Let's Be Losers

 Mark 8:31-38   9-15-24

 

It Is Finished
Jorge Cocco Santangelo

Everybody likes a winner.

Everyone wants to be a winner,

or at least to be seen with the one who is at the top.

We give medals, prizes, recording contracts, trophies.

The winners have the most money, fame, glory, and success.

 

We want to see gold, silver or bronze medalists,

the Oscar winner, the one with the Super Bowl trophy

Everyone wants a long interview with the winners

how did you do it? what was your strategy?

What was your inspiration?

All we want to know from the losers is, what went wrong?

 

Everyone says it’s an honor just to be nominated,

or to play in the finals,

that they’re just happy that they got as far as they did.

But we know that’s not completely true.

They wanted to be the winner too.

 

Our culture values winning, victory, being number one.

For a lot of people, doing well is not enough.

The goal is to win.

 

Now we might not all be involved in all this competition stuff.

But this need to win still ekes into our personal lives.

Everything becomes a bit of a competition

and even if we don’t need to be the best,

we want to be on the winning side of the picture.

We have to earn enough, sell enough,

get good grades, get the good seal of approval.

Whatever the measure of success is

in our chosen field, we want to be on the winning side.

 

And our Christians churches

have this same drive whether or not we admit it.

We want to be the biggest or the best

or the truest, have the purest theology.

Or at least be on the winning side of things.

Europe in the middle-ages seemed to have a competition

for who could build the biggest most ostentatious

church buildings, even though I understand that

attendance in church, even at that time,

did not warrant the size of the buildings.

 

And they’ve been gilding churches in gold for centuries,

not because it’s the most efficient, or the most durable.

But because it’s the most prized, it says success and glory.

It looks awesome.

 

And today, mega churches are valued,

The bigger the better. Their pastors are lauded

and respected and interviewed on the news

as if they have some special insight.

If their church is big. They must be doing something right.

 

Churches even try and sell the theology of winning

Joel Osteen who has one of the largest churches

in the United States, has written a lot of books

and his first and most popular is called “Your Best Life Now:

Seven steps to living to your fullest potential.”

Basically a Christian way to win at life.

Christianity is another way to achieve and win.

Even our obsession with “getting to heaven” can be seen

as a desire to win.

 

Peter wanted this from the church,

Peter wanted to follow a winner, the best.

He thought that Jesus would be a success

and recognized by everyone as such.

When Jesus asked who people said he was,

Peter easily says, “You are the Messiah!”

He was very happy to be following the Messiah.

But Jesus follows this up with a twist:

“Then he began to teach them that he

must undergo great suffering,

and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests,

and the scribes, and be killed.”

 

Ooh. That doesn’t sound like winning.

That’s not even on the winning side of things.

I don’t think the “seven steps to living your best life now”

includes suffering, rejection by the powerful and being killed.

That sounds a lot like losing.

 

So Peter told Jesus no, he must be wrong about this part.

Because, of course, God only backs winners.

But Jesus rebuked Peter at this

He told him, not only that he was wrong,

but all this winning stuff was Satan’s handiwork.

It was Satan’s temptation of us, another way to divide us.

And God doesn’t just back winners.

God backs losers.

 

And to stress the point Jesus told them

that those who followed him should be losers too.

 

At the time of Jesus,

Greco Roman society was even more obsessed

with winning than we are now.

They actually worshipped Victory.

Victoria, and the Greek equivalent Nike

(that the shoe is named after)

was the goddess of victory.

There were many temples in Rome

that were built and used in honor of Victoria.

She was worshipped regularly.

 

She represented Victory over death

and the way to have victory over death

was to be victorious in life.

To win battles and wars.

To achieve and win at life.

To be the best at everything.

That was to be blessed by the gods.

That was how you lived eternally.

 

Which was super-cool for the rich,

and the healthy, and those born into privilege

or those who had attained a privileged status

in Greco-Roman society.

 

But for the rest of the people.

For the poor, or the disabled, or those born into the wrong

side of the tracks, or the ones who had fallen on string of bad luck,

it was more than just sad and a struggle.

People weren’t sympathetic with them.

They believed the gods had cursed them, so people cursed them too.

Life was awful and death would be awful too.

They had no victory over death.

They were shameful and ignored or shunned

by those on the winning side of things.

They were avoided, because if you were seen with a loser

than you might be a loser too.

 

Then came Jesus.

And all his teachings that the last will be first.

And his meeting and talking and eating with all the losers.

And then Jesus dying on the cross.

And this was hard for those who followed him

to deal with this reality.

Their Messiah, had died this awful, shameful, embarrassing death.

He was, by all accounts, a loser himself.

And they could have denied it, or forgotten about it,

but Jesus earliest followers decided to lean into it instead.

 

Even Peter, the one who rebuked Jesus when

he told him about the cross, even he preaches over

and over again in in Acts about how Jesus died on a cross.

We have Paul centering his letters and his ministry on this fact.

And we have the churches following Jesus and centering

themselves around the most vulnerable in society.

 

In the early years of the Christian church,

Christians were scorned by others

because their actions ran contrary

to the values of Greek and Roman society.

Christians spent their time with the losers.

Christians helped the sick, they visited prisoners,

they welcomed and fed the poor,

they valued the life of slaves.

Winners and losers did not spend quality

time together in those days,

losers were only there to serve the winners.

 

The Christians, then purposely welcomed in the losers.

They became part of their communities.

They all shared what they had and gave away what they had.

So that when you went to a Christian temple

you couldn’t tell the difference between

the winners and the losers.

So how were you supposed to judge others?

How were you supposed to know who it was

fashionable to hang out with?

How were you supposed to know who their

God had blessed and who God had cursed?

It’s like Jesus wanted to re-order all of society or something!

 

This was a controversial horror to some.

But it was also what made Christianity hugely

attractive to others in the first century of the church.

 

Of course, before the ink was dry on the scriptures,

those were written in, we lost that part of our identity

and we started gilding our churches and

painting Jesus on a throne in fine robes.

And the cross became more about our victory

than about our sacrifice.

And we started writing Christian books about winning in life.

 

But the story has always been there.

Hidden under years of traditions and misuse.

 

Jesus isn’t looking for winners.

Jesus is looking for losers.

Those who give up their own time

and their own money, and sacrifice it to serve others.

 

Jesus wants people who give up their own

victories in order to see victories in other people.

Jesus wants people who are willing to

lose our own status and dare to be seen

around the poor, the oppressed, the cast aside,

the homeless, the mentally challenged,

the immigrant, the prisoner, those that society rejects.

 

Jesus wants people who serve at a distance,

but who dare to follow Jesus,

and welcome other people into

our hearts and our lives as equals.

 

If any want to become Jesus followers,

let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow him.

For those who want to save their life will lose it,

and those who lose their life for Christ’s sake,

and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.

 

Let’s all be losers.