What’s In a Name
March 4, 2012
Genesis 17
What’s in a name? A rose is a rose is a rose, and all that.
So, how many of us were named after someone in our family?
How many of us were named after a figure in the Bible?
Anyone named after a famous public figure?
How many of us don’t know why we were given the name we carry?
Over the years I’ve found lots of folks who don’t know why they have the name they have, so it’s not particularly unusual, on the one hand. On the other, you’d think that something as dear to us as our own name would be something we’d know everything about.
Moreover, you’d also think it would not be easy to give up. Yet that’s just what Abram and Sarai do – they give up the names by which they’ve been called for many, many years to be called by something new.
What’s in a name, indeed?
My friend Bob Pryor, who is the retiring director at Camp Hanover outside of Richmond, has a remarkable gift for names. He makes an almost always successful effort to learn the name of each and every camper who comes through the place, which, in a full summer means more than 600 kids who are there, at the longest, for two weeks.
He makes the effort because it honors people and tells them that they are important.
Names matter because people matter, and, in calling each one by name, Bob is telling kids that they are beloved.
On the other hand, sometimes we get things a little messed up around names.
God is the one who calls us by the name that matters: “beloved.” The other names fade in comparison – especially the titles: doctor, pastor, teacher, general, president. None of those matters, because God strips them all away to reveal us to ourselves as what we really are: beloved children created in the image of a loving God.
We mess that up – mar, damage even destroy the image of God in others and ourselves – precisely at the moment when we make the names the culture gives us more important than the one God gives us. It happens even in the church, and sometimes it happens with the best of intentions.
I was walking around in here this week, meditating on these passages, and I took note of some name plates: the pulpit lights – given in memory of Donald Moriarty; the table, in honor of Irene and Alexander Evens; each of the windows has a name attached.
There’s nothing wrong with honoring loved ones, and attaching their names to things, but there is a danger there that the “thing” becomes more valuable than the memory or than the person honored.
When that happens, especially in churches, memorial stones become stumbling blocks. You know the old joke, “how many Presbyterians does it take to change a light bulb?” The answer: “you can’t change that light bulb; my precious Aunt Sadie donated that light bulb 65 years ago. See? Here’s the plaque.”
Change is hard, and so often – as organizations and as individuals – we make it even harder.
That’s what’s so remarkable about the Abraham story: it’s all about change – right up to and including a change of names.
Sometimes I’d like to change names, myself.
For quite a few years now I’ve heard fellow liberal Christians lament the capture of the name “Christian” by the Religious Right. Isn’t there some other name we could call ourselves by?
After all, the earliest followers of Jesus were called, simply, “people of the way.”
And therein lies the rub.
They were called people of the way because they lived a certain way; their lives conformed to the way that Jesus lived. They were people of the way because they were called to a way of living and they responded to that call with their whole lives.
Following the way of Jesus sounds simple enough. In fact, I remember being told by somebody years ago when I was doing youth ministry that what he wanted was for me to teach kids to be nice and honest and polite. That was the sum total of Christian teaching, as far as he was concerned, and it would lead the kids toward success in middle class American life.
I still wonder what he made of passages such as the one from Mark’s gospel, in which Jesus taught his followers that he would suffer, be rejected by the religious authorities of his own people, and ultimately be killed (Mark 8:31-38).
Mark tells us that Jesus taught this quite openly, and that Peter, for one, didn’t much care for it. In fact, the story goes, Peter took Jesus aside and said, “knock it off, man.”
Jesus looked right at him and said, “get behind me, satan. You’ve got your mind on the wrong things. I’m focused on God and on following God’s call; you’re caught up in the world’s values. I don’t have time for that.”
Then comes the kicker – the line that no one has ever asked me to teach their children, the line that most of us grownups would prefer not to deal with either:
Jesus called the crowd and his disciples and he said to them, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”
When Jesus uttered those words the cross was not a piece of jewelry. It was not a sign of belonging to a faith tradition. It was certainly not the sign of anything of power. It was the sign of an empire’s crushing hand.
To take up one’s cross did not mean to wave it as a sign of triumph. It meant to carry the burden that Jesus knew would fall upon anyone who lived the kind of life he was living – a life that challenged the status quo of structural economic, political and religious inequality; a life that challenged the status quo of kinship and tribe; a life that challenged the status quo confinement of God to a particular religious practice; a life that challenged the powers and principalities by looking at people called “outsider” by the powerful and renaming the poor, the sick, the dispossessed as the “beloved.”
That kind of life is going to draw the attention – and the wrath – of anyone whose power, position or wealth is upheld by the way things are and is threatened by the prospect of change.
Who wants their children taught to follow that kind of life?
“If anyone would be my follower, let them take up their cross and follow me.”
And yet, here we are, people who say that, yes, we want to follow Jesus.
It is not easy to follow Jesus, and a community that does it really well, really faithfully, really honestly may be vibrant, but it is not going to be huge.
But that’s OK. As an article I read in the past few days put it, “The church’s job is not to grow – not even to survive. The church’s job is to die – continually – on behalf of the world, believing that with every death there is a resurrection.”
God promised to make of Abram a great nation, but God also made it clear that a lot of Abram – including the very name he called himself – would have to die in order for that nation to rise up.
That same article I read last week concludes like this:
“Convincing the church she does not exist for the benefit of her members, but for the life of the world is a bad church growth strategy. It's also exactly what the church must do. It's a tough sell because crucifixion seems like a losing strategy unless you believe in the resurrection. Faithfulness seems like a losing strategy unless you believe that the power of the gospel trumps our ability to come up with all the right answers to all the right questions.”
Friends, I do not pretend to know all the right answers, and I’m not even sure about the questions.
But I do know this, at my baptism I was called, claimed and named a child of the covenant – a child of the promise that God made to Noah, that God made again to Abraham, and to Moses, that God embodied in Jesus. I am a child of the promise. I am beloved. And so, friends, are you.
Jesus calls us now to go out into all the world and to teach each person we encounter that he or she is also beloved, and then to demand that every decision, every policy, every action of every powerful person or institution consider first the effects of that decision or policy or action on the lives of the least of these, our equally beloved sisters and brothers. Let us live that way, and in so living claim for ourselves the name of those who follow the way of Jesus. Amen.
Genesis 17
What’s in a name? A rose is a rose is a rose, and all that.
So, how many of us were named after someone in our family?
How many of us were named after a figure in the Bible?
Anyone named after a famous public figure?
How many of us don’t know why we were given the name we carry?
Over the years I’ve found lots of folks who don’t know why they have the name they have, so it’s not particularly unusual, on the one hand. On the other, you’d think that something as dear to us as our own name would be something we’d know everything about.
Moreover, you’d also think it would not be easy to give up. Yet that’s just what Abram and Sarai do – they give up the names by which they’ve been called for many, many years to be called by something new.
What’s in a name, indeed?
My friend Bob Pryor, who is the retiring director at Camp Hanover outside of Richmond, has a remarkable gift for names. He makes an almost always successful effort to learn the name of each and every camper who comes through the place, which, in a full summer means more than 600 kids who are there, at the longest, for two weeks.
He makes the effort because it honors people and tells them that they are important.
Names matter because people matter, and, in calling each one by name, Bob is telling kids that they are beloved.
On the other hand, sometimes we get things a little messed up around names.
God is the one who calls us by the name that matters: “beloved.” The other names fade in comparison – especially the titles: doctor, pastor, teacher, general, president. None of those matters, because God strips them all away to reveal us to ourselves as what we really are: beloved children created in the image of a loving God.
We mess that up – mar, damage even destroy the image of God in others and ourselves – precisely at the moment when we make the names the culture gives us more important than the one God gives us. It happens even in the church, and sometimes it happens with the best of intentions.
I was walking around in here this week, meditating on these passages, and I took note of some name plates: the pulpit lights – given in memory of Donald Moriarty; the table, in honor of Irene and Alexander Evens; each of the windows has a name attached.
There’s nothing wrong with honoring loved ones, and attaching their names to things, but there is a danger there that the “thing” becomes more valuable than the memory or than the person honored.
When that happens, especially in churches, memorial stones become stumbling blocks. You know the old joke, “how many Presbyterians does it take to change a light bulb?” The answer: “you can’t change that light bulb; my precious Aunt Sadie donated that light bulb 65 years ago. See? Here’s the plaque.”
Change is hard, and so often – as organizations and as individuals – we make it even harder.
That’s what’s so remarkable about the Abraham story: it’s all about change – right up to and including a change of names.
Sometimes I’d like to change names, myself.
For quite a few years now I’ve heard fellow liberal Christians lament the capture of the name “Christian” by the Religious Right. Isn’t there some other name we could call ourselves by?
After all, the earliest followers of Jesus were called, simply, “people of the way.”
And therein lies the rub.
They were called people of the way because they lived a certain way; their lives conformed to the way that Jesus lived. They were people of the way because they were called to a way of living and they responded to that call with their whole lives.
Following the way of Jesus sounds simple enough. In fact, I remember being told by somebody years ago when I was doing youth ministry that what he wanted was for me to teach kids to be nice and honest and polite. That was the sum total of Christian teaching, as far as he was concerned, and it would lead the kids toward success in middle class American life.
I still wonder what he made of passages such as the one from Mark’s gospel, in which Jesus taught his followers that he would suffer, be rejected by the religious authorities of his own people, and ultimately be killed (Mark 8:31-38).
Mark tells us that Jesus taught this quite openly, and that Peter, for one, didn’t much care for it. In fact, the story goes, Peter took Jesus aside and said, “knock it off, man.”
Jesus looked right at him and said, “get behind me, satan. You’ve got your mind on the wrong things. I’m focused on God and on following God’s call; you’re caught up in the world’s values. I don’t have time for that.”
Then comes the kicker – the line that no one has ever asked me to teach their children, the line that most of us grownups would prefer not to deal with either:
Jesus called the crowd and his disciples and he said to them, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”
When Jesus uttered those words the cross was not a piece of jewelry. It was not a sign of belonging to a faith tradition. It was certainly not the sign of anything of power. It was the sign of an empire’s crushing hand.
To take up one’s cross did not mean to wave it as a sign of triumph. It meant to carry the burden that Jesus knew would fall upon anyone who lived the kind of life he was living – a life that challenged the status quo of structural economic, political and religious inequality; a life that challenged the status quo of kinship and tribe; a life that challenged the status quo confinement of God to a particular religious practice; a life that challenged the powers and principalities by looking at people called “outsider” by the powerful and renaming the poor, the sick, the dispossessed as the “beloved.”
That kind of life is going to draw the attention – and the wrath – of anyone whose power, position or wealth is upheld by the way things are and is threatened by the prospect of change.
Who wants their children taught to follow that kind of life?
“If anyone would be my follower, let them take up their cross and follow me.”
And yet, here we are, people who say that, yes, we want to follow Jesus.
It is not easy to follow Jesus, and a community that does it really well, really faithfully, really honestly may be vibrant, but it is not going to be huge.
But that’s OK. As an article I read in the past few days put it, “The church’s job is not to grow – not even to survive. The church’s job is to die – continually – on behalf of the world, believing that with every death there is a resurrection.”
God promised to make of Abram a great nation, but God also made it clear that a lot of Abram – including the very name he called himself – would have to die in order for that nation to rise up.
That same article I read last week concludes like this:
“Convincing the church she does not exist for the benefit of her members, but for the life of the world is a bad church growth strategy. It's also exactly what the church must do. It's a tough sell because crucifixion seems like a losing strategy unless you believe in the resurrection. Faithfulness seems like a losing strategy unless you believe that the power of the gospel trumps our ability to come up with all the right answers to all the right questions.”
Friends, I do not pretend to know all the right answers, and I’m not even sure about the questions.
But I do know this, at my baptism I was called, claimed and named a child of the covenant – a child of the promise that God made to Noah, that God made again to Abraham, and to Moses, that God embodied in Jesus. I am a child of the promise. I am beloved. And so, friends, are you.
Jesus calls us now to go out into all the world and to teach each person we encounter that he or she is also beloved, and then to demand that every decision, every policy, every action of every powerful person or institution consider first the effects of that decision or policy or action on the lives of the least of these, our equally beloved sisters and brothers. Let us live that way, and in so living claim for ourselves the name of those who follow the way of Jesus. Amen.
posted by David Ensign at
12:41 PM
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