What's In A Name?
Sermon
Sermons on the First Readings
Series II, Cycle C
Object:
What's in a name? Does a name matter? Does it really matter if you're named Tom, Dick, or Harry -- or Sharon, Sue, or Maggie? Hard to say.
Consider the case of Gerald Ford, a former president of the United States. He was sixteen years old when a strange man sat down next to him at a soda fountain, introduced himself as his father, and told Gerald his name was really Leslie King, Jr. President Ford sounds very American, but in our democratic society, would we really want a person named King to be president?
The noted Christian writer, C. S. Lewis, was born Clive Stapes, but when he was four years old he walked into the family room, thumped his chest with his thumb, and said, "He is Jacksie!" And for the rest of his life his friends called him Jack, which seemed to suit the man much better.
Names can say things about our ancestry. In some places, like Sweden or Norway, to be named Johnson means that your father was named John. Your child might well have a different last name if your first name is different from your parents. In Russia it is the middle name that includes the father's first name. Ivanovich and Ivanovna mean that the son or daughter's father was named Ivan.
Names can be used against us. A poll watcher observed a presidential election in El Salvador and discovered that one went to vote not according to address but according to last name. However, a last name is taken from the mother, and that means that a husband, a wife, and a child might have three different last names, meaning they had to go to three different polling stations. That is not a problem for rich people who can drive around town, but for poor people it can become next to impossible for everyone in the family to vote.
Some names tell a story about the person. In the novel, The Lord of the Rings, by the Christian writer J.R.R. Tolkien there is a particular creature called Treebeard who is one of the Ents, a treelike race that lives for centuries. Treebeard makes it clear that his real name would take a long time to recite because in his long, slow language a person's name has to tell the person's story, and those who have lived a long time have very long names indeed.
It's not just individuals, but groups that have names as well, and ideally their name should say something about them. Many of us are proud to call ourselves Americans, for instance, but I wonder how many of us really know that much about Amerigo Vespucci. He was the map maker who named a continent after himself. In the end, I suspect it is not Amerigo in whom we take great pride, but the story of the people who have inhabited that continent that makes us proud of who we are. It is our understanding of ourselves as a people, our particular view of our story, that makes us happy.
For instance, we tend to think of ourselves as a nation of immigrants, of people who came at one generation or another to seek a better life for themselves and for their descendants, who endured great hardships and worked long hours to carve out a niche in the new land. Whether it is our distant ancestors, or we ourselves, who made the crossing, it's a story we share in common with most people who live here.
But not all. Others can claim that their ancestors were here thousands of years before others arrived, and these people might tell the story of European immigration much differently. They might talk about slaughter, genocide, the deliberate and accidental spread of disease, the destruction of species like bison or buffalo, when telling the story of this nation. How we name things makes a big difference.
In today's scripture passage, Moses is giving the people a name and identity, as well as a name to call upon, as they prepare to cross over to the promised land. Now he could have simply reminded them that they had called aloud to God in their slavery and had been found, redeemed, and freed, sent across the desert while all the time observing miracles and wonders, a people who had seen God speak on Mount Sinai, and who had followed their prophet and lawgiver, Moses himself.
Or Moses could have reminded them of all their whining, of their distrust, of their determination to return to slavery rather than trust in the God who freed them, of their lack of faith that God would feed them, give them water, sustain them. He could have called them "idol builders" after what they did while he was up on the mountain receiving the Ten Commandments.
Instead, Moses invited them to continue in a close relationship with God, to give an offering of their firstfruits in thankfulness after they had entered into their land, and to say simply, "A wandering Aramean was my ancestor." He invited the people to call to mind the wandering of Abraham and Sarah, and their eventual faithfulness.
The people who would now own their land, who would worship God in a fixed place, the temple, instead of a movable tent like the tabernacle, the people who would define their families geographically as well as genetically, were reminded by Moses that they were wanderers once and might wander again.
They were also told that in the wake of the tremendous story of the liberation and exodus, they were also known as a thankful people, an offering people, a people who gave back to God and to God's people a portion of their own. The very fact that they -- and we -- are to call to mind our days as wanderers is to prevent us from taking too much credit for what we have and what we've done, and to give glory to God. As Abraham was a wanderer, so we too must be ready to wander, when God calls us and sends us forth to preach the gospel.
It's a different way of looking at things. Some of us are mobile, but others are tied to a patch of earth and have been that way for generations. But, our father was a wandering Aramean. And because we are wanderers, and the descendants of wanderers, we must never forget to give thanks -- in profound gratitude -- for what we have and what we have been given.
Throughout this passage Moses uses the name of God. Usually translated Lord and presented in all capitals in our Bible translations, this name on the one hand tells us nothing about God except that God exists. It is a form of the verb to be, and partly tells us that God is unknowable. Beyond the fact that God exists, there is nothing we can know about God.
And yet God is very knowable -- through the relationship God has with the people. This God says to Moses in Exodus, "I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob" (Exodus 3:6). On the one hand, that tells us nothing. It doesn't tell us what God looks like or sounds like, and the Hebrew Scriptures have no intention of telling us anything of the sort.
But it does tell us what God acts like -- by calling to mind our ancestors, the name I Am suggests that the way we know God is to call to mind by long memory what God has accomplished with the people in all generations. It's what God does, not what God says about God, that matters.
As the people prepare to enter into the promised land to give thanks, they are reminded that theirs is the God of Abraham, and that means a lot.
As we enter the season of Lent, we, too, are reminded of our spiritual ancestry, of the God who has a track record with us, and what that record means. Just as the father of all of us was a wandering Aramean, so, too, the Son of Man complained that, "Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head" (Matthew 8:20).
And the Apostle Paul once shared his glittering resume. As he put it, he was "... a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless" (Philippians 3:5-6).
Paul's resume is fairly impressive. It outlines his relationships to his family and his faith. It is full of meaning and depth. It's worth something. Paul puts it all in perspective. There is one relationship that is key, that is crucial, that illuminates and preserves all the other relationships. This is what is important.
As he hastens to add: "Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ" (Philippians 3:7).
It is our relationship to God, the way we take the name of Jesus, that matters more than our ancestry, our family name, our genealogies, our nationalities, our ethnic background, as the hymn writer puts it, "... the vain things that charm me most, I sacrifice them through his blood."
If we are known as a disciple of Jesus, as one who is ready to suffer and die for the name that we claim above all others, we are a member of the family of God. If we allow other things -- pride over nationality or name or economic status, the team we root for, the school we attended -- if we allow these other things to matter more, we have nothing. And we understand the value of nothing.
That's why it is so important for the people to give of their abundance, and that is why Moses wants to remind them it is their identity, as descendants of a wandering Aramean. It's because they are God's people.
Some people think when the gospel quotes Jesus as saying that we will always have the poor among us that suggests that there is no use in trying to work against poverty, since we will never solve the problem. But that ignores what Jesus was saying.
Jesus was actually quoting Deuteronomy 15:11, where Moses while talking about the year of jubilee said, "Since there will never cease to be some in need on the earth, I therefore command you, 'Open your hand to the poor and needy neighbor in your land.'"This verse was quoted by Jesus when the woman washed his feet and some criticized her for wasting the gift. Jesus said in reply that the poor would always be with us and some have taken that to mean we'll always have the poor so there's nothing you can do about it. You can see, however, that Jesus was quoting the law to say that since we will always have the poor we must never cease giving. The people who were criticizing the woman for what she did needed to mind their own business and set about helping the poor with their own cash instead of worrying about hers!
We are a people of abundance. Even though there are those of us who struggle to pay our bills, and often go without, we are measuring ourselves by the standards of a society that is too rich for its own good. We are all rich by the standards of the rest of the world. Certainly even the richest who lived in Jesus' day would have thought that with our heat and air conditioning and microwaves and satellite television and cell phones that we were the richest people who ever lived. And so we are. And, if we want to be named and known by our wealth, we will die by our wealth.
What's in a name? If we name ourselves descendants of Abraham, brothers and sisters of Jesus, children of God, we will see true abundance by knowing only Christ. And we know Christ in the poor. As Jesus says in Matthew 25:40, "... just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me."
You will know Christ in the poor. You will know Christ in your giving. You will know Christ in your relationships. You must have Christ at the center. It is what makes all other things possible and gives them meaning.
Lent is known as a season of giving up, but it is far more important to simply give, and to resist the temptation to give in. Give to the work of the church. Give to others. Give up because you want to be able to give more, and because you refuse to give in to our culture of wealth, power, acquisitiveness, envy, and greed. You bear great names -- the names of Abraham and Jesus, and the God who is, and the promise of what is to come. These names make life worth living, and other lives worth saving. Amen.
Consider the case of Gerald Ford, a former president of the United States. He was sixteen years old when a strange man sat down next to him at a soda fountain, introduced himself as his father, and told Gerald his name was really Leslie King, Jr. President Ford sounds very American, but in our democratic society, would we really want a person named King to be president?
The noted Christian writer, C. S. Lewis, was born Clive Stapes, but when he was four years old he walked into the family room, thumped his chest with his thumb, and said, "He is Jacksie!" And for the rest of his life his friends called him Jack, which seemed to suit the man much better.
Names can say things about our ancestry. In some places, like Sweden or Norway, to be named Johnson means that your father was named John. Your child might well have a different last name if your first name is different from your parents. In Russia it is the middle name that includes the father's first name. Ivanovich and Ivanovna mean that the son or daughter's father was named Ivan.
Names can be used against us. A poll watcher observed a presidential election in El Salvador and discovered that one went to vote not according to address but according to last name. However, a last name is taken from the mother, and that means that a husband, a wife, and a child might have three different last names, meaning they had to go to three different polling stations. That is not a problem for rich people who can drive around town, but for poor people it can become next to impossible for everyone in the family to vote.
Some names tell a story about the person. In the novel, The Lord of the Rings, by the Christian writer J.R.R. Tolkien there is a particular creature called Treebeard who is one of the Ents, a treelike race that lives for centuries. Treebeard makes it clear that his real name would take a long time to recite because in his long, slow language a person's name has to tell the person's story, and those who have lived a long time have very long names indeed.
It's not just individuals, but groups that have names as well, and ideally their name should say something about them. Many of us are proud to call ourselves Americans, for instance, but I wonder how many of us really know that much about Amerigo Vespucci. He was the map maker who named a continent after himself. In the end, I suspect it is not Amerigo in whom we take great pride, but the story of the people who have inhabited that continent that makes us proud of who we are. It is our understanding of ourselves as a people, our particular view of our story, that makes us happy.
For instance, we tend to think of ourselves as a nation of immigrants, of people who came at one generation or another to seek a better life for themselves and for their descendants, who endured great hardships and worked long hours to carve out a niche in the new land. Whether it is our distant ancestors, or we ourselves, who made the crossing, it's a story we share in common with most people who live here.
But not all. Others can claim that their ancestors were here thousands of years before others arrived, and these people might tell the story of European immigration much differently. They might talk about slaughter, genocide, the deliberate and accidental spread of disease, the destruction of species like bison or buffalo, when telling the story of this nation. How we name things makes a big difference.
In today's scripture passage, Moses is giving the people a name and identity, as well as a name to call upon, as they prepare to cross over to the promised land. Now he could have simply reminded them that they had called aloud to God in their slavery and had been found, redeemed, and freed, sent across the desert while all the time observing miracles and wonders, a people who had seen God speak on Mount Sinai, and who had followed their prophet and lawgiver, Moses himself.
Or Moses could have reminded them of all their whining, of their distrust, of their determination to return to slavery rather than trust in the God who freed them, of their lack of faith that God would feed them, give them water, sustain them. He could have called them "idol builders" after what they did while he was up on the mountain receiving the Ten Commandments.
Instead, Moses invited them to continue in a close relationship with God, to give an offering of their firstfruits in thankfulness after they had entered into their land, and to say simply, "A wandering Aramean was my ancestor." He invited the people to call to mind the wandering of Abraham and Sarah, and their eventual faithfulness.
The people who would now own their land, who would worship God in a fixed place, the temple, instead of a movable tent like the tabernacle, the people who would define their families geographically as well as genetically, were reminded by Moses that they were wanderers once and might wander again.
They were also told that in the wake of the tremendous story of the liberation and exodus, they were also known as a thankful people, an offering people, a people who gave back to God and to God's people a portion of their own. The very fact that they -- and we -- are to call to mind our days as wanderers is to prevent us from taking too much credit for what we have and what we've done, and to give glory to God. As Abraham was a wanderer, so we too must be ready to wander, when God calls us and sends us forth to preach the gospel.
It's a different way of looking at things. Some of us are mobile, but others are tied to a patch of earth and have been that way for generations. But, our father was a wandering Aramean. And because we are wanderers, and the descendants of wanderers, we must never forget to give thanks -- in profound gratitude -- for what we have and what we have been given.
Throughout this passage Moses uses the name of God. Usually translated Lord and presented in all capitals in our Bible translations, this name on the one hand tells us nothing about God except that God exists. It is a form of the verb to be, and partly tells us that God is unknowable. Beyond the fact that God exists, there is nothing we can know about God.
And yet God is very knowable -- through the relationship God has with the people. This God says to Moses in Exodus, "I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob" (Exodus 3:6). On the one hand, that tells us nothing. It doesn't tell us what God looks like or sounds like, and the Hebrew Scriptures have no intention of telling us anything of the sort.
But it does tell us what God acts like -- by calling to mind our ancestors, the name I Am suggests that the way we know God is to call to mind by long memory what God has accomplished with the people in all generations. It's what God does, not what God says about God, that matters.
As the people prepare to enter into the promised land to give thanks, they are reminded that theirs is the God of Abraham, and that means a lot.
As we enter the season of Lent, we, too, are reminded of our spiritual ancestry, of the God who has a track record with us, and what that record means. Just as the father of all of us was a wandering Aramean, so, too, the Son of Man complained that, "Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head" (Matthew 8:20).
And the Apostle Paul once shared his glittering resume. As he put it, he was "... a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless" (Philippians 3:5-6).
Paul's resume is fairly impressive. It outlines his relationships to his family and his faith. It is full of meaning and depth. It's worth something. Paul puts it all in perspective. There is one relationship that is key, that is crucial, that illuminates and preserves all the other relationships. This is what is important.
As he hastens to add: "Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ" (Philippians 3:7).
It is our relationship to God, the way we take the name of Jesus, that matters more than our ancestry, our family name, our genealogies, our nationalities, our ethnic background, as the hymn writer puts it, "... the vain things that charm me most, I sacrifice them through his blood."
If we are known as a disciple of Jesus, as one who is ready to suffer and die for the name that we claim above all others, we are a member of the family of God. If we allow other things -- pride over nationality or name or economic status, the team we root for, the school we attended -- if we allow these other things to matter more, we have nothing. And we understand the value of nothing.
That's why it is so important for the people to give of their abundance, and that is why Moses wants to remind them it is their identity, as descendants of a wandering Aramean. It's because they are God's people.
Some people think when the gospel quotes Jesus as saying that we will always have the poor among us that suggests that there is no use in trying to work against poverty, since we will never solve the problem. But that ignores what Jesus was saying.
Jesus was actually quoting Deuteronomy 15:11, where Moses while talking about the year of jubilee said, "Since there will never cease to be some in need on the earth, I therefore command you, 'Open your hand to the poor and needy neighbor in your land.'"This verse was quoted by Jesus when the woman washed his feet and some criticized her for wasting the gift. Jesus said in reply that the poor would always be with us and some have taken that to mean we'll always have the poor so there's nothing you can do about it. You can see, however, that Jesus was quoting the law to say that since we will always have the poor we must never cease giving. The people who were criticizing the woman for what she did needed to mind their own business and set about helping the poor with their own cash instead of worrying about hers!
We are a people of abundance. Even though there are those of us who struggle to pay our bills, and often go without, we are measuring ourselves by the standards of a society that is too rich for its own good. We are all rich by the standards of the rest of the world. Certainly even the richest who lived in Jesus' day would have thought that with our heat and air conditioning and microwaves and satellite television and cell phones that we were the richest people who ever lived. And so we are. And, if we want to be named and known by our wealth, we will die by our wealth.
What's in a name? If we name ourselves descendants of Abraham, brothers and sisters of Jesus, children of God, we will see true abundance by knowing only Christ. And we know Christ in the poor. As Jesus says in Matthew 25:40, "... just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me."
You will know Christ in the poor. You will know Christ in your giving. You will know Christ in your relationships. You must have Christ at the center. It is what makes all other things possible and gives them meaning.
Lent is known as a season of giving up, but it is far more important to simply give, and to resist the temptation to give in. Give to the work of the church. Give to others. Give up because you want to be able to give more, and because you refuse to give in to our culture of wealth, power, acquisitiveness, envy, and greed. You bear great names -- the names of Abraham and Jesus, and the God who is, and the promise of what is to come. These names make life worth living, and other lives worth saving. Amen.
