The Gospel for Nobodies
1 Corinthians 1:18-31
January 30, 2005
First Baptist Church, Wilson, NC

Every time you go to the grocery store, the last thing you see before you check out is that pantheon of stars on the magazine rack. There’s Ben and Brad and George, there’s J Lo and Jennifer and Nicole, there’s Oprah and Phil, there’s A-Rod and Lance. THIS is the true religion of America: the cult of the celebrities! It is inevitable that the church would try to imitate it. At large Christian gatherings and crusades, there are always celebrities featured on the program. And who wouldn’t want to come hear a great athlete or a beauty queen or other celebrity speak personally about his or her experience with Jesus? There is something encouraging about that. It helps us believe that, yes, I can be a part of the real world and be a believer.

But there is an unlooked-for side effect to featuring Christian celebrities. The average person might be more discouraged than encouraged. The average person might say "I’ll never be rich, I’ll never win a pageant, never make the major league, so God can’t use my life." The average person can get the message that God can use you only if you’re smart, wealthy, good-looking, and strong.

But that is not the gospel. The gospel is not just the gospel for the somebodies. The gospel is the gospel for nobodies.

Consider this: JESUS WAS BORN AS A NOBODY. He was born in a barn with animals and manure, born to a Jewish girl of no wealth or status, born in a backwater town whose first visitors were shepherds on the graveyard shift.

And then when Jesus began his ministry, JESUS MINISTERED WITH NOBODIES. He didn’t visit the palace and make himself Pilate’s personal chaplain. He didn’t hobnob with beauty queens or superstars. He spent his time with ordinary people, people so ordinary you would call them "common:" traitors and notorious sinners and ladies of the evening, those kinds of people.

More than that, JESUS MINISTERED WITH NOBODIES AS A NOBODY. What status and social standing Jesus had, he lost as he allowed himself to be seen with common people. He didn’t even keep a safe distance from lepers, but actually touched them, making himself as ceremonially unclean as they were. Proper people were scandalized and said, "No self-respecting prophet would be with these people. He’s making a fool of himself." As Jesus ministered to the nobodies of the world, he made himself a nobody. Not long after Jesus lived and died and rose, someone wrote a hymn about this. Paul quoted it in a letter to the church in Philippi in northern Greece:

Jesus was born as a nobody. Jesus ministered with nobodies as a nobody.

And, JESUS DIED AS A NOBODY. The last week of his like, when the time came for him to enter Jerusalem, he rode in on a borrowed donkey. By the end of the week he was hanging on a cross. Today it is hard for us to understand the significance of death on a cross because we are so familiar with the story, and yet we are so ignorant of its meaning. Sometimes we say that crucifixion back then would be equivalent to dying today in the prison gas chamber or by lethal injection. But it’s not, not because of the pain of the cross, but because of the shame of the cross. The Roman Empire never crucified its own citizens. Crucifixion was reserved for non-citizens and nobodies, for enemies of the state, for common disenfranchised criminals. There simply was no greater humiliation in the world than to be skewered on a gibbet and hung indefinitely without burial. So when Jesus was on the cross, he was hung with the lowest category of humanity: the lowly, the poor, the plain ugly.

In today’s scripture from 1 Corinthians in verse 23 Paul said the crucifixion was a skandalon to the Jews, and a morian to the Gentiles. To the Jews, Jesus’ crucifixion was a scandal. To the Gentiles, it was moronic. It was a scandal to the Jews because their idea of a Messiah was of a strong and powerful celebrity who would ride into Jerusalem on a warhorse and win back the country. It was moronic foolishness to the Gentiles, because their idea of a god was of an invulnerable being who could never be hurt, much less killed.

Jesus was born a nobody. He lived as a nobody. He died as a nobody. From the world’s perspective, his was a foolish and wasted life.

But hear Paul again in verse 25:

It has always been that way with God. All through the Old Testament, God chose the least and the last to work with God. God chose an unknown people in a geographic backwater, the Hebrews, to be God’s chosen people. God chose a stuttering murderer, Moses, to lead that people to the Promised Land. God chose the smallest son of a family, David, to slay Goliath and to be King of Israel and Judah.

God has always chosen the underdog, the unknown, the fool, the weakling, to shock the world with God’s power until people are forced to say, "Nothing can explain this but the power of God."

Modern movies, whether they name God or not, portray this theme time and again. Some say the best football movie ever made is not about Broadway Joe or Johnny Unitas or John Elway, but about a little guy from a steel mill town named Rudy. Rudy’s dream was to play football at Notre Dame, but everybody said he was too dumb for college and too small for football. But Rudy got his grades up at another college and managed to transfer to Notre Dame. He tried out for the team and made it onto the practice squad. On the practice field, Rudy gave his all in every single play, and sometimes made bigger and better players look lazy. During his whole career he never suited up for a single game until he pleaded with the coach for one game. In the final minutes of the game, in a rout against Georgia Tech, his teammates started chanting "Rudy, Rudy" until the coach finally put him in for the final plays. On the last play, Rudy sacked the quarterback, and the team gave Rudy a rare Notre Dame honor and carried Rudy off the field. They honored the strength in this little man.

Foolishness was wisdom in the movie "Forrest Gump." Remember how Forrest promised to start a shrimp trawling business with his friend Bubba. But when Bubba was killed in Vietnam, Forrest kept his promise anyway. People asked him "Are you crazy or just stupid?" But Forrest kept his promise, and made smart guys look dumb, and hauled in the shrimp. He said, "I’m not a smart man, but I know what love is." And it seemed that God blessed him in every thing he set his hand to. With God, foolishness is wisdom, and weakness is strength.

This has always been God’s style: picking the nobodies. Then Paul spoke directly to the Christians in Corinth, that God had picked them even though they were the nobodies of Greece:

Corinth was to Athens as Charlotte is to Raleigh, at least in the eyes of Raleigh. Athens was the center of the glory of Greece. Corinth was a joke. Corinth was a seaport town that had lain in ruins until the government rebuilt it. Therefore the new city was relatively uncultured, with no noble aristocracy like the old families of Athens. Oh, the Corinthians were making a lot of money on shipping, but they were still just nouveau riche, just a town full of drunken sailors chasing after the town prostitutes. If you wanted to tell someone he was one step above pond scum, you called him a Corinthian. There were so many prostitutes in Corinth that Paul counseled the female members of the church, many of whom were former prostitutes, to keep their heads covered to signify that they were no longer in the business. But Paul told the Corinthian church that although they were nobodies to the world, to God they were God’s chosen. God worked through the nobodies of Corinth. God always works through people who have little power to boast of, so that whatever God does through them is obviously by God’s power alone.

AND GOD WORKS THROUGH THE NOBODIES OF WILSON. If God could use a dysfunctional church like Corinth and turn it into the great church that it did become, then God can certainly use us!

We Wilsonians are like the Corinthians. Some of us make a lot of money. But overall, from the perspective of a city like Raleigh or New York, we are just a little village in the country. The world takes little note of what happens here. The world pays attention to intelligence, fame, power, beauty. We are not celebrities. We are relative nobodies.

But God turns things upside down and picks us. God works through us, works through anyone who is honest enough to know that on our own we have little to brag about on our own. You may feel like a nobody, but know that God has picked you. Of all peoples, God has picked us, the weak and the foolish, and uses us in God’s wise and mysterious way.

God picked our Baptist Men, and sent them to a little house way out on a dead end street in Sims. And God is working through them to renovate that house. God picked a few people to form a little mission team from our church to the Middle East. By themselves they may not look especially strong. But our weakness is God’s strength.

In this service, we dedicated Sydney Jones and we baptized Aaron Skinner and Stephen Tomlin today. The world will take little note of that. It won’t make it into the paper tomorrow. But we know that God’s call is upon them. God is choosing them. The dynamite power of God is working through them too.

The dynamite power of God is set off in you and me. How? The same way as in Jesus Christ. The power of God was set off in Jesus’ humiliation, and so it is in us. Whenever we lower ourselves to people who need the help of God, then the power of God flows through us. Whenever we allow ourselves to be humiliated by being seen with the unlovely and the despised, then the wisdom of God works through us. The power of

God was also set off in Jesus’ suffering, and so it is in us. Whenever we allow ourselves to suffer with those in our world who suffer, then the power and wisdom of God flows through us.

So whenever you feel you are too homely, too poor, too stupid, or too weak, remember: God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength. God uses nobodies. To the world you may be nobody. But by the grace of God you are somebody!

-- Douglas E. Murray