Survivor: The Real Thing

September 03, 2000

Mark 9:30-37

Survival,

the CBS reality-adventure series,

wrapped up its summer run...

The 13-week series

which began May 31,

was set on a tropical island

in the South China Sea.

Here's the premise:

Eight men and eight women are marooned.
They must band together

to find food, water and shelter

and build a world for themselves.

Yet, every week

they vote to expel one person

from the island.

The last one left on the island

wins $1 million.

And we all know now, who won.

Whether you know it or not,

the founder of Eco-Challenge,

Mark Burnett,

is also the Executive Producer of Survival.

The Eco-Challenge Expedition Race 2000

is also history.

The 10-day, 300 mile, 24/7 challenge

concluded only three weeks ago

in the remote highlands of Borneo, Malaysia.

The international field

of over 70 teams

raced through Borneo

via ancient headhunter trails,

remote rivers

and the surrounding tropical seas.

Not every team that starts finishes.

After five days into the 1999 race

in Patagonia, Argentina,

a full 25 percent of the teams

had dropped out.

Injuries are common.

Marlies van der Linden of Holland

was blown off a snowfield last year

and crashed into the rocks below

and had to be evacuated by helicopter.

Her team was disqualified.

The Japanese team

tried five years

before it even finished the race.

"We've been to hell and back,"

said a member of Team Vail

after reaching Checkpoint 15

of the Patagonia race

last year.

Registration for the 2000 race

in Borneo

began on September 1, 1999,

on a first come, first served basis.

All spots for teams from the United States

were filled in less than one minute.

The international slots

were full within two hours.

Each team had to ante up

a $12,500 entry fee.

The winning team takes home $55,000

and the top five teams

will share a $100,000 purse.

The teams consist of four members

and must have someone of the opposite sex on the team.

If one member of the team

is unable to complete the course,

the team is out.

Period.

In fact,

here is what the

"Rules of the Race"

state:

If a team loses a member

due to illness,

fatigue,

injury

or a team disagreement,

they are disqualified.

Only teams that can work together as friends

have any hope of reaching the finish line.

Honest communication,

compassion
and remaining mission-oriented

are essential.

Think with me for a moment...

If that is the criteria for life...

that we all finish,

that no one is left behind,

no one is abandoned,...

then we may be in trouble.

In another setting,

Jesus says these words,

"When you fed me when I was hungry...

clothed me when I was naked,

gave me water when I was thirsty,

cared for me when I was injured...

you were being the kind of people I want

in my kingdom.

And when you didn't do these things,

blew me off because I was an inconvenience...

you were not the kind of people

I want in my kingdom." (paraphrase of Matthew 25:31ff)

Jesus says it this way in our text today:

"Whoever wants to be first

must be last of all

and servant of all" (Mark 9:35).

What does he mean?

For background on the concept

of winning and losing

we turn to the founders of game theory,

John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern.

They draw a distinction between

zero-sum games and

non-zero-sum games.

In zero-sum games,

the fortunes of the players

are inversely related.

If one person wins,

the other person has to lose.

Think of tennis, chess and boxing -

one contestant's gain is the other's loss.

But in non-zero-sum games,

one player's gain

need not be bad news for the other

because the players' interests

overlap entirely.

In a new book called Nonzero,

Robert Wright points out that 30 years ago,

when the three Apollo 13 astronauts

were trying to figure out

how to get their stranded spaceship back to earth,

they were playing an utterly

non-zero-sum game.

The outcome would be equally good

for all of them,

or equally bad.

The Borneo Eco-Challenge Expedition Race 2000

is a combination of the two concepts.

Only one teams wins;

the others lose (zero-sum).

But within the team itself,

all must work together to win.

One team member's success

spells success for the team.

One member's disaster

is disaster for the team (non-zero-sum).

In less dramatic fashion,

the same holds true in day-to-day interactions.

If you own a Honda minivan,

you have a non-zero-sum relationship

with the people in Japan who built it.

They get money and you get a van -

it's a win-win situation.

All kinds of people

can play this game -

a merchant and a customer,

two members of a legislature,

two childhood friends -

as long as they are people

who sometimes find their interests overlapping.

A fight in marriage

is a good example.

If our interest is to win,

then someone has to lose.

If our interest

is to clarify what is happening

and work out

how we will move on in the marriage,

then we will win.

To the extent that their interests DO overlap,

their relationship is non-zero-sum.

The outcome can be win-win or lose-lose,

depending on how they play the game.

I have a mechanic

who has been my mechanic since 1992

because he and I

have a non-zero sum relationship.

His interest is

fixing what is wrong with my car

and being paid for it.

My interest is

paying someone to fix

what is wrong with my car.

I have had other mechanics

before this one

who wanted to play

a zero-sum game.

Their interest was

milking as much money from me...

for unnecessary work and overpriced parts.

And if you watch the news

you will notice that many times

the true conflict lies

in an inability to see that

two groups,

two individuals,

do have overlapping interests.

Labor / management,

Union / Owners,

Teachers / School District.

Any time I hear the words,

"We're going to show them..."

or

"We're going to make them..."

it is not hard to figure out that

someone is playing a zero-sum game

and looking to win.

There is an image of hero

that I think we would do well

to do away with...

that being the Lone Ranger

who is going to ride in,

join our side

and beat up our opponents,

the bad guys.

I think the better image of hero

is someone who will be able to

build negotiations around common interests.

The disciples,

Jesus discovers,

are operating in strictly

zero-sum territory.

They are interested in winning and losing,

who's the greatest and who is the least.

In our text,

Jesus sets out to reverse their thinking.

Discipleship

is a challenge

with a non-zero-sum mentality:

the greatest among us

"must be last of all

and servant of all."

Of course,

this is the very motif

that Jesus himself had long modeled,

with little success it appears,

for the disciples themselves.

He understood that

his own destiny as the Messiah

was not the way of

worldly glory and greatness

but the path of service and sacrifice,

one that would take him through

rivers of betrayal
and the valley of death.

Did the disciples catch on?

Not right away.

The author of the gospel of Mark

is not gentle on the disciples...

doesn't paint them as

persons to be looked up too

because they weren't too quick

to grasp the concept of non-zero sum.

The underlying message of Mark is,

don't be like these guys...

arguing with one another

about who was the greatest

in a zero-sum game

that no one

was going to win.

This section of Mark,

if we were to read all of it, (Mark 9:30-10:45)

would give us understanding

of why the people,

and even the disciples,

fail to understand Jesus' teaching.

Jesus teaches his disciples that

the true value of a person or thing

is often very different from

the value which the world gives

someone or something.

The world teaches us

we have value when we

accomplish, produce, achieve, deliver, complete,

When we possess right

clothes, cologne, hair style,

eye-glasses, coffee, vehicle, house.

Jesus teaches us that

human value is not an achievement,

but a gift...

It's not because we have value

that God loves us,

but because we are loved

that we have value.

God's love doesn't seek value,

it creates it.

Jesus points out that

discipleship understood as servanthood

is a non-zero-sum proposition,

one in which

there is no distinction to be made

between the first and the last.

It's win-win,

as game theorists would say today,

with servants who are leaders

and leaders who are servants.

Jesus gave of himself

in a way that

did not elevate him high above the world,

but instead

enmeshed him down in the world -

in a tapestry of

life-changing and life-giving relationships

with other people and God.

This is the Discipleship Adventure Race

that we are called to run today,

as a church that can survive and thrive

only if it takes a non-zero-sum approach to ministry.

The question is not

"Who is the greatest?"

but instead

"How can we cooperate with God's will

to achieve the greatest good?"

As is so often the case,

Jesus shows us the way

in our text today.

Taking a little child in his arms,

he says to his disciples,

"Whoever welcomes one such child in my name

welcomes me,

and whoever welcomes me

welcomes not me

but the one who sent me" (Mark 9:37).

Welcoming children.

That's one of the keys

to servant ministry.

Embracing the most vulnerable members of our society:

Children who are

unwanted, neglected,

abused and ignored ...

children who are

overlooked, taken for granted,

uneducated and unloved ...

children who are

hungry for approval,

affirmation, intellectual stimulation

and Christian education.

If we commit ourselves

to welcoming the least of our brothers and sisters,

the children of our community,

we will be well on our way

toward win-win ministry.

Winning the Discipleship Challenge

requires us to function with

a different set of ideals...

Winners bear a cross

before they wear a crown.

Winners serve

before they are served.

Winners know what to lose

in order to gain.

Winners are selfless

rather than full of self.

Winners know how to win together

rather lose alone.

Winners know how to move

from me - to you.

Winners don't survive;

they thrive.

When Mike Peters

won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for political cartoons,

he wasn't expecting honor.

He described his response by saying,

"It is like

you are asleep

and it is two in the morning

and you are hugging your pillow

and you are in your funny pajamas

and somebody bursts through the door

and they come over

and start shaking you

and they say,

'Wake up, wake up!'

And you say,

'What is it?'

And they say,

'You have just won

the Boston Marathon!'

And you say,

'But I'm not running

in the Boston Marathon.'

And they say,

'Doesn't make any difference,

you won ....'"

Jesus taught that

heaven, too,

will hold some surprises.

Honor and glory

will be granted for behavior

that was so natural,
so undistinguished,
and so noncompetitive. ...

If we listen to Jesus...

and I think that's a good idea...

many of God's children will be surprised

to find that their faithful service

has brought them top honors.

Other things I found preparing for this soul talk...

Citing dozens of historical sources,

[Robert Wright] argues,

first,

that although ancient societies

undeniably could be brutal,

in the main

the men and women of prehistory

helped each other

more often than they harmed each other.

Why?

Because it was in their interest to do so.

"Game theory,"

a branch of mathematics,

is called on to show why.

Wright uses game theory

to demonstrate in elaborate detail

that although there are individual instances

where people come out ahead

by harming each other,

most people most of the time

will maximize their personal fortunes

by cooperating rather than by fighting.

This is why,

he suggests,

people banded together in the first place:

not for combat,

but for mutual aid.

It is why

the really hostile, destructive societies of history -

the Spartans, the Nazis -

have disappeared,

while the mainly cooperative societies flourished.

Good guys don't finish last,

Wright contends.

Historically,

the good guys

have done quite a bit better

than the bad guys.

In today's standard intellectual interpretation,

human affairs are "zero-sum" -

one person or group wins

while the other loses,

so that if you average the outcomes,

you get zero.

Wright contends instead that

most human interactions have

"non-zero" or "win-win" results -

both parties come out ahead,

though perhaps one is more ahead than the other.

-Gregg Easterbrook, "Good Guys Finish First," www.beliefnet.com.

There is value in cooperation

in non-zero-sum games,

since, if both players cooperate,

both can gain

and no one has to lose. ...

The trucking game

was developed

by Deutsch and Krauss (1960)

to explore the bargaining behavior of individuals

in a social situation.

Each player owns a trucking company

and tries to make a shipment

as quickly as possible.

Each has a long route to the destination

as well as a short route

that converges into a one-lane road.

In order to use the shortcut

(and make "money"),

the players have to cooperate

and take turns using the road.

However,

each person also has control of a gate

to prevent the other trucking company

from using the road.

The best strategy

is to cooperate,

and yet the researchers found that

when the players had a weapon

(the gate),

the majority of the time was spent

competing and threatening the other.

-"Cooperation and Competition," www.dushkin.com.

War is a zero-sum game,

but commerce is,

or can be (if one person is not cheated by another)

a non-zero-sum game.

[Robert Wright] argues that

human beings have been driven

toward more complex forms

of social organization

and eventually away from

imperial domination and war

by the progressive adoption

of non-zero-sum games. ...

Ancient Athens

is often pictured as

a zenith of civilization,

but the Greeks of Pericles and Sophocles

saw non-Greeks as being less than human

and didn't hesitate

to enslave or indiscriminately slaughter foreigners.

brings a growing recognition

of a common humanity.

"You simply cannot do business with people

while executing all their male citizens,

and increasingly

we do business with people everywhere," Wright writes.

-John B. Judis, "The Wright Stuff," The Washington Monthly, April 2000, 51-52.

Two prisoners,

let's call them Joe and Sam,

are being held for trial.

They are being held in separate cells

with no means of communication.

The prosecutor offers each of them a deal.

He also discloses to each

that the deal was made to the other.

The deal he offered is this:

a) If you will confess that

the two of you committed the crime

and the other guy denies it,

we will let you go free

and send him up for five years.

b) If you both deny the crime,

we have enough circumstantial evidence

to put both of you away for two years.

c) If both of you confess to the crime,

then you'll both get four year sentences.

Put yourself in Joe's position.

If Sam stays mum and you sing,

you get zero years.

If he stays mum and you stay mum,

you will each get two years.

On the other hand

if both of you confess,

you both get four years.

Finally,

if he confesses and you don't,

you will get five years.

Whatever Sam does,

it is to your advantage

to admit your wrongdoing.

Sam is also a rational person

and he will,

therefore,

come to the same conclusion.

which nets a total of

eight man-years in the pokey.

if you had both denied the crime,

a total of only four man-years

would be spent behind bars.

Can it really be that

rationality leads to an inferior result? ...

In summary,

the Prisoner's Dilemma model

postulates a condition in which

the rational action of each individual

is to not cooperate

(that is, to defect),

yet,

if both parties act rationally,

each party's reward

is less than it would have been

if both acted irrationally and cooperated!

[There is an advantage for both prisoners

in remaining silent,

thereby guaranteeing both

a relatively light sentence.]

The model can be applied

to many real-world situations,

from genetics

to business transactions

to international politics.

-Leon Felkins, "The Prisoner's Dilemma," June 12, 1998, www.magnolia.net.