"He Became Poor"

05-Dec-2010

“He Became Poor”

Robert M. Thompson, Pastor

Corinth Reformed Church
150 Sixteenth Avenue NW
Hickory, North Carolina 28601

828.328.6196 corinthtoday.org

Thou who art love beyond all telling

Saviour and King, we worship Thee.

2 Corinthians 8:9

December 5, 2010

The Other Wise Man

When Dr. Bruce Carlton was a boy, every Christmas Eve his father would gather the family and read The Story of the Other Wise Man, by Henry van Dyke. Not long ago, Bruce found a copy of the book in an antique store. I found a number of copies online, and have ordered one for our library. It should arrive this week.

Henry van Dyke was an American author educated at Princeton University and Seminary in the late 1800s. Besides the story I am about to share with you, he is best known for writing the lyrics to the hymn, “Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee.”

You know about the wise men in Matthew 2. Legend outside the Bible says there were three of them; the Bible does not number them or give their names. Henry Van Dyke’s story is about the “other” wise man, Artaban. He wanted to see the newborn king as well, but he missed his chance.

Why? Distractions. Interruptions. Artaban rode his horse, Vasda, hard to meet his fellow Magians at their rendezvous. He too had seen the star, and his chest pounded as Vasda, also laden with jewels fit for a king, kicked up a cloud of sand.

Artaban’s journey was interrupted by the waters of Babylon in a grove of palm trees where he had paused to refresh his horse. Vasda had discovered a human form lying motionless. The Magian’s intuition told him this was a poor Hebrew exile. As Artaban dew close, he saw the marks of a deadly yellow fever. Van Dyke writes,

How could he stay here in the darkness to minister to a dying stranger? What claim had this unknown fragment of human life upon his compassion or his service? If he lingered but for an hour he could hardly reach Borsippa at the appointed time. His companions would think he had given up on the journey. They would go without him. He would lose his quest.

But if he went on now, the man would surely die. If he stayed, life might be restored. His spirit throbbed and fluttered with the urgency of the crisis. Should he risk the great reward of his divine faith for the sake of a single deed of human love? Should he turn aside, if only for a moment, from the following of the star, to give a cup of cold water to a poor, perishing Hebrew?

“God of truth and purity,” he prayed, “direct me in the holy path, the way of wisdom which Thou only knowest.”

Then he turned back to the sick man. Loosening the grip of his hand, he carried him to a little mound at the foot of the palm-tree.

He unbound the thick folds of the turban and opened the garment above the sunken breast. He brought water from one of the small canals near by, and moistened the sufferer’s brow and mouth. He mingled a draught of one of those simple but potent remedies which he carried always in his girdle – for the Magians were physicians as well as astrologers – and poured it slowly between the colorless lips. Hour after hour he labored as only a skilful healer of disease can do; and at last the man’s strength returned; he sat up and looked about him.

“Who art thou?” he said in the rude dialect of the country, “and why hast thou sought me here to bring back my life?”

“I am Artaban the Magian, of the city of Ecbatana, and I am going to Jerusalem in search of one who is to be born King of the Jews, a great Prince and Deliverer of all men. I dare not delay any longer upon my journey, for the caravan that has waited for me may depart without me. But see, here is all that I have left of bread and wine, and here is a potion of healing herbs. When thy strength is restored thou canst find the dwellings of the Hebrews among the houses of Babylon.”

As you might guess, when Artaban reached Borsippa, his intended companions had departed without him. The rest of the book is about Artaban’s continued pursuit of Jesus for decades, ending in Jerusalem on the day of the crucifixion. I won’t spoil the ending if you’ve never read it.

But the lesson of the book is not hard to figure out. When we give to others, we give to Jesus. When we serve them, we serve the King. Generosity is the lesson we need to take from the story of Christmas.

Rich generosity

Does it cheapen or deepen Christmas if we turn the story into a lesson about giving? After all, from a Christian perspective we are talking about the pivotal event in human history. God became man, and the possibility of a forever life was born. Doesn’t everything else pale in comparison, even giving a gift of cold water to a dying man?

I might be tempted to say so if it were not for 2 Corinthians 8:9.

This Advent season, we are looking for Christmas in unexpected places. I didn’t expect to find inspiration for today’s sermon in a dusty booklet more than a century old, stumbled across by Bruce’s father decades ago. If you open your heart, you will find the Lord in lots of places you never would have imagined.

We usually look for the story of Christmas in the gospels. Four chapters in those two gospels tell us everything we know about the life of Jesus before he burst on to the public scene at about age 30. The birth of John the Baptist, the annunciation to Mary, the confirmation in a dream to Joseph, the census that required Mary and Joseph to travel to Bethlehem, the birth in a stable, the manger, the song of the angels, the shepherds, the wise men, the flight to Egypt – all of those stories are in Matthew 1-2 and Luke 1-2. Those are the expected places to find Christmas.

We went looking for Christmas in unexpected places. You wouldn’t expect to find the story of Christmas in a letter of the Apostle Paul to the church at Corinth. The city of Corinth was a bustling cosmopolitan business hub, and the city had a reputation for immorality. The church at Corinth was filled with gifted but strong-willed people often at odds with each other and with the founder of their church, the Apostle Paul. Paul’s relationship with that church was like a roller coaster.

In the middle of what we call 2 Corinthians, which was the fourth letter Paul wrote to the Corinthian church (see 1 Cor. 5:9-11 and 2 Cor. 2:3-9), Paul appealed to the church to support an offering he was collecting for the mother church in Jerusalem. The Christians there were primarily Jews who had believed in Jesus, and they had fallen on hard times. Not only had there been a famine in Jerusalem, but the Christians in Palestine were victims of economic discrimination.

Paul, the Apostle to the Gentiles, found this to be a wonderful opportunity for Gentile Christians in Asia Minor (modern day Turkey) and Greece to give back to the mother church, and also to build a bridge between the Gentile and Jewish branches of the church. As he traveled from city after city he appealed for a generous offering.

Paul was not above using all sorts of angles in his fund raising campaign. He compared one church to another. He said he was “testing the sincerity” of their love (8:8). He used Scripture (8:15). He promised to be above board in how the offering was handled (8:21). He reminded them of his relationship with them (9:2). He used praise, even flattery (9:5). He promised a reward (9:6). But he also clarified that he wanted them to give willingly, not under compulsion, because God loves a cheerful giver (9:8).

At no point did Paul bring out a more powerful motivational tool for giving than the one in 2 Corinthians 8:9, “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich.” That’s finding Christmas in an unexpected place.

Four words

Three words capture my attention in 2 Corinthians 8:9 – rich, poor, grace, and know. Let’s talk about them.

Rich. In most people’s minds this is not a nice word. Almost everyone thinks of the rich as someone else. It’s always relative. A Gallup poll found that people who make less than $30,000 a year think of those who make $75,000 a year as rich, while those who earn $100,000 think it takes $200,000. So let’s go with this definition of rich: someone who makes at least twice as much as I do. By that definition, in about half the countries in the world the family making $10,000 a year is very rich.

The root meaning of rich is abundance. It means to have more than enough. In Henry van Dyke’s story, Artaban was rich.

Poor. The Greek word for poor comes from a root word meaning “crouched together.” The image is of street beggars, huddled and destitute, dependent on the help of strangers. Early Greek thought did not even believe that helping the poor was a particularly moral or spiritual act.

From one end to the other, however, the Bible counters that pitiless and willful neglect and oppression of the needy. God cares for the poor and is their advocate (Isaiah 3:15). Exploiting the poor breaks God’s law (Exodus 22:22-27). Jesus blesses the literal poor (Luke 6:20) and the poor in spirit (Matthew 5:3). Paul is eager to help the poor (Galatians 2:10), and James says God has chosen the poor to be “rich in faith and to inherit the kingdom” (2:5).

If “rich” means having more than enough, to be poor is not having enough. As with wealth, the perception of poverty varies. I’m reminded of the line at the end of the film “Two Weeks Notice,” where George Wade (Hugh Grant) says to Lucy Kelson (Sandra Bullock), “I'm now poor. When I say I'm poor, I mean we may have to share a helicopter with another family.” That’s not what the Bible means by poor. It means those who have no shelter, no food, and no hope of either – like the Hebrew exile in van Dyke’s story.

Paul’s angle on the story of Christmas says nothing about a virgin birth or angels or shepherds at a manger. His version is that the Lord Jesus Christ was rich and became poor. “Rich” almost seems inadequate to describe what Christians call Jesus’ pre-existence. That oxymoron means that we believe Jesus’ birth at Bethlehem was not his beginning. He had no beginning. He is eternally One with the Father and the Spirit. “Rich” is Paul’s metaphor for the glory and splendor of heaven. The Lord Jesus Christ, Paul says, was rich, but for your sakes he became poor.

In Philippians 2, Paul quotes an early Christian hymn: Jesus, “being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness.”

Why? Paul says he did this so that you, through his poverty, might become rich. What do you call that? You call it “grace,” our third word.

Grace. In his wonderful book, What’s So Amazing About Grace? Philip Yancey calls grace “the last best word.” For the most part, he says, we have not spoiled the word. We “say grace.” We are “grateful” when someone is kind. We “graciously” extend hospitality. We leave a “gratuity” for the service. Musical scores include “grace notes.”

I love the word “grace.” Did you know that we owe it almost exclusively to the Apostle Paul? It may surprise you to know that Jesus himself never used the word in his teaching.

To be sure, Jesus taught grace. He taught it mostly in stories. A father welcoming home his prodigal son with open arms and a lavish feast. A tax collector who beats his breast and cries, “Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner!” A master who pays workers hired at the end of the day the same wage as those hired at the beginning. Jesus’ teaching was full of grace, even without the word.

But what captures Paul’s heart is not Jesus’ stories of grace. It is rather the supreme act of grace that is Jesus’ incarnation, the Christmas story. By volume, Paul’s letters occupy only about 1 in 20 pages of the Bible. But he uses the word “grace” twice as often as all the other biblical writers combined.

Listen to just a few of Paul’s grace quotes –

Romans 5:20, “Where sin increased, grace increased all the more.”

Romans 12:6, “We have different gifts, according to the grace given to each of us.”

2 Corinthians 12:9, “But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”

Ephesians 2:8, “It is by grace you have been saved, through faith.”

Colossians 4:6, “Let you conversation always be full of grace.”

Titus 2:11, “For the grace of God has appeared that offers salvation to all people.”

Grace is undeserved kindness. That’s all it is. Every gift I have – spiritual, material, present, future, visible, hidden – I didn’t earn any of it. Paul knows that.

If you haven’t grasped grace, you don’t understand Christmas or even Christ. Gordon MacDonald says grace is unique to our faith. “The world can do almost anything as well as or better than the church. You don’t need to be a Christian to build houses, feed the hungry, or heal the sick. There is only one thing the world cannot do. It cannot offer grace.”

The world screams for justice to be done to perpetrators of evil. What you did should be done to you. You have to pay. It’s only fair. Even in our own homes and with our loved ones, we want those who sin against us to suffer some kind of consequence. In an even more profound way, we choose to wallow in our own guilt and shame because we’re trying to bring consequences upon ourselves for what we’ve done.

Grace makes no sense. As Philip Yancey says, “By instinct I feel I must do something in order to be accepted. Grace sounds a startling note of contradiction” (71).

Yancey again: “Grace means there is nothing I can do to make God love me more, and nothing I can do to make God love me less” (71).

What Yancey calls “ungrace” shows up in arrogance, resentment, distance, greed, and indifference. It emerges when we put conditions on our love for others, when we’re afraid to be used or taken for granted. Grace is humility, kindness, forgiveness, patience, and generosity. Grace risks loving unconditionally.

Know. This is another power-packed word in the New Testament. To know is to be intimately acquainted with, to the point that it came be a euphemism for intimate relations between a husband and wife. It is personal, it is experiential, it is real. “You know this grace,” Paul can say to the Corinthians, because it’s all you hear me talk about. It’s all grace. It’s all I talk about.

You Corinthians – you former sex addicts and greedy, selfish drunks and swindlers who divide into spiritual cliques and can’t stand the sight of each other and are so up and down in your respect for me – you know this grace because it grabbed and changed you and holds on to you.

Love beyond all telling

It’s rare to find people, even Christians, who know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ who became poor that we might become rich. Here’s a little test for whether you know that grace.

In the vignette I read from The Story of the Other Wise Man, do you see yourself as Artaban, trying to decide whether you should take from your treasures and your food and give to a dying man? Is that the struggle for you? How much do I have to sacrifice or give away when I have other pressing priorities?

If you grasp grace, you instead see yourself as the dying man, hopeless and completely dependent on the good will of a stranger who owes you nothing. Once you have received that kindness, is there anything at all you won’t do to pass grace on to someone else?

Frank Houghton was the Editorial Secretary of the China Inland Missions in the 1930s. It was the Great Depression in the U.S., and in Europe Hitler’s Naziism was on the rise. In China the Red Army was intimidating the church, and within a little more than a decade, all foreign missionaries would be gone a century after Hudson Taylor had brought the gospel to that vast country.

Many Christian missionaries had been captured by the Red Army, mistreated for a year, then released. Some had never been heard from. A few were known to have been beheaded. Still, Frank Houghton thought he should make a personal journey to China and visit missionary outposts.

It was on that trip in 1934 as he walked through the Szechwan Mountains that Mr. Houghton was meditating on 2 Corinthians 8:9 and wrote the following hymn –

Thou who wast rich beyond all splendour,
All for love's sake becamest poor;
Thrones for a manger didst surrender,
Sapphire-paved courts for stable floor.
Thou who wast rich beyond all splendour,
All for love's sake becomes poor.

Thou who art God beyond all praising,
All for love's sake becamest man;
Stooping so low, but sinners raising
Heavenwards by thine eternal plan.
Thou who art God beyond all praising,
All for love's sake becamest man.

Thou who art love beyond all telling,
Saviour and King, we worship thee.
Emmanuel, within us dwelling,
Make us what thou wouldst have us be.
Thou who art love beyond all telling,
Saviour and King, we worship thee.

Amen.