Losers and Winners

IN the news:  “Who are the lucky three? That was a common question on the minds of all the rest of us Mega Millions losers on Saturday after lottery officials announced that three lottery tickets sold in Kansas, Illinois and Maryland hit the world record-breaking $640 million jackpot. The morning after the drawing, most Americans were left with dashed fantasies of what they would have done with more than half a billion dollars.  In New York City, Sean Flaherty hoped to trade in some of his 12-hour days working as a video game tester to spend more time with his wife and daughter.

"I knew that when I bought the ticket, that I wouldn't win," Flaherty said Saturday. "But I did it anyhow. Because, I don't know, it would be like Christmas." Sean is a loser.  His important life’s work testing video games keeps him away from his wife and daughter. And now he has lost the lottery.  Sorry Sean. 

Did any of you play the Megamillions lottery.  $640 Million is a lot of money.  Remember when a million was a lot? If you’re not approaching a billion these days, you’re not winning.  We assume that more is better, that having the most is the best.  I did not play the lottery.  Never do.  Maybe we Lutherans should get in the game, though.  If all of us bought ten lottery tickets with the promise that the winning ticket-buyer keeps 10% and gives away the rest, we could collectively bail out the Lutheran church in America.  Apparently there are three winners.  I Doubt that they are thinking about contributing to the Lutheran church.  How many people spent money to buy tickets, knowing the odds were not in their favor, with the dream that they would win, believing that winning the lottery is a ticket to a better life.  Like the man said: it would be like Christmas.  Because Christmas is all about acquiring more, which is the meaning of life.

There are always winners and always losers.  Whether it’s the final four (Kentucky and Kansas) or the Civil War, we divide the world thus.  Winners have the power, the money, the record of success.  Their stories are told, so that they become example.  Sometimes winners in life are beloved, sometimes they are demonized.  No doubt Adolf Hittler succeeded. He ruled Germany and nearly the western world.  He successfully established a program to eliminate an entire population of people.  Now no one disagrees that Hitler’s atrocities were some of the very worst crimes against humanity.  But Hitler was popular and powerful.

When we think about the meaning of success, a successful person, what or who do you think of? Are you successful?  How we have come to define success and failure, winning and losing, is important.   I like how Presidents are elected here.  For a short time that person seems to garner the support of the people. That changes.  He is demonized, maybe even Hitlerized.  The four-year Presidents are the least memorable, defeated mid-term, as it is.  A new ruler rises and will also fall.  Do any of you believe that the next guy is going to be so much better than the one who came before?  Does history bear that logic out?  Or is it as likely that the next guy will fail us too?   

We see the rise and fall of successful people all the time.  One day they throw you a parade the next day they throw you under a bus.  Tiger Woods rose and fell.  If you’re lucky enough, they will let you make a comeback---because Americans love comeback stories and underdog stories.  We love rags to riches stories. We don’t like stories about losers who stay that way.  We don’t like tragedies. 

Before us is a tragic story in two parts.  Part one:  Jesus the Rabbi, compassionate Galillean healer and forgiver of sins is the King of the Jews.  The crowds shout in his honor:  HOSANNA in the Highest!  He is paraded into Jerusalem at Passover on a donkey.  He spends a week confronting the powers of the temple court and acting with authority and power, acting like a king. He leads a crusade to purify the temple, to restore the Kingdom of God. In so doing, he challenges the political system.  Part II:  He is betrayed for money by a friend, convicted by his peers at a mock trial, arrested, beaten, and presented before the crowds.  The crowds could spare his life.  They could stand behind the man they celebrated last weekend.  Instead they shout CRUCIFY.  They could rise up as an army to defend him.  Instead they abandon him to the real power of Pontius Pilate and the Roman military machine.  Their King is led away to the ultimate Roman punishment.  He is crucified outside the city during the Passover festival.  He dies on a Friday afternoon and is buried in a tomb.  Jesus loses.  He fails.  He dies. 

But Christians dare to believe that Jesus’ loss and death is our gain.  We dare to believe that his death is sacrificial and protects us from a meaningless death. Those who lose their lives for my sake will find it.  In a great reversal, a counterintuitive way, Jesus demonstrates the power of failure, the power of losing.  Could it be that our definitions of winning and losing, success and failure are reversed? 

What if sacrificial giving and a willingness to lay down your life for someone else characterized Christianity?  Too often Christianity has wanted to be on the wrong side of the winning/losing equation.  We have wanted to be MEGA church with money and youth and persuasive cultural powers. Not to mention the best music and coffee in town. 

 Jesus teaches the power of downward mobility.  To take the losers seat.  To be smallest, least, weakest, oldest, dying. For it is in losing that we find God.  Amen.  

what death is doing to us.

“Do not be alarmed.  You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, the one who was crucified.  He has been raised; he is not here.  Look the place where they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he goes ahead of you to Galilee.  There you will see him, just as he told you.” 

Afraid,grief-stricken, and alone you stand before your best friend’s grave.  Gone too soon.  How did it happen?  Your memories take you back to your first date, your wedding day, the birth of your first child, the birth of your second, the broken bones, lost teeth, games and concerts, that trip to…  the day the diagnosis came, the surgeries, those six good months before those seven bad weeks.  And then there was the funeral and the good-intentioned people.  Friends and family.  You are fortunate to have them.  You don’t know if work would make this easier or harder.  You don’t know exactly what to do next.  You are paralyzed, standing in front of the gravestone. There is this place inside you that seems empty, dark, cold.  Like something has been physically removed from your body.  You haven’t been able to listen to music or eat much of anything.  You left the plants to die.  But the house is clean and the grass is mowed.  Others have taken care of that.  You think, when we married we knew this day would come.  No one lives forever.  Someone was going to die first and the other was going to suffer through it.  It could’ve been you and you’ve wished it were you, especially when the pain seemed unbearable.  But now you are glad you are suffering and he is at peace, only because you wouldn’t want this to be how he feels.  You would weep, if there were any tears left. 

In a tent in a village in the sweat and heat of the morning the doctor pronounces that she has died.  You hold her frail body in your arms and you weep uncontrollably.  The medicine came too late.  In  two weeks, the disease stole her from you.  Her weak, undernourished body could not fight the parasitic infection that attacked her heart and lungs.  She would turn six next week.  She was looking forward to starting school, since your family had recently received assistance that would allow her to attend.  Even as you hold her dead body in your arms, you worry about her little brother; he is three and may already have Malaria.  You cannot lose them both.  You have seen what happens to the mothers who have lost all of their children.  How their life seems to drain away from them and they become incapacitated by grief. You pray for his protection, even as you pray for God to take your daughter to heaven.

What is death doing to you?  What toll has it taken?  What threat does it continue to pose?  Death is indiscriminate, universal, and personal.  It hurts us.  We use the threat and power of death as a weapon, as a mechanism of control, as a means to achieve other ends. We kill enemies to avoid being killed.  We try to take shelter from it, but it is senseless and merciless. Death threatens to annihilate the meaning of life.  The brevity of life causes us to ask why.  We flee from death, knowing we cannot escape it. Most of us were not alive 100 years ago.  We will not be alive 100 years from now.  We are part of the story, the human story, the earth story, the story of life.