I follow an online daily devotion provided by The Center for Action and Contemplation. It’s from the writings of Father Richard Rohr, a Franciscan leader, His entry on October 18 was, “Insisting on Winners and Losers.” I’ve been mulling over this one for the last two days.
Rohr observes that our western worldview is dominated by the presumption of a zero-sum game. This means we believe that for someone to “win” someone else has to lose. I can only prevail if there is someone else who does not. Rohr says this is the water in which we swim. This means that I cannot succeed or excel in anything unless that is measured by someone else who has not done so. It’s a severe binary of basic evaluation which we assume is the natural way of things.
A zero-sum, win/lose view permeates everything. Obviously it grounds our obsession with sports. (And I am a HUGE sports fan!) We measure beauty by those who we have declared are not beautiful. Popularity means nothing unless there are folks who are deamed unpopular. We assume that the larger the base of financial power one has (no matter how it was acquired), the greater the win. However much money I have, it is not a “success” unless there are those who have less; i.e. – the “losers.” In politics, one party doesn’t win unless the other loses. And on and on it goes… As Fr. Rohr says, our basic belief is, “I win, therefore I am.”
The challenge for those who claim the Lordship of Jesus is that his good news and his identity crash against this fundamental worldview. The news of his birth wasn’t given first to the “winners” of that world. It was revealed intentionally to identified losers – shepherds. Jesus’ great offense to the religious authorities (winners) of that time was the inordinate amount of time he spent with identified losers – prostitutes, tax-collectors, violent revolutionaries, lepers, demon-possessed, the poor, etc. He treated them as if they were winners, which ran against every acceptable view of existence. That’s in part what made him so dangerous to those in authority. If we depend on a zero-sum, win/lose reality, we can’t have losers thinking that they somehow matter.
The scandal is that the grace of God in Jesus the Christ is a win/win. The power of the Body of Christ, the Church in its origin lay in the seeking and welcoming of rich and poor, slave and free, Jewish and non-Jewish, ritually clean and unclean. This isn’t just about everybody gets a participation trophy. This is about the heart of God longing to remove all that separates all of us from God and from each other. This included the destruction of the zero-sum worldview.
This whole in-the-world-but-not-of-it thing can be challenging, can’t it?
I’ll see you around the next bend in the river.
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