Isaiah 49:1-7; John 1:29-42
If you’ve been around this parish for more than a day, you’ve probably noticed we have a lot of Davids walking around. We even have multiple Father Davids. There’s Fr. David Wayland, who is often referred to as David the Tall. That would make me David the Short, although I prefer the traditional ecclesiastical title, David the Less. And that’s not to mention David the father of Dahlia, Phineas, and Truman. We have David the Teacher, David the Tenor, David the Pilot, David the Artist. There’s David the Mountain Biker, one of our star acolytes, and David the Lively, who sits in the back at the 9 o’clock service, beaming with smiles and exuberance. It can be hard to distinguish them all in conversation. Poor Mo. Kathleen often has to speak in mouthfuls: “I was late to my meeting with David Stoddart because David Sturges called, and then on my way over from Lucia House I ran into David Walther, and . . .” Well, you get the point.
I love our name. It’s Hebrew, and it means “beloved.” And I say all of this because names have been on my mind a good bit as I have pondered the readings for today. Isaiah says in our first lesson, The LORD called me before I was born, while I was in my mother’s womb he named me. I am pretty certain that when the Bible speaks of God naming people, it means more than God dictating what legal name will appear on someone’s birth certificate. In Scripture, names often reveal a person’s essence, the truth of who they really are. One of the epic moments of revelation occurs when God reveals God’s name to Moses at the burning bush: the great, unpronounceable I AM. And many significant moments of naming happen throughout the Bible, most of them initiated by God. We see an example of that in our Gospel this morning, when Jesus, God’s Son, looks at Simon with his no doubt penetrating gaze and says, “You may be called Simon, but I name you Cephas, Peter, Rocky,” seeing something in him that Peter probably didn’t yet see in himself.
We might try to distance ourselves from all of this by thinking that such divine naming applies only to a few special people, to a handful of prophets and saints, but not to us. That, however, would not be true. It’s not like God just loves a few special people, and no one else matters to her. Quite the opposite. There’s a passage from the second chapter of Revelation that speaks to this. Urging people to persevere in faith, the writer quotes God as saying, To everyone who conquers I will give some of the hidden manna, and I will give a white stone, and on the white stone is written a new name that no one knows except the one who receives it (Rev. 2:17). It can be hard to understand the symbolism in the Book of Revelation, but this particular image is striking: God will us a new name which only we and God will know. In other words, through God, each of us will finally know the fullness of who we are. As Paul writes in First Corinthians: Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known (1 Cor. 13:12). God has already named each one of us: we are just in the process of discovering what that name is.
The challenge is that we like to name ourselves. And by that I mean we like to determine and establish our own identity. Each one of us has a story we tell ourselves, filled with successes and failures, gifts and flaws: I excel at math; I stink at soccer; I make great chili; I procrastinate too much at work; I get angry at my kids too often; I’m a successful businessman; I’m a lousy golfer; I really hate my haircut; and so on and so forth, a continuous chattering stream of analysis and commentary that goes on in our heads which we think of as “our selves.” And these things matter to some extent: they are a part of our human experience. But they don’t ultimately define us. All these qualities about ourselves that we like or detest do not name us. Part of growing spiritually and living more fully in Christ is letting go of our constant and sometimes frantic efforts to establish some kind of identity of our own and instead letting our true identity emerge over time – allowing God to name us.
That is not the work of a week or a year, of course, but a life-long process. And certainly worship, prayer, acts of love and service are all essential parts of that process. But it is also crucial that we have a light touch with ourselves. Our failures that loom so large and our successes that seem so important don’t matter that much. Peter denied Jesus three times, and he had moments of cowardice and failures in leadership after the resurrection. But he proved over time to be a rock, to have a core of courage and strength that led him in the end to be crucified for Christ. His failures did not define him: Jesus named him correctly. On the other extreme, Paul was a super successful Pharisee, a man who, by all outward appearances, perfectly observed the demands of the Law. But that success meant nothing. In Philippians, he writes: Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus as my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him (Phil. 3:7-9a), Be found in him. Paul let go of his old self and found his true identity in Christ. And in doing so, he unleashed limitless reserves of love, joy, and peace.
I realize I cannot offer some easy three-step or twenty-step program to find our true identity in God. But I can say this: if we are feeling weighed down or crushed by our failures and flaws, we can relax and let go of that. Not only are we forgiven, but there is far more to us than those failures and flaws. And if we find ourselves clinging to our successes and constantly trying to boost our egos with more successes, we can relax and let go of that. We are of infinite value even when we are not perfect or fail to succeed at all. There is far more to us than our achievements. We are God’s beloved, each one of us called by God, each one of us named by God. It is the adventure of a lifetime to find who we really are in Christ until we receive that white stone with our true name on it, a name God already knows and is waiting patiently for us to discover.
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