“Plant in every heart, we pray, the love of him who is the Savior of the world, our Lord Jesus Christ.” (Collect for The Holy Name)
Are you at all confused about what day it is today? The calendars say January 1st, of course – New Year’s Day, which used to be a time for taking stock of the year past and making resolutions for change in the future. But does anyone make New Year’s resolutions anymore or are they just a quaint memory from my childhood? For many people in this country, the 1st of January normally represents a day of continuous televised entertainment, —first several parades, then hours and hours of college football. Except this year. Because New Year’s Day falls on a Sunday, much of the spectacle has been put off until tomorrow’s Monday holiday. And let’s be honest, this January 1st will provide for some a day of recovery from their excesses on New Year’s Eve. A cable TV channel has dubbed today “National Hangover Day.” So New Year’s Day has gone from a day of self-examination, a time for reflecting earnestly on our lives in time, to a day of self-anaesthetization, lost time, even a time of denial that we live in time.
We Episcopalians should know better. The calendar of our church year lists the 1st of January not as New Year’s Day, but the Feast of the Holy Name of Jesus, a most significant holy day and one that helps account for our practice of bowing our heads when Jesus’ name is spoken. Since I must pronounce it so many times over the next few minutes, allow me to reverence the Holy Name of Jesus once-for-all.
We should know what day it is today. My experience, however, even here at St. Paul’s is that the other activities of New Year’s Day – or the aftermath of New Year’s Eve – normally crowd out any parish-wide keeping of the Feast of the Holy Name of Jesus. Except this year. Because it falls on a Sunday and is one of only a small handful of holy days that take precedence over the yearly rhythm of Sundays, we have today the rare gift of celebrating Holy Name together as a community. May we use this time, this January 1st, to deepen our appreciation of the name of Jesus and to adopt through our keeping of this holy day a pair of New Year’s resolutions for 2006.
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The last sentence of today’s gospel lesson tells us quite succinctly what the Feast of the Holy Name is all about. For centuries this one sentence served as the entire gospel reading for this day. “After eight days had passed, it was time to circumcise the child; and he was called Jesus, the name given by the angel before he was conceived in the womb” (Luke 2:21) – referring to the visit of the angel Gabriel to Mary announcing that she would bear a son.
Our gospel sentence reminds us of how seriously ancient and traditional cultures take names. In such cultures, names may express some essential quality of the person named or tell a story about them; a name change may signal a change in a person’s status. Dances with Wolves. Stands with a Fist. Abraham: “the ancestor of a multitude.” El-roi: “the God who sees”; named by the Egyptian slave woman Hagar after an encounter in the wilderness. Jacob re-named Israel, “the one who strives with God.” The Holy Name is no different. The name Jesus or Joshua or Yeshua means: “The LORD saves.” Jesus’ name encapsulates the story of his life and the story of Jesus – birth in Bethlehem, healing and teaching in Galilee, death on a cross outside of Jerusalem, resurrection from the dead – makes flesh the essential quality voiced in his name.
Although our gospel reports that the Holy Name was given by an angel even before Jesus’ birth, it also makes a profound truth claim: the name Jesus or Joshua or Yeshua is a real, human name by which two real, human parents, Mary and Joseph, called their flesh-and-blood child. In fidelity to the ancient traditions of their people, these particular parents bestowed this particular name on this particular boy through the ever so flesh-and-blood ritual of circumcision eight days after the infant’s birth in blood from his mother’s flesh. Without the activity of Mary and Joseph and the receptivity of baby Jesus, the angel’s words would have remained empty. For the second or third time already this Christmas season we see God’s mighty purpose worked out through the elemental or ordinary or even imperfect realities of human life.
On the other hand, the real, human name Yeshua or Joshua or Jesus contains within itself a divine name, the divine name. God’s proper name, too, tells a story: “I AM WHO I AM” or “I WILL BE WHAT I WILL BE.” Devout Jews from before Jesus’ time down to the present have abstained from pronouncing the divine name out of reverence for it. Upon coming to the four Hebrew letters that spell God’s name, our Jewish sisters and brothers say instead “Adonai” (the LORD) or “Ha-Shem” (the Name).
The Holy Name of Jesus begins with a one-letter abbreviation of the proper name of God. And this is the name “exalted…in all the world” according to today’s psalm (8:1); the same name Aaron and his sons are commanded to “put…on the Israelites” in our first lesson: “Ha-Shem bless you and keep you; Adonai make his face to shine upon you, and be gracious to you; The LORD lift up his countenance upon you, and give you peace” (Numbers 6:22-27). Paul, too, in our second lesson invokes this divine name: “Christ Jesus,…though he was in the form of God,…emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death – even death on a cross. Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth” (Philippians 2:5-10). Our Christian faith rests on the conviction that we have been granted a distinctive way of expressing God’s not-to-be-pronounced name – the Lord, Adonai, Ha-Shem, yes, but above all, Jesus.
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Having savored the name of Jesus, how might we as individuals and as a community of faith be changed by today’s Feast of the Holy Name? I have two thoughts, one touching on our inner spiritual lives, the other our outer life in the world. I offer them to you as New Year’s resolutions.
First, hear again the collect for today: “Eternal Father, you gave to your incarnate Son the holy name of Jesus to be the sign of our salvation: Plant in every heart, we pray, the love of him who is the Savior of the world, our Lord Jesus Christ” (BCP, 213). Holy Name addresses the heart rather than the head. It entices us not just to think about Jesus or believe in Jesus, but to love him.
Our Christian tradition offers many examples of such affective spirituality, such emotional, almost bodily, love mysticism directed toward Christ Jesus. Consider just one: Margery Kempe, a laywoman, mother of fourteen children, who lived 600 hundred years ago and dictated one of the earliest autobiographies in the English language. (The Book of Margery Kempe, trans. by B.A. Windeatt, [Penguin, 1985].) Margery had a ring made for herself, inscribed as follows: “Jesus is my love.” With extravagant actions, reactions, and affections, Margery took the raw material of intimate human relationships – daughter, mother, sister, wife – transposed them and devoted them all to Jesus. Why? Well, it began with Margery facing death after the difficult delivery of her first child and convinced she would be damned eternally for a specific un-confessed sin. She went out of her mind for some eight weeks, during which time she had to be physically restrained because she tried to kill herself – tearing at her heart with her own fingernails so violently that she bore the scars the rest of her life. In the midst of this madness, Jesus appeared to Margery, sat at her bedside, and spoke a single loving line to her: “Daughter, why have you forsaken me, and I never forsook you” (p. 42). Immediately Margery is restored to herself and to her family. The LORD saves indeed!
From this point on, Margery’s love for Jesus manifested itself primarily in frequent conversations with Jesus, the weekly receiving of communion when once a year was the norm, uncontrollable fits of weeping when she was reminded of Jesus’ suffering and death, and a readiness to speak about her love for Jesus to anyone and everyone. Jesus carried Margery through lengthy and dangerous pilgrimages, intense opposition, several arrests and jailings, one heresy trial, and her husband’s dementia and death. But by way of this relationship to Jesus, Margery, an illiterate, married, lay woman was endowed with public religious authority, both consoling and rebuking wealthy lay people, monks, priests, bishops, and even the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Don’t misunderstand me. I am not suggesting that any of us should cultivate a spirituality like Margery Kempe’s. We are all different: introverts and extroverts; thinkers and feelers; high-touch and low-touch. There is no one privileged way of relating to Jesus. I am saying, however, that the emotions and the body are every bit as integral to our humanity as our reason and so offer legitimate pathways to God. And I must confess that Margery’s extravagant piety reveals how puny and insipid mine usually is; how much at arm’s length I ordinarily keep Jesus; how disembodied my faith tends to be. Today’s Feast of the Holy Name of Jesus grants us permission, if permission we need, of opening our full selves in love to Jesus as a living person and not just an image or an idea. Let us resolve to love Jesus more deeply in 2006. Today and every Sunday he is present in this place: we can hear Jesus speaking in our reading of Scripture; we can taste and see his body and blood in the meal we share; we can reach out and touch him in this assembly of human beings, which is the body of Christ.
Second. As we stand at the beginning of a New Year and peer out into a world of overwhelming suffering and injustice, we may lose focus and heart for the struggle. To avoid moral paralysis, we need some way of setting priorities for our actions.
Yes, Margery Kempe wept uncontrollably when she heard about or saw images of the passion of Jesus. But she also displayed the same visceral response when she encountered a wounded man or a mistreated child or a horse being beaten. In her eyes, Jesus’ suffering was all other creaturely suffering and all suffering throughout the world was the suffering of Jesus her love. And her feelings led to actions. Late in life, Margery was brought by a distraught husband to the bedside of a woman who, like Margery so many years earlier, was suffering from violent, postpartum psychosis. The woman was bound hand and foot in iron and had been moved to a room on the very edge of town so that others would not hear her ravings. Margery reproduces for this woman the role Jesus played in her own life – sitting with her, loving her, speaking kindly words, and ultimately restoring the woman to herself and to others.
I know our baptismal covenant requires us to “seek and serve Christ in all persons” and to “respect the dignity of every human being.” But let us resolve in this New Year to be especially moved to action by those human beings whose plight mirrors Jesus’ own experience or who have needs like those Jesus himself addressed. A hymn by Carl P. Daw, Jr. entitled “In All These You Welcomed Me” looks to the particulars of Jesus’ life-story for guidance and beautifully catalogues a set of priorities for our actions in the world.
“Trav’ler’s child laid in a manger, refugee to Egypt bound,
pilgrim youth, yet not a stranger when your Father’s house you found:
Christ, who set aside your glory to reclaim our wayward race,
help us read salvation’s story in each passing heart and face.
Guest who vintaged wine from water, wand’ring healer brimmed with balm,
foreigner whose hearer brought her heart-thirst to your well of calm:
Savior, may we see our neighbor as an emblem of your care;
in our leisure and our labor give us grace to find you there.
Homeless squatter in a garden, feaster in a rented room,
scapegoat for another’s pardon, sleeper in a borrowed tomb:
Jesus, outcast and offender to those certain of God’s will,
rend the veils of race and gender, wealth and health that shroud us still.
Strange wayfarer to Emmaus, vague form on the distant shore,
fright to friends (“Does sense betray us?”) when you stood with them once more:
risen Lord be there to meet us when life dawns eternally;
may your promised blessing greet us, “In all these you welcomed me.”
As individuals and as a community of faith, let us resolve in 2006 to embrace in immigrants and refugees, prisoners and outcasts, the homeless, the helpless, those who are hungry and those who have lost possession of themselves, the Jesus whom we love and whose Holy Name we celebrate today.
Amen.
