Power Beyond Words

Cruciform baptism:  marked with the Sign of the Cross

In the Jordan

People have often had a hard time with Jesus’ baptism. That is because they start out with the notion that Jesus is fundamentally unique among human beings.  They call him “sinless” to emphasize that he is one-of-a-kind. So the problem right off the bat is to make some sense of Jesus’ doing something that was totally unnecessary, since they suppose that baptism was for sinners and therefore not for him.  Some have explained that Jesus was baptized to demonstrate how he was so humble.  Others have argued that he needed and wanted to identify with John the Baptist and the old prophetic tradition instead of getting mixed up in some of the other movements of the day, notably the legalism of the Pharisees, the revolutionary politics of the Zealots, the monastic withdrawal of the Essenes, or the reactionary reductionism of the Sadducees. 

What happens if we begin to rethink the baptism of Jesus not in terms of how it does or does not fit our ideas of who and what Jesus is, but in terms of the power of baptism itself?

Start with what baptism is on its simplest level.  It is basically a bath.  And a bath is generally for the purpose of getting clean.  But baths are more.  Baths, including showers, are often relaxing, pleasurable. Sometimes the pleasures of bathing or showering are in fact its primary feature with cleansing almost an afterthought. 

The Baptism of Christ

It is clear from the gospel accounts that John the Baptizer was administering baptism to get people ready for the coming Day of Yahweh.  His message was “the kingdom of God is at hand.” It is unlikely that John taught any highfalutin doctrine of baptism.  It was a bath that signified a need to clean up in preparation for this kingdom-at-hand.  In Luke’s gospel, John explicitly tells what religious leaders, soldiers, tax collectors, and others need to do in order to clean up their acts.  Now, did it make any difference?  We cannot say. We have no records to prove one thing or another about the effect that John’s baptism had on his early audiences.  What we do know is that he had a number of disciples.  We know that Jesus was directly affected by the baptism that he himself experienced because, in Mark’s account, it is the baptism that triggered a descent of the Spirit of God on Jesus in a singular way and that Spirit drove Jesus out into the wilderness to wrestle with what shape his Messiahship would take.  But you may be sure that no one imagined that John baptized largely for the fun of it.  Nor did he imagine that he was simply giving free baths to the physically dirty.  In other words, baptism was a ritual that had the potential of being life-changing.  Whether it would succeed depended upon the degree to which the baptized would actually live out what baptism promised and provided:  a new life lived with markedly changed motives.

So, long before the Church got ahold of baptism and made it its initiatory rite, the simple baptism by John was a powerful act, powerful enough to change hardened souls, powerful enough to change behavior, powerful enough to change minds, powerful enough therefore to change the world.  That is what good rituals do. If they express real longing and true feeling, they can be mind-blowing in richness.  But even if the person undergoing a ritual is unconscious; even if those leading the ritual have ulterior motives; even if participants are confused or ignorant about the symbolic action involved, rituals can still be amazingly effective, for good or ill. 

Let me give you an example of what I mean.  Years ago a parishioner of mine had a massive heart attack. His condition was grave.  He lay unconscious in ICU for weeks.  Some of his vital signs were strong, but the doctors were not giving us much encouragement that he could survive the damage that had been done. One evening I was in the hospital with his wife, son, and daughter-in-law.  We gathered around Bill’s bed. As we offered the prayers of Compline, the nighttime prayer office, all of us reached out and touched Bill.  We held his hands, rubbed his legs, caressed his forehead, massaged his feet.  We watched the monitor. Every once in awhile it looked as if Bill was responding in some way, but that could well have been wishful thinking on our part, or simple happenstance.  He was unconscious.  Yet here we were, praying, anointing, laying hands all over him.  Would we have done it even if the doctor had walked in minutes beforehand with a pronouncement that nothing more could be done for him?  Of course we would have.  Why? We believed that what we were doing had an effect well beyond what could be rationally understood, at least by the sick man himself.  Did it make any difference?  Who knows?  Bill died a few days later.  What I do know is that I am telling you this story forty years later because that ritual changed me.  I am not even sure how.  But I know that the very action of soothing a dying man made me more human, opened up some channels of sensitivity, taught me more deeply how love translates into prayer and prayer into touch. The Presence of the Holy was there.  We knew it.  We felt it.  We were one with it, just as sure as if we had been able to see the spirit of healing descend on Bill and us in dove-like form.

Susanna Annesley Wesley

It’s relatively easy to make a case for a powerful ritual in such circumstances.  A life-and-death situation suggests something of overwhelming importance.  But let’s take another example. Susanna Annesley, born in 1669, the 25^th of 25 children, was married at age 19 to a priest of the Church of England.  She gave birth to 19 children.  Nine died in infancy, four of whom were twins.  A maid accidentally smothered one.  A brilliant woman, Susanna once wrote to her husband that, although she was neither a man nor a minister, she took seriously her responsibility for her children during her husband’s long absences.  She managed to devote an hour of her time to each of her children once a week. Imagine that ritual:  a personal conversation with each of her children.  Did it do any good?  Was anyone changed by the ritual? We cannot say precisely how.  But we do know that two of her children are known to all the world for the way they turned 18^th century England upside down.  Their names are John and Charles Wesley, the founders of Methodism.  I doubt that Susanna Wesley ever called what she did with her children a ritual, but that is what it was: a regular, predictable, practice of simple presence and conversation.

Simple rituals have amazing power.

You have rituals too. Some are so ordinary that you take them for granted.  They may include sitting down to a meal each day and offering thanks before you take a bite.  You may have a ritual of kissing the person you love first thing in the morning or the last thing at night.  You might have a routine that is more than a habit but yet something that sustains you, opens you, conveys to you a meaning and purpose that springs from the deepest part of your soul.  Perhaps you have a ritual that you share with your family weekly or annually. You are at a ritual this moment.  For you have taken a place in a ritual community today, one in which you share a meal, say and listen to some prayers, make ritual movements such as bowing or kneeling or stretching out your hands to receive holy things.  Do you understand what you’re doing?  Somewhat, no doubt. I can tell you fancy answers to that question myself, but at the end of the day I cannot explain the power of the Holy Eucharist.  I cannot tell you why sometimes saying words I don’t even need to read from the book will sneak up on me like a thief in the nighttime and steal my breath so that I cannot utter them without my voice cracking or my eyes brimming with tears.  Is it just an illusion?  I think not.  I can honestly say, as you probably can, that well beyond anything I can explain, I have been changed little by little, imperceptibly even to myself, so much so that I can almost no longer think about anything without summoning the phrases that have become like flesh to me: “Almighty God, unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known.”  “And here we offer and present unto thee, O Lord, our selves, our souls and bodies.”  “But thou art the same Lord whose property is always to have mercy.”  “That we may evermore dwell in him and he in us.” 

Who knows why Jesus was baptized, except that he was moved to identify with whatever it was that John was saying and doing?  What we do know is that he picked up John’s theme and took it way further than John was able to do before he was thrown into prison and ultimately martyred.  What we know is that long before there were stories circulating about his conception, his birth, or anything else, he stepped out of the shadows and engaged in a profound act of immersing himself in a passionate love of God that manifested in a profound love for all manner of human beings.  His baptism was just the beginning of a God-soaked life. 

And the point of that life, the point of his baptism, was not that he was categorically different from you but that he is the Way that you can become authentically the person you are created to be, just as he was authentically the person he was created to be.  You have been baptized with the same power and our vocation is nothing less than to be as passionately full of God as Jesus was.   

A sermon for the First Sunday after the Epiphany: The Baptism of Christ, based on  Mark 1:4-8.

© Frank  Gasque Dunn, 2018.

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In Water By Spirit

Mark 1:4-11

            Water.  The most plentiful substance on earth, though supplies are increasingly endangered.  We cannot live without water.

            It is no accident that the primary sacrament of the Church is a sacrament in which water conveys the grace we need in order to live the life of God.  Water, along with wind, is the major way in which everything on the planet ultimately gets broken down, recycled, to be built up again, then worn down again, broken up, and made into something new.  Water is thus the quintessential sign of the work of the Spirit of God.  For the Spirit of God wears things down, breaks things up, shifts possibilities, moves boundaries, transforms soulscapes, births relationships, reorders communities, nurtures visions, spawns dreams, twists matter into new shapes, tickles old skin, charms little children, washes away embarrassment, floods imaginations, erodes prejudices, transports burdens, fills hearts to the brim and even beyond the brim.  The Spirit of God does all that and more.  Like water finding its way to the breaks in rock, the Spirit of God seeks out the weakness in stony attitudes and drips down into the cracks and crevices of the most hardened persons.  Give water enough time and it will create Grand Canyons, alter mountain ranges, split landmasses in two.  Little wonder that the Spirit of God brooded in the beginning of creation over the waters, for the waters were the reflecting pool mirroring the Spirit’s own powerful visage.

             If we had only the Gospel of Mark to go on, as for a time the ancient Church had, there would be no Christmas with angels and manger, no Epiphany with wise men and star, no flight into Egypt, no childhood Jesus, no lost boy in the Temple stunning the elders with his precociousness.  The story would begin here with what we celebrate today.  It would start with the baptism of Jesus by John in the River Jordan.   We would no doubt be the poorer without the other gospels to feed our imagination with story and symbol.  But we would see perhaps more clearly that the Jesus whom we meet at once as God and brother shows us what happens when a life is completely saturated with Spirit.  It is the Spirit that will drive him into the desert to be tested and to test his own authenticity.  It is the Spirit that will flow through his hands when he touches and heals.  It is the Spirit that will stir the wills and desires of his audience when he tells his telling parables.  It is the Spirit that will feed five thousand once, four thousand yet again, with only a fish sandwich or two.  It is the Spirit that will speak words of forgiveness and loose the bonds of oppression.  It is the Spirit that will lead him to take up his cross.  And it is the Spirit that will ultimately echo in that hollow, agonizing moment when he cries, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”   All of that is the life into which he was baptized, immersed, and which filled him.  All of that is the God-life that was so brilliantly stunning that it can only be described as a sky-splitting revelation, the Spirit settling upon him as gently as a dove might alight on his human shoulder. 

            And the best part of the story is that it is about Jesus only so that it can be about you.  The Spirit of God is not some magic that can only be invoked by the gods.  It is about the power of God made present, real, human in Jesus precisely so that it can be made present, real, and human in you.  Yes, you, young Max, whom we baptize today.  And you, Beth and Justin who gave him your genes.  And you, Nick and Amanda, who promise that by your prayer and witness you will help him grow into the full stature of the Christ whose life he now will share.  And you, all of you, who witness these things:  yours is the life of the Spirit who right this instant is at work seeping through every fault in your life not to condemn you, but to transform you. 

            Baptized in water, sealed by the Spirit,

            Cleansed by the blood of Christ our King:

            Heirs of salvation, trusting his promise,

            Faithfully now God’s praise we sing.

            Baptized in water, sealed by the Spirit,

            Dead in the tomb with Christ our King:

            One with his rising, freed and forgiven,

            Thankfully now God’s praise we sing.

           

            Baptized in water, sealed by the Spirit,

            Marked with the sign of Christ our King:

            Born of one Mother, we are her children,

            Joyfully now God’s praise we sing.[1]

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2015

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[1] Michael Seward, “Baptized in water,” words altered, in The Hymnal 1982 (NY:  Church Hymnal Corporation, 1982), 294.

Choosing

Every year it seems a bit strange to leave Jesus in the crib one week and come back the next and have him be a full grown man going on his own to be baptized by John in the Jordan. Except for one story about the adolescent Jesus in Luke’s gospel, we have only legends and silence between his infancy and his ministry. Sometimes I think it is a kindness that we know nothing for sure about Jesus’ childhood and youth, because I suspect he would be presented as such a sterling example of goodness that we would not believe him to be a real human being. Or, if a tale or two had sneaked into the tradition about some mischief he got into, it would totally confound all those who have an idealized image of Jesus as thoroughly special. Better that we are left wondering, or at least spared the disappointment of having Jesus spoiled for us.

To Mark, writing his gospel before many questions about Jesus had gelled into full-scale controversies about his nature and identity, none of these matters seems to have been important, if they occurred to him at all. He has no birth narratives with shepherds or angels or wise men. For him, Joseph gets no mention, not even a biographical footnote. And Mary, far from being the Blessed Mother that she becomes in the three later gospels, is thoroughly dumbfounded by Jesus’ behavior and joins his other siblings in seeking to get him to leave off his preaching and come home, fearing perhaps for his safety, probably embarrassed or perhaps anxious from the rumors that Jesus was out of his mind (Mark 3:19b-17; 31-34; 6:3-5). Mark is definitely interested in showing us that Jesus is the Son of God, but that means something quite different to him than it generally means today, and even something different from what it would mean a decade or two after he wrote his gospel. The story of how Jesus was baptized and what happened to him then was of great importance to Mark, because for him the baptism was clearly the beginning of Jesus’ special status. The baptism was public enough, one supposes. But, unlike the account in Matthew’s gospel, all that happened—heavens opening, dove descending, voice speaking—were for Jesus’ eyes and ears only, not for the crowds. These elements of apocalyptic symbolism were enough to confirm Jesus’ sense of his own identity, from which he never wavers in Mark’s gospel, not even in his dereliction on the cross. From the moment of his coming out of the water, Jesus was a Holy Spirit-filled person. And that Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness on what you and I might call a search to unpack the meaning of it all.

But let’s not get ahead of our story! We were just noting that all of this happens, as it were, out of the blue—no tidy series of steps carefully bringing Jesus to the Jordan and to baptism, so far as we know. Yet we do know more than that. We know that Jesus, like any young Palestinian Jew of his time, had several options. One was, of course, to be totally submissive to the tradition of his time and society, dutifully bowing to received wisdom, essentially questioning nothing. (That is always a human option.) We know that, smart as he turned out to be as theologian and thinker, he could certainly have identified with the Pharisees, for example, the group most interested in applying the Torah, the Jewish Law, to life with unrelenting rigor. He had the talent to be a scribe, and no doubt could have made a name for himself (if for no one else) by becoming a religious lawyer. Moreover, since he was to give clear evidence of interest in communal life, it is entirely possible that he toyed with the idea of joining the Essenes, a religious community with a monastery not too far from the place where John likely did his baptizing. With the Essenes he would have had the chance to parse and ponder what we now know as the Dead Sea Scrolls, which they produced. Or with his passion for justice and compassion for the downtrodden, Jesus might well have become a Zealot, one of that band that wanted to foment rebellion against the Romans. Off to the hills he might have gone to join the political revolutionaries.

But none of these roads did he follow. Instead, he walked the dusty trail from Galilee down the river valley towards Jericho. He had either heard of John the Baptizer or he discovered him along the journey. Was Jesus searching for something? We can only imagine, we cannot know. But what we do know is what he found and what he identified with. He found someone out of the heart of the old prophetic tradition, straight off the pages of the Prophet Isaiah: “the voice of one crying in the wilderness, ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, makes his paths straight.’” We know that he heard and identified with a call to repentance. And the story is that this John kept telling people that one was coming who was more powerful than he, and who by comparison was infinitely more worthy, one who would baptize multitudes with something way beyond the power of ordinary water—the very Spirit of God. One wonders. Did Jesus hear that statement, standing among the crowds? Did John’s words fall on him like a burden, pierce him to the quick, excite him, inspire him, galvanize his young vision for ushering in the Reign of God on earth? Was he already primed to believe he had a vocation? Did he, searching for a moment of clarity, hear what John was saying and immediately know that it was he who would be the one to baptize with Holy Spirit?

The Church has long had a habit of making up stories about Jesus, stories that fill in the gaps between the pages of scripture. And Christians have generally had the habit of believing those stories. One of the strongest and most long-lasting of those stories is that Jesus never had a moment’s doubt about anything. If you are one who believes that story, you probably have little interest in even imagining that he ever had to search for a thing, and certainly not a vocation, an identity. But there is some chance, perhaps even a large chance, that you are one who for whatever reason finds it perfectly plausible that Jesus was so uniquely powerful that existing scripts—Pharisee, scribe, conventional rabbi, Essene, Zealot—did not suit him or interest him. Perhaps you are willing to entertain the notion that he was a mold-breaker, or that God it was who broke the mold out of which Jesus was formed so that there was not nor could there ever be another quite like him. In that case, maybe you find yourself imagining that it was a restlessness that led him to leave his Nazareth home and make his way miles down the country to join a movement that dared to believe in things like radical forgiveness, utter dedication to the Reign of God, and the availability of healing and feeding for all comers. Perhaps something is going on in your own life, a dissatisfaction with things as they are, maybe even an anger at the conventions that people live by, which they use to pass as moral and upright. Maybe something is stirring in you that finds your own Nazareth far too confining, something that has made you strike out to make a difference in the world, maybe even by finding and living in the Commonwealth of God. Perhaps you see in Jesus a kindred spirit, a mentor too authentic to settle for half-truths and easy answers, and maybe you want to lurk in the shadows long enough to see if he might be the One to follow.

If that sounds like you, then the way to the Jordan is this way—right straight to the water of baptism. If you have never been baptized maybe you want to consider it. If you have been baptized, maybe you want to reconnect with your baptism. If you have been living your life faithfully, perhaps you want simply to say Yes again. In any of those cases, it is possible—not guaranteed, but possible—that you will be plunged into a totally new kind of life, one in which you will feel, even as the water is running out of your ears, the heavens split open, and an indescribable peace settling upon you, dovelike, as your Yes is answered by a Yes: “You are my child, my beloved.”

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2012

By Name

A sermon preached at St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church, Washington, DC, The First Sunday after the Epiphany, the Baptism of Christ, January 10, 2010.

Text: Isaiah 43:1-7; Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

When two creatures first awoke from the long journey from being just some other primates to being conscious humans, the first thing they must have done was to look at each other and speak a name. Even before verbs there were probably nouns, names. Man, woman, earth, sky, food, water: these must be the oldest nouns in the oldest tongue in the world.

In one of our foundational stories, God forms out of the ground every animal and bird and brings them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. Far from being the point of the story, this little detail reveals how ancient and how important is the notion of naming. We are not the only species with names, believe it or not. Research shows that dolphins have distinctive whistles to which they respond. But it is hard to imagine human beings without names. In fact it is hard to imagine a human being who can look at virtually anything without thinking of that thing as something with a name. When we encounter something previously unknown, our first impulse is to name it.

So when the prophet Isaiah, conveying words of God, writes, “I have called you by name, you are mine,” he is dealing with one of the oldest ideas in human experience and using it to describe the peculiarly intimate relationship between God and Israel. That is the sort of thing we either expect to hear in scripture and thus pass over without thinking, or the kind of thing that if we do think about it seems so strange that it hardly grabs us. I want to suggest three things today on this Feast of The Baptism of Christ. One is that naming is integral to understanding ourselves. A second is that naming is intricately related to baptism. A third is that naming is fundamental to understanding God.

First, naming is about understanding ourselves. When I was born, Daddy was away at war with several months to go before his return home. His mother named me Francis, after her oldest brother, and Gasque, her husband’s and my father’s middle name. Francis Gasque. I don’t know when I first heard, but I was fairly young when I learned that when Daddy came home he took a look at me and asked, “How come you named him Francis?” Daddy wasn’t the only one who had a problem. About the time I was of school age there was a series of movies featuring Francis the Talking Mule. I was not amused when people made a connection between one Francis and another. Not only that, but relatives frequently got confused because they knew of an older, more established Francis Dunn, one of Daddy’s first cousins. This was frighteningly confusing to me. But it was not quite as bad as the gender confusion that I already had in spades being exacerbated by the information that Francis could be a girl’s name as well as a boy’s, depending on whether one spelled it with an “e” or and “i.” Things were looking pretty bleak for young Francis when he went to first grade. And after a year of being the butt of jokes and the subject of confusion, I begged Mama to change my name before I went into second grade. And for fifty cents, paid to the South Carolina Bureau of Vital Statistics, I became legally and officially Frank.

I paid no attention whatsoever to the importance of any of that until years later when I was in seminary studying sacramental theology. Suddenly I came upon an important intersection of name-giving and baptism. I then realized how much of my personal history was either prefigured by or summed up in this narrative about my name. To a surprising extent the main themes of my very life are summed up in my name. Even the double-entendre of the name “Frank” is, I suspect, a key to my personality and even its shadow sides—as a signifier of frank as “free” and frank as “honest, to the point of being blunt.”

Lest you think that this is far too much about me, take a look at your own name and see if reveals any less about you. If you like your name or if you don’t, it is important. If you are known by a nickname, it is likely that it, too, has had an uncanny impact on the way you view yourself.

In the biblical tradition, as in other ancient traditions, to know someone’s name is to have a kind of power over that person. That is why, until recently, a person who stood in a socially inferior relationship would not dare call a superior by the first name. It signaled an affront, an offense of a major sort. And that is why one of the worst things one can do to another is to call a person by an unflattering or pejorative name. It can be the worst sort of insult.

But what about the names we give ourselves, more like labels? We can call ourselves “idiots” when we do something thoughtlessly or clumsily, “dorks” when we behave strangely and uncomfortably, “eggheads” when we are embarrassed about being intelligent, “dumb jocks” if we think our athletic ability vastly outstrips our intellectual capacity. Every time we call ourselves such names, we depreciate a bit, or more than a bit, our sense of self-esteem. In effect, we curse ourselves—which is really no better than cursing someone else, and sometimes as much or more poisonous.

So names are powerful. So powerful that it brings us to the second point: why naming is integral to baptism. The present Prayer Book does not make as big a deal of name-giving as its predecessors did. In the 1928 Prayer Book, for example, the priest said to the parents and godparents just prior to the pouring of water, “Name this child.” And the reply was, as the presentation still is, to give the “Christian” name to the child, not including the family name. In the tradition of the Church, we have no family name except “Christian.” We belong to Christ. So, properly speaking, people are known in the congregation by their Christian name, which is why, when we pray for our bishop, for example, he is called by his Christian name. When we are naming the sick, we frequently call them by their Christian names only, a sign of familial intimacy. I wouldn’t put too fine a point on it, however. When we are praying for “Jane” in this congregation, for example, you may find yourself distractedly wondering just who is standing in the need of prayer: Jane Bishop or Jane Lincoln or Jane Colgrove? Is it Elizabeth Finley or Elizabeth Palmberg who is celebrating a birthday? Which Jessica is it who is pregnant, and which John is it who has a new job? And so forth.

But the point is that we are not isolated, nameless bubbles in the household of faith. We have names. “I have called you by name; you are mine,” says the Holy One of Israel. It is easy for us to see that in a congregation like this one, where there is a high degree of acceptance and mutual caring. But the family of God into which we are baptized includes not only St. Stephen and the Incarnation, but All Saints, Chevy Chase, and Christ Church, Akkokeek. It includes not only Anglicans but the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Washington and Bishop Harry Jackson of wherever it is in Maryland. It includes not only Desmund Tutu but George W. Bush. You get the picture. The issue is not that we have to agree with or like everybody in the household of God, but that we are committed by our baptism to respect the dignity of every human being.

And, I would argue, the naming of persons does not stop at the walls of the Church universal. It extends to the whole of the human family and even beyond that to the whole cosmos. Why? Because the Church does not exist so that only those who are in it can be accorded the dignity of personhood but in order to bring the world into union with its creator, whose will it is that everything in all creation be redeemed, saved, and whole. In other words, our baptism is not a badge of specialness for an in-group, but a vocation, a calling, to proclaim the truth, love, and justice of God to the whole world. Ultimately the message of Jesus goes beyond even the marvelous words of Isaiah: “you are mine” is intended to be heard by the whole world, not just Israel.

And that is the third thing: naming is fundamental to our understanding of God. In a sense, no one fully understands God, and we are fooling ourselves if we think we do. Fred Craddock, a noted preacher and homiletician, once quipped that sometimes you hear people talking about God as if they had walked all around God taking pictures. But that is not to say that we understand nothing about God. Through the long experience of homo sapiens, we have come to understand that there is something intensely responsive about the universe. Our scientific investigations show that even the smallest particles respond to each other. It is in the nature of things that something on one side of the universe has an effect on something quite remote. But all of that is tangential to the poetry, if you will, that we read in the face of Jesus. For, to quote St. Paul, “the God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ has shown in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.’” At the center of our faith is not an idea or an event or a book or a law but a person with a name. And it is through a person with a name that we come to encounter the maker and ruler and ground and heart of the universe. Outside of Jesus himself the great revelation of God to us is the revelation of the divine Name, so sacred that our forefathers and foremothers did not dare pronounce it, “I AM who I AM.” I am being itself. And I will be what I will be. Whatever else Jesus reveals about God, he makes plain again and again that God is not an impersonal, unfeeling, entity divorced from the experience of the world of human joys and tragedies. God is “Abba,” sweeping creation to find the lost, running with tears of joy to welcome home the wanderer, prowling the mountainside to rescue the perishing, feeding the hungry and clothing the naked as if they were the most important business in all creation. God does not have a name, God is a name. And that great “I AM” has a predicate nominative, love. Boundless, deep, passionate love.

In one of C. S. Lewis’s books the character Orual asks, “How can the gods meet us face to face till we have faces?” It is the same question that dogged the Swiss doctor and pastoral theologian Paul Tournier in the middle of the last century. Tournier was a Christian from childhood, but only until he had what he called a “face to face encounter with God” did his whole life and work and orientation change. In a letter to his patients he wrote, “I can speak endlessly of myself, to myself or to someone else, without ever succeeding in giving a complete and truthful picture of myself. The same thing happens with all these people who come to see me, and take so much trouble over their efforts to describe themselves to me with strict accuracy; inevitably I form an image of them which derives as much from myself as from them.” The whole question of the meaning of persons which had enchanted him for twenty years boiled down to one simple question, “who am I, really, myself?”

If you read St. Luke’s story carefully, you will see that Jesus’ whole life was in a sense a commentary on the name given to him before his birth: Yeshua, for he shall save…” What did it mean? Where would it take him? What secrets did it contain? It is the same mystery that lies at the bottom of your deepest longing and your highest hope. It is the gold that lines your despair when your work seems to amount to nothing and the ecstacy that dazzles you when your bump into a person who so thoroughly loves you that you are changed inside and out. “Who am I, really, myself?” And all those false names which we would give as answers are wide of the mark. “I have called you by your name. You are mine.” Your name. Your name. Your name.

And if there is one thing that ever happened to Jesus that most assuredly has happened or will happen to you, it is that at that very moment, heaven is open and the Creator cries back, “You are my child, my beloved. And I couldn’t be more pleased.”

© Frank G. Dunn, 2010