I woke up one morning in San Salvador with a bumper sticker in my head.

The previous night, I had been reading Robert Farrar Capon’s The Parables of Grace, where he writes: “God works only with the lost and the dead … he has no use for winners.”

That phrase rang through my dreams and merged with images of El Salvador that were freshest in my mind: corrugated tin shacks that refuse to keep the rain out … Jesuit priests massacred by the government’s death squads … Psalm 91 printed on the back of a bus … barefoot children working with us to fill in a muddy road … Salvadoran laborers making $4 for a day’s work. Here I was in the only country on earth named after Jesus himself: El Salvador, the Savior. El Salvador is full of people who are struggling painfully just to live to the next day. And as I woke in the morning, this phrase was stuck in my head:

“Jesus is for losers.”

That would look provocative on the back of a car, wouldn’t it? More so than any political bumper sticker in an election year, even.

Well, I got home and discovered I wasn’t the first to think of the phrase, “Jesus is for losers.” A Christian singer-songwriter named Steve Taylor recorded a song with that title in 1993, and as you can imagine, it made a lot of Christians angry. Many of us were raised to believe that following Jesus is the way to win! And that’s not untrue. But listen to these lyrics: “Just as I am, I am needy and dry/ Jesus is for losers/ The self-made need not apply.”

In the Bible, the Chosen People alternate between understanding that they are in God’s hands, and trying very hard to become a self-made nation. And when God gives them a victory, they don’t appreciate it for long. Sure, Moses parts the Red Sea, and the chariots of Pharaoh and his army are swept away by the waters, [as our intermediate Sunday school class has so vividly illustrated] … but what happens next? Forty years wandering in the desert, grumbling all the way that they would rather go back to Egypt and be slaves!

Later, God allows them to build a proper temple instead of a flimsy tent. But within a generation, Israel is divided and begins to be conquered by foreign nations until there’s nothing left. A big temple couldn’t protect them. And that’s because God has no interest in preserving a mighty political structure. God is interested in whether we’re learning to love and forgive one another.

If you’re in relationship with God long enough, you start to understand: sometimes, you have to let your dreams die to make way for the greater good that God is cooking up. People expected Jesus to come storming into Jerusalem on horseback and reclaim the city and the nation from the Romans. Instead, he rode into Jerusalem on a donkey, and within a week, the people had decided he was a fraud. When a charismatic leader doesn’t live up to the people’s expectations, crucifixion is a common result.

So Jesus died. By all eyewitness accounts, Jesus failed completely. Jesus was a loser. And when Jesus became a loser, he not only saved everybody, but he also established a wonderful paradox: To be rid of the burden of winning is to win. And that is why Christ reigns victorious from the cross.

A friend of mine once found herself in a verbally abusive relationship. She and her boyfriend fought constantly, but she kept forgiving him. Then, one day, she asked him, “When we have a fight, what is your ultimate goal?”

Without a second thought, he shot back: “To win!”

At that moment, she knew their relationship was over. She got out as fast as she could. She lost, and that was what saved her. It turned out that all her little forgivenesses for individual slights weren’t forgiveness at all: they were repeated attempts to win him over to her side. Instead, she gave up on winning. She lost once and never had to go through it again. Now she can work on forgiving him for real.

See, when winning becomes more important than forgiveness, there’s no point in going on. Today, Jesus tells us to keep forgiving time and time again … 77 times if necessary, and that means forever! Unfortunately, Christians throughout history have used this memorable aphorism to suggest, among other things, that wives should never leave their abusive husbands. But these people aren’t reading far enough. To understand, we must link Jesus’ “77 times” statement to the gripping drama of the parable that follows it.

A king wants to settle his accounts. One of his servants owes him a lot of money. To help us keep the characters straight, let’s call the servant Joe.

How much money does Joe owe the king, exactly? He probably lived more like a poor Salvadoran than a privileged American, but for argument’s sake, let’s say the servant makes today’s minimum wage in the state of Washington. In that case, he owes his master somewhere between 80,000 and a quarter of a million dollars: fifteen years of pay! The king wants his money back now. Joe says, “I can’t pay now, but I promise I will pay you back someday.” This isn’t true, of course. But, out of pity for him, the king not only releases Joe but cancels the entire debt.

I imagine Joe is somewhat rattled by this experience, and maybe he’s also struck by the unfairness of the situation. He’s just been given an incredible gift, but he doesn’t know how to receive it. Maybe Joe feels humiliated—he’s a good, honest man, and he doesn’t want to be a charity case. What will his neighbors think? Or maybe Joe doesn’t believe that the king actually has forgiven the debt. So he figures he’d better start scraping together as much money as he can before the king asks him for payment again.

At any rate, the first thing Joe does is find some poor schlub—we’ll call him Harry—who owes Joe 800 bucks. Now, when you’re making minimum wage, that’s still a lot of money! Joe demands immediate payment. But Harry doesn’t have $800, so Joe has Harry thrown in jail.

Now, let’s be clear: Joe hasn’t done anything illegal. Harry owed him $800, and Harry couldn’t pay, so Harry went to jail. But when the king finds out, he calls Joe on the carpet to explain himself. What is Joe’s crime? Simply this: his failure to trust that the king has, indeed, forgiven the debt. So the king reinstates the debt. Because Joe wouldn’t believe he really was out of debt, he will now be tortured until the debt is paid. Indeed, Joe has decided he prefers the torture of debt to the torture of being forgiven.

What a loser! But I know his kind. I’ve been his kind. The world is full of Christians who just can’t believe God has forgiven us. Despite 2,000 years of the Good News that Jesus has died for our sins, somehow, we keep trying to earn God’s favor. But salvation can’t be earned by repaying our debt to God; salvation is already ours! We can only accept or deny the gift.

Will we admit before God that we can’t win? That no matter how hard we work, we’ll never truly be able to say, “This is the life I always dreamed of”? God doesn’t want us to have a comfortable life. God wants us to have abundant life, and that has nothing to do with money or power or security or victory or competence or even our lives! We can’t keep any of these things.

In that same book, The Parables of Grace, Robert Farrar Capon says the gifts God gives us are fleeting. One at a time, they pass through our hands, and we have a choice. We can see a gift we like and clutch it tightly. But if we do, we won’t be able to receive any other gifts that come along. If we keep our hands open, enjoying what we receive but willingly letting go at the right time, more gifts will come—a never-ending parade of gifts that teach us to live abundantly.

Our former rector, Jeff Lee, once joked that St. Thomas’s slogan should not be “Practicing the Hospitality of God,” but rather, “Come Die with Us.” That wouldn’t exactly put money in the offering plate, would it? But it would be the Gospel. Come die with us. Come lay it all on the line. Come give your body and heart and soul to God, and don’t expect to get them back the way you left them!

Bring your anxiety over your job or your family. Bring that neurosis from childhood that you still haven’t gotten over. Bring them and put them on the altar. Bring the fight you had on the playground with your best friend. Bring that grudge you’ve been holding onto for years—you know the one! Put it on the altar. Bring your salary and your schedule and your possessions and your homework and your commute and hand them over to God, who actually owns them all anyway.

Don’t try so hard to win! Today, in this place, you can sacrifice that charade on this altar. And God will transform it into something you don’t recognize, something that’s far better than you ever could have imagined.

Some say, “Eat or be eaten.” To that, Jesus says, “OK, I’ll be eaten. Then I can nourish you.” Jesus is for losers, and that is the best news! Jesus has saved all of us losers. And the minute we admit that, to God and to ourselves, we can relax and humbly enjoy the abundant gift of life that God has given us, in which we learn the meaning of love and forgiveness and not needing to win. Amen.