{Prayer}
Charlie Brown from the Peanuts cartoon can never catch a break. He is the stereotypical American loser. Whenever he tries to kick the football that Lucy is holding, just as he is about to kick it, she pulls it away at the last second. Charlie Brown misses it and goes flying through the air only to land flat on his back. His baseball team has never won a game. Although there was that one time when they did score a single run.
For being a school age kid, Charlie Brown has some major premature balding going on and he can’t for the life of himself ever seem to get anything right. For Halloween he tried to make himself the easiest costume ever, a ghost. But somehow he cut a gazillion holes in sheet. So instead of having only two holes that he needed for eyes, there were holes all over the place. As a result, he receives rocks instead of candy.
For Christmas he is given the noble task of getting a Christmas tree. Instead of coming back with a beautifully full Fraser fir, he gets something that is a little more than a twig. Ol’ Chuck felt sorry for the little thing because no else wanted it. He thought the tree was a little like himself. The result was that everyone was angry with him and accused him of sabotaging Christmas. Oh good grief!
Charlie Brown is a loser. No one wants to be like Charlie Brown. No one idolizes Charlie Brown. No one looks up to Charlie Brown. We might feel sorry for Charlie Brown but deep down inside we are relieved that we are not that bad.
No one likes to be called a loser. It’s not something that we teach our kids how to be. We want everyone to be winners. We expected people to succeed at whatever task or job is given to them. There’s this mentality in our world that failure is not an option. No one wants to be called a loser.
Listen again to what Matthew says, specifically in verse 39 of our gospel reading. Here Jesus says, “Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” As we have looked at chapters nine and ten, we have been talking about discipleship. To be a disciple of Jesus, you must be a loser. To say that, to say that Jesus is for losers may not sound just right, but it does say something about two types of things which I want to unpack for us this morning. First off, it reveals something about the people who Jesus calls to follow Him. Such people are, in more ways than one, losers. And these people should own it. The second thing that Jesus is for losers declares is something to us about God.
Let’s start off with what “Jesus is for Losers” says about disciples and discipleship. If you look at the original twelve disciples that Jesus chose, there is nothing about them that screams “pick me! Pick me!”. None of them went to school to become a disciple. If the prophet Jeremiah was around at the time of Jesus, he more than likely would have doubted their credentials and capability of being disciples. And yet, Jesus chose them. Walking along the shore of the Sea of Galilee, walking through town, Jesus seemingly called the disciples out of the blue. “Come follow me” He would say. And, these common, every day kind of men did just, they drop everything and followed Jesus.
But after this good start of following Jesus, things for the disciples started to go downhill rather quickly. In the midst of Jesus’ teachings, miracles, and preaching, we find the disciples repeatedly misunderstanding Jesus. It seems like they are always needing further clarification on what Jesus was talking about. Not because they want more knowledge, they just didn’t get it. They didn’t understand. The disciples easily got angered at the religious elite and at times wanted to call down fire from heaven upon them. They would argue amongst themselves over who was the greatest. When Jesus would talk about being handed over to sinful men, crucified and buried, the disciples would try to put Jesus in His place by saying that He wasn’t going down like that. Then in the Garden when the soldiers came to arrest Jesus, the disciples, especially Peter try to prevent them from taking Jesus by whipping out his sword and cutting off the ear of the high priest’s servant. But then when Jesus is arrested, this misfit crew of disciples are nowhere to be found. They all run away looking out for their own skin. After Jesus is killed and buried, these fair-weather followers find themselves hiding in an inner room behind locked doors for fear of the Jews. To say that discipleship is for losers is to notice that the people Jesus calls to follow Him are weak, unimpressive, and ultimately undependable. Paul points out to the Corinthian church, “Not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, and not many were of noble birth” (1 Cor. 1:26).
And if all this wasn’t enough, the disciples are losers in yet another sense. One that is more connected to our reading from Matthew 10. “Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for My sake will find it” (10:39). To lose your life is not simply to be a loser to begin with. To lose your life is to continue to lose, to be on a losing streak. It’s to lose your pride, to lose your boasting, or to lose anything else which you might presume to offer up to God as being significant or worthy of praise. Paul says in our second reading, “I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in him” (Philippians 3:8-9a). We lose our lives when we recognize that we have nothing to offer God. We have no claim to anything, no right to anything, nor are we entitled to anything because all things, everything we have comes from God alone. There is nothing special about us which would bring God to call us to follow Him as His disciples.
To say that discipleship is for losers is not only to say something about the disciples themselves, but it also has something to say about God. You know, God is the One who chose the disciples. It was God who chose the Israelites back in the Old Testament. He is the One who chose that small nation which in the grand scheme of the world at the time had an extremely small role to play. But this fits. This fits in perfectly with a God who humbled Himself by taking on flesh, by lowering Himself to become a human from the good-for-nothing hometown of Nazareth.
This humble God delights in showering His favor upon the lowly, the least expecting. God lifts up the humble, He reaches out to the broken and the defeated, He welcomes the outcast and He make friends with the foreigner. In other words, you can say that God is for the loser. To say that then means … that God is for you and me. We confessed it earlier, you and I are sinners. We are outcasts deserving none of the things which God so freely gives us. We are foreigners in that it is only through the grace of God in which you and I have been brought into God’s family.
But here’s the thing … God has chosen each and every one of us to be His losers. You and I are His disciples and we have been given the precious gift of eternal life in Him.
There’s also a flip side to this idea that God is for losers. Not only does God choose those who are undeserving, not only does he lift up the lowly … but God also humbles the proud. He brings to nothing those who think they are all that, those who think they are something. And that one strikes close to home and should hurt a bit because there are more times than not in which we need to be knocked down some. When we start comparing ourselves to others and think, at least I’m not that guy, or look at me compared to so and so … we need God to humble us. We need God to bring us back down where we belong, we need to be put in our place. Even though we may think it at times, we are not God. By putting us in our place, humbling ourselves before God … there is room for faith, there is room for saving faith in Jesus.
This kind of faith, it recognizes that we are totally dependent on God and His call to follow Him. You and I, we have absolutely nothing to offer God. Like sheep behind their shepherd, we follow Him wherever He goes. We follow Him, even if it means following Him through the suffering and the pain of being betrayed, being attacked, being harassed and made fun of. As disciples of Jesus, we follow Him to and through death. Going with Him to and through death, we come out with Him on the other side of the resurrection and into eternal life. As you and I lose ourselves in God, only then do we find the possibility for real and lasting life.
What do losers like this look like? Perhaps it’s easier to tell them apart by what they sound like. If you listen in on their prayers, they probably sound something like Saint Teresa of Avila. Let us pray.
May You be blessed forever, Lord,
for not abandoning me when I abandoned You.
May you be blessed forever, Lord,
for offering Your hand of love in my darkest, most lonely moment.
May you be blessed forever, Lord,
for loving me more than I love myself.
May you be blessed forever, Lord,
for continuing to pour out Your blessing upon me, even though I respond so poorly.
May you be blessed forever, Lord,
for drawing out the goodness in all people, including me.
May you be blessed forever, Lord,
for repaying our sin with Your loves.
May you be blessed forever, Lord,
for being constant and unchanging, amidst all the changes of the world.
May you be blessed forever, Lord,
for Your countless blessings on me and on all Your creation. Amen.
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