Changing Names: Sermon for Lent 2B, 2018.

Changing Names

Sermon by Loren Crow, Ph.D., preached at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church on 25 February, 2018.

Scripture Readings: Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16; Psalm 22:23-31; Romans 4:13-25; Mark 8:31-38

I’d like to begin this sermon with a poem by one of the great theological poets of the 20th century, T.S. Eliot. 

The Naming of Cats, by T. S. Eliot

The Naming of Cats is a difficult matter,

It isn't just one of your holiday games;

You may think at first I'm as mad as a hatter

When I tell you, a cat must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES.

First of all, there's the name that the family use daily,

Such as Peter, Augustus, Alonzo or James,

Such as Victor or Jonathan, George or Bill Bailey—

All of them sensible everyday names.

There are fancier names if you think they sound sweeter,

Some for the gentlemen, some for the dames:

Such as Plato, Admetus, Electra, Demeter—

But all of them sensible everyday names.

But I tell you, a cat needs a name that's particular,

A name that's peculiar, and more dignified,

Else how can he keep up his tail perpendicular,

Or spread out his whiskers, or cherish his pride?

Of names of this kind, I can give you a quorum,

Such as Munkustrap, Quaxo, or Coricopat,

Such as Bombalurina, or else Jellylorum-

Names that never belong to more than one cat.

But above and beyond there's still one name left over,

And that is the name that you never will guess;

The name that no human research can discover—

But THE CAT HIMSELF KNOWS, and will never confess.

When you notice a cat in profound meditation,

The reason, I tell you, is always the same:

His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation

Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name:

His ineffable effable

Effanineffable

Deep and inscrutable singular Name

I am fascinated by the power of names. Adam gave names to all the animals, and whatever he called a thing, that was its name. Naming is about understanding things, classifying them into groups that have some kind of meaning in our world view, a mystical, almost magical ability that we human beings all have. We would be unable to understand anything at all if not for this power. What a marvelous ability!

But it has a dark side. As fascinated as I am by our astonishing ability to divide the world up and name it, I am disturbed by how often naming has the effect of hiding the truth, shaming heroic efforts, justifying evil, demeaning the beautiful. I once heard it said that the subject of Da Vinci’s famous painting, the Mona Lisa, was a prostitute, a name that carried shame with it like dirty car grease and fouled the speaker’s perception of the painting’s beauty. If you’ve ever been at the receiving end of this kind of naming, the kind that makes you feel worthless and hopeless, you won’t soon forget it. I confess to you now that I am guilty of that kind of naming more times than I can count. Maybe you are, too. Sticks and stones do break bones, but names can injure people’s deeper selves in places untouched by mere physical injury.

But names don’t just have the power to degrade and demean. Their mystic potency is able to summon, as if from nothing, nobility and glory previously unobserved. Before Adam ever named anything, God called every good thing into being by naming it. And God renames people in Scripture often enough that it becomes almost cliché: Hosea’s children get renamed twice, the first time for judgment and the second for reconciliation; Jesus’ disciple Simon becomes Kephas (or its Greek form, Peter). Sometimes it doesn’t matter much, but most often we would be making a serious mistake in reading if we failed to think of those renamings as anything less than world-changing for the characters. Imagine Jacob’s paradigm shift when the angel he’s been wrestling with names him Israel because he’s really been wrestling with God. Think how jarring it must have been for Peter when Jesus said, “Get behind me, Satan” — sternly correcting Peter’s mistaken belief in a Messiah who triumphs without suffering. 

We heard another one of those stories this morning in the Old Testament reading, when God renames Abram and his wife Sarai, giving them the names Abraham and Sarah. They are old and childless, and reconciled to their fate. I mean, as St. Paul says, who ever heard of people having children who are so old as to be practically dead themselves?! But God renames the both of them, makes a new covenant with them, and promises that they would become the ancestors of a multitude of nations. Into what seemed like their dying gasps, God spoke a new word that set them on a new path that made what had seemed like the end of their story into their story’s middle. All that with a name.

A name is never exactly the same as the thing to which it points; sometimes it’s lesser, and sometimes it’s greater. This is why, like the cats in Eliot’s poem, there remains a deep ineffability to God’s true Name that we cannot ever know, let alone utter. God lets us use various names of our own making or even ones that God tells us to pray and theologize. But when we use names like “God” and “Jehovah” and “Jesus,” and even “Trinity,” we make a mistake if we think that such words articulate the fullness of God’s Self. They allow us to address God as “Thou,” in Martin Buber’s terminology, but they do not define or limit God’s Being. God’s character is strong enough and transcendent enough that God is unfazed by and resistant to all our attempts to pin it down.

But we do not have the strength of character that God has: we are susceptible to the ways we are named by others. True, humanity, made in the image of that God’s Being and after God’s likeness, is also much more than the names we give and receive. But with the names we give to one another — the labels we use to designate people’s character, the things we highlight and downplay about one another, the aspects of our fellow human beings that we deplore and that we cherish — we shape our experience of them and we contribute to their experience of themselves. For my part, rather than criticizing where there is deficiency, I want to encourage and strengthen where there is goodness. I want to expect and summon the best in myself and others by the names I use. My Lenten meditation, and my earnest desire and prayer, is to work on naming my neighbors and myself in ways that summon beauty and goodness and strength, and that can set us all moving with hope and faith into the new story to which we are called in Christ. That story takes us through Lent and Good Friday, but it brings us into Easter and gives to all of us the shining name “Saints.” That’s the name God gives us, calling us into a new kind of life. When you leave this place, go out and give the name “saints” to those you meet, trusting God to make it true. Amen.

Scripture, God's Weight Room

Scripture, God’s Weight Room

Sermon preached by Loren Crow, Ph.D., at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, Eugene, Oregon, on 19 November 2017, Year A Proper 28

Old Testament: Zeph 1:7, 12–18
Psalm 90:1–12
New Testament 1 Thes 5:1–11
Gospel Matt 25:14–30

We Episcopalians have a different view of Scripture than some of our neighbors do. Some of our neighbors want to use Scripture as a sourcebook for scientific truth. Some want to predict the future with it. Others dismiss Scripture flippantly as little more than an artifact from a barbaric culture. Neither of these will do for us Episcopalians. We receive Scripture as one of the means by which God changes us from earth-bound, deathly creatures into beings capable of being brought into God’s nearer presence. As this morning’s Collect says, God caused all Holy Scripture to be written “for our learning,” and the goal of this learning is “that we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life....” For us, reading Scripture is about God bringing us into maturity; it’s like, if you’ll permit me a bit of latitude with the simile, a gymnasium and a weight room for the soul. God has provided this means by which our souls can grow stronger, but it is we who have to work at it: we have to “hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them” which gives us the strength to “embrace and hold fast the blessed hope.”

If you look closely at this morning’s readings, you find that each of them, although it appears to be about judgment and doom for evildoers, is really about something else — ready? here it comes! — they’re about trusting in God’s goodness in the midst of judgment. If we can trust that God will do what’s right no matter what, then that trust is the first step in finding ourselves transformed. In the Bible we find that the God who is portrayed there — though he is wild, untamable, unpredictable, unstoppable — is also unutterably good. And so we slowly find ourselves able to trust that same God in our turbulent lives. We don’t ever know the future, and we won’t know it any better by reading Scripture than we will any other way, but we know the One Who holds the future. And by exercising our spiritual muscles in God’s weight room, we become strong enough to “embrace” and “hold fast” the hope that the future God is bring about is far better than we can desire or pray for.

Let’s start with the Gospel. It’s a familiar story. Most of the time we focus on the faithful slaves who, trusting their master’s goodness, invest and double his principal investment. The commendation from his lips rings out, “Well done, good and trustworthy slave.” And we all hope to hear such words from God someday, so that’s natural enough. God has given each of us “talents” that we’re expected to use in the service of the Kingdom, and so this is a natural lesson to draw. But the story is actually much darker than that, contrasting the actions of those good slaves with those of a worthless slave, and I’d like you to notice what the worthless slave says:

I knew that you were a harsh man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not scatter seed; so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground.

His opinion of his master’s character determines his course of action. The master, he thinks, has unfair expectations. Who knows what this guy would do if a bad investment were made and the money lost; so the slave tries to protect himself by removing the element of chance, hiding the money rather than using it to accomplish things. It’s a failing to which I and most of the people I know are prone: we may tell ourselves, “In God We Trust,” but we hedge our bets in a hundred ways, everything from our armed forces to our insurance policies.

The prophet Zephaniah alleges that this self-protective attitude is idolatrous, trusting in a god who is unmoved by morality. The LORD, they say, “Will not do good, nor will He do harm.” The thing is, I bet if we’re honest most of us will admit that these ancient people of Jerusalem articulate a principle that governs our daily life almost all of the time. If God can be expected to remain aloof, neither helping the good nor hindering the wicked, then we’re going to have to look out for ourselves. We don’t really believe that God helps people, so we live by the principle that God helps those who help themselves. We don’t really believe in God’s judgment, so we have a hell of a time leaving judgment in God’s hands. And in particular, we keep living our lives as if nothing were going to change. We build houses and store up wealth; we plant our vineyards. We stock up on weapons and ammo, we hire police and military and private security contractors. We set apart “rainy day funds.” We buy “life insurance” and “health insurance” and pretend that they will keep us alive and healthy. Like the Israelites in the wilderness, we try to store up the manna that we receive daily, but only find that it doesn’t keep.

How would that all change if we really believed in God’s unchanging goodness? How would you change? How would I? How would we, as a church, change our behavior if we really expected God to act, powerfully and inexorably, on the side of good?

Well one possible response might be to just check out, just sit around and wait for God to do something. This is apparently what some in the church at Thessaloniki thought: Since Jesus does all the work of salvation, they figured, and since He was coming back soon to complete His work, they could afford just to bide their time. Like the foolish virgins that we heard about last week, who waited for Jesus’ imminent return but didn’t carry enough oil to provide for even a slight delay. In his letter this week, St. Paul advises Christians to keep themselves watchful even though there’s no way to predict when Jesus will return. They were to keep doing the works of the Kingdom, staying sober and watchful so as not to be caught unawares.

After nearly two thousand years, maintaining this kind of watchful expectation for God is even more difficult than it was in St. Paul’s day. Even maintaining a hopeful attitude about the future is hard when we’re bombarded by news from near and far that makes it feel like the world is unraveling. This is why we need to hear, to read, mark, learn and inwardly digest the Scriptures: to keep alive our hope that, despite all our failings and despite the sorry state of the world, we are being brought by God, sometimes kicking and screaming but inevitably, into the Kingdom where life and not death is the operative principle.

How does reading Scripture do that? Most importantly, it makes our story part of the story of God saving the created world, lets us know that what seems to be a setback in our life is actually a necessary part of the work God is doing, transforming our failure into God’s victory. There is no greater success than to fail and experience how God redeems that failure and turns it into something to be thankful for. But for that to happen, we can’t be like that guy who buries his sack of money in the ground. We have to step out bravely, looking expectantly for what God is doing, and the strength to do that comes from hearing all those stories in Scripture where death is swallowed up in victory. If we read the Bible expecting to encounter there that good God who, even with judgment, comes with healing in His wings, then we will surely meet this God, embrace and hold fast the blessed hope of our salvation.

The Yoga of Christ: Sermon for Proper 9, July 9th 2017

Sermon preached on Sunday, 9 July 2017, at Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Eugene, Oregon

Scripture Readings for Proper 9: Zechariah 9:9-12; Psalm 145:8-14; Romans 7:15-25a; Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

Every religion tells followers to accept a yoke, a discipline that is thought to help transform the adherent into a better self. If you were Hindu, you might engage in regular fasting, or practice body postures, or memorize and recite Hindu Scriptures, or study philosophy, or one a a handful of other disciplines each of which is known as a yoga. The Sanskrit word yoga is actually etymologically related to the English word yoke. A yoke is a piece of wood that harnesses a pair of oxen so that they can work together to pull a wagon or a plow. Both the Sanskrit word yoga and the English word yoke have that literal meaning, but they also have two metaphorical meanings: (1) a discipline to which one submits willingly, and (2) enslavement to a discipline imposed by others. The first of these metaphorical meanings articulates powerfully what a religion means and how it accomplishes the good toward which it aims. When Jesus invites His followers to take on His yoke, he’s asking them voluntarily to adopt the way of life that he embodies: humility and gentleness, and trust in God’s goodness.

Like Hindus, we Christians have several different yogas, different yokes or disciplines, that we think will bring us closer to God. For some of us, prayer and reading of Scripture are spiritual yokes that we do our best to shoulder. Others of us focus on giving alms, or serving the poor and downtrodden, or regular attendance at Mass. Monastics take on the yoke of submission to the chain of authority in their order. If we were Jewish, we might take on the yoke of keeping a kosher home, or studying the Torah and the Rabbis.

But the second metaphorical meaning of a yoke, oppressive enslavement by others to their agenda, is something we all have to deal with. Our culture is obsessed with striving. We’re offered countless programs for self-improvement, everything from weight loss and smoking cessation to improving memory and emotional stability. We’re bombarded with messages about our culture’s ideals and how we fall short of them. We’re taught that constant attention to self-improvement is noble and we’re warned against the dangers of stagnation and acceptance of the status quo. We’re saddened when we notice someone who fails to live up to their potential, by which we mean that they don’t meet our culture’s standards of effort and accomplishment; we think they’re wasting their life and talent.

Our yokes can make us arrogant and intolerant if we’re not careful. If I take on the discipline of sobriety, it’s easy to be judgmental about anyone else who doesn’t. If I express my faith mainly by working for social justice, then I may be tempted to regard as inferior those who seek God in lives of solitude. Christians who are peace activists may be tempted to think the Christianity of the crusaders is in debatable. It’s so easy to praise ourselves by dismissing others’ efforts. But if I’m honest with myself I realize that the challenge of living a Christian life, even by my own standard, is one that I repeatedly fail to meet. There’s just too much that has to be done, and I’m just one person. I get overwhelmed by the vast gulf between the world’s need and my ability to meet that need. Even just for myself, there’s too much work that needs to be done, too much to strive for. If meeting a supposed Christian ideal of life and character is what it means to be a Christian, I’m afraid I’ll never make it.

Of course there are some people who maddeningly manage much of the time to do what they set out to do. Yet I suspect that even they may not feel as successful as they seem to others. Maybe the worst thing about the self-improvement obsessed culture we live in is the fact that it robs from us our ability to relax. There’s always some project on which we should be working — learning a foreign language, training for a marathon, working off those pounds, working on being a better spouse and parent — and if you’re like me you sometimes feel buried under the seemingly inexhaustible supply of things that need to be improved, each one worthwhile and some even essential. There are so many important yokes to bear.

And Christianity teaches us that the main yoke we must bear is a cross. When Jesus invites us to follow Him in bearing our crosses to Calvary, he is bidding us suffer and die with Him, and and promising resurrection. He’s inviting us to yoke ourselves together with Him in His project to save the world. The cross is a yoke that can only be taken in gentleness and humility, because even the slightest impulse of pride causes us to throw that yoke off. It goes something like this: “I shouldn’t have to suffer in that way. I deserve to be treated better than that. It’s beneath my dignity. I’m not going to stand for this kind of treatment.” But to bear the cross-shaped yoke is willingly to submit ourselves to humiliation and pain, again and again, not defending ourselves, not resisting evil, offering the second cheek when the first has been struck. That’s the yoke of Jesus that he calls us to bear.

But riddle me this: How on earth can he call that yoke easy and that burden light? The way of self-denial, of submission to torture and death, the way that feels often enough like “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” That doesn’t sound easy, so why does he say it is? I think it’s because we don’t have to be successful; we just have to bear up. Success is in God’s hands, not ours; all we have to do is trust that God’s Kingdom is victorious. If we will accept this yoke that leads us through the lowest, most ignoble defeat, then we are assured of success.

That’s why this passage from Saint Paul’s letter to the Romans has always held such power for me. I remember even as a teenager deriving a lot of hope from the fact that Saint Paul himself, a man of huge importance, struggled with failure. I identify with his frustration at being unable to make much headway in the project of self-reformation. I’m as caught up as anyone in our general cultural idea that life is all about becoming a better version of oneself, but more often than not I fail at the yogas I attempt to live by, and even when I don’t fail, those yogas don’t accomplish what I hope they’ll accomplish. The thing I want to do is the very thing I don’t do, and the thing I don’t want to do, that’s what I do. I know well enough what I should do, but find myself unable to meet the challenge consistently. Given my inability to pull myself up by my own bootstraps, how is any improvement possible? Paul’s answer resounds, “through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

Because the thing is, when we take on Jesus’ yoke, the partner we’re yoked with is the very Son of God. He is like the powerful ox that pulls the cart inexorably to its true destination. Our contribution, compared to His, is minimal. Yet, if we take on that yoke, He takes our half-hearted, week-kneed, feeble efforts and strengthens them so that they become part of the transcendent story of God’s victory. Success is certain, indeed it’s already accomplished. We can stand up under our yoke and keep walking with Jesus through suffering and death, and right on through resurrection and ascension. He will recreate us as the version of ourselves that we ought to be, and that will be better than a thousand self-help programs. If we trust Him to do that, we will find peace.