The Strength of a Loser a sermon preached by Khleber Van Zandt at First Unitarian Church of Alton, Illinois, on Aug. 21, 2005.

Our caps were navy blue. So were the stripes on our real uniforms with the name "Yankees" spelled out across the chest. Yankees was a strange name for a team of wild-eyed, lily-white eleven-year-olds in the Jim Crow South of the early Sixties. I had grown up with the knowledge that my family had deep roots back through the Confederacy – Yankees? - paradox was not my strong point back then and, well, the Yankees were the only team that chose me.

There was little to distinguish that little league team that year; none of us were, or are now, exceptional in any category that matters much. We had one ‘star’ pitcher – we called him that because no one could ever get a hit off him. He was just too dangerous – he started the year wearing a pair of those old coke-bottle eyeglasses and switched midway through the season to some kind of prehistoric contacts that made him squint like a grade school Mr. Magoo. He could throw hard. He couldn’t see. And that’s an awesome combination in little league - he scared the daylights out of opposing batters. If he didn’t hit them or strike them out, he would just walk them, again, and again, and again, and again. No one bothered to calculate his ERA; we just knew he never won.

The one thing that in my mind sets this team apart from any of the other teams I have played on down through the years is that -we lost. In the spring of 1962, we lost not just every month or every week, but most of the time we lost twice a week. Of sixteen games, we lost every game but one. I had to get to be an adult before I realized how unusual an accomplishment this is. The major league baseball teams that stink win at least a third of their games. Football teams that are terrible win three or four of their sixteen games. No, we were losers of more immense proportion than my young mind could assimilate. Time and time and time again, we snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. We lost a lot.

I was the first-string catcher – meaning I was the only catcher. The catcher on a baseball team is supposed to be a leader. The catcher is the player who is uniquely positioned to see all the field of play laid out before their eyes. The catcher remembers batters and what pitches they like or don’t like and where they’re likely to hit if they do hit. He reads the plays as they develop and tells others where to throw and what to cover. The catcher is important to a team’s success. And I did my best. And I urged my teammates on. And I lifted their spirits after bad plays and good. And we lost.

These were not give-up-and-roll-over kinda kids, either. One case in point: Jimmy (name omitted), the Yankees’ wisp of a second baseman, got run over on a play by a big kid named Hal. Big Hal didn’t even notice little Jimmy in the base path. Hal just trampled Jimmy on his way around second and kept going. Jimmy lay there for a long minute and then dragged himself up out of the mud and the blood and the tears and started limping toward the dugout. About two-thirds of the way there, he stopped, turned towards Hal on third base and yelled, "You’re not gettin’ rid of me that easy!" He strode defiantly back to second and played the rest of the game.

When one loses nearly every time one steps onto a field of play, one is not threatened by throngs of adoring fans nor is one burdened by daydreams of stardom. One’s mind is left to be starkly open, shall we say, to new ways of understanding. I wish I could say that I learned to look cool as I swung at a pitch in the dirt or took a called third strike. No. I always looked just as pitiful losing as the next loser. But there is one thing I learned that losing year that has stuck with me. I learned that, no matter the score at the end of the game, no matter whether we’d won or lost the night or the week before, no matter what else was going on, I liked playing the game. I liked playing each point for everything it was worth. I liked the challenge and the camaraderie and the competition, no matter the overall outcome.

I’d liken this to learning to live in the moment. In the Buddhist sense, it’s paying attention – if you’re washing the dishes, they say, wash the dishes; if you’re playing ball, play ball. Or in a Christian sense, "give us this day our daily bread" – that’s all we need, all we should ask for, just today, just this moment.

I had no idea at eleven years of age that I was learning lifelong religious principles. If someone had told me I was, I would have blown them off. And yet, there was the truth, right there on the little league ball field, free for the taking.

I’ve been in a lot of Unitarian Universalist churches and it’s always hard to talk about losing. We UUs think of ourselves as winners, not losers. We tend to think of all people as winners. We have such a high regard for humanity and for human beings that we find it hard to talk about them being less than perfect. We’re shocked by random events and bad behavior. We don’t like to think about those times when things don’t go as we plan, when we screw up, fall off the path, commit a sin, or whatever you choose to call it.

We like to think that everything goes well for those that think right and act right, live well and go to the right church – this one. But we have no special insulation here in these walls. Bad things do happen to good people, no matter where they go to church or synagogue or mosque or not.

We don’t like to think about bad stuff happening in our congregations, but I’ve talked to churches where members have committed suicide, where accidents have claimed the lives of youth, where staff or volunteers have embezzled money, where ministers have abused their authority as well as the vulnerable people they are called to care for. Here in this church, we’re burying our pillars - we’ve had several long-time church members die just in recent months. Bad stuff does happen, and we ignore it at our peril.

And in our personal lives - I have lost many things in my life. My grandparents have all died. My mother has died. I have lost jobs, a marriage, relationships, pets. My children are all still alive, but two live with chronic and potentially life-threatening diseases. Hopes have crumbled and expectations collapsed.

Think about what you’ve lost. If you’ve lost parents or family, if you’ve lost a job, if you’ve lost a home, if you’ve lost a marriage or a friend or a partner or a spouse, if you’ve lost a child or the ability to have children, these losses never leave you. Oh, we grieve and hopefully go on, but these losses we carry with us always. They become part of us, part of who we are.

If you’ve received a bad diagnosis this week, talking about losing a child’s baseball game might seem pointless and crass right now. But this is what the religious enterprise is all about – searching for metaphors and ways to talk about meaning and being. We are searching together for ways to share our experiences and make them easier to bear. Losing a baseball game, losing any game, doesn’t hold a candle to the kinds of losses many of us have experienced in our lives. But the things we learn in one part of our lives sometimes help to give us languages to use in other parts of our lives.

I have lost more than baseball games, and I have sat with many other people in their moments of personal loss. And I have learned a few things through it all, as have all of you. As reluctant as I am to make lists – because people expect them to be definitive or finished before they should be – As reluctant as I am to make lists, I have begun a list of things I’ve learned from losing. Since preaching is supposed to be a dialogue rather than a monologue, a conversation rather than a lecture, I will be glad to continue this conversation over time and hear your additions to this list. I know some of you know much more than I do about loss; some of us have learned far more than we ever wanted to learn about loss. Together, then, perhaps we can become a store of wisdom for our kids and for those that come along after us. So at the risk of only making a beginning and initially missing quite a lot, here is my list so far:

• I have learned that we are all stars. Whether we can throw a baseball or negotiate a deal doesn’t make a wit of difference in the end. We are all made of star-stuff, we are all important, and we are all worthy of respect and love.
• I have learned that if you treat life as a competition, then someone’s always going to lose. If you treat life rather as a dilemma to get through together, then at least we’re all on the same team.
• I have learned a very little bit about acceptance – that we all lose, we all die, but that’s no reason to give up or quit.
• I have learned that death is hard, but worst of all is the waiting and the uncertainty. Patience is the only antidote to that.
• I have learned that it is better if you share your feelings of loss with family or friend, or with the stars or the universe or God. A shared load is a lighter load.
• I have learned that no one gets out of here alive. But resurrection in its broadest sense happens to us everyday, not just to special people with the right heavenly connections.
• I have learned that it’s nice to win once in a while. That winning feeling can carry me a long, long way through a difficult and trying season.
• I have learned to keep playing. Don’t give others the satisfaction of driving you away or keeping you down.
• I have learned that only the end of the world is the end of the world. As long as we wake up every morning, there’s still a chance to grow; there’s still room for hope in our hearts.

That’s my starting list. It’s not finished - I look forward to adding your wisdom to it.

It is a paradox to me that we can lose so much and still love playing, but such is the strength of hope and the strength of a loser.

May we continue to be the people who have lost and learned, and lived to learn again one day.

So may it be.