When we went on a Youth Works mission trip the first summer
I was here, one of the t-shirts that the organization was modeling had a single
word across the front of the chest: Loser.
It was an
attention-getter—the kind of thing nobody wants to be, the last thing you would
want in bold print across your chest. But it’s one of the many paradoxes of the
Christian faith that to be a follower of Jesus is to be a loser. The reverse
side of that t-shirt made reference to Matthew 16:24-25:
Jesus told his disciples, "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.
Become a loser, Jesus says. Lose your life for my
sake.
I thought about that again this week
when a friend of mine posted a story to Facebook about the New England Patriots
chaplain, who calls himself a “character coach.” In the wake of the arrest of
the team’s owner for soliciting prostitution, the chaplain resigned, but, as
Adam pointed out, it’s a sign of how poor American Christianity has become that
a chaplain leaves a team “because the owner turns out to be a real live sinner.
This is what needs to die (in American Christianity),” Adam concluded.
I wholeheartedly agree. Christianity
in America has allied itself with winners. Big churches. Lots of money. Lots of
influence. Christians get mad when the government is not explicitly Christian,
when statues of the Ten Commandments are removed from public places, or when
Christian prayers are not said in public schools. Pastors run when leaders do
not live morally superior lives. In this view of the Christian church as a place
full of winners, the church can only be a success when it keeps sin in check,
except it can’t, it never has, and it never will. Christians aren’t better
people than any other faith; we aren’t better than Jews or Muslims or Hindus,
and we aren’t better than atheists either. We are sinners. Every one of us. But
from the seat of power, Christians have too often deemed ourselves beyond sin.
We have imagined that to be a Christian is to pretend to be something we are
not—that we have become like Jesus by virtue of our awesomeness at following
Jesus.
In place of being losers, we pretend
to be winners.
The biggest open secret in American
Christianity is that none of this is true. Everybody sees that we-Christians,
who sit on our high thrones and pronounce moral judgments on society, are just
as sinful as everybody else. In fact, if we do that, we are worse, because the
moral power we wield corrupts us to our core. This is why we see rampant abuse
scandals in the church—in the Roman Catholic Church and the Southern Baptist Church—scandals
whose enormity would destroy any other institution in this nation. We need to
see that this is a direct result of the presumption of moral superiority; it’s
because the church has believed itself to be full of winners—full of people who
would never do something like that. Then, when it’s proven that we are all sinners—not
winners—the church does its best to rid itself of the bad apples when those are
precisely the people that Jesus turns around and welcomes as sinners, full of
the desperate need for repentance.
Too often the American Christian
church is so full of winners that it doesn’t have any room left for Jesus.
Losers. Jesus would have us be
losers instead.
Jesus says to the disciples, “If any want to become my followers, let
them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”
If you think that
sounds hard, it gets worse. You have no examples to follow in this department
besides Jesus himself. Your favorite preacher, pastor, or spiritual guru is a
failure at cross-bearing. We are all human. We are all terrible examples of the
way of the cross. So, those who convince you they are really good at bearing
crosses are universally lying; only those who realize they can never be good at
cross-bearing—that all of us will fail to live up to Jesus’ standard—are worthy
of it. Another paradox of being Christian is that the people who want to be up
front and acquire power are precisely the ones least worthy of it. Only those
who practice humility, knowing how sad an imitation of Jesus they are, can be
much of anything.
Losers. They are losers. And they know it.
I’m sick of
winners. I’m sick of people who know
they are so righteous that they know how
to live that they know how others
should live. I am sick of winners, because they eat their own, they obsess over
the ways that others fall short, crafting a narrative where their sins are in
their past, and when reality pops up and shows them the truth, they simply make
up a new story about how they have surely turned the corner now.
Winners are obsessed with telling a story of their own
redemption. They are obsessed with looking good. Sure, they want everybody to
know how bad they were, but only so that they can use Jesus to point to how
good they now are. When I think of winners, I think of Lance Armstrong; not
only because of all those Tour de France victories but also because of how he
held together that fictional narrative for so long that he tore apart the lives
of all the losers around him. When you’re the hero in the narrative, it doesn’t
matter how many others you cast aside on the way to the top.
Winners are the worst, because they don’t exist. They are
losers putting on a mask, because they don’t understand that they don’t have to
be a winner to succeed in life. God isn’t coming for the biggest or best sheep;
he’s coming for the one that is lost. God wants the one who takes up the cross,
not the throne. God wants you, not the person you imagine yourself to be, or the
character you play for everybody else to see.
I remember a guy from college who was the champion
one-upper. I’ve met many people like this (and have been this person at various
points in my life)—people who have to beat your story, whatever it is, in order
to justify their existence. This guy took it to an incredible extreme. He had a
story about everything. You could start talking about the time you met Gandhi
on a train and he would have a story about saving Mother Theresa. I mean, it
was almost that ridiculous. This whole mentality of needing to justify
ourselves by having a better story than everybody else is the direct by-product
of a society that tells you that you need to be a winner. Ironically, it’s so
often the people who are truly great at things who understand they really aren’t
that great at all.
The great news about all of this is that God doesn’t want
winners. He doesn’t care about winners, because they don’t exist. God wants
losers. God wants you in your weakness, on the days you struggle to get out of
bed, when you are crushed by anxiety, when you know that everybody else knows
you are a fraud, and when you can’t hold it all together. God wants that you,
because that is the real you, not the winner you pretend to be.
This is not a
celebration of sin—far from it. Rather, we desperately need to know that the
solution for sin lies not within us but up on that cross we are supposed to be
carrying. We do not save ourselves by becoming winners; we admit we are losers
(which we are!) and Christ takes us for who we really are.
The sad reality is that American Christianity isn’t very
Christian at all. Not when it’s more concerned about statues of the Ten
Commandments and prayer in schools than it is with the abuse that comes with power,
and not when it is about elevating celebrity pastors and influencing
legislation. This is a lesson that has been taught again and again through the
centuries: When Christianity aligns with power, the first
casualty is Jesus. Christianity isn’t going to be persecuted in this country
any time soon, but for fear of some imagined persecution, Christians are concerned with winning the culture wars, and in-so-doing they are using Jesus
as a tool to win.
I don’t know much, really, but I know this: Jesus is not a
tool to be used. Jesus is the way, and the truth, and the life, and we are
losers, trying pathetically to walk that path of discipleship, but thanks be to
God that it is losers who God is interested in, losers who God wants to save,
and losers who will lose our lives that one day we will live again. That’s the
kind of loser we can all strive to be.
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