Homily: The Second Sunday after the Epiphany [January 15, 2023] St. Alban's, Westwood

 

            One of the many connections I have with your former rector, Susan Klein, is that she followed me as vicar, then rector, of St. Aidan’s Church in Malibu. For many years Susan and I have been good friends, and we are both members of a clergy colleague group. Over the years we’ve had occasion to discuss our time in Malibu, especially the revolving door of “seekers” who come into the church, look around for a while, and then leave. After my stint in Malibu I served for many years at All Saints, Pasadena, and part of my job there was to oversee the Covenant Class, an eight-week course for newcomers that brought people into the life of the parish. What we learned there was that, after a few weeks, about half the people who had enthusiastically joined the church just drifted away to try out another faith community.

            My experiences in Malibu and Pasadena led me, over time, to understand that many people are spiritually restless and are driven to explore a number of religious traditions, Christianity among them. As Susan once said, “The problem isn’t that people today don’t believe anything. The problem is they believe everything”, putting Christianity on an equal plane with belief in Astrology, Crystals, and Numerology. Many people come toward us, but only some of them will stick with us.

            Today’s Gospel [John 1: 29-42] brings this issue into focus. Two disciples of John the Baptist are seeking the Messiah when they encounter Jesus:

The next day John again was standing with two of his disciples, and as he watched Jesus walk by, he exclaimed, “Look, here is the Lamb of God!” The two disciples heard him say this, and they followed Jesus. When Jesus turned and saw them following, he said to them, “What are you looking for?” They said to him, “Rabbi” (which translated means Teacher), “where are you staying?” He said to them, “Come and see.”

 

These two disciples (Andrew and one unnamed) are, like modern seekers, restless. They make the move from John the Baptist to Jesus without missing a beat. They are ready to follow anyone who might offer a new hope of healing and peace.

What I find interesting in today’s gospel is the neat irony revealed in what happens next:

They came and saw where he was staying, and they remained with him that day. It was about four o’clock in the afternoon. One of the two who heard John speak and followed him was Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother. He first found his brother Simon and said to him, “We have found the Messiah” (which is translated Anointed). He brought Simon to Jesus, who looked at him and said, “You are Simon son of John. You are to be called Cephas” (which is translated Peter).

Andrew and his colleague have been seeking the Messiah. It turns out that, all the while, the Messiah has been seeking them. They have expended a lot of frenetic energy looking for God. It turns out that God already had them in sight.

We talk a lot in our culture about “spiritual journeys” and “seeking”. Perhaps the wisdom of this story from early on in John’s Gospel has to do not with looking but with being found. 

There has been a lot of talk this week about Prince Harry’s new autobiography, Spare. From what I gather, it’s an autobiography filled with many grievances. I was intrigued when Patti Davis, the daughter of Ronald Reagan, wrote an op-ed in The New York Times last Saturday called “Prince Harry and the Virtue of Silence” [“Prince Harry and the Value of Silence”, New York Times, January 7, 2023]. As the daughter of an American president if not a king, Patti Davis knows a lot about what it means to be aggrieved about one’s treatment in a powerful and famous family.

In her article, she says in part:

Years ago, someone asked me what I would say to my younger self if I could. Without hesitating I answered: “That’s easy. I’d have said, ‘Be quiet.’” Not forever. But until I could stand back and look at things through a wider lens. Until I understood that words have consequences, and they last a really long time. 

 

Now I don’t want to equate this morning’s disciples with the children of a king and president. But there is something a bit frantic about all four of them. The two biblical characters seem agitated. The two modern ones feel aggrieved. They all act out of a lack of confidence in their status as loved children both of fragile human parents and of God. They are looking for something or someone outside of themselves to validate them.

Over the course of their lives I am sure that Andrew and the unnamed disciple learned to relax and let Jesus find them. And given the wisdom on display in her op-ed essay, I will bet that Patti Davis understands that our approach to wholeness is best grounded less in our own complaint than in an openness to what might be coming toward us. I sense that of the four, Harry is still in process and will, perhaps, get there one day.

The disciples were searching for the Messiah. The Messiah was searching for them. What would a person of long acquaintance with the faith say to a seeker? In Patti Davis’s words, here’s the first step: “Be quiet”.

Being quiet is an easier concept to envision than enact these days. So much of our common life is taken up with chatter. It’s not only the hundreds of advertising messages we receive each day. It’s also the amount of what we might generously term “discourse” in social media and other communications forms that assaults us. It seems like we don’t know what we think until we say it. But with everyone talking all the time, who is really taking any of this chatter in? Is anybody listening to any of this?

Early on in our passage, John the Baptist sees Jesus and calls him the “Lamb of God”. In its very earliest days, the Christian community chose the lamb as its symbol. It was only after Christianity became the religion of the Roman empire that the church discarded the lamb and embraced the cross as its brand. It’s easy to understand why. For hundreds of years we were a marginal movement. Suddenly we were the state’s official religion. Think about it: the lamb is a symbol of weakness. The cross is a symbol of power.

When we’re frantically looking around for God, we are often more drawn to power than vulnerability—to the cross rather than the lamb. Andrew and his friend are on the lookout for a Messiah, a king, a representative of power and authority. Instead of a potentate they find Jesus, a very unlikely Messiah. This lamb of God does not proclaim himself. He sees and knows these two by name. Jesus finds these restless seekers in spite of themselves.

A little autobiography here: tomorrow is Martin Luther King Day, and King had everything to do with my becoming a Christian. I was a freshman in college in the spring of 1968, and in high school and college I had read everything that King wrote. But I had never even entered a church building. King was assassinated on Maundy Thursday, and on Easter I went to a church for the first time in my life to try and make sense of his murder and what it all might mean. Martin Luther King’s witness had found me in high school, and in college his death brought me first into a church and gradually over time into the Christian community. Thinking back, I realize I didn’t really have much to do with it. God was looking for me, and found me through the life, death, and witness first of Martin Luther King and then through the life, death, and resurrection of the one he followed, Jesus of Nazareth, the lamb of God.

At the close of today’s Gospel reading, Jesus meets Andrew’s brother Simon, and tells him that from now on he will be called “Peter”.  In almost every language save English, “peter” means “rock”. Even in this first meeting, Jesus sees something essential about Simon’s nature that he brings out by giving him this new name. This story is not only about God’s search for us. It is about the depth of God’s knowledge of who we are at our core. 

If you find yourself on a frenetic search for God, for meaning and hope in your life, your work, your relationships, you couldn’t do better than follow Patti Davis’s advice to Prince Harry. “Be quiet.” God is on the lookout for you, and (one way or another) God is going to find you. God already loves you and knows what you need. All the spiritual flailing around we do will only get in the way of the inevitable deep and lasting connection we all seek.

God will not rest in the search for you. Your job, a hard one sometimes, is to stop, and listen, and be quiet so that you may be found. Amen.

 

 

 

 

 

Homily: Holy Name [January 1, 2023] St. Alban's, Westwood

            I am not a big believer in New Year’s resolutions. My skepticism results from my observation that, at least in my case, they have never worked. Whatever success I have had in changing self-destructive habits has not come from the dropping of the Times Square ball on New Year’s Eve. Quitting smoking, losing weight, getting in shape—it’s possible to do these things, but they require more than mere the tick of a clock. Aside from parades and bowl games, there is not much about this holiday for me to celebrate except the switch from one calendar to another.

            But that is not to say that January 1 is an unimportant day. In the Christian calendar this day was historically called the “Feast of the Circumcision”, a term deriving from today’s gospel account of Mary and Joseph bringing the infant Jesus to be circumcised on the eighth day of his life. As in Christian baptism, so in Jewish circumcision, this ritual signified both belonging and identity. Both rites culminate in being given and claiming a name.

When we adopted a new prayer book in the 1970s, we changed the name of today’s holiday from the “Feast of the Circumcision” to the “The Holy Name of our Lord Jesus Christ”. There were good reasons to do this—only half the population will feel a personal connection to the biblical rite of circumcision—but in so doing we’ve lost some of what’s being said by the Holy Family’s obedience to Jewish law. For Jews, circumcision is both an initiatory rite and a sign of God’s promise enacted anew in each generation. In a time of increasing antisemitism it is important to remember that Jesus was Jewish, and that we can only properly understand the meaning of his life, death, resurrection, and ministry in the context of Jewish history and expectation.

            But his name is important, too. “What's in a name?” asks Juliet of Romeo; “that which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” [Romeo and Juliet, Act 2, Scene 2] Maybe, but you and I know just how important our names are to us. Back when I used to lead retreats and conferences, I discovered the best of all possible icebreaker exercises to introduce people to each other:  ask each person to tell the story of how they were given their first name. You will be surprised that each person’s name has a story, that so much history and meaning are packed into our names. 

            Take the name “Jesus”, for example. Earlier in Luke’s Gospel [Luke 1:31] the angel Gabriel had said to Mary, “And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus.” Why that particular name?

            In Aramaic, the spoken form of Hebrew in first century Palestine, the name we translate as “Jesus” was actually spoken as “Jeshua”. And “Jeshua” is the Aramaic version of the Hebrew name “Joshua”. Now for Jews both then and now, the name “Joshua” has religious significance. In the story of the Exodus, it was Moses who led the Jews out of slavery in Egypt through the 40-year period of wandering in the wilderness. But Moses did not lead the people into the promised land. That task was left to his successor Joshua.

            For first-century Jews, the name “Joshua/Jeshua” has saving significance. Joshua led the Jews from slavery to freedom by crossing over the river Jordan into Palestine. As the new Joshua/Jeshua, Jesus leads humanity from death to life beginning with his baptism by John in the Jordan’s waters. What’s in a name? For Jews and Christians, a name means a lot. The name Jesus carries a whole history of sacred meaning. It also carries a promise. By naming the infant Jesus, Mary and Joseph are completing the angel’s promise.  As Gabriel also said to Mary at the Annunciation,

He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David. He will reign over the house of Jacob for ever, and of his kingdom there will be no end. [Luke 1: 32-33]

 

In today’s act of circumcision and naming, God reveals Jesus as the bearer of a promise both for Israel and for humanity at large. This new Joshua will bring us from slavery to freedom, from fear to courage, from death to life.

If this all were only a trip down history lane we would have an interesting take on Jewish history and ritual. But there is much more going on here. In the church we reenact the naming of Jesus on the eighth day of his life in our sacrament of Baptism. Some people are baptized as infants, others as adults. Some people never get baptized at all. Like the Jewish rite of circumcision, the Christian baptism service celebrates both belonging and identity. As followers of Jesus, each of us is given both a community and a name. Like the infant Jesus we are connected now to a story much larger than our own. And like that same child, the precious nature of our identity is revealed for all to see. Our destiny is now bound up with the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus and the community which bears his purpose in the world. And our own individual dignity and worth are now proclaimed by the simple affirmation of our names.

“What’s in a name?” Quite a lot, it seems. Whether you like your name or not, you know how important, over time, it has become. Your name has a story. It has a meaning. It connects you to your family and community. And it uniquely denotes who you are. At bottom Christianity is about two big things: it is about God’s promise of a hopeful destiny for the world, and it is about the unique dignity and worth of every one of God’s creatures. You and I are participants in a story that has a lot of ups and downs but will, in the end, have a glorious outcome. We are important to God not only because of that big story but also each in our own right. We are made in God’s image, known and loved in Jesus, and signified as precious by the bearing of our names. The Holy Name of our Lord Jesus Christ turns out not to be about him only but also about us. We, too, are bearers of God’s love, justice, and purpose in the world, even if we have weird names. 

Several years ago, the British newspaper The Guardian {March 10, 2015)  ran an article with the following headline "High noon for Gary: why is the once-popular name on the verge of extinction." As the copy went on to explain, "The name is dying out, and not even Garys Cooper or Lineker seem capable of saving it. Why do parents hate it now, and what can we do about it?"

For someone named Gary, as I am, this piece was a bristling read:

Parents just don’t like the name any more. Gary reached its peak in the US in the early 1950s, when it was at one time the 12th most popular boy’s name, with more than 38,000 appearing every year. There were even 90 girls named Gary in 1947.

I remember being one of several Garys in my elementary school class. Clearly the name was overused. But over time fashions in names change, and in the last decades we Garys haven’t been the only losers:

In 2013, English and Welsh parents created just 17 Roys, 15 Keiths, seven Kevins and three Traceys. Compare that with 110 Jaxsons, 167 Romeos, 2,211 Siennas, 3,264 Leos and 4,511 Oscars.

 

            Several of my English friends sent me copies of this article when it ran in 2015. And, if our names were only badges of our fashion, I would find the disappearance of my name cause for alarm. If the name Romeo is on the upswing, it may turn out that Juliet was right. “What IS in a name?”

            I have never met a Romeo. Nor, for that matter, have I met a Jeshua. But, as one who tries to follow Jesus, I have met and come to know and love myriad individual people each of whose names have come to signify a complex human person who bears a unique and precious identity. I am grateful that Mary and Joseph followed the angel Gabriel’s instructions in naming their child Jesus. I am grateful that Jesus has become the name which signifies the love, justice, and compassion of God at work in the world. And I am grateful that the name and story of Jesus have become your name and my name, your story and my story. 

            Know it or not, you and I are now caught up in the Jesus story, and our names signify that his destiny will be ours. “He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David. He will reign over the house of Jacob for ever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.” This Christmas news is the gift of Jesus’s Holy Name and yours. Juliet, a fictional character, was wrong. Tiny Tim, another fictional character, was right. God bless us every one! Amen.