(Originally preached at Luther Rice Memorial Baptist Church, Silver Spring, MD, Aug. 12, 1973; subsequently, with variations, at Woodbrook Baptist Church, Baltimore, MD, Aug. 19, 1973; Viers Mill Baptist Church, Rockville, MD, Sept. 9, 1973; Bethesda First Baptist Church, Bethesda, MD, Oct. 14, 1973; Greenbelt Baptist Church, Greenbelt, MD, Nov. 11, 1973; First Baptist Church, Silver Spring, MD, Dec. 30, 1973; St. Matthew Presbyterian Church, Silver Spring, MD, July 14, 1974; First Baptist Church, Wheaton, MD, July 21, 1974; Carrollan Woods Baptist Church, New Carrollton, MD, Aug. 4, 1974; First Baptist Church, Laurel, MD, Aug. 18, 1974; Germantown Baptist Church, Germantown, MD, Aug. 25, 1974; Kensington Baptist Church, Kensington, MD, Sept. 22, 1974; Wisconsin Avenue Baptist Church, Washington, DC, Oct. 13, 1974; Belair Baptist Church, Bowie, MD, Aug. 31, 1975; University of Maryland Chapel, College Park, MD, Sept. 21, 1975; Riverside Baptist Church, Washington, DC, Dec. 9, 1975; Takoma Park Baptist Church, Washington, DC, Feb. 22, 1976; Clifton Park Baptist Church, Silver Spring, MD, Aug. 15, 1976; Calvary Hill Baptist Church, Alexandria, VA, June 18, 1978; Hillcrest Baptist Church, Hillcrest Heights, MD, Sept. 23, 1979; First Baptist Church, Gaithersburg, MD Oct. 7, 1979; Clinton Baptist Church, Clinton, MD, Oct. 28, 1979; Westover Baptist Church, Arlington, vA (youth retreat), Apr. 24,1982; Calverton Baptist Church, Silver Spring, MD July 25, 1982)
In his novel, “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” James Baldwin has given us the plaintive description of a boy who frequently made his way to the front entrance of the great main branch of the New York City Library. Baldwin tells us that the child found the building and what it represented enormously attractive; the great stone lions guarding the steps seemed to him at a distance to be but oversized friendly pussycats. The building and its promise of learning offered great attraction; but the boy could never quite bring himself to enter the library and to check out a book. Somehow as he approached it, the building loomed too large, the halls too long. It became frightening, it communicated in all its silence that it was not for him, that he did not belong there. And so always the boy would return to Harlem and would go back to the branch library in his neighborhood, there to pore over books he had read many times, hoping somehow to become somebody and to feel as though he belonged, really belonged in the great main library, lions and all!
Baldwin's boy, in a word, felt that he was nobody. Something deep within him telegraphed a continuing silent message to him: you're a nobody, you don't belong in this grand hall. Wait until you are somebody. As for now, you're a nobody.
Indeed this is a universal human experience. Each of us has those moments in which he senses his inadequacy, his lack of worth. Each of us comes on occasions, a set of circumstances in which he can only feel that he does not belong, that here, in this time and place, he is a nobody. Martin Luther King said it well as he spoke of black America: For years the black man in America has been given a sense of nobodiness; only now is he developing a sense of somebodiness.
The people called Israel faced just such a crisis in their own experience. The Old Testament in depicting those crucial events of the Exodus, these days when Moses led them out into the desert to seek their destiny, is quite realistic. The Scripture reminds us that this was indeed a nondescript and motley crew, that those who followed Moses were a rag-tag-and-bobtail band of ne'er do wells. They were no people at all, but they became a people only because of what God did in their midst. They were nobodies; but they became God's nobodies because they shared an experience of God’s activity. They became somebody, and because God chose them and forged them into something, they moved out of their nobodiness.
So Israel came to have an identity, as we would put it in our 20th Century psychological language. She had had a massive identity crisis, but now she knew who she was. In fact, she came to know all too well.
By the time of the 8th century before Christ she had developed a strong heritage, a noble tradition. In her own eyes she was a proud and worthy nation. She had forgotten how she came to be, how her ancestor were the despised Hapiru whom other nations had regarded with scorn and fear. She was really somebody.
But into her midst in that 8th century BC came the prophet Hosea, with a terrible and frightful image. Hosea was an intensely personal and emotional prophet, and he drew on the deepest and most moving symbols at his command. The prophet describes at the beginning of his book how he sensed the Lord; command to do a terrible thing, an unbelievable thing – to take as his wife Gomer, the unfaithful and promiscuous Gomer. And Gomer is to bear his children, children whose names were to be living pictures of the anger of God at his people. We need not linger long over the details of the story, but we do need to look at these children and what they represent.
One of the children born to Hosea and Gomer is called Lo-ruhamah, “no pity." “No mercy.” Can you imagine it? A little girl running around the house and out in the streets, and every time you call her, you have to spit out that message of judgment. "Come here, no mercy; come in for supper, No mercy.” With every mention of that child came the warning that all was not well between Israel and her God.
And then the son. And the Lord said, “Call his name ‘Lo-ammi’, not my people.” Call him nobody. And every time you see this boy in the streets of your city, you will be reminded that you are really nobody. Oh, you may have become accustomed to supposing that you are somebody. But actually you are nobody; not my people.
A frightening prophecy; a graphic message that no one could miss. But Hosea went beyond the harshness of his own message, Hosea offered a word of hope beyond all this talk of judgment and anger. Hosea is always the prophet who sees both sides of God, who understands that when God is judgment He is also in deep grief. So Hosea’s word of hope: “I will have pity on the house of Judah. And in the place where it was said to them, you are not my people, it shall be said to them, Sons of the living God." You are nobodies, and don’t you forget it. But you are God’s nobodies, and don’t you forget that either.
Now watch what happens when we come to the New Testament and see its writers struggling to describe what the church is. Look throughout the New Testament, from Jesus to Paul to Peter to James, and see how all of them pick up all the image and symbols used in the Old Testament to describe Israel, but now they use these to describe the church. The church of Christ is the new Israel, the new people chosen of God. Once again he has taken some nobodies and made them into somebodies, the sorts of somebodies best called God’s nobodies. And look especially at our text in I Peter. Here the apostle quotes directly from Hosea, and he boldly and imaginatively transforms Hosea's ancient images to a new situation. Peter says of the church, you are now the people of God, who were once not his people; outside his mercy once, you have now received his mercy.
Here is the early church, Jew and Gentile, learned and ignorant, free and slave, mostly poor, mostly the outcast elements of the first century world. Once no people at all, no identity at all, but now God's kind of nobodies; once outside the concern of God, but now drawn together by an act of grace. Let’s look this morning at the kind of nobodies these people were to become. What, exactly, is the identity of the church? What does it mean to discover that suddenly you have been given this kind of somebodiness?
I
First, the Apostle Peter reminds us that God’s nobodies become somebodies when they realize that they are different, that there is something special about them. To know that we are the people of God is to know that we have a special calling, a particular identity. We are not simply an echo of the culture in which we live; we are not to be simple reflections of the values and attitudes that prevail in the world around us. Something has happened to us, something decisive. The eternal himself has invaded our lives, he has welded us together, and he has made into something we didn’t used to be.
The story is told of the man whose job it was in the factory where he worked always to blow the noon whistle. Precisely at 12:00 sharp, he was to pull the cord and sound the whistle signaling the noon hour. This gentleman took his duty very seriously, so he always made it a point to stop by the jewelers shop every morning and check his wristwatch against the elaborate and expensive clock mounted in the jeweler's window. Day after day he checked his watch in this manner, frequently moving it up a minute one day, back a minute the next day. Then one day his curiosity got the better of him, and he entered the jeweler's store and asked the jeweler, "Where do you get your time signal for that clock? Do you call the Naval Observatory? Or do you check with Western Union? To which the jeweler replied, “Oh, I just set it every day by the noon whistle that blows down at the factory!"
The world expects signals, standards, and we give only a mirror image. You see, sometimes our identity as the people of God gets very confused because we are listening to the wrong signals. We are still acting as if we were nobodies, and we have forgotten that we are God's nobodies. Our task is to move into the world with self-consciousness, with identity. The trouble is, you see, that you and I in the church of 20th century America have some problems with this sort of identity. We are nobodies; like Baldwin’s boy at the New York library we do not sense the worth God has conferred on us. We don’t know what we are worth. We have trouble with this whole notion that we are God's nobodies. We have become what our peers and our circumstances make us.
As often happens, Charley Brown and Lucy do a good job of illustrating this dilemma. In one of the Peanuts strips Lucy is in her booth ready to dispense psychiatric advice for the preinflationary price of 5ยข. Charley Brown calls Lucy's attention to the sky and says, “See that plane up there? It's filled with people who are all going someplace. That's what I'd like to do, go off somewhere someplace and start a new life.” Lucy responds, “Forget it Charley Brown; when you got off the plane, you'd still be the same person you are.” But Charley Brown persists. "But maybe when I got to this new place, the new people would like me better." But Lucy, true to form, chills his hopes, “0nly until they got to know you, Charley Brown; then you'd be right back where you started.” Now poor Charley gives it one more try, "But maybe these new people would be more understanding.” And Lucy ends the whole discussion with a note of finality: “People are people, Charley Brown!”
Thus it is with us; too often we believe with Lucy that people are people, that we are locked in. We find it too easy to believe that we are locked into our personal histories, that we are locked into our social situations, that we are locked into financial limitations. We find a thousand and one ways to excuse ourselves, to discount the possibility of being something new. We are like Lucy, indeed; all too often we believe that we are nobodies, and despite what God has done in our lives, we persist in our strange pessimism. And yet I do not find in this text in I Peter any qualifiers, any ifs, buts or maybes. I find only the absolute insistence that we have been made into something beyond ourselves and our own resources, and we have no right to stand in the way of God and his desire to do something with us. I find here only a radical openness to the creative power of God. You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, God’s own people.
II
But there is more to this business of being God’s nobodies. Our text in I Peter has another insight for us. There is something else special about being these who were once
Our situation is rather like the one that occurred in a small hospital out in Kansas. One evening during an electrical storm, the power failed, and all the electrical equipment in the hospital, of course, stopped working. There was only one immediate crisis; a man had been caught in an elevator, and he obviously had panicked. He began to scream and to pound on the door and to demand that someone get him free immediately. One of the nurses in the hospital tried to calm him by saying, “You’ll be all right in a moment, sir. Our maintenance man will be here soon and he will get our auxiliary power system working. Just wait for our maintenance man.” But from deep in the elevator shaft came the plaintive cry, "But I am the maintenance man!”
How easy it is for us to become self-contained! How easy for us to become part of the problem instead of part of the answer! And how trapped we feel when suddenly we discover that there is a world in need, but we cannot respond. We, the maintenance men, are in the stalled elevator ourselves; and since it seems firmly and decisively stalled, some of us just settle for the kind of existence it offers us. It may not be very exciting, you see, to live in a stalled elevator, but it cannot be too dangerous either, provided there is air to breath and plenty of food to eat. After all, how many risks can you run in a stalled elevator? How many injuries can you sustain huddled in the corner of your own little room? What a temptation!
You see, this is a part of our nobodiness too. We Christians have convinced ourselves that in our nobodiness we are not really needed. The world that surrounds us ignores us, and we take that to mean that they do not need us. I wonder how long it has been since we peered out of the portholes that remain in our stalled elevator and studied our community? How long has it been since we took seriously the human needs that our community presents us?
But to live that way is to admit to being nobodies. And we are not simply nobodies; we are God’s nobodies, and that means that we are a witnessing, sharing, giving community. We are restless, because we need to be moving in tempo with the redemptive activity of God. We are searching and are experimenting, because God has more truth out there for us than we have been able to comprehend. We are to be a bold and creative and innovative community, because we belong to Christ, and that's the way he is.
I covet for today's church more than anything else this active sense of being God's nobodies, this divine restlessness. And I fear more than anything else our everlasting temptation to do churchly housekeeping instead and call that being the church. How much more being the church, being the people of God it is to get involved with the needs of the world around us than it is to spend our time talking to one another behind the stained glass! How much more we are the church tomorrow when we scatter into the world than we are here when we gather on Sundays or in meetings! And how much it says about our identity as nobodies, sheer nobodies, if we fail to touch men and heal them where they hurt! How absurd for us to suppose that we have nothing to give to an anguishing world! We are not nobodies; we are God’s nobodies, and that makes all the difference. Our resources in and of themselves may be limited, but he multiplies them into sufficiency.
Chad Walsh, in his strange book, “God at Large,” has a little couplet:
“Mirror, mirror on the wall,
When is the church going to fall?
Not with a bang, not with a whimper;
Churches fall with psalm and simper.
Mirror, mirror on the wall,
Is mine the sickest church of all?”
To which I answer: not necessarily. It need not happen to us as long as we know we once were nobodies who experienced God’s deliverance, and who became a new kind of somebody, God’s nobodies.
