Texts: Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26; Romans 4:13-25
When I was a kid, right about my son’s age, I was involved in the Cub Scouts. We met in a little Lutheran Church in Prospect, PA and it was in that church basement that I first learned how our culture understands success. You understood it because everyone wore their success on their uniforms—you could tell immediately how many merit badges someone had achieved and you could instantly compare yourself. Sure, there were a lot of cool things about the Cub Scouts—romping in the woods, playing with a pocketknife, being authorized to start a campfire—but for me it was all about the badges.
In high school, we didn’t have badges but we did have grades and organizations to chart our worth. Class rank became important—the difference between an A or a B might mean the difference between which colleges you could get into. I was in the band, and where you sat meant everything. It wasn’t good enough to just play, it was important to be the “first chair.”
After high school I joined the Army, which largely works on the same principle. You look at someone’s uniform and can instantly discern their worth because of the badges and insignia—rank, qualifications, where they’ve served, even whether or not they had been in combat. Within 10 seconds of meeting another soldier you knew whether they were squared away or a tent peg.
In the civilian world people are ranked less with badges and more with the outward trappings of success. Your worth is gauged by how much money you make, what kind of car you drive, which neighborhood you live in, the prestige of your job title. People go into debt, work themselves to death, sacrifice the love of family to achieve some status. The bar keeps rising and the effort keeps increasing.
Our culture tells us repeatedly that we have to do something, achieve something, prove something in order to be somebody. We look at those who’ve achieved some material success and say, “Well, that person really made something of himself.” We honor those who came from nothing and who have really become something. Notice how the presidential candidates all try to paint themselves as coming from humble backgrounds.
Here’s the thing, though…all this striving to be somebody really exposes one of the deepest of human fears—that we’re really a nobody. The feeling that “I am nothing” is often what drives us to try and prove ourselves. We don’t want our lives to go by unnoticed by others, so we’re constantly comparing ourselves to them. So we work harder, climb over others, deal with stress and anxiety all because we’re driven to overcome our assumed insignificance.
But we weren’t created to live this way. In fact, if we read the Scriptures closely we come to realize that God’s desire for us is not to make ourselves into something, but instead God is always inviting people to embrace their nothingness.
Start with the Old Testament, which Paul references in this morning’s text from Romans. Abraham, the great patriarch and father of the Israelites, was chosen by God and made right with God not because of anything he had achieved. Abraham had no land of his own and no children in an ancient culture that marked those two things as the primary gauge of success. Abraham was, in other words, the quintessential nobody. Yet, God chose Abraham and made something out of nothing—giving him land and a family and a future, not through his own striving but through the grace of God. Paul says that God “credited” Abraham with “righteousness”—not because of his achievements but because of his faith in a God who makes something out of nothing.
Read through the Old Testament and you see that time and again God chooses people who live in obscurity, people who are nobodies, to do major tasks. Moses was a fugitive and a stuttering shepherd, Gideon was timidly hiding in a hole in the ground, David was a young shepherd boy, Jeremiah was just a youth—the list goes on and on. Over and over again God seeks out the least, the last, and even the lost.
But that’s not even the most shocking example in Scripture. Move to the New Testament and we learn that not only does the Bible say that God works among nobodies, but that God himself is a nobody. In Jesus, God chose to break into human history in person, in human flesh and blood. Paul writes about this in Philippians 2, saying of Jesus, “he made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness.” In Jesus, God became a “nobody.”
Consider the evidence:
He was born in a barn in a one horse town to a family of peasants. He grew up in another obscure village far from any city. He worked as a contractor until he was 30 years old, doing nothing that was noteworthy. Then he traveled for three years, spending most of his time in tiny towns with people no one in power ever knew about. He never wrote a book. He never held an office. He never had a family or owned a house. He did not go to college. In fact, he spent most of those three years dealing with criticism. Why? Mostly because he befriended other nobodies.
The Gospel text this morning is a prime example. The three people that Jesus encounters are all nobodies—a tax collector, a chronically sick woman, and a dead girl. According to Jewish law, Jesus, as a good Jew, should not even touch these people. They’re all ritually unclean and, in touching them, Jesus himself would become unclean. The religious elite classified all these people as “sinners”—nobodies deserving nothing. But Jesus, as a nobody himself, felt right at home with them. “It is not the healthy that need a doctor but the sick.” Jesus understood that God, the God of nobodies, “desires mercy and not sacrifice.” Jesus hadn’t come to bless the self-righteous striving of religious somebodies. He had come to bless the nobodies, the sinners, the outcasts. He came to make something out of nothing.
What’s the requirement for making something out of nothing? Well, first you have to be nothing. What’s the main requirement for being a disciple of Jesus? The Scriptures offer only one unusual qualification. You have to be a sinner–a nothing. Somebodies need not apply.
It’s important to remember that all the somebodies of Jesus’ day had nothing to do with him.
Even today, being a somebody may, in fact, be a barrier to following Jesus. It’s interesting to me that Christianity is growing like wildfire in the third world—in South America, Asia, and Africa especially. The largest Christian church in the world is in South Korea—not in the West. The largest Methodist church in the world is also there. At our last United Methodist General Conference, the number of delegates from the third world had increased to the point that their voting influence rivals that of the U.S.-based conferences. Africa is sending Christian missionaries to the U.S. and Europe in a reversal of the evangelism stream. Christianity is exploding among people whom the world has seen as traditionally having nothing.
In western Europe and even in the U.S., though, Christianity is declining. Why is that? Well, my theory is that it’s because people here are so focused on making something of themselves that they have little room for God.
I meet people all the time here in Park City who are very satisfied with their lives. They’ve reached the top of the heap, they have it all, are able to do whatever they please. When you’re in that mode and mindset, it’s pretty easy to believe you’ve done it on your own and that you don’t need God. People construct theologies that bless their own materialism instead of giving thanks to the God who created everything. They become blinded by their comfort and security. They’ve made the classic human mistake of believing that being, doing, or having something can save them.
Bishop Will Willimon says this: “The Christian faith has historically had such bad things to say about the sin of ‘pride.’ It is not that a positive self image is a bad thing. It is rather that, in our pride, we are tempted to be gods unto ourselves, to solve the problem of our sense of inadequacy through our own efforts rather than reliance on the grace of God. That’s what’s wrong with our pride—the attempt to earn for ourselves, through our own efforts, a strong sense that we are, by our own efforts, somebody.”
But there’s a reality we have to face and it is this. No matter how much you’ve managed to become something in the world’s eyes, no matter how much you have achieved or acquired, there is but one guarantee—and we will all face it—that there will come that day when you will have nothing and you will be nothing. Death is the great equalizer. All the productivity and things you’ve achieved will be taken away. Everything you’ve strived after will be but a memory and your possessions given to someone else. Standing before God, you will have nothing and you will be nothing.
I know that we’re not taught to think this way about ourselves. Most of us were taught to believe that life is some kind of assignment to be completed through our own efforts—that our worth and meaning in the world is based on what we produce. But the Scriptures make a radically different claim—that our final significance, the verdict on who we are and what we mean is God’s and not ours. We are not saved by our own efforts, we are made right with God through God’s grace alone. When it comes right down to it, we don’t have that much to be proud of on our own—it’s all temporal and temporary. All we have, in the end, is God’s mercy and grace to fall back on.
Hard news? It is if you’re trying to be somebody. But if you’re already a nobody, it’s good news because that’s where God wants us—with nothing—so that God can give us everything. When we empty our lives of the need for things, of the desire for greatness, of the search for significance, it is then that God can fill us with his best for us. When we say to him, “Lord Jesus, I need your salvation. I need your love, grace, and forgiveness. I need you because I am a sinner. I am nothing.” When we say that, when we admit we are nothing, we are given everything—a life no longer striving after our own achievements, but a life made into something precious and eternal by God. The more we become nothing, the more God is able to make us into something.
Badges? We don’t need no stinking badges. We need Christ!
Following Jesus means that we remember our nothing-ness in comparison to his own. We remember that in the end the few friends he had deserted him. He was falsely accused of a crime and sentenced to death between two death row inmates. He died naked and nailed to a stake. While he died, others gambled for his clothes—the only possessions he had. His body was laid in a borrowed grave offered in pity. You can’t be much more of a nobody than this.
Yet we also know that in this ignominious end was the ultimate beginning. The empty tomb is the ultimate statement that God makes something out of nothing. How much more can he make something out of us, if only we’d embrace our own nothing-ness?
In I Peter 3:10, the writer says this as a result of Christ’s sacrifice and example for us: “Once you were no people (you were nobodies), but now you are the people of God.” The only mark on us that matters is baptism and the only achievement that matters is gaining Christ.
We live in a place populated by more than our fair share of somebodies. Can we, as the people of God, dare to be nobodies? Can we admit that we need Christ? Can we empty ourselves of pride, materialism, achievement, and all our badges of earthly distinction and allow ourselves to be filled with God’s grace and love—the only things that really last?
I read about an artist that created a statue for the hallway of a church—a statue of Jesus kneeling before a basin with a towel in his hand. Jesus is looking intently downward as if he is about to wash someone’s feet. When the artist was asked why he put Jesus in such an unsual posture, he said this: “You have to kneel down, or be down low already in order to look at the face of Jesus.”
We have to go low in order to see him.
“He made himself nothing” and spends time with nothings. May we learn to be nothing—to give our lives to the only future that really matters, one with Christ.
Maybe you’ve been feeling like a nobody lately. Hear the good news—God can use nobodies for great things.
Or, maybe you’ve been beating yourself up trying to climb the ladder of success and make yourself into somebody. Jesus invites you to a different kind of effort—to be empty of yourself instead of full of yourself, to realize your spiritual poverty and get down low to see the face of Jesus.
Some of you have been fortunate enough to learn early on that we are, indeed, nothing. An illness, a great loss, grief—something has laid you low. The good news is that it puts you in a marvelous position to receive the gift of everything—the gift we call salvation.
It’s a gift and not a badge we earn. Grace is God’s ability to make something out of nothing. Will you receive that grace?
Source Material:
Willimon, William, “Something of Nothing,” Pulpit Resource, April, May, June 2008, p. 41-44.
