A sermon preached by Beau Surratt on January 1, 2017, the Feast of the Holy Name of Jesus, at St. Mary's Episcopal Church in Park Ridge, IL
Philippians 2:5-11, Luke 2:15-21
Just a few short weeks ago, on the 4th Sunday of Advent, we heard a reading from Matthew’s Gospel that is relevant to our celebration today of the Feast of the Holy Name of Jesus. If you’ll permit me, I’d like to offer a slightly edited version of that passage that I think might speak to where some of us find ourselves on this New Year’s Day, the first day of 2017. “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from 2016.”Maybe you’ve seen it on social media, heard it said by family and friends, or even said it yourself: “Come on, 2016. You’ve already taken Carrie Fisher….now Debbie Reynolds too???”I’m not sure which natural disaster, mass act of violence, or celebrity death eventually prompted the transformation of the year 2016 into the personification of evil and death, but, even for a glass-half-full kind of guy like me, it is pretty safe to say that 2016 has had more of a share of pain and sorrow than any year should be allowed. Maybe it was the worst year ever. Or maybe not…as op-ed contributor Charles Nevin pointed out in the New York Times, “To begin at the beginning, the year Adam and Eve left the Garden of Eden could not have been an easy one – the ultimate reality show, you might say. Nor did things improve much soon, what with one son murdering the other and the rest of it.” (https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/28/opinion/2016-worst-year-ever.html?_r=0)In addition to all of the personification of 2016 and blaming it for the innumerable tragedies that befell the human race in the previous 365 days there have been those who have, perhaps rightly, called us on this rather odd practice and have wondered perplexedly about why anyone would think that a unit of time could be responsible for so much destruction and death. Why are so many of us naming and blaming 2016 for all this madness?At the heart of all of this, I think, is the innate human tendency to name…to name each other…to name things…to name that which we cannot control in hopes of being able to control it. Sometimes we call each other names in a sort of effort to say “This is me and you and all you represent are not me.” We name so we can differentiate. We name to begin to know and understand. We choose the names of our children carefully, in a prayerful and heartfelt effort to encourage them to be about all that is good and beautiful as they grow up in the world.Or sometimes we name them to remind them, us, and the world where they came from. We strive to gift our children with strong and beautiful names worthy of the strong, beautiful, and hope-filled human beings we long for them to become. And sometimes we change our names when we take on a new identity in religious life, as a part of a gender transition, or because, like Jacob in the Hebrew Bible, we have striven with God and prevailed.On Christmas Eve at the later service and then again on Christmas morning we heard the Gospel of John’s beautiful, mystical and theologically dense proclamation of the mystery of Christmas: “And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father's only son, full of grace and truth.” But for all of its beauty and majesty this proclamation doesn’t really seem all that, well, fleshly.Fortunately for us, we humans who have a need to name things, to name people, for them to be real to us, for them to be concrete, we have Luke’s much more “fleshly” account of Christmas to help us.The Gospel reading we just heard comes at the very end of Luke’s classic Christmas story…you know the one…the one with the multitude of heavenly hosts praising God and saying “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favors!" This is something you might expect to hear (if you’re the kind of person to have certain expectations of what to hear at the birth of a Messiah) at the birth of God-made-flesh. A spectacular hymn of praise sung by all of creation is fitting for such a birth. But such a heavenly chorus sounds a bit more like something that might fit in John’s account of Christmas rather than Luke’s. The shepherds help bring things back down to earth, back into the fleshly realm. Ordinary shepherds. People who were not at the center of wealth and power.Poor, ordinary people whom we would never expect to be present at the birth of God-made-flesh—the God of all time and space made present in a tiny, helpless baby. And after those poor, ordinary shepherds had departed and the eight required days had passed, an event happened that was as ordinary and everyday as those recently-departed shepherds, an event in which every good Jewish family with a newborn would participate: the baby…God-made-flesh was circumcised and named. Jesus. God saves. Jesus. No ordinary name. Jesus. God-made-flesh. Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited. Jesus, the name that is above every name, the name at which every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth. This baby is no ordinary baby. Truly human yet very God. God of all time and space, but with a name bestowed on him by his parents. God-made-flesh was named Jesus in a way that any parents might name a child but with a name stronger than death to match his love that is stronger than death – Jesus – God saves.Friends, all of us gathered here today are living proof that we have been given the gift of a new year. As the old Lutheran hymn puts it, “The old year now hath passed away; We thank Thee, O our God, today That Thou hast kept us through the year When danger and distress were near.” That means we’re done with naming and blaming 2016 because, praise God, 2017 is here. And I wonder…in this new year, what name will have on our lips…what name will we, like Mary, ponder in our hearts?As the old Gospel hymn reminds us: “Take the name of Jesus with you, Child of sorrow and of woe; It will joy and comfort give you, Take it then where’er you go. Take the name of Jesus ever, As a shield from every snare. If temptations round you gather, Breathe that holy name in prayer. Precious name! Oh, how sweet! Hope of earth and joy of heav’n; Precious name! Oh, how sweet! Hope of earth and joy of heav’n.”As we begin this new year we are certainly called to take the name of Jesus with us, to treasure it in our hearts and have it on our lips as Christians have done for centuries, this strong name that reminds us that God saves. And we are called to more than that. We ourselves are called by God in baptism to be living signs, icons of the truth that God saves. We not only take the name of Jesus with us, we are marked with the cross of Christ forever. We not only take the name of Jesus with us, we receive him into our bodies in the Eucharist…the Body of Christ, the Bread of Heaven…the Blood of Christ, the Cup of Salvation.How might we, the Body of Christ at St. Mary’s in Park Ridge, be living signs of the name of Jesus, the truth that God saves? How might we actually embody the salvation of God in our broken and hurting world? I have no doubt that we will continue to contribute thousands of meals to help feed hungry people through Second Sunday Sack Lunches, Sunday Night Suppers, and the Night Ministry, continue helping students at CCA academy to learn the things they need to be successful, keep providing for the needs of many through the Maine Township and St. Cyprian’s Pantries as well as The Revive Center for Housing and Healing, and more. And each of us individually will be bright lights in this often dark world and, with God’s help, be agents of love, healing, and beauty that even a year like 2016 can’t stop. Perhaps all of this sounds daunting on a New Year’s morning, but it need not. We were made for these times. God has given us God’s very self. Jesus- God save. And God has given us each other. All we need is here. Amen.