The First Sunday after Christmas
December 28, 2008
The Rev. Steve Smith

As a relatively new Episcopalian, all of 29 years old, I am learning something different all the time. For instance, one of you who was raised in this communion asked me the other day, are we celebrating the Feast of the Circumcision this year? The Feast of What, I answered. Sure enough, since the Sixth Century, January 1st marks this Feast, which falls on the eighth day after Christmas, when Jesus would have been circumcised. More recently, we have held January 1st as the Feast of the Holy Name, which in effect, takes place in Jewish practice at the time of circumcision.

As we ring in the New Year again this week, it is this naming rite that I am thinking about this evening/morning. And as I think about this, it is these words from Ireland’s first lady of Rock and Roll, Sinead O’Connor that comes to mind: “All babies are born saying God’s name, over and over singing God’s name.”

Names have power. Consider your own name. Before you could string two words together in a sentence; before you could eat on your own, or walk, or use the bathroom; Before you 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 that was uniquely and intentionally chose for you. It was the first gift you received in birth; and it is the last gift you will give up at death. Consider your name as you most sacred keepsake, the only thing you truly possess in life, the sum total of your existence.

Before and above all else, it is our names which have power to bestow upon us honor and shame. Spoken, you name establishes your identity. Signed by your hand, you name establishes you solemn vow. Out names are the only things that separate us from oblivion, the only bequest we leave to this world.

And 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 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 or slander, this has an equal power to keep us wounded in life, and keep us distrustful of the world and of ourselves.

Long before modern psychology showed us how love begets love, and abuse begets abuse, the scriptures spoken about how blessing and curse is visited on the children’s children to the third and fourth generations. Do you remember that rhyme we glibly recited as children: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.” But that was a terrible lie! Names have as great a power to hurt and harm us, as they have to honor a heal us.

This week, I pulled out my files a Boston Globe article from 10 years ago entitled: Lost Futures, Our Forgotten Children. And I looked again at the pictures of those forgotten children who will carry on the work of humankind into the 21st century, after we are gone: At the vacant eyes of a diseased Vietnamese children used by his family to beg. And the tortured grimace of a Romanian child with AIDS. The broken body of an abused baby in a Boston Hospital ICU. And a Palestinean child maimed by the ravages of war. It was their miserable existence that held my gaze, but there was something more. What struck me again about these children and the millions more who mirror their pain then and since is how these children have been crushed by the power of the names given them in spite and cruelty. And to add insult to injury, now they are given names to help us swallow the horror: we call them victims, statistics, wards of the State, orphans, throwaways, all of them destined for pauper’s graveyards with no markers, erasing the memory that they had ever lived and suffered at all.

Yet, all these children, all of them, like the ones we hold near and dear to our hearts, and who we draw close to us this time of year, all of them came into the world saying God’s name, over and over born singing God’s name. And we must never forget this.

Ostensibly, it is the Holy Name of Jesus we celebrate on New Year’s Day this week. And in this Feast Day, we proclaim God has a name. We say God chooses a name, a human name. We say God’s name is written on our hearts. We say all of us born saying God’s name.

And by saying this, we recognize this peasant child born into poverty, who spent his first hours in a stable without light, without warmth. We recognize a child who spent his first years as a refugee, a fugitive, an 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 lost children in the world. And by recognizing this, we understand the names we have been given in love and trust were given for a purpose. And that is so that we in turn may love and trust those in our world who have received a bad name, or a wrong name, or name that is rotten or obscene or evil. We have been given names so that we can name those who have no names.

We are on the verge of a New Year, thank God. We are given a clean slate, a blank page on which to write our name again, the name God intends for us, the name God has given us, the name we give to God. And if there is one resolution t keep this new year, if there is one resolution worth keeping, let it be to more concerned with naming those who are here with us in this world, and finding, even in the most simple and ordinary ways, to bring honor, justice, and hope to those names we say. Let our resolution be to bring more, not less, holiness into the world this year, by the names we take for ourselves, and the names we give to others. And in all of this, may the name of Jesus be on our lips and in our hearts as we go out to serve Him.