Losing
a sermon by John W. Wimberly, Jr.
Pastor, Western Presbyterian Church
Washington, D.C.
June 15, 2008

Text: Romans 5:1-8

When I watch a sporting event and my team wins, predictably, my first reaction is elation.  However, when I see the losers leaving the field, heads down, distraught and discouraged, I experience an emotional flipflop.  No matter how much I disliked the other side during a contest, seeing their pain in defeat immediately causes me to feel an empathetic bond with the losers.

As energizing as the primaries have been this year, they have also been painful.  Watching public servants such as Governors Huckabee, Richardson, and Romney, Senators Biden, Clinton, Dodd, and Edwards, and Congressman Kucinich and Paul lose and drop out is no fun even if our favorite candidate is prevailing.  In fact, it is excruciatingly painful.  Watching the failed candidate?s families stand by them as they concede is perhaps the most difficult thing to observe.

We have a bond with life?s big time losers because we too regularly experience the reality of defeat in life.  As kids we lose in love, school and sports.  To this day, I remember details surrounding the moment when the coach told me I was the final person cut from the junior high basketball team.  I took it so personally.

As adults, we lose in love, at work, in finances and too many other things to name.  Much of my pastoral counseling has to do with issues surrounding defeat.  People didn?t get the job they wanted or the partner they desire or entrance into the graduate program they wanted.

However, the real challenge of losing isn?t defeat itself or the abrupt disappearance of what we lost?the job, the dream, the person.  The challenge is that losing causes us to feel like a loser. 

Unless we are ego maniacs, in our heart of hearts, each of us has a certain level of insecurity, self-doubt.  For healthy people, insecurity and self-doubt are small, mostly deflated balloons within our psyches.  However, when we suffer defeat, these small insecurities get blown up. 

For people already challenged with low self-esteem, losing is far more problematic.  It takes a major problem with self-esteem and blows it up into potentially catastrophic form.  When a person?s already low self-esteem is dealt a body blow by losing, people can do extreme things (start to drink too much, become wildly promiscuous, spend too much money).

One response to the agony of defeat is an aggressive but futile effort never to lose.  We all know people who adopt this strategy.  These folks are irrationally competitive.  Even when they lose, they refuse to admit they have lost.  For these individuals, losing clearly makes them feel like losers, insignificant, and of no value. 

Their effort to stave off defeat in its multitudinous forms is futile because God has built winning and losing into the very nature of things.  Evolution is one example.  It is a complicated competition in which only the winners of natural selection move on. 

Given the omnipresence of defeat in our lives, Christians need to develop a positive understanding of losing.  The value of victory is self-evident.  But we need to discern spiritually the value of defeat.  We find help to that end in Scripture where the occasional defeats of the Hebrew people, Jesus and others are framed and filled with theological meaning.

No one in the Bible develops a theology of losing quite as powerfully as does the apostle Paul.  Clearly, Paul was someone who liked to win.  You sense it in his writings. 

For example, he tells us that as a young man, he quickly moved up the Pharisaic ladder.  Paul did so by excelling in the highly competitive rabbinical schools of his day.  In one of his letters, he flat out brags about his accomplishments as a Pharisee. 

When Paul switched teams and joined the Christian movement, he went from riches to rags, intentionally immersing himself among people who were considered losers by large segments of his society?tax collectors and slaves, women and beggars, lepers and Gentiles.  In D.C., we would say he went from being an insider to being an outsider.  No matter what problems we may have with some of Paul?s opinions, it is hard not to respect the way he followed his convictions with courage.  In worldly terms, he gave up so much to become a Christian.

In his ministry, Paul and some of his Christian colleagues ended up in jail and worse.  He heard Christianity?s critics murmur that Jesus had been soundly defeated by the power of Rome.  Since Paul was an intellectual, he needed to wrap his head around the notion of Jesus? apparent defeat as well as the struggles of the early church.  He needed a cogent, logical understanding of how defeat could be viewed as leading to victory. 

We hear the conclusions to his ruminations in the Letter to the Romans where he talks about the suffering we sometimes experience in life, some of which is caused by defeat.  He says, ?suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us….?  It is a magnificent image but one not many of us embrace.  We have one of those ?sounds good for others, but I hope it doesn?t happen to me? reactions to Paul?s thoughts on suffering.

Thinking about what might happen to us if we lose in life, most of us envision a psychological sequence of events quite different from that which Paul lays out.  As we envision it, bad doesn?t morph into good.  On the contrary, bad morphs into worse.  We experience defeat as debilitating; debilitated, we are unable to re-imagine our lives as anything other than more problems; having lost the ability to envision a positive future, the future becomes daunting.  So in our world, conventional wisdom tells us that bad leads to worse, not to hope.

Before I say more about Paul?s positive approach to suffering, I need to express a caveat.  Paul?s theology can lead to an unholy conclusion.  We need to be very careful that we don?t judge people as weak who are overwhelmed by suffering.  Because some people simply can?t handle suffering.  They aren?t weak.  They aren?t emotionally unstable.  They are simply overwhelmed.

Some slaves in this country collapsed under the intense burden of being slaves.  Many more became as tough as a 24-carat diamond.  Some people can handle the battle against cancer.  Others can?t cope with the physical and emotional suffering it creates. 

One response to suffering isn?t better than the other.  One person isn?t stronger than the other.  People just have very different tolerances for suffering.  So let us not judge people based on their ability or inability to handle defeat.

That being said, Paul offers the best path I know to transform defeat into victory, despair into hope, brokenness into wholeness.  Using it, we can handle the most difficult things life throws at us.

The genius of Paul?s approach is its step-by-step nature.  He doesn?t attempt to swallow defeat or suffering whole.  Like a woodworker transforming a rough piece of lumber into a beautiful object, in each step in the process, he moves further from suffering and closer to New Life.

Paul?s first step is endurance.  He does not recommend running from suffering or even trying to end it as fast as one can.  Instead, he suggests overcoming it through endurance.  Some Christians have captured this in the expression ?Pick up your cross and carry it.? 

Take a look at any major battle for social justice.  A common key to victory is the ability of the victims to outlast the victimizers, the oppressed to out wait the oppressors.  In the civil rights movement, the anthem was ?We Shall Overcome.?  As we sang the song, there was a deeply rooted belief that the ability to endure suffering would overcome the cause of the suffering. 

Think of people we know who have battled cancer.  Each situation has specific medical particularities which play a huge role in the outcome.  But there is another intangible factor: the victors over cancer necessarily learn to endure the chemo or radiation, the loss of hair and side effects of drugs.  People who can?t endure usually succumb.

Step Two. Paul says, ?suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character.?  Indeed, the character of cancer survivors, people who have made it through a war, nations who have overcome great obstacles?the character built as we process a painful defeat can be astounding.  An argument can be made that the success of this nation in the 20th century was rooted in an entire generation?s ability to deal with two enormous defeats: the Great Depression and Pearl Harbor.  Will we do the same with the challenges before us?

  ?Character,? says Paul, ?produces hope.?  Standing alone, that concept doesn?t make much sense to me.  But placed in the string of events Paul describes, it makes all kinds of sense.  As we battle suffering, as we endure, our character becomes strong.  Coping with the worst life offers, we are no longer intimidated by life.  We embrace it.  We no longer fear the future but welcome it.  Character produces hope.

Step Three.  The apostle writes, ?and hope does not disappoint us.?  This is most definitely not a slam-dunk proposition.  Paul?s assertion that ?hope does not disappoint us? is not without its critics.

I spend a lot of time in conversation with folks arguing for hope.  Sometimes it is in board meetings of community organizations where I serve.  I challenge people who don?t think we can do this or that to remain optimistic.  Other times it is with a married couple struggling to keep their marriage alive.  Yet other times it is with someone who has received a potentially negative medical prognosis.

To believe in and defend Paul?s assertion that hope does not disappoint, we must assume a historical perspective.  Take the current housing crisis as an example.  Lots of folks bought homes in the past five years filled with hope of owning it one day.  Instead, they have lost their dream.  Their hopes have been dashed by foreclosure.

However, taken historically, we see another reality.  In 1940, 44% of all Americans owned a home.  Today, approximately 70% own a home.  Even groups who have experienced discrimination in the housing market are better off.  In the same time period, home ownership, among African Americans, has risen from 23% to 49%.  So, seen through a historical lens, the hope of home ownership is real and being realized.  The goal of the next President must be to keep the hope of home ownership alive.

In the middle of chemotherapy, it can be very, very challenging for patients to keep hope alive.  They are so busy battling the debilitating side effects of the treatment.  Of course, they also know folks who didn?t win the battle and fear their suffering may be for naught. 

But when we look at the statistics in the battle against cancer, we know this is a battle we are slowly but surely winning.  In 2003, the number of deaths from cancer dropped for the first time in seventy years.  This happened despite the increasing number of people over the age of 60 where a lot of cancer strikes.  So our hope in the battle against cancer has not disappointed us. 

We will not eliminate defeat from our lives.  It is an inescapable part of life.  But we don?t need to be defeated by defeat.  We cannot eliminate losing.  But we don?t have to feel like losers. 

Sarah, Miriam, Job, Jesus, Paul, and others we look to as spiritual giants were women and men who learned how to transform life?s negatives into positives.  Learning the power of endurance, their character grew.  As their character grew, so did their hope and faith in God.  May the same be true for you and me.

Let us pray: Gracious God, you place within us a powerful hope.  However, the events of life wear on hope like water dripping on a stone.  Help us to remain optimistic even in the face of suffering.  Help us to feel the character we build as we struggle to keep hope alive.  As we do so, may others be inspired by our example.  Amen.