Feast of The Holy Name—January 1, 2006
Year B

Happy New Year!

Today wears several hats: Not only is it New Year’s Day, it is also the first Sunday after Christmas, the eighth day of Christmas, and the Feast of the Holy Name. The Feast of the Holy Name always falls eight days after Christmas, and so it is always on New Year’s Day, but it is not always on Sunday.

The Feast of the Holy Name began as the Feast of the Circumcision. According to Jewish tradition, male babies are to be circumcised on the eighth day after their birth, and it is at this time that they also receive their names. This is a practice that still continues for boy babies, and today, Jewish girl babies may have a naming ceremony in lieu of the bris, or circumcision.

Mary and Joseph, being good Jewish parents, of course presented their infant son duly on the 8th day after his birth for his circumcision, and at that time he formally received the name Jesus. Only it wasn’t “Jesus” –that comes from the Greek "Iesous" –it was Yeshua—Joshua more properly in English. Yeshua was a venerable Hebrew name—it was Yeshua or Joshua who was with Moses in the wilderness, and who actually led the Israelites into the promised land. It was Joshua who was victorious in that famous battle in which the walls of Jericho reportedly came tumbling down.

Yeshua or Joshua or Iesous or Jesus, a name that means “Jehovah is salvation”—that was the name the angel gave to the babe before his birth, when he was still in the womb. Of course, Jesus is not the first to have his name revealed from God. When God made his first covenant, he changed the names of Abram and Sarai to Abraham (meaning father of a multitude) and Sarah, marking them as his own. When Jacob wrestled all night with the angel, God gave him the name Yisra’el—Israel—which means “God prevails.” When the angel told Zechariah that his wife Elizabeth would bear a son, he was struck dumb for his disbelief, and it was only when he revealed on the eighth day after the baby’s birth that the baby would be named John, the name given to him by the angel, that Zechariah regained his speech.

Now as then, names carry power. These days parents devote a great deal of time considering names for their children. We consult family and friends, and family histories, and baby name books. We think about spelling and how the name sounds, and what nicknames might be derived from it or how it might be shortened for better or for worse. We think about initials and how the first name goes with the last. We wonder whether to go with something old and venerable, or something trendy, or something unique. We invest so much energy in choosing names because names are important. When we give a name to a child at birth (or increasingly, even before birth) we feel that we “know” the child in a new way. Names are often the first thing others know about us, and over time names take on added meaning, they become, in a way, the person in proxy. Even after a person dies, his or her name can evoke memories so vivid that they are a sort of presence. Names have power.

Names allow us to be known, and knowing and being known are essential to our existence. We do not live in isolation—we live in community, in relationship with one another. To be known by another is to recognized, to be real in some essential way, and to be known by God is to be. Perhaps the best illustration of this I’ve ever encountered comes in Madeleine L’Engle’s book, A Wind in the Door. In this story, the protagonist, Meg Murry, encounters a cherubim named Proginoskes. Meg’s brother, Charles Wallace, is suffering from a mysterious illness and fighting for his life, and it is the task of Meg, her friends, and Proginoskes to save him. Proginoskes, the cherubim, it turns out is a Namer—it’s Proginoskes’ job to name all the stars in the universe, for their existence depends on being known to God, and to be un-named is to be annihilated. It becomes Meg’s job under Proginoskes’ tutelage to name the farandolae, the sub-cellular particles whose dis-ease is threatening Charles Wallace. In her writing, Madeleine L’Engle reveals a very cosmic theology—a view of the world in which there is a cosmic struggle for good and evil, and in which the actions of the smallest and least significant can have an impact on the entire universe, and that plays a role in this story too. But the bottom line is this: what saves Charles Wallace, and what is saving for all beings in the universe, from the smallest sub-cellular organism to the largest star in the most distant galaxy, is being known, being Named. For you see, the powers of evil, the echthroi, would un-name, would x you out of existence, but when you are named, you are known and evil no longer has any hold on you. To be named is to be known by God, and to be known by God is to BE.

When the angel, the messenger from God, gave the infant Mary was carrying the name Jesus, we were given a new name for God, a new way of knowing and being known by God. When God became incarnate for us, when God took on flesh, and lived among us, and was crucified and died and rose for us, God’s love for us was revealed in a new way and we knew God in a new way--not one replacing the God we already knew because if we believe in the Trinity, we know it is all the same God. Rather knowing God incarnate in Jesus, knowing God by the name of Jesus calls us into a new way of being in relationship with God, a God who knows us and loves us. And knowing God this way we believe that what his name—Jesus, Iesous, Yeshua, Joshua —connotes: Jehovah is salvation. God is our salvation, God through his Son whose name Jesus was revealed by the angel.

We are called by name into relationship with God, with Jesus. Scripture tells us that God searches us out and knows us, that God counts even the hairs on our head. God knows us, knows us by name and so we live and move and have our being. God knows us by name and so we ARE. As long as we are known by name by God we are, I think, ultimately safe from the echthroi, from the powers of evil that would destroy us. But I think this goes both ways. I think the presence of God, of Jesus in our world depends on us knowing God by name. On the surface that sounds arrogant and presumptuous. And I don’t for a minute believe that God’s existence, God’s being, depends on me or anyone else—God is and was and always will be. But at least in this world, in the here and now, proclaiming the name of God, the name of Jesus is part of what we are called to do, if not to keep God in existence, to help make God’s presence felt. We are, in fact, Christ’s Body in the world, and perhaps that Body in the world needs to clearly be known by name—the name of Jesus. We proclaim that name not only with our words, but also with our actions as we seek to love God and one another, as we seek to live out the Gospel imperatives to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the prisoner.

Names have power. We are known by name and we know God by name. As we begin this new year, let us proclaim that name, the name of Jesus, loud and clear as we act as His Body in the world.

Thanks be to God.