Lifesaving Skills

“Come, let me show you my parish church.” My friend with whom we were spending several days is a devout Roman Catholic and I knew how important it was for him to show me his spiritual home. “I’ll show you the Episcopal church as well. It’s lovely. Really beautiful.” He went on to tell me that his church building had been dedicated on the day of his birth fifty some years ago. I was eager to see this place that functions so prominently in his life.

We pulled up in the parking lot of Sacred Heart Church at dusk. He mentioned that it used to be open all the time but he thought it was probably closed now. He spun around and headed down the street a block or two. There it was. A typical stone Gothic revival structure, a touch of an English village in this New Jersey town on the banks of the Delaware River: Christ Episcopal Church. I appreciated his gesture of taking me to see “my” church’s presence in the town. And frankly I was pleased that he thought it beautiful.

Christ Episcopal Church, Riverton, NJ

And that is what church is to many of us. A building. A symbol. A place. An anchor. Where life is knit together, its multifarious threads washed in a font, woven into coherence around an altar, their meaning articulated from a pulpit. I learned as a little boy in Sunday school that the church was not a building but a people. Then I learned as a priest that people can’t do without a building, say what you will. Not only must there be a building, but at least in the United States it must have pews, or at least chairs arranged in rows. If you ask them why, they’ll say something about how it’s necessary to seat people in a fashion that will highlight the entrance of the bride at a wedding. Even when people get outside a building called a church to have a funeral or a wedding or even an ordinary service of worship, they will arrange chairs in rows. It might be the natural thing to do, but it is contrary to what builds community, which is not the experience of looking at the backs of people’s heads but at their faces, generally speaking.

King David’s desire to build a temple and the Prophet Nathan’s intervention to dissuade him from doing so is a very interesting story because it captures the tension between institution and spirit.[1] It is not my bias that institutions are all bad or inferior to some other arrangement of human beings. It is my experience that institutions settle on an agenda for survival and thus frequently lose sight of any purpose beyond survival itself. It is as if simply existing and doing what they habitually do is the point of it all.

There is an old but telling metaphor that describes what I’m talking about.

On a dangerous seacoast where shipwrecks often occur, there was once a crude little lifesaving station. The building was just a hut, and there was only one boat, but the few devoted members kept a constant watch over the sea, and with no thought for themselves went out day and night tirelessly searching for those who were lost. Some of those who were saved and various others in the surrounding area wanted to become associated with the station and gave of their time, money, and effort to support its work. New boats were bought and new crews trained. The little lifesaving station grew.

Some of the members of the lifesaving station were unhappy that the building was so crude and poorly equipped. They felt that a more comfortable place should be provided as the first refuge of those saved from the sea. They replaced the emergency cots with beds and put better furniture in the enlarged building.

Now the lifesaving station became a popular gathering place for its members, and they decorated it beautifully because they used it as a sort of club. Fewer members were now interested in going to sea on life-saving missions, so they hired lifeboat crews to do this work. The lifesaving motif still prevailed in the club’s decorations, and there was a liturgical lifeboat in the room where the club’s initiations were held. About this time a large ship wrecked off the coast, and the hired crews brought in boatloads of cold, wet, and half-drowned people. They were dirty and sick. The beautiful new club was in chaos. So the property committee immediately had a shower house built outside the club where victims of shipwrecks could be cleaned up before coming inside.

At the next meeting, there was a split among the club membership. Most of the members wanted to stop the club’s lifesaving activities as being unpleasant and a hindrance to the normal social life of the club. Some members insisted upon lifesaving as their primary purpose and pointed out that they were still called a lifesaving station. But they were finally voted down and told that if they wanted to save the lives of all the various kinds of people who were shipwrecked in those waters, they could begin their own lifesaving station. So they did.

As the years went by, the new station experienced the same changes that had occurred in the old. It evolved into a club, and yet another lifesaving station was founded. History continued to repeat itself, and if you visit that seacoast today, you will find a number of exclusive clubs along that shore. Shipwrecks are frequent in those waters, but most of the people drown.[2]

The parable needs no explaining for anyone familiar with the contemporary church, either inside or outside it. What is not so plain, however, is what might be done about it short of cutting loose from whatever establishment you’re a part of and starting once more something that purports to be in line with the authentic and original purpose of the church.

That is where we might find Ephesians a useful resource.[3] At first glance, it is only about the relationship of Jewish and Gentile Christians in Paul’s time. But it is more than that. It is about the creation of a new humanity, a humanity that obliterates the dividing walls and hostilities that separate us into camps of “rescuers” and “victims” for example. In plain terms, the church is not a place but a community, formed in Christ Jesus who has reconciled all the different factions among people in his one body through the cross. There is a sort of “building” that can be called “church.” But it is not built of bricks and mortar, glass and wood.  It is indeed a
“house:” the household of God, the dwelling place of the holy.  Its foundation is the  apostles and prophets.  Its  cornerstone is Christ Jesus himself.  There is a structure, one that is joined together and grows into a holy temple. The church is that temple. You are that temple.  We are that temple. And that temple is the dwelling place of God.

Think about that. We are the dwelling place of God. Bishop Tutu once said that we should be genuflecting to one another because each of us is a tabernacle in which the Body of Christ lives. C. S. Lewis in Mere Christianity memorably said that it was the vocation of each Christian to be a “little Christ.”[4] An old hymn that I knew as a Methodist teen ended with the words, “Fill with thy spirit till all shall see Christ only, always, living in me.” Sometimes I can hardly get through the words of the old Prayer of Consecration in Rite One so moved am I by the words, “…made one body with him, that he may dwell is us, and we in him.”

We cannot be the Body of Christ and not act like Jesus. We cannot let ourselves off the hook by saying that he is an impossible model. He is not. Nor need we beat ourselves up because we aren’t perfect, or berate ourselves for being real, or feel like phonies because we have shadow sides that rise up to twice the size of our conscious will to be nice and good. No, to be like Jesus requires a daily practice of turning to him just as we are, owning every piece of ourselves, and setting an intention to be as accepting and loving of everything human as much as we possibly can, beginning with our very own selves. Someone once marveled to Mother Teresa how she loved the poor so lavishly and asked what she would recommend to someone who wanted to change the world. She is said to have replied, “If you want to change the world, go home and love your family.” Anyone that has any experience living in a family realizes two things. One is that loving one’s family is about the hardest job there is in the world sometimes. The other is that that job can be done with plenty of grace and a good sense of humor.

That is what being the church is all about. It is not making a pretty building in which God can be trapped for our own purposes. Being the church is embodying in ourselves the new humanity. It is to do what Christ did by breaking down the dividing walls of hostility and manifesting a reconciling love in his body.

When we begin taking seriously our vocation to be the dwelling place of God, as was and is Jesus, we won’t even need a course in lifesaving skills. All we will need to do is simply to be present, responding to each situation that arises. Do that, and you will see before your very eyes the church change from obsessing about its own survival to bringing life and healing right and left, just as the Master himself did.

That’s a promise.

A sermon preached on July 22, 2018, on Proper 11, Year B: 2 Samuel 7:1-14a; Ephesians 2:11-22; Mark 6:30-34, 53-56.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2018

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[1] 2 Samuel 7:1-14a.

[2] Dr. Theodore O. Wedel wrote the original version of this parable in 1953. This slightly altered version is on the internet at http://www.ecfvp.org/vestry-papers/article/272/parable-of-the-lifesaving-station, accessed July 21, 2018. Ordained as an Episcopal priest in 1930, Theodore Wedel was Canon Chancellor of the Washington National Cathedral in Washington, DC, and from 1943 until 1960 was Warden of The College of Preachers. He served in the 1950’s as president of the Episcopal Church's House of Deputies.

[3] Ephesians 2:11-22.

[4] The entire quotation from Mere Christianity, runs thus: “Now the whole offer which Christianity makes is this: that we can, if we let God have His way, come to share in the life of Christ. If we do, we shall then be sharing a life which was begotten, not made, which always existed and always will exist. Christ is the Son of God. If we share in this kind of life we also shall be sons of God. We shall love the Father as He does and the Holy Ghost will arise in us. He came to this world and became a man in order to spread to other men the kind of life He has—by what I call "good infection." Every Christian is to become a little Christ. The whole purpose of becoming a Christian is simply nothing else.”

Joy

John 20:1-18

            But as yet they did not know the scripture that he must rise from the dead.

            Had he not told them?  How could he not have said what to expect?  But their world had no place within it for a crucified Messiah, and none at all for a Messiah who was raised from the dead.  So they could have heard it from him a dozen times and been no more prepared. 

            For if the resurrection is anything at all, it is a surprise.  Long before it is anything at all about life after death for you and me, it is a surprise.  Before it is ever a subject of debate or a theoretical construct or a stumbling block to those who know nothing outside the provable and verifiable, it is a surprise. 

            They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.  Sometimes the surprise is bad news.  And you know that bad news, because one or more times, perhaps myriads of times, you have heard it or felt it or seen it.  You heard it when some voice said, “Malignant.”  You saw the doctor shaking her head and heard her say, “I’m sorry.  We did everything we could.”  You went to work one Monday morning and found a pink slip you could barely look at.  You opened the envelope that read, “We regret to inform you…”  You heard it when he looked at you and said, “Divorce.”  You answered the door in the middle of the night and there stood two men in military uniform.  Someone had taken away your Lord, your life, and you had no earthly idea of what to do, nor how to do it, because you did not know where they had laid him. 

            And it was all the harder because day was about to break.  It is hard to die when all the birds are singing in the sky.  It is hard to see anything to celebrate when your body is battered or your whole world is shattered.  So all you can do is just cry.  “Why are you crying, ma’am, sir?”  Because they have taken away my Lord and I do not know where they have laid him.

            If your heart has never been broken, you are in for a surprise.  It assuredly will be.  And all those stories like the binding of Isaac will make sense because you will know that you are living them.  And the Passion of Christ will no longer be a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing.  You will see that the betrayal, the denial, the flight from reality, the last somber supper with what is left of your life are the stories that you could write because they are yours. 

            The impulse is to run.  Not necessarily to run away from anything, but to run to see what the siren is screaming about, or what the origin of the blaze is, or what has brought about such pitch-black darkness.  We don’t think twice before we run to see if it is true, this terrible tragedy.  Disciples run. At times like that we do not necessarily recall what the scriptures say, if indeed they say anything at all.  Certainly no stock phrases do us much good.  No pat answers comfort us.  And there is no time to untangle all that stuff that we have not figured out of the meaning of.  All we know is that what we had clung to and loved and wanted to go on forever is suddenly dead.  Unbelievable.  Does no one understand?  Pain is isolating.  Grief more so. 

            The scene befuddles.  There are the grave clothes where the body should be.  And there is the little napkin, all rolled up in a place by itself.  There is the slab on which the corpse had lain. Little mementos that meant nothing two days ago—a pair of shoes he played golf in, her apron hanging on the kitchen door, the little trophy sitting atop a pile of papers on her desk, his toy from two Christmases ago—things so insignificant, grave clothes, napkins, signal loss.  The world is messed up, turned around, out of joint, O cursèd spite! 

            The sun keeps rising. 

            Is it really what we thought?  It can’t be true, can it?  Let me look one more time.  She stoops, sticks her lantern through the small opening, sees two angels.  Oddly she is neither frightened nor comforted.  What difference do angels make when they have taken away the Lord of angels?  And, like all the people yet to come around bringing their platters and platitudes, they ask a stupid question, “Why are you weeping?”  Are you not an optimist?  Can you not see that this is just a passing moment, that everything will get better?  Et cetera.  She says what is beginning to sound like a mantra.  “They have taken away my Lord,…”  She wants to spit out the words but they stick in her throat with the sobs.

            Then, a presence.  Crouched down in the little anteroom of the tomb chamber, she can see the feet of a man outside the tiny doorway.  Whose feet they are she does not know, but they look like the feet of —must be the cemetery caretaker, the man that trims the bushes and whitewashes tombs.  She hears him ask like all the others, “Why, why…?”  And she finally thinks that maybe he can help because maybe he knows.

Don’t you understand her flash of hope?  Maybe at last there is something, some doctor, some treatment, some source of money, some something that can fix it, fix him or her or me.  And in a rush of words, not yet looking up or out of the tomb, she says, “If you have taken him away, tell me, and I will…”  I will.  I will. 

            Something like an eternity goes by between her last word and his next one.  Like C. S. Lewis’ bus trip one day in London, we start the journey not believing in anything, and get off the bus fully convinced that everything we thought was backwards.  He called it, “Surprised by Joy.” 

            “Mary.”

            Oh, my God.  My Lord and my God! Rabbouni!  Surprised is too light a word.  The sound of her very own name takes her breath away.  Her hand goes to her mouth and the tears momentarily stop.  She wants to hug him, hold him, touch him, but for some reason he says no.  For now she simply hears his commission, his command.  “Go to my brothers and tell them…”

            So begins the resurrection of Mary, the resurrection of Peter, and of the Beloved disciple.   Thus begins the resurrection of Tim and Barbara and Debbie and Raphael and Joseph and Tina.  Because in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, dozens and hundreds and thousands, and gazillions feel the earth quaking from some stupendous, indescribable Truth that roars when it awakens.  We all hear our names, our very own names, pronounced by the One who made us.  We are not fixed; we are changed.  We are not guaranteed anything, but loved like everything.  And we become not a bunch of isolated individuals, with only our own pain and suffering to attend to, but a community that tells, that teaches, that baptizes, that preaches, that feeds and heals and celebrates.  It is not that nothing will ever go wrong again, but that everything that could ever go wrong has been overwritten with a Power so strong it seems rather pointless to try to describe it.

            Don’t you see?  It is not his story and his resurrection.  It is theirs.  It is yours.  It is mine.  Broken, grieving, wintry hearts we continue to carry.   Weeping may spend the night, but joy comes in the morning.  Scars we have and will always bear.  But the whole world changes the moment we hear something or someone uniquely calling our names.  And the only thing we know to do is to gasp, “Rabbouni!  I knew it, I knew it!”

© Frank Gasque Dunn 2014

But Deliver Us

 Exodus 3:1-15

            In his introduction to our book for Lent, Speaking Christian, Marcus Borg tells us that when he left the Midwest and went to the West Coast to teach, he began one of his classes by stating that in order to understand Christianity, you have to understand its roots in Judaism.  Immediately a hand shot up.  “What’s Judaism?” a student wanted to know.  Borg began to explain Judaism by referring to Moses.  Another raised a hand.  “Who’s Moses?” 

            I suspect that there may well be a good slice of this congregation today in the same predicament in which Borg’s students found themselves.  You may know what Judaism is (or not) and you may know who Moses was (or not), but I suspect that few people could articulate exactly why we would be hearing about Moses on this particular Sunday. 

            So we have our work cut out for us.  The second and third Sundays in Lent, this season in which we are moving towards a celebration of “the Paschal Mystery,” a name we give to Jesus’ death and resurrection, are invariably about Abraham and Moses.  That is because in our holy history, Abraham and Moses represent the two pillars on which our covenant relationship with God rests.  What Borg was trying to tell his students is that there is no way of understanding the importance we Christians attach to Jesus and the “New” Covenant made through him without understanding the “Old Covenant” in which God creates a people through Abraham and delivers them from bondage to freedom through Moses.  By the way, “new” is not necessarily good and “old” is not necessarily bad.  There is nothing shameful about being old, even if you are a covenant.  I’m saying that because it has become fashionable in recent times to avoid calling the Old Testament the Old Testament or Covenant.  No matter what you call it, it gets a certain amount of bad press in Christian circles because it is quite wrongly supposed that the Old Testament’s God is pretty wretched in contrast to the rather cuddly God of the New.  Nothing could be further from the truth regarding either Testament.

            Now the reason that all this business about Old and New Covenants (better known as “Testaments” in the sub-titles of the Bible), is that it is all one story.  It makes no sense to skip act one of a play because all you want to see is act two, especially if there is no way of understanding the second act without the first.  It can also work the other way around.  Sometimes what it revealed in the second act or the third clarifies and indeed interprets what was happening in the first act.  So Paul, writing to the Corinthians in the Letter you heard read a few minutes ago, uses the language and experience of the New Covenant to understand what was happening in the Old Covenant.  I’m not so sure that Paul was all that successful in reinterpreting the Old Covenant, but give him an A for at least trying to see the relevance of past experience for his own time. 

            If we had to choose one chapter in the entire Old Testament that is the lynchpin of the whole thing, it would arguably be Exodus 3, the story you heard this morning.  Why?  Because the deliverance of Israel from slavery in Egypt is the formative event in its history.  Before that, we can’t even be sure that there was a history, to be honest.  Yes, we have stories, important ones.  But we can say with some assurance that the nation of Israel was born in the Exodus from Egypt.  All the scriptures are written in light of that conviction.  When centuries later a scribe wrote, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” he was writing about the God he knew from the story of the Exodus.  The creator God was the liberating God. 

            Exodus:  the way out, the coming out of God’s people.  It all began one day when Moses was out keeping the flock of Jethro, his father-in-law.  Moses had gotten there ironically because he had indeed escaped from Egypt and from a murder conviction that was likely coming his way.  If you read the whole story of Moses’ encounter with God at the burning bush on Mount Horeb or Sinai, it is full of humor and pathos.  We feel for Moses who is being called to do something indescribably difficult, namely lead a horde of slaves out from under the control of a very powerful state.  But the guts of the story is not what Moses says but what God says.  “I have observed the sufferings of my people in Egypt…  I have heard their cry.  I know their sufferings.  I have come down to deliver them.”  I have come down to deliver them.  That one phrase sets the stage for all that is to come.  God is a God of deliverance.  God observes, hears, knows, and delivers. 

            It would be hard to overestimate the importance of those verbs, because from then on, the story unfolds a relationship that God has with the oppressed, with the downtrodden, with the marginalized, with the non-people, the outcasts, the vulnerable, the poor.  We never ever hear the Bible saying that God somehow prefers that we should be slaves or downtrodden or oppressed.  We hear instead how God makes a people and challenges them to share God’s concern for the little people—children, strangers, foreigners without citizenship, the socially outcast, the politically powerless.  The scriptures make no bones about what God is up to.  It is called righteousness.  But righteousness in the biblical vocabulary has nothing at all to do with moral rectitude, let alone with personal purity.  It has to do with right relationships, the goal of which is always to bring about a redress of wrongs, a healing of broken bonds, and the establishing of justice.  That is in fact what justice means:  the lining up of relationships in their rightful order and proper balance. 

            Now if you can get that far, then it is perhaps possible to begin to see why it is that God is so intent on delivering people.  Sometimes people simply need to be delivered from oppression, and they need someone to intervene on their behalf.  Note that God apparently cannot, or will not, do this alone—at least not among humans.  It seems to be the divine preference that people, Moses for example, be called up and enlisted in the program, because it is through humans that humans are most likely to be delivered  and thus to be changed.  That is not to say that God is not a hands-on God; but it is to say that God works within the very limits, as well as with the capacities, that we humans manifest.  After all God made us and the world the way we are, not the way we might wish to be.

            Let me be clear about what is at stake here.  The overarching story, not only about Moses and the Children of Israel, but about Jesus and us, is a story about deliverance.  The whole kit and caboodle is about deliverance, all kinds of deliverance on all levels, deliverance from the power of evil, deliverance from our own self-sustaining neuroses, deliverance from illness, deliverance from sin (we’ll come back to that one, so hold on), deliverance from evil, deliverance from death, especially deliverance from death as a scary monster whom we have to fear.  Trouble is, most of the time we are not only not aware that we can be delivered; we don’t really imagine that we need to be delivered.  I know I don’t speak for all of you, but really:  if you are relatively affluent—rich by the world’s standards—have what you think you need or at least able to get it without too much trouble; if you are white, straight, well-educated, or some combination of all of that, what on earth do you need to be delivered from?  And what would you like to be delivered to except more of what you already have?  If you are already relatively powerful, accepted, affirmed, why would you find deliverance an attractive notion at all?  Does it not sound like the title of an old movie, a concept more at home among the snake-handling sects of Appalachia, the province of weird exorcists than anything you identify with? 

            Ah!  You may think that because you don’t fit the mold of this litany of characteristics I’ve named, you are immune to being blasé about deliverance.  But, truth be told, you and I are most likely in need of deliverance from things we at best vaguely recognize.  And usually they are not the problems that we’d put first on our list of priorities to be addressed:  good job, good money, decent housing, affordable health care, happy family life, personal fulfillment.  Let me share with you a telling example.  Some of you are aware that I have been working with a small group of you lately on the matter of violence, especially gun violence.  We drafted a letter and shared it with a number of church leaders in our diocese, calling on our diocesan council to look carefully at the way we invest church funds.  Our belief is that the church ought not to be making money off of firearms, munitions, and other means of killing people.  Someone pointed out that our position might be untenably broad.  After all, were we suggesting that not only private guns but military weapons not be the subjects of investment?  Good question.  But the person, a very thoughtful person I might add, went on to ask if we were prepared to argue for disinvestment in Quaker Oats if they were somehow themselves involved in companies that produce ammunitions and weapons.  What is more, how can we draw the line?  That well illustrates the fact that, like it or not, we are enmeshed in an endless complex net that cannot be easily untangled into “good” and “bad.”  That is the story of the world in which we live.  Whether it is personal life or business life or corporate involvement or government programs or the judicial system or the educational system or the banking system or the medical world, we are involved in networks that far transcend individual human initiatives.  Even the best of them corrupt and destroy the creatures of God, and not just human creatures.  It is not just personal sin that we need to be delivered from.  That is relatively easy to deal with compared with these vast and powerful economic, political, and social systems in which we are usually pawns and players, no matter how personally powerful—or good—we might be. 

            Is it possible to be delivered from such a predicament at all, short of the total destruction of society as we know it?  Short of our own death?  Well, no, and yes.  If you read our own holy story, you will see that, although the Israelites had an exodus out of Egypt, they did not necessarily become immune to other kinds of slavery.  Over the coming centuries they were to experience corruption, rebellion, massive government dysfunction, wars, forced labor, deportation, exile, serious religious regression, and spiritual malaise.  From any one of these they needed deliverance on a level they themselves could not supply.  Over and over again they had to turn to God, learning many things that affirmed the old ways, but many things that pushed them across new and frightening frontiers.  And still these our fathers and mothers found themselves trapped in behaviors and mindsets that defied anything but the most radically divine deliverance—witness Jesus. 

            But there is also the “yes” answer to the question of whether we can actually be delivered from our predicament.  And it might not be quite what you think.  When St. Paul, writing to the Romans, asked, “Who will deliver me from this body of sin and death?”  he was not merely talking about his human body.  He was talking about the entire existence of life in this world lived apart from God.  It is personal and it is also communal.  “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” he exclaims.  Jesus, through his death and resurrection, breaks through the net which has us trapped.  And while we still have to live, inevitably within this trap where good is on the defensive and evil is always lurking to subvert good purposes to its own twisted ends, we can little by little find deliverance by getting on the side of God.  We can intentionally hearken to the drumbeat calling us to act like God—defying Pharaoh, listening to the cries of the distressed, paying attention to the sufferings of the world (not just our own), even enlisting in Operation Deliverance ourselves.  That is what it means to be baptized into Christ’s death and resurrection.  That is what it means to take up our cross and follow Jesus.  That is what it means to thumb our nose at the evil powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God. 

            In C. S. Lewis’ famous story The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,  Aslan the magnificent lion lies on the great stone table having given his life for the sake of freeing Narnia.  You and I understand that Aslan is in fact Christ, bound on his cross.  And we might well understand that Aslan is also in a sense you and I, tied up in systems that choke and stifle us, bound by forces that keep us enslaved.  Susan and Lucy, two of Aslan’s admirers, grief-stricken at seeing the great animal muzzled and tied by the spiteful rabble that has killed him, want to untie him in one last act to respect his dignity. 
They are unable.  But there is a tiny movement going on in the grass under their feet.  It turns out to be mice, which the girls think are rather pathetically trying to untie Aslan not realizing he is dead.  But as the sun rises in the dawn, dozens and even hundreds of little field mice gnaw through the ropes that have bound the noble lion.  Suddenly there is a shattering noise, the great stone table on which he lay is broken in two from end to end, and Aslan appears behind them, free, alive, real, risen, strong.  All those little mice had played their part.  They had in their own way contributed to his deliverance.  And because Aslan was delivered from his bondage, he is free to bring Susan and Lucy and all who follow him into his own freedom.

            That is our story.  You never can tell what unlikely creatures or mysterious developments will deliver you and set you free.  But you may be sure that if you throw in your lot with the God who has come to deliver the world from its bondage, you will finally be free and there will be no turning back.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2013

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