I am delighted to be co-leading worship with so many incredible, lovely people today. I am grateful for the work and collaboration of our musicians, the voices of Gina and Scott as our co-liturgists, and for Maureen’s lovely children’s moment, among others who you will hear from later. I should also note that I did not intentionally plan a sermon around the blessing of a name to coincide with Maureen’s moment on Saint Patrick, but I will say I have always felt a connection with St. Patrick- from my Irish name, birthday in March, my favorite color as green. This name, my name, was given to me by my parents in honor of my paternal grandfather, James Patrick O’Connor, so I carry these other Patricks and their lives with me daily. While not always the case, there is often something about our name that holds a special meaning for us.
Our text today finds Abram in the middle of his journey with his wife Sarai. A few chapters earlier in Genesis 12, God first reveals to Abram the blessings of God’s calling on Abram’s life and gives directions to begin their journey. In Genesis 15, God makes a covenant with Abram after bringing him out to see the stars. “Look to the stars and just try to count them,” God says, “this is what your legacy will look like.” And so for years, Abram and Sarai continue on this journey, this pilgrimage, for what must have felt like the entire world. But, this journey seems to be building up to something, and as God appears to Abram at the beginning of chapter 17, these first three verses set the stage for the metamorphosis that is about to take place with Abram.
God commands Abram: “Walk in My ways and be blameless,” and so indicates to him that he must be absolutely loyal. This demand may suggest that despite the fact that for 25 years Abram had demonstrated great loyalty to God, his loyalty was not yet considered absolute. So as God speaks to Abram, the text reveals the humility of Abram, his desire to hear the word of God, as well as his feelings at the moment of the revelation.
Then, God speaks again and after God promised Abram that he will become “the father of a multitude of nations,” God changes his name from Abram to Abraham by adding the letter he. Later, God also changes Sarai’s name to Sarah, by changing the last letter to he. Although no explanation is offered for this change of name, God promises “for I will bless her so that she shall give rise to nations; rulers of people shall come from her”.
So, why, precisely at this stage of life, did God change the names of Abraham and his wife, the first name change in the Book of Genesis?
According to biblical scholar J. Fleishman: “In the Bible and in ancient Near Eastern cultures a name served not only as a means of personal identification, but also as a cultural and religious marker, creating a link between the bearer of the name and associations linked to that name. Thus the giving of a name or changing it had great significance.”
For us to continue digging into the name change, we need to zoom out to place this story into the larger story arc of Israel. The selection of Abraham, to the Hebrew writers, was and is the turning point not only in the story of humanity, but also in God’s plan to redeem humanity from its current situation through Abraham and his descendants, Israel. The explanation for the new name of Abraham, and of Sarah, define their destiny. Abram, the name given to him by his father Terah, kept Abram attached to his former life and culture. God changing Abram and Sarai’s names is an act of God naming and claiming Abraham and Sarah as God’s own, as well as naming and claiming what God will do for the Israelites through the two of them. God blesses them with a name so that they can live into their legacy as God’s own.
In the sequel to Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, the protagonist Meg befriends a cherub named Proginoskes, or Progo. Progo is an other-worldly creature whose job is to name things, specifically, to name the stars. Naming is a major theme in the second of the Time series by L’Engle, as it becomes a redemptive act of recognizing and expressing who a person is, and was created to be.
While we may not go through a name change in our lifetime, we are still named and claimed by God as God’s own. When God calls us by name, God sees, loves, and embraces every part of us. When God calls us by name, God holds us in relationship to God and to one another. For a few moments in silence, I encourage you to reflect on the ways in which you see yourself as named and claimed by God.
silence
There’s another part of our text however that has to do with the blessing of a name. Right before we get to the name change for Abram and Sarai, God first appears to Abram with a new name- El Shaddai. This name becomes the preferred name of God in the proceeding patriarchal narratives in Genesis and Exodus, as well as in the book of Job into some of the Psalms as well. El Shaddai literally translated means God Almighty, although scholars argue its origin. God becomes known during the patriarchal narratives as El Shaddai as a way for the Hebrew writers to emphasize God’s power to achieve God’s purposes. Now, if I were as musically talented as our friend Rev. Allie Utley, I’d break out into Amy Grant’s classic, timeless song “El Shaddai”, but I’ll leave it to you to listen to it later this afternoon during the coming rainshower.
As we understand God’s naming and claiming of us, and we understand it as a means of relationship, so must we also do the work of naming and claiming God through name. But what does this look like?
Theologian Sallie McFague understands that how we name and claim God is through metaphor. While God has the ability to see all of us at once, we typically can only see part of God, so using metaphor helps us capture glimpses of God. We know from Scripture that God uses multiple names in the Hebrew Scriptures- YHWH, Elohim, El Shaddai, among others. But Sallie McFague sees part of our responsibility as Christians to “answer the call to deconstruct and reconstruct the traditional symbols of our Christian faith”, which is why she considers theology metaphorical. She writes: “A metaphor is a word or phrase used in appropriately. It belongs properly in one context but is used in another: the arm of a chair, war as a chess game, God the father. From Aristotle until recently, metaphor has been seen mainly as a poetic device to embellish or decorate. The idea was that in metaphor one used a word or phrase inappropriately but one need not have… What a metaphor expresses cannot be set directly or apart from it, for if it could be one would have said it directly. Here, metaphor is a strategy of desperation, not decoration; it is an attempt to say something about the unfamiliar in terms of the familiar, and attempt to speak about what we do not know in terms of what we do know. Metaphor always has the character of is and is not: an assertion is made but as a likely account rather than a definition. That is to say, God is mother, is not to define God as mother, not to assert identity between the terms God and mother, but to suggest that we consider what we do not know how to talk about relating to God through the metaphor of mother.
In today’s liturgy, we used similar yet contrasting metaphors to name God, partly as practicing what Sallie McFague has offered to us, but also to honor the tradition of the fourth Sunday in Lent as Mothering Sunday. Traditionally celebrated in the UK and Ireland, Mothering Sunday is similar to the American Mother’s Day, but much less commercial and consumer-focused. Mothering Sunday celebrates the mother church and works to emphasize the mothering aspects of God and our tradition. With such a traditional emphasis on the patriarchal, masculine imagery of God, Mothering Sunday offers a different glimpse, a different name for God.
It is understood that for too long the masculine, patriarchal names for God wound up doing more harm than help in the presentation of the Gospel. God the Father was used to justify men’s false claims to authority while minimizing those not cismale or masculine enough, and still there is work to be done on that front. But Sallie McFague argues that it’s not our responsibility to remove all masculine names for God, but rather keep them balanced with contrasting images. For school-aged children in a concrete operational thinking, God is often and usually imaged as an old white man sitting in on a throne in the clouds. It’s not that this image is wrong, but it is incomplete. It is my responsibility as a Christian educator to aid in the deconstructing and reconstructing of the image of God as youth move out of their concrete operational thinking into understanding abstract-metaphorical thinking, and it is one of my favorite parts of my job!
I’d like for us to take a few moments for silence again, this time reflecting on how we name and claim God. What metaphor for God is most appropriate for you in this moment? I encourage you to take a few moments to reflect on that, and if so led, sharing your name for God in the chat.
Silence
Now, we’ve discussed the vertical systems of naming between us and God, now I’d like for us to quickly move to our work of naming and claiming in the world. Often times, the process of naming something in our world can cause a great deal of fear. In the Harry Potter series, Harry is coming to learn more about the death of his parents at the hands of Voldemort, but notices that most witches and wizards refuse to call Voldemort by his name, instead referring to him as He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. Wise Professor Dumbledore however, offers Harry this nugget of wisdom: “Fear of a name always increases fear of the thing itself.” It makes me wonder back to our Scripture for today--I wonder if Abraham and Sarah ever felt apprehensive about their new name, as it carried such a new meaning for them, now named and claimed by El Shaddai, God Almighty.
Are there things in your life that you are afraid or apprehensive of naming? For privileged folk, we must continue to lean into the process of naming our privilege. Naming white supremacy, naming injustice, naming the systems of oppression from which we have benefitted. We must continue to say the names of those who have lost their lives to these systems. We must say the names of those black and brown bodies who have been lost to police brutality: George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Freddie Gray, Ahmaud Arbery, Tamir Rice, Travon Martin, Sandra Bland and so many others.
We must name the pain and grief and loss that we have all had after one full year of pandemic. Loss of life, missed celebrations and gatherings, a good and gracious hug.
And as Christians, we must continue to do the work of naming the suffering around us, while also name and claim the hope, peace, and love that surrounds us. As we continue to make our way through the Lenten season, naming our blessings, may we be named and claimed by God, and do the work of naming the good and righteous and just and love around us.
© 2021 Patrick O'Connor
Benediction -- Adapted from a Franciscan Blessing
May God bless you with discomfort at easy answers, half truths, and superficial relationships, so that you may live deep within your heart.
May God bless you with anger at injustice, oppression and exploitation of people, so that you may work for justice, freedom and peace.
May God bless you with tears to shed for those who suffer from pain, rejection, starvation, and war, so that you may reach out your hand to comfort them and turn their pain to joy.
May God bless you with a name, to be named and claimed by God so that you may partake in the work of tending to Creation through naming and claiming,
And may God bless you with enough foolishness to believe that you can make a difference in this world, so that you can do what others claim cannot be done.
Amen.