What’s in a Name?

Point Reyes (CA) Community Presbyterian Church

Rev. Douglas Olds

January 1, 2023

 First (OT) Reading: Ecclesiastes 3:1-13.

3 For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: 

    2a time to be born, and a time to die; 

    a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; 

    3a time to kill, and a time to heal; 

    a time to break down, and a time to build up; 

    4a time to weep, and a time to laugh; 

    a time to mourn, and a time to dance; 

    5a time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together; 

    a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; 

    6a time to seek, and a time to lose; 

    a time to keep, and a time to throw away; 

    7a time to tear, and a time to sew; 

    a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; 

    8a time to love, and a time to hate; 

    a time for war, and a time for peace. 

9 What gain have the workers from their toil? 10 I have seen the business that God has given to everyone to be busy with. 11 He has made everything suitable for its time; moreover he has put a “sense of past and future’ [olam] into their minds, yet they cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. 12 I know that there is nothing better for them than to be happy and enjoy themselves as long as they live; 13 moreover, it is God’s gift that all should eat and drink and take pleasure in all their toil. 

 GOSPEL READING : Luke 2:15-21: 

When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let us go now to Bethlehem and see this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us.” So they went with haste and found Mary and Joseph, and the child lying in the manger. When they saw this, they made known what had been told them about this child; and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds told them. But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart. The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them. 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.//

Let us pray from the Litany of the Feast of the Holy Name:

Jesus, Son of the living God, 

splendor of the Father,

brightness of eternal light.

 sun of justice.

 most amiable.

most admirable.

Jesus, the mighty God.

Father of the world to come.

angel of great counsel.

most powerful.

patient.

obedient.

meek and humble of heart.

Jesus, author of life.

example of virtues.

zealous lover of souls.

Jesus, our God.

Jesus, our refuge.

Jesus, father of the poor.

Jesus, treasure of the faithful.

Jesus, good Shepherd.

Jesus, true light.

eternal wisdom.

infinite goodness.

Jesus, our way and our life.

Jesus, joy of Angels.

Jesus, King and

Master of the Apostles.

 teacher of the Evangelists.

strength of Martyrs.

Jesus, light of Confessors.

Jesus, crown of Saints.

[We ask for your gracious hearing], O Jesus. AMEN.

Today our Church’s calendar celebrates the Feast of Jesus Name. 

In earlier times the Church called this calendar festival the Circumcision of the Lord. 

    Both circumcision & Jesus’ name are listed in this morning’s Gospel reading from Luke as occurring on the 8th day after birth.  Because the Christian Church has considered that the sacrament of Baptism substitutes for OT rituals of circumcision,  we moderns honor the naming of Jesus rather than his circumcision as we consider the dawning of a new calendar year. 

    Before I speak about a New Year, I want to propose some considerations of what Jesus’ name means for us—why we pray in Jesus’ name, & why names are power.

Traditional & ancient societies deemed knowing the name of another gave one power.  

The goal, as in old Hollywood Westerns, was to keep your own name private while you tried to learn the names of others. 

Aliases are important in these systems: “the Pecos Kid,” “Wild Bill,” “Doc or Kit.” 

    These more traditional cultures believed that being able to know the real name of a demon gave one power over that demon.  We see conservative Christians today who practice Spiritual Warfare on a national & political stage  consumed with learning the names of demons over the powers & principalities. 

    I believe that this focus on demonic names is misplaced.  Rather than learning the names of demons to have controlling power over them, it is more important to learn the name of your neighbor in both church & society & act graciously & non-dominatingly toward them.. 

Demons hide their names, western outlaws covered up their identities. By contrast, the Gospel accounts of Jesus coming into the world reveal his name early after conception.

In the Gospel of Matthew, an angel visits Joseph to announce to him what he is to call the child. 

In the Gospel of Luke, the angel announces to Mary the name of the child to be called Jesus. 

The name of Jesus. 

The name of Jesus that the Apostle Paul says in Phillippians (2: 9) is over every name in the world. 

The name of Jesus in which we pray, because it has a power & honor which brings grace from heaven. 

    Unlike ancient pagans who invoked incantations, Christians pray this in Jesus’ name because it is he who reveals God’s ultimate character & will in grace & word, so that an invocation of the name “Jesus” makes prayer efficacious. It brings results.

But there is more to be said.

    “The naming—or the renaming—of a person is even more significant when it is God Godself who is doing the naming."[3].

The name Jesus which we celebrate in today’s church calendar is both divine—announced by angels--& has the intrinsic power of the divine name. 

The angel in Matthew chapter 1 says that the name “Jesus” indicates that he will “save his people” from their sins. 

    The Semitic/Aramaic form Yeshua is often rendered in the Greek as Jesus (Iesous),  which also hearkens back to the OT antecedent “Joshua” yəhôšûaʿ who opened up the earthly promised land after the Israelites wandered for 40 years in the desert. 

yəhôšûaʿ is adapted into "Yeshua" in the Books of Ezra & Nehemiah when the Temple is being rebuilt, with the earliest Greek Bibles called the Septuagint—at least 2 centuries before Jesus' birth--rendered as the Greek name Jesus. 

    Yeshua became a common name starting around the time of the Jews’ exile from Judah in the Babylonian captivity. The name’s popularity suggests that the message “the Lord saves” was particularly relevant in this period, which was marked by great uncertainty & foreign, imperial rule. 

    “Iesous” becomes the Greek form of the name that marks the congruent anxious historical period when new temples to God are being built. 

    Yeshua was a name for anxious parents as the Judahites are dominated by Mesopotamian imperial powers, “Iesous” when Judeans become dominated by the Roman imperial power.

 Yeshua/Iesous as names cycle through ancient Jewish traditions.

The name Jesus thus renders yəhôšûaʿ, Joshua, & Yeshua: “YHWH is saving help/generosity.” 

Joshua announces something of the earth-bound character of God, the conqueror by grace. 

Isaiah 45:22 (NRSV) uses the same verb:

22Turn to me & be saved --hiw·wǒš·ʿûʹ -- all the ends of the earth! For I am God, & there is no other. 

Isaiah is announcing the need to be saved & that God is named for that task. 

    The naming of Jesus by the angel announces that the savior is arriving, with both Isaiah & Matthew also naming the coming one Emmanuel, “God with us.” In the announcement of the name, the Angel is announcing God's solidarity with anxious Judeans. Jesus/Yeshua was a surprisingly common name at the time.

    Relatedly, a second way to transliterate the name is “Yesh-ua,” with “Yesh” meaning “belonging to,” so that Yeshua belongs to Ja, belongs to God. The one who is named as belonging to God & the bringer of conquering grace will also belong to God  & will open up the new promised temple in the heavens that comes down to earth.

    God through Joshua had liberated Israel from wandering in the desert after slavery under Pharaoh once before & would do it again. This time by liberating the Jewish people from their Roman-backed overlords & installing a new political & religious order in its place. We need only follow him our leader into that new, spiritual temple that dispenses & rewards grace. And as we follow, we pray in that powerful & manifold name.

    This is my opening message for today’s Festival of Jesus’ Name. 

In the divine instruction that Joseph & Mary call their son ‘Jesus’, the child—the Joshua Commander of the Israelite Wanderers of the Lord in human flesh—is identified in times of anxiety & imperial domination with the great Holy Warrior who achieved the victorious entry of God’s liberated people into the promised land on earth. 

    In the naming of Mary & Joseph’s son, a window into our own incorporation into the praying & victorious community that enters the promised heavenly temple can be opened this Christmas season./

    Thirteen years ago this season I was in Jerusalem for the pealing of the noontime bells from the Church of the Holy Sepulcher which marked, according to tradition, the cave where Jesus’s body was laid after being brought down from the Cross. 

    As the bells rang, my heart sang with the words, “Holy Holy Holy, you are blessed.” I was moved to tears of joy in that plaza outside the church. 

Jesus, the name & Word of God, escaped the tomb & lives evermore & eternally in the Holy of Holies. 

Praying in his name leads us there as God the Father gives grace to those who honor his son by the name.

    Now we have moved into the New Year’s phase of the secular calendar in the midst of the 12 day Christmas season. 

Our first reading this morning has us consider how the history-conquering announcement & effect of Jesus’ name fits into the historical understanding of the pre-incarnation people of God, the ancient Israelites. 

    Our reading from Ecclesiastes (3: 1-13) suggests that history cycles.  In the personal & the cultural:  

Ecclesiastes 3For everything there is a season, & a time for every matter under heaven: 

Birth & death, planting & plucking, killing & healing; deconstruction & rebuilding, weeping & laughing, mourning & dancing, embracing & rejecting, seeking & losing, tearing & sewing, silence & speaking, loving & hating, war & peace.

Everything is possible, but without God the human attempt to guide history is vanity. Which side of this list do we choose to participate and pray for? There is only one side, God in Jesus' side. 

    Strategizing the consequences of human acts by human systems of morality,  especially attempts to secure peace through finance, is fruitless vanity [1]. 

Continuing confusion on the world stage may be a feature of 2023. 

The dichotomies of Ecclesiastes 3 suggests that there will be a lot of political and cultural phenomena people don’t understand and thus reject in favor of simplistic conspiracies and preposterous readings of the Bible. 

“The craft of accurate sense-making will be in high demand, once people realize their old mental models [put in service of religious tribes and controlling power] have failed.” [2] 

    Peace-loving and holiness-guided Christians are in position to make sense and meaning of seeming chaos from what Ecclesiastes notes as the sense implanted into our minds by God of eternity--from the position that God is controlling history for the Holy Spirit’s progressive purposes.

OT life before the widespread receipt of the Holy Spirit was perceived as cycles to make sense of purported chaos, but the spirit-guided OT prophets & the NT announce progress, a landing on the better ground of the teeter-totter dichotomies listed in Ecclesisastes. 

    The victory of grace in the name of Jesus means that the cycles of sin have been broken in history,  though perhaps not in every individual life./

    "Mircea Eliade, the great Romanian historian of religion, proposed that ‘traditional’ societies lived in ‘cyclical time,’ innocent of history…In traditional societies, according to Eliade, everything important has already happened. All the great founding gestures go back to mythic times, when animals could talk or turn into humans, sky & earth were not yet separated, & it was possible to create genuinely new things (marriage, or cooking, or war). 

    People living in this mental world of cyclical history saw their own actions as simply repeating the creative gestures of gods & ancestors in less powerful ways,  or as invoking primordial powers through ritual. According to Eliade, historical events thus tended to merge into archetypes. If anyone in what he considered a traditional society does do something remarkable – establishes or destroys a city, creates a unique piece of music – the deed will eventually end up being attributed to some mythic figure anyway. 

    The alternative notion, that history is actually going somewhere (the Last Days, Judgment, Redemption), is what Eliade referred to as ‘linear time’, in which historical events take on significance in relation to the future, not just the past. 

    This ‘linear’ sense of time was a relatively recent innovation in human thought. Embracing the notion that events unfold in cumulative sequences, as opposed to recapitulating some deeper pattern, brought on the “terror of history” that rendered humans less able to weather the [necessary] vicissitudes of war, injustice & misfortune,  plunging us instead into an age of increasing anxiety &, ultimately, nihilism. 

    Eliade[’s…] basic argument was that the ‘terror of history’ was introduced by the [Old Testament prophets] [4]

who saw life in God as full of ups & downs, with ups the final word on earth. 

NOT: as a simplistic reading from Ecclesiastes might suggest, that we can't control anything that happens to us, & we can't predict what the future on earth will hold, only when history is fulfilled & arrives “in heaven.” /

So what comes in this new year? 

    A culturally significant portion of religious conservatives believes that “the church seems to be headed into the same sort of antagonistic world as the first followers of Jesus experienced.  The small band of disciples left on earth to spread the gospel was surrounded by enemies,  many of them lethal. 

The church of today is seen headed into the past.” [5]

But is it?

Is this really a Christian message for the New Year? 

That we need to go back into the past, to repeat its cycles of so-called Holy Wars against the unfaithful & rebuild the Jerusalem temple? 

To recall the Persian emperor Cyrus as our security-ensuring political messiah? 

To blow shofars so that enemy walls of Jericho at the nation’s capitol crumble?

Is the New Year going to experience these or any other recrudescence of cyclical sin & history? 

So like traditional people we will (and want to) see history repeating? 

Tragically & violently? 

    To consider this possibility, let us practice  the virtue of recollection to understand human history as cyclic or progressive. 

The Feast of the Holy Name litany that I quoted from in my opening prayer considers the character of Jesus to recognize the one who belongs to God [Yesh-ua], the one who saves. 

The One who guides history. 

The meaning of God’s name reveals that the incarnation of God is going to bring radical change to the cycles of sin & the defeat of the powers of death: greed, selfishness, domination, violence, & authoritarian impurities of all sorts.

    As God redeems these defeats to sway history to the positive side of the Ecclesiastes 3 lists, we recognize what the name embodies, so that we may work toward developing those same excellences. 

If we do, we may be confident that we live inside Jesus’s Spirit-led historical progress. 

By virtuously following Jesus’s example, we participate in God’s church bringing progress to history defined as shalom.  If by contrast our values are strife, war, contention, hierarchy, pride, tyranny, then we may expect to be dominated by the cyclic eruptions of history’s sins. 

Personal ethics & hopes matter. 

Live into the name of God in Jesus’ shalom.

Into human cultures that try to force history into violent cycles to make it predictable to the fearful, the Name of God in Jesus ensures that the serpent’s cycles of sin are crushed & to bring to fruition the progress of shalom. 

    The name announced by the angel transforms history into the process of the Holy Spirit: 

that the name’s announcement is soft power! 

    New Year’s Day is a time of recollection & anticipation. Recollection of God’s activity in the past year & what can be relied upon in the new. 

    The Church is in one of those seasons of life where so many things seem to be going wrong. 

We may feel it is hard to imagine being more stressed & how it's likely there are more crises to come. 

In times like these, we are like a wounded animal tempted to retreat & isolate. 

But where is the growth & sanctification in that?

Instead, Christians welcome times like these as opportunities—opportunities to grow spiritually by serving others. To stay the course & let Jesus illuminate the way by his excellent virtues & faithfulness.

    Living prayerfully inside the name of Jesus who bears such grace-dispensing virtues is the potential of grace to disrupt history for the better. In his name’s constant call to prayer, we recall the revolutionary historical inbreaking of grace. 

    We can, through a cyclical reading of history, "make the God of the Bible look like a vindictive Canaanite war god." [6]  Or—We can make the God of the Bible in the name Jesus where the Word of God is read with a progressive view of history, where the Spirit is leading toward the heavenly destiny of abundance and peace.

Where the name of God involves grace.

"Only one name is a right reading of Scripture."/

    We Christians bear the honor & responsibility of reflecting Jesus’ name of Christ, the anointed ruler.

Let us strive to live lives that honor & reflect that name in which we pray,

As we pray for God's blessing for the beginning of the civil New Year to make it a year of universal progres  and not the return of cyclical violence.   I can't tell you what your new year's resolutions should be, I am goinga to resist the proliferating mating calls of petroleum and cryptofinance, 

I am going to resist the dog whistles of racism and fascism, 

I am going to resist the triggering slogans for warrior religious nationalists, pandemic disinformation, and social strife. 

While we cannot individually bring in our preferred future by our strategems, 

 we can trust that God is in control & has a plan for history that includes us as individuals. 

    Last night many of us sung: “Auld Lang Syne.” Which is a wistful tradition, just don’t make it the incantation of your heart. 

Don’t make it into a soundtrack for nationalism.

A compulsion to bring back safety, predictability, and uniformity of an imagined past,a compulsion to live in the past is the signal of living with the Terror of history.

Nostalgiacs and reactionaries choose to go back in time toward feelings of a golden age of safety while living in terror of the future—anticipating a final but cataclysmic restoration of the Garden of Eden.

    Progressive Christian forecasters by contrast apply a more linear trajectory to the Spirit-led unfolding of the Kingdom of God on Earth as in Heaven, open to the wonder of ever-advancing, ever-renewing & challenging newness—the forward trajectory of soul growth that overcomes fear & anxiety.

    The Ecclesiastes reading explicitly speaks of the Virtues of silence, gratitude, recollection, courage, acceptance, impartiality. By these, God transforms us from the self-directing agents in service of recrudescent sin into the dispensers of radiating grace. 

God will transform tears into dance [Psalm 30:11–12], shame into joy.

The New Year is a time to dance. 

Dance in the purity of conscience. 

Dance & pray in Jesus’ name. AMEN.//

----------

Notes:

[1] "The most extreme of vanities," Ecclesiastes 1:2. הֲבֵ֤ל הֲבָלִים 

[2] Dave Troy @davetroy, Twitter December 30, 2022.

[3] Alastair Roberts, https://theopolisinstitute.com/you-shall-call-his-name-joshua/

[4]Graeber, David, and David Wengrow. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021, 497.

[5] Michael S. Heiser, Facebook post, 2/8/22.

[6] Zahnd, Brian. “God Is Like Jesus.” Brian Zahnd, August 12, 2011.  https://brianzahnd.com/2011/08/god-is-like-jesus-2/.