apprehended). These men, when they saw that happening, were made so uneasy about their own shadow, that instead of dealing with the darkness within (which is what we all need to do), they attempted to cope with it by projecting their anger and condemnation on another person. Jesus very definitely recognized that this was the problem and so by shifting the focus back to their own darkness rather than to hers, he got them to doing what we all need to do in the face of human sinfulness, that is not cry out, "It's him; it's her; it's them, oh Lord, standing in the need of prayer," but rather to get us to do that much more difficult act to confess, "It's me; it's me; oh Lord, in whom the darkness resides," and the way to begin to deal with evil is not to castigate the person out there, but begin to do work within ourselves, the homework that begins in honest repentance and the willingness to face the darkness within.

Jesus knew that if he could ever get those men to doing that, then the impulse to condemn would give way to the impulse of compassion. If I ever have the courage to fish out my own system, deal with my own incompleteness, then I find out that that which separates me from another is a matter of degree and not of kind, that I am more like that person than unlike, and that person more like me than unlike me. There is a great commonality in our needfulness. There is a great sense in which we all need the same things. We stand on level ground under the mercy of Christ and beg him to heal us and to forgive us. And it is to these men's credit that when Jesus turned the accusation around and pointed them to their own sinfulness rather than to the woman's, they took the clue, and the scripture says that beginning with the oldest (the one who had the most experience), they began to leave that place one by one. The kind of work Jesus was inviting them to do is the kind of work that can only be done individual to individual. We do things collectively that we would never do if we deal with our own individuality.

Soren Kierkegaard, in talking about the scene right before the crucifixion, said that none of the people who spat on Jesus, who ridiculed him, who made fun of him and reviled him, none of those people had they been lone individuals, would have had the courage to walk up and spit in Jesus' face or slap him. But put together, somehow the evil in each one grows and becomes more hideous.

The interesting thing is that here by getting these folk in touch with their own need for self-examination, the collective mob disintegrated. They left one by one to do their homework, to get in touch with the beam that was in their own eye rather than the mote that existed in that pathetic woman. It was a deft way of focusing attention where it needed to be.

Then the third thing. When the group of accursers was gone, Jesus looks up and says to the woman, "Is there no one to condemn you?"

And she says, "No one, sir.''

And he says those incredible words, "Neither do I condemn you then. Go and sin no more."

Here is the shift from 'if only' to 'next time'. Here is the word that says, "You are invited to take your past seriously but not ultimately." Here is that gift of grace that was being given by that one that said to her that she could be different in the future. She didn't have to go on being the way she had always been. Jesus moved her out of that dead end of despair into that open course of hope and creativity. When we use our sins as a way of learning what needs to be learned and take the wisdom that they bequeath to us and move this into a new future. That's the way to make creative response to our failures. There is nothing we can do to undo what we have done, but there are things we can learn from our failures that can make us into more compassionate and creative persons, and Jesus in bequeathing that mercy to this tragic person who had been caught in her sin, was doing for her what he did for every sinful person that he met: he gave them the gift of forgiveness, the gift of free grace. He did it out of a bountiful sense that the one who gives us life is a God of mercy, that he will give us second chances in our lives on the same terms that he gave us our first chance.

If you stop to ask yourself, "What did I do to deserve being born into this world?" it comes to you that the life that you experience at birth is a sheer and total gift. We do nothing to earn our way into this world. It is given to us apart from our deserving.

And the good news of Jesus Christ is that we are given second chances on the same terms that we were given our first chance. God is not a perfectionist, but a loving father. Life is not a spelling bee, one mistake and down you go. It is rather like a potter's shop where a patient artist takes a lump of clay and works with it, and works with it, and works with it until at last he gets it to the way he wants it to be. There is something bigger in the world than our sin, and that something is a merciful God. He is willing to give us second chances out of his grace and not out of our deserving, and the power to move from 'if only' which is a way of regret, to 'next time' which is a way of hope is that creative mercy of God saying most clearly in the face of Jesus, when he said to that woman, "I do not condemn you. I do not relegate you to hopelessness. I do not freeze you into what you have been. I open for you the possibility of a new future granted in the same kind of mercy that you received when you first were born into this world." The power to move from 'if only' to 'next time' is the incredible mercy of God.

Dr. William Muehl of the Yale Divinity School had something happen years ago in his family that gives graphic image to the truth I am trying to convey. It seems that he had a five-year-old son who was in kindergarten. About October of that year, the teacher suggested to the children that they might like to make some kind of present for their parents for the coming Christmas. Their son decided to make a ceramic ashtray. He took some clay and with the help of the teacher, he molded it carefully, painted it just the way he wanted it.

The teacher even helped him put it in the kiln and fire it. He was so pleased with the work of his hands and the prospect that come Christmas morning, he was going to be able to give his parents something that he had made himself. The last day before Christmas holidays came, they had a traditional Christmas pageant, and the little boy went to the classroom to get his cherished package. But in his hurry to put on his coat, run down the hall, say "goodbye" to all his friends at the same time, he tripped and the package went out of his hand, up in the air, and came crashing down on the floor with a terrible sound of breaking. When the child realized what had happened, that all of his work and all of his hopes had absolutely gone to shambles, he began to cry uncontrollably. The father trying to deal not only with the child's discomfort but with his own discomfort, moved in and said, "Don't cry, son. Don't cry. It doesn't matter. It really doesn't matter.”

But the mother, far wiser in things of the heart, pushed the father aside and said, "Oh, you are very wrong. It does matter. It matters a great deal that this has happened," and with that she put her arms around the weeping child and began to weep with him for his shattered dreams. But then when the tears were passed, she reached in her purse and got out a handkerchief and quietly dried the tears on the little fellow's cheek and then said to him, "Come on, let's pick up the pieces and see what we can make of what is left."

In the three principal actors of that drama, you have the three alternatives in dealing with failure. The crying of the child is a symbol of the despair in that what we have done cannot be undone, what we have broken can never be mended. There is nothing as hopeless as the sense that the past is an ultimate that we cannot change.

The father's attempt to minimize the pain by trivializing what has happened. That will never bring any significant change either, because it drains all life of meaning.

No, the figure of that mother who knew how to weep appropriately for that which ought to have been wept over, who knew how to take the past seriously, but then saying, "Come, let's pick up the pieces and see what we can make of what is left," ah, that is the way of grace, that is the way of seeing that there is always something that God can do even with our most broken lives and our most broken experiences.

Therefore I would say to you tonight that the power to move from 'if only' to 'next time', the power to get beyond the terrible shadows of the past into some kind of significant future, grows out of the incredible mercy of God who is willing to give us new chances at life on the same terms he gave us our first chance.

Therefore, I have used many images: the young achiever moving from 'if only' to 'next time', the stooping figure of Jesus who said, "Neither do I condemn you, go and sin no more," or that wonderful mother reaching down to weep and then to say, "Let's pick up the pieces and see what we can make with what is left." That is the Gospel. There is something bigger than you are in this world and that something is the merciful God.

Would you let his goodness take your badness and make you wiser and better because of his forgiveness? It is his gift. Take it and become new. Amen.