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Christmas 1 As the early Church adapted itself to the vagaries of the pagan calendar, it promulgated its own religious holidays and seasons. Christmas became associated with the winter solstice, and the Season of Advent heralded its own new liturgical year. Because January 1st fell within the two week celebration of Christmas, it began to take on its own significance. By the 15th Century, the Franciscans officially adopted the date as the Feast Day of the Holy Name. Tomorrow, while the rest of the world ushers in the new year, we celebrate the naming of our Lord and Savior Jesus. This of course follows traditional Jewish practice. On the seventh or eighth day of the birth of Jesus, his parents would have brought him to the local rabbi to have him circumcised and officially named. Jesus ben Joseph was the name he was given, and how he would known and identified throughout his life. The Feast Day of the Holy Name invites us, I believe, to consider the power of names. For names do indeed hold power. Consider your own name. Before you could string together two words in a sentence; before you could eat, or walk, or use the bathroom on your own; before your learned to trace the outline of your mother’s face; from the time you left her embracing womb to enter the world, you learned a name, a name uniquely and intentionally chosen for you. It was the first gift you received in birth. It is the last gift you will relinquish in death. Consider your name your most sacred keepsake, the only you truly possess in this life, the sum of your existence. Or as W.H. Auden wrote “proper names are poetry in the raw. Like all poetry, they are untranslatable.” So sacred and untranslatable is a name, that in the divine law we are commanded never to take our names in vain, and we are never to take God’s name in vain. Before and above all else, it is our names which hold power to bestow upon us honor and shame. In the book of Ecclesiastes we hear “a good name is better than precious ointment.” Spoken, your name establishes your identity. Signed by your hand, it establishes your solemn vow. Our names are the only things that separate us from oblivion, the only bequest we leave to this world. We know all too well how names have the power to build up and the power to destroy. For most of us, and for most of the time, our names have been the vehicle for affirmation and trust. They have been spoken in love and respect, in praise and esteem. But if our names are consistently uttered in anger and deprecation, in shame and slander, this has an equal power to keep us wounded in life, and keep us distrustful of others and ourselves. Long before modern psychology showed us how love begets love, the scriptures spoke about how blessing and curse is visited on the children to the third and fourth generation. As children, we glibly recited the rhyme: sticks and stones will break my bones, but names will never hurt me. But this is a terrible lie. Names has as great a power to hurt and harm us, as they have to honor and heal us. A few weeks ago, I opened a magazine to see a photo study of the world’s forgotten children. The vacant eyes of a diseased child of Darfur. The tortured look of Romanian child with AIDS. The broken body of an abused baby in a Boston ICU. A Palestinean child maimed by the ravages of war. An Iraqi child wounded by a suicide bomber. It was their miserable existence that held my gaze. But there was something more. What struck me was how their names had been lost, forgotten, discarded. And they had been given new names to somehow mask the horror. Now they were victims, statistics, wards of the state, collateral damage, orphans, throwaways, numbers. All of them destined soon for pauper’s graveyards with no markers, erasing the memory that they had lived and suffered at all. Erasing the memory that they, too, like the baby Jesus, had been named at their births. It bnngs to mind the words of Irish folk singer Sinead O’Connor: “All babies are born saying God’s name, over and over all born singing God’s name.” Like all children near and dear to our hearts, like us, like Jesus in a manger, these forgotten souls have come into the world saying God’s name, over and over born singing God’s name. And we must never forget this. We are here to celebrate the Holy Name of Jesus today. And in our celebration, we affirm that God has a name. We affirm God chooses a name. We affirm God has written a name on our hearts. And by affirming this, we recognize this peasant child, born into poverty. We see this one who spent his first hours in a stable, without light, without warmth. We recognized this child who spent his first years as a refugee, a fugitive, and illegal alien, who himself barely escaped the fate of being slaughtered with the Holy Innocents. We recognize this child whose name is Jesus as the first of all forgotten children in the world. And by recognizing this, we understand the names we have been given in love and trust were given to us for one purpose. And that is so that we in turn may in love and trust rename in affirmation and hope those in our world who have received a bad name, or the wrong name, or a name that is obscene or rotten or evil; we have names ourselves so that we can name those who have no names. Friends, it is a new year, thank God, a clean slate, a blank page, on which to write our name again, the name God intends for us, the name God given us, the name we give to God. If there is one resolution to keep in this new year, if there is one resolution worth keeping, let it be this: let us be true to our names. Let us honor the names of those around us. Let us raise the names of those who have fallen. Let us remember the names of those who have been forgotten. Let our resolution be to bring more, not less, holiness into the world this year, by the names we give to each other. And in all of this, may the name of Jesus be on our lips and in our hearts as we go out to love and serve him.
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