God Knows Our Names

Wednesday, January 14, 2015
St. Alban's, El Cajon

God, let these words be more than words and give us the spirit of Jesus. Amen.

Richard Meux Benson is the saint we celebrate today. He lived in London in the 1800s and he was a priest and founded the Society of St. John the Evangelist (SSJE). Its mission is "to realize and intensify the gifts and energies belonging to the whole church.” A house was established in Boston in 1870 and it's still there today. In fact, the SSJE has experienced a renaissance as of late because it has embraced technology and social media. For Advent, the brothers hosted the first global Advent calendar in which they invited everyone with smartphones to subscribe. Every day during Advent, you would receive the word for the day and then post a photo to Instagram, Twitter or Facebook that represented or embodied that word. Thousands of people all over the world participated. For Lent, they’re offering a video meditation every day with one of the brothers on the subject of time. This is how they describe it on their website:

“So much of our stress and anxiety derives from our pollution of Time. God has given us the gift of time, and called it holy, yet we often experience time as a curse. In a series of short, daily videos over five weeks, the Brothers of SSJE invite you to recapture time as a gift. You can join the Brothers as they wrestle with questions of time and discover how to experience the joy of the present moment.”

If you’re interested, it starts February 18 and you can find it by going to ssje.org/time.

Let’s turn our attention now to the readings for the day. In the Gospel, Jesus prays for his disciples. And he says that he has made God’s name known to them. In Biblical times, to know someone’s name was far more meaningful than it is now. It wasn’t just that Jesus was saying: OK, God, I’ve told them your name is the LORD, now I’ve done my job . . . He wasn’t running around saying God’s name. That’s not it.

When you knew someone’s name in ancient Israel, you knew that person’s whole character and nature. So when Jesus says he has made known God’s name, he means he has revealed God’s character and nature to the apostles. God’s name was so sacred to the Jews that they would never say it. The consonants are YHWH. Only the high priest on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year, would say it, but no one else was ever to utter it because it was too sacred. But they had to refer to God because they didn’t want to say: “Dear So-and-So” or “Dear You Know Who” so they made up a name as a placeholder: Jehovah or Adonai, which means Lord. One of my teachers in the diocesan School for Ministry said it is irresponsible and disrespectful of the Jewish tradition for Christians to run around saying the holiest name for God. The YHWH word. He won’t use it. He’ll use “the Lord” instead out of respect for the people who value that name so highly.

The ancient Jews did not believe in the afterlife. That is a Greek concept that came later. They believed that when you died, you went into the Pit, She’ol, and that was it! They believed that we have one life to live in the here and now and that the greatest thing you could do was to live righteously so that God would bless you with abundance which to them looked like: a lot of children, livestock, land, friends, good health - abundant life! Right here. Right now. They believed that the holy name of God was the very thing that gives life. In fact some scholars believe that God’s name, for the ancient Jews, was the inbreath and outbreath that keeps us alive every moment of every day. Yah (inbreath). Weh (outbreath).

God is the ground of our being. God knows our Name, our whole character and nature. It is not possible for us to be separated from God or from the love of God, for he is our creator and sustainer. God never forgets our name, but we forget names all the time, even our own! That's why we have to try on other identities that often don't fit and that do us more harm than good. But Jesus calls us by name. He helps us remember who we really are and that we belong to God. Jesus reveals God to us, he teaches us God’s name, God’s character, God’s nature.

He calls you to follow him and to do something beautiful with this life he’s given you.  This one, wild, precious life sustained by God in every in-breath and every out-breath. What will you do with it? How will you spend your time?