EpiscopalCenter at Duke University

Some years back, Ted Turner, the media mogul, founder of  CNN, and former husband of Jane Fonda, was quoted as saying, “Christianity is for losers.”

He has a fair point.

Today is All Saints Sunday, the celebration of the communion of saints to which we belong. It’s a kind of family reunion for the Church and a good time to look over our family tree. Which, as it turns out, is chock full of losers.

Take Channing Moore Williams, for instance. He was sent as a missionary to China and Japan in 1855 and nine years later, baptized his first convert.

One. One convert in nine years. Not a great rate of return for time invested.

Williams is one of the saints on our family tree.

Or there’s Anskar, a bishop who went to spread the Gospel in Denmark and Sweden in the 800’s. He tried to plant the Church in Scandinavia on several different occasions over the course of about thirty-five years, but the kings on whom he relied for support kept getting deposed. He got back from one trip only to discover that many of the Christians in his own diocese had been carried off as slaves by a pagan tribe.

This is what one writer has to say about Anskar: “Anskar was a dud.”  Even the collect we pray on Anskar’s feast day says (and I quote), “he did not see the results of his labors.”

Anskar is one of the saints on our family tree.

Then there’s Constance and her companions, nuns living in Memphis in the late 1800’s. When Memphis was hit with a yellow fever epidemic in August of 1878, Constance and her companions chose to stay rather than flee and save their own lives. Together with the madam of a local brothel, they nursed the sick. Within the month, they were all dead.

Constance and her companions are saints on our family tree.

I could go on: Bridget, who gave away everything she had and then started in on giving away everything her family had, including what they were supposed to eat. Archbishop Oscar Romero, who was doing just fine as a chaplain to members of the El Salvadoran military and government—until, that is, he looked out the window and saw the streets full of people demanding justice of that military and that government. Or Harriet Bedell who was invited to visit Seminole Indians on a reservation in southern Florida and was so appalled by their living conditions she moved in.

These are not winners in the eyes of the world. They have none of the marks of successful people: they’re not efficient, they stink at advance planning, and instead of killer instincts, these folks don’t even have instincts for self-preservation. They don’t always get visible results and they aren’t good with money, or at least they’re not good at holding on to it.

We don’t call them losers. Or winners either, for that matter. We call them saints. We look to them for inspiration and example and we proudly claim them as part of our family tree, fellow members of the communion of saints. It’s not just pure contrariness that makes us call them saints, either, because it’s awfully hard to sustain pure contrariness for a couple of millenia. And it’s not their personal saintliness that makes us call them saints because most of them weren’t actually all that saintly. They’re more like St. Augustine who prayed, “God make me chaste, but not yet.”

We call them saints because in their lives we can see God. They are signposts, pointing us to a reality beyond themselves, pointing us to God and God’s kingdom. And actually, it’s their very loserliness that let’s us catch a glimpse of God’s kingdom, a world in which all worldly priorities are reversed. Remember, God blesses the poor, the hungry, those who weep, and those who are hated, excluded, reviled, and defamed on His account. God turns out not to be interested in whether someone’s a winner or a loser.

And right about now, Ted Turner probably isn’t the only one who’s wondering, “Yeah, and so? So God blesses you—you’re still poor, hungry, sad, and hated. This is something we should hope for???”

Which is really a question about what is God’s blessing? What does it mean to be blessed if it doesn’t mean that all the hard things in life suddenly disappear?

Maybe you all have heard of something called the ‘prosperity gospel.’ The Prayer of Jabez came out a few years ago and was on the top of the best seller lists for a good while. Prosperity gospel advocates say that God wants to bless us and bless us abundantly which I believe is absolutely true. They go further and claim that God wants us to be abundantly successful, including financially successful, and this is where we begin to part ways. According to prosperity gospel proponents, material wealth is a sign of God’s blessing. Nice car? God obviously loves you. Big house? God is clearly on your side. Large bank account? You are truly favored!

Only that’s hard to square with what Jesus says. That replaces the Gospel news that Jesus Christ is the salvation of the world with an individualistic religion of success. The so-called ‘prosperity gospel’ is a confusion of what counts in this world with what counts in God’s kingdom. Its advocates have confused asking God to condone their lives with asking God to bless their lives.

God’s blessing has to do with relationship, not with stuff. God’s blessing is about wholeness and reconciles us to God’s self and to our loved ones and  our enemies, both. God’s blessing is about life eternal and being fully alive because we live in Christ and death has no more dominion over us.

And that changes things. God blessed Channing Moore Williams, and that freed Bishop Williams to travel far from home to an utterly foreign land and to work there day and night for nine years before he baptized his first convert. And you know what? That was just fine because the saints of God aren’t motivated by church growth, but by serving their neighbors one at a time, if need be. Blessing is about relationship, not numbers.

God blessed Anskar and although Anskar may never have felt he was making any headway in Scandinavia, that was ok. Anskar knew his job wasn’t to control the outcome, but to continue spreading the Gospel and working for the reconciliation of the world. Blessing is about ceding control to God, not about mastering the universe ourselves.

God blessed Constance and her companions and although I’m sure they didn’t want to die of yellow fever, they were nonetheless free to stay and nurse their neighbors because they loved God. Blessing is about living fearlessly because we know death isn’t the final word.

Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. If someone hits your cheek, offer them the other one to hit, also, and if someone takes the coat off your back, give them your shirt, too. Give to everyone who begs from you, and if someone steals your stuff, let them keep it.

In the world’s eyes, that might be a job description for losers. In God’s eyes, that’s a job description for a member of the communion of saints.

I wouldn’t stand in the midst of some of the brightest, most interesting, most engaged, and most engaging people I know—and some of their parents—and pray that we will all turn out to be losers. That’s not the point. The point is that, be they winners or losers, the saints of the Church share an extravagant, unquenchable love for God. Their very beings are lit from within because they know God is with them. They are blessed because God blesses them, and they are therefore the freest, most joyful losers—or winners—the world has ever known. And when those saints go marching in, Lord, I pray we will all be in their number. Amen.