Things That Are Not
1 Corinthians 1:26-29 - "For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God."
In 1797, in a Dutch-speaking settlement in Ulster County, New York, a girl was born to enslaved parents and given the name Isabella Bomefree. Her father, James, was known as Bomefree, a Low Dutch word associated with “tree,” a name given because he had once stood tall and straight.
But Isabella’s early life was anything but rooted or free. For nearly three decades, she lived under slavery. She would be sold at the age of nine for $100 along with a flock of sheep. She was beaten, abused, separated from family, and never taught to read. Later, her five-year-old son Peter would be illegally sold south to Alabama, and Isabella would fight through the courts until he was returned.
In 1826, with an infant daughter on her hip, Isabella walked off her enslaver's land and found refuge with abolitionist neighbors who paid for her freedom.
Then, on Pentecost Sunday in 1843, she had what she described as a divinely inspired call. She believed God was asking her to leave New York City, walk out into the countryside, and testify to the hope that was in her. She took a new name for the new calling. She called herself Sojourner Truth.
She couldn’t read the Bible she preached. She knew its contents from oral tradition, from sermons heard and remembered. She was, by every measure her era used to assess significance, not anything. A formerly enslaved Black woman with no formal education in a country that wanted her to disappear. And she became one of the most powerful voices the 19th century would hear on the worth of women and the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Now read 1 Corinthians 1:26-29 again, with that woman in mind.
"For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God."
Paul's piling up of categories is not accidental. The wise. The powerful. The noble. He names the three social markers that defined who mattered in the first-century Greco-Roman world. Then he says God didn’t choose His church from among them. He chose the foolish, the weak, the low, the despised, and even things that are not.
That phrase is theologically electric. It’s the same language the New Testament uses elsewhere of creation itself. Hebrews 11:3 says God made the things that are seen out of things that were not visible. God speaks into being what is not. And here, in 1 Corinthians 1:28, Paul says God still does that. The lowest person in the room of the world is not a problem God is condescending to solve. They are the kind of raw material God always uses to demonstrate His power.
Sojourner Truth was, in every legal sense that 19th century America used, a thing that is not. A slave was not a citizen, not a voter, not a witness in court, not a person under property law. The whole legal apparatus of her early life had her filed in the category Paul names. And the same God who spoke light into darkness on the first day of creation spoke a name to her on Pentecost Sunday 1843, and made of what was not a Sojourner whose Truth still rings.
See, we tend to read this passage as God's preference for the poor and the marginalized. Of course, God cheers for the outcasts and the underdogs. James 2:5 confirms this: "Has not God chosen those who are poor in the world to be rich in faith?" But there’s something deeper in Paul's argument. The reason God chooses things that are not is not primarily ethical, but theological. He chooses them so that no one might boast in His presence. The whole architecture of salvation is designed to render boasting impossible. Anything we could have brought to the table, God refused to use, in order that the One who saves would be unmistakably Himself.
This means there are no spiritual VIPs. Not in Corinth. Not in Bayside. And it means the person in your life that the world has filed under not anything is precisely the kind of person God most loves to use.
This is where the Compassionate Responder lives. The Compassionate Responder has learned to see the world the way God sees it, and won’t walk past the person no one else looks at. The single mother in the third row. The man in the parking lot the rest of the lot has decided is invisible. The widow whose Sundays have become quiet. The neighbor whose gender identity makes everyone listen less. The Compassionate Responder reaches toward those the world has dismissed, because the Compassionate Responder has learned by reading their Bible that God reaches toward them first.
Today: Identify one person in your orbit the world routinely overlooks. Be specific. Picture their face. Do one concrete thing today that says, I see you the way God sees you. Send the text. Pay the meal. Sit in the chair next to them. Ask the question no one is asking them.
Prayer: "Father, I thank You that You choose what the world neglects. Open my eyes today to the people I’ve been walking past. Teach me to see them the way You see them, and to move toward them as one who knows I was once a nothing and an outsider. In Jesus' name, Amen."
-PK