Losers – Based on Luke 15:1-32

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Special thanks to my favorite theologian Robert Farrar Capon and his writings on this passage.  They heavily informed my work on the middle section about the shepherd searching for the lost sheep, the woman looking for her lost coin, and the two lost sons (otherwise known as the “Parable of the Prodigal Son”).

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We are, all of us, losers.
We are, all of us, in the process of either losing something or getting lost ourselves.
We are always losing things of value:
friendships of the past,
our loved ones through betrayal, divorce and death,
our children to adulthood (though they never really go away… right?),
and ultimately, we lose our lives to deteriorating health and bodily decay.
Some people even lose their faith -
a tragedy strikes too close to home and heart -
and they lose their religion.

Of course, we lose less important things too.
Our keys, books, important documents . . .
Have you ever lost your car in a large parking lot?
We are losers; even the most successful of us.
Oh, we may be proud of our accomplishments.
We may have even done a thing or two to garner attention or recognition.
But we are still losers nonetheless.

Over time, some of the more observant of us, have noticed this.
Michael Jordan, considered by many to be the paragon of winning, once said,
“I have missed more than 9000 shots in my career.
I have lost almost 300 games.
26 times I have been entrusted to take the game winning shot . . . and missed.
And I have failed over and over and over again in my life.”

In Philippians 3, Paul the apostle tells us that:
If anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh,
I have more: circumcised on the eighth day,
a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin,
a Hebrew born of Hebrews;  as to the law, a Pharisee;
as to zeal, a persecutor of the church;
as to righteousness under the law, blameless.
Yet whatever gains I had,
these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ.
More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.
For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things,
and I regard them as rubbish (the more accurate word here is actually “dung”)
I regard them as dung, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him

Like Paul, I could brag a little about my accomplishments if I wanted to.
Three college degrees,
a member of numerous  honor societies,
I am a published writer,
I have won numerous scholarships, awards, certificates of merit,
and I have had a somewhat successful 20 year career in ministry.
But does any of this make me any less of a loser?
No, it doesn’t, for I too have failed at so many things in my life.

And how about you?
What are your accomplishments, achievements, and good deeds?
And do any of these things make you any less of a loser?
No, unfortunately they do not.
As another has said,
when we stand before God, all our righteousness is but filthy rags.
And Martin Luther, the great reformer, put it this way,
in his last written words before his death:
“We are all beggars; this is true.”
And what are beggars, if not the ultimate losers?
I guess it is fortunate for us that God loves losers.
That God loves those of us who are lost,
and he will stop at nothing to find us.

“I want you to imagine that you have one hundred sheep and that you lose one of them,”
Jesus says to the very religious people who have gathered around him.
“Now if you had done that, wouldn’t you go look for the lost one until you find it?”
Well, what’s the real answer to that question?
The real answer to that question is “of course not.”
Nobody in his right mind in the sheep business with one hundred sheep,
and who loses one, leaves the ninety-nine to the wolves and the coyotes,
and goes chasing off after one.
You cut your losses, forget about the lost sheep, and go on with the 99.
So Jesus’ question is perverse, odd and ironic.
Who among you wouldn’t go out and do this?
Well, no one would; no one would go out and do this sort of thing.

And as if that was not enough, Jesus goes on,
“And when you find that one lost sheep, what do you do next?
Well, I’ll tell you what I would do.
I would put the sheep on my shoulder,
and then notice what Jesus says here,
he doesn’t say, “And I will go back to the ninety-nine and give the little sheep back to his mother sheep,”
or something else like that.
No, what Jesus says is that he puts the lost sheep on his shoulders and goes to his house.
He goes home.
In this parable, Jesus never goes back to the ninety-nine sheep.

You see, as Bible scholar Robert Capon points out, the 99 sheep are a set-up.
Jesus has divided the flock into one sheep and 99 sheep,
but he’s not trying to make two different groups representing humankind -
you know, 99 who don’t get lost, and one who does.
No, the real meaning of the one and the 99 is that the one lost sheep represents the whole human race as it really is,
and the 99 “found” sheep who never get lost are the whole human race as we think we are.
That’s why the 99 sheep are ultimately unimportant in this story.
The one lost sheep, the one loser sheep, stands for all of us,
and this means that the only thing the shepherd-God, the God character – is interested in,
is going after the lost,
and, if necessary,
the shepherd will go out of the sheep ranching business to find the lost.
Further, this means that God will even go out of the God business,
out of the business of being the kind of God we turn God into –
the bookkeeper God,
a kind of  divine Santa Claus in the sky who’s keeping records on everybody, naughty and nice,
and if you aren’t nice, he’s not going to bother with you anymore.
That’s the business God leaves behind when he goes after the lost because he only wants to come and find sinners . . . losers, in other words.
He doesn’t want anything or anyone else.

Jesus ends this story with one last statement:
“I say to you that there is more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.”
This is the proof that every human being is found in the one lost sheep.
After all, have you ever met any of those ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance?
No, you haven’t; there aren’t any.
In fact, there isn’t one in the whole world.
So this proves the set-up that Jesus is only interested in finding the lost;
that God, in Christ, is only interested in searching for losers.

Now after the lost sheep, Jesus follows up with the parable of the lost coin,
and here the God character is a woman,
and a very strange woman at that, if you ask me
(and here, I have to admit that as a man, women have always been strange to me).
If the shepherd is crazy to go chase one sheep and leave 99 alone in the wilderness,
this woman is even worse.
Jesus says this woman has ten silver dollars,
and every morning she gets up, takes a look at them,
perhaps she even polishes them,
and then she puts them back down again until the next day.
But when she gets up one morning,
she discovers that one of her silver dollars is missing.
So, what does this crazy woman do?
She puts her entire life on hold.
She searches and searches and searches,
turning her life and her house upside until she finds the one lousy, lost coin.

And what does she do when she finds it?
Well, she gets on the phone to her friends and her neighbors and says,
“Come on over, I’m going to have a party. I found my lost coin.”
A party?  Just because she found a lost coin?
A party that will cost much more to host than the silly coin she has found?
Yeah, right!

But in a way this woman and her actions prove something.
In the lost sheep, you can develop some pity for the poor, little lost sheep.
You can feel bad, you know, that it’s injured or hurt or fearful and all that.
But you can’t work up any pity for a lost coin.
A lost coin doesn’t even knows it’s lost.
The point is that what these two parables put together say is that what governs God’s behavior to us is not our sins, and it’s not our problems. . . it’s his need to find us.
These parables are all about the need of the finder to find,
not about the need of the lost to be found.

And nowhere is this clearer than in the last parable in Luke 15,
in which we have 2 lost sons and three great big losers.
In this story, which you all know, the youngest of two sons comes up to his dad and says,
“Dad, you know that will you have . . . Can you do me a favor?
I don’t really want to hang around until you die to get what’s coming to me,
so could you act like you’re dead now and give me my inheritance today?
Can you imagine?
But guess what?  The father does it.
He gives the younger son his inheritance in cash,
and he gives the rest of what he has, including the ranch, to the older brother,
and then the father retires to his rocking chair on the front porch.

So the younger son takes the money and goes to Europe.
He spends it on wine, women, and song;  he blows all his money.,
And when his money is gone, he ends up slopping pigs,
and so bad is he that he is tempted to join them at the feeding trough.
Then one day a light bulb comes on in the dark recesses of his mind,
and he thinks to himself,
“You know what, my father’s servants eat better than I do.
I’m going to go home, and say,
‘Father, I’ve sinned against heaven and against you.
I’m not worthy to be your son; make me a hired servant.’”

And this is what he does.
But even before he has a chance to walk in the front door,
his dad runs off the front porch and meets him on the road,
almost a mile from the house.
And then before he gets his rehearsed confession out of his mouth,
the father forgives him everything and orders a party for his wayward son.
After all, “My son was dead, and he’s alive, he was lost, now he’s found.”
And so they have a party, and there’s music and dancing and singing and eating.
Then Jesus brings in the other lost son.
He’s the ninety-nine; he’s the nine other coins in the box.
He thinks he’s already found;
in fact, he believes that he has never even been lost.
This boy comes in from the fields,
and he’s starts right in with the whining and complaining:
“All these years I have been such a good boy,
I’ve done everything you ever asked me to do,
I’ve done one wonderful thing after another,
and you never even gave me a goat to have a party with my friends.
But when this son of yours,
who has wasted his money on whores,
comes home, then you give him the fatted calf.”
And he won’t go in and join the celebration.

So what does the father, the God character in the story, do?
He goes out - like the shepherd, like the woman - to seek the lost.
Remember, it’s all about the need of the finder to find.
He all but begs his oldest boy to join the party,
to forget about his anger and his sense of fairness and justice.
to stop being so lost himself and to just get found.
And that is where the story ends.

And what does the eldest son do?
We don’t know.
Because Jesus ended in story in such a way that it doesn’t ever really end.
For 2000 years this story has been read in the church,
and every year people read it in the Bible over and over again, endlessly.
And for 2000 years, this story has never, ever ended.
The father always seeks the lost son,
whether it’s the prodigal or the stay at home “good” boy.
The father will always seek the lost.

And in the final analysis that is why this is the consummate “loser” story.
Certainly the prodigal son is a loser.
He has lost everything, even his dignity.
He is a disgrace, a failure, who has to crawl back home,
all the while choking on the big mess of crow he has to eat in order to do so.
Even his attempt at repentance is a joke.
There’s not a sincere word in it.
No, all he wants is to get out of the jam he is in.

The older boy is no less a loser, however.
This boy loves to keep score.
He loves to make sure that he will always get his fair share.
He has an overdeveloped sense of justice,
he is consumed with unforgiveness,
and he would rather stand outside and pout and complain and give his Dad a hard time than go inside the house and party and welcome home his only brother, who had been all but dead to him.
Now I want to know,
What kind of person doesn’t join in a good old fashioned party?
What kind of person doesn’t rejoice and celebrate when occasion calls for it.
I’ll tell you what kind of person doesn’t . . . a loser.

And that brings us to the biggest loser of all in this story:
the old man, the father.
This man has been told by his son that he was as good as dead to him,
and yet he spends the better part of every day sitting on the porch staring off into the distance,
hoping against hope that his ingrate of a son will one day return home.
Talk about a loser.
His son has all but cursed him,
he has left and forsaken him,
and he has taken his Dad for everything he has,
And yet there the father is, searching the horizon . . . waiting, watching.
It’s sad . . . pathetic really.
This father, this stand-in for God,
who is as big a loser, an even bigger loser, than his children ever dared to be.

This father is God, and God is the father, the divine loser,
who, in Jesus, gives away the farm and forsakes his heavenly glory and power so that he can look for and search out the losers of this world.
Losers, who I might add would just as soon spit in his face and nail him to a tree as to look at him.
And yet there he is, the biggest loser of all time,
suspended between heaven and earth,
blood dripping down his forehead into his eyes,
hands and feet pierced by spikes,
his back a bloody pulp from the Roman whip,
and still he is  looking down the road,
scanning the horizon, for his wayward children,
the very ones who have done this to him,
waiting for them to come home.
Forgive them, he says.

Now I ask you,
what kind of shepherd, what kind of father, what kind of God acts like that?
Our good shepherd does, that’s who.
Our heavenly father does.
Our God in Christ does.
He became a loser himself for the sake of all us losers.
That’s how much he loves losers and the lost.

“Show me a good loser,” a man once said not long ago, “and I will show you a real loser.”
Martina Navratilova once said that the person who remarked, “It’s not whether you win or lose that counts,” probably lost.
And Vince Lombardi asked,
“If it doesn’t matter who wins or loses, then why do they keep score?”
Media mogul Ted Turner has called Christianity a religion for losers.
What Mr. Turner and his fellow winners do not understand is that they and we are all losers in the sight of God.
But even more important than that,
what he and they and we need to know most of all it this:
The only people our loser God can save are losers,
people who know that they are losers and that they are among the lost.
Amen.  [print_link]

Technorati tags: sermon, lectionary, Proper 19C, Ordinary 24C, Pentecost 16C, losers, lost, Luke 15:11-32