Photo by Ronda Broatch.
There is power in a name, and there is power in giving someone a name.
Legend says that my father would take each of his newborn children in just one hand, moments after our births, and proclaim our names. And so it came to pass that on a summer day in August 1970, my father took me in his right hand and said, “This is Stephen Daniel.”
I am the namesake of Stephen Kinsella, remembered as “Big Steve,” my mother’s mother’s mother’s father. I am also the namesake of Daniel Collins, my mother’s mother’s father.
I can also claim to be the namesake of Stephen the New Testament deacon and protomartyr, and Daniel the heroic apocalyptic dreamer in a later book of the Hebrew Bible.
My parents discouraged nicknames for their children, but I have a first name that is easy to mispronounce, and easy to shorten. And so, while the basketball star Steph Curry is undoubtedly a person of unimpeachable character and impressive accomplishment, he frustrates me by shortening and mispronouncing our shared name. And finally, on a brighter note, I sometimes call one of my better inner selves by the name “Danny.” I like my inner “Danny.” He is more easy going than the rest of me. He’s a real mensch.
I sometimes wish I could change my name. It rhymes in a sing-song way with “Crippen.” “Stephen” has two syllables and two English spellings, so it’s not low-maintenance, like Paul, or Luke (our senior warden has a great name - an evangelist, and a Star Wars character!). But I cannot change my name. It is a gift from my father, lovingly given. It is one of a few things in my life that is mine, but not mine for the changing. Some gifts can be changed, or handed back. For me, my name is not one of those things. My name is a fixed reality.
I would most certainly feel differently about this if I were transgender or genderqueer, and I want to state firmly that I fully support and encourage our trans siblings to select, and celebrate, a new name, if that is the path of life and gladness for them. This is an exception that proves the rule: there is power in a name, and so there is something healthy – even necessary – about some of us changing their name as a way to affirm something deeply truthful and vital about themselves.
Today we encounter Abram, a person on the verge of a startling name change, imposed upon him by none other than God. (God also has a Name, the ultimate Name, the Name beyond all names.) God is about to change Abram’s name, and the story of that name change is striking in what it says about God, and about all humanity.
First, God changes Abram’s name by inserting God’s own name into it! God does this by adding the Hebrew letter hey — ה׳ — into Abram, making it Abraham. God then does this to Abram’s wife Sarai: Sarai becomes Sarah. The letter hey is shorthand for God’s four-letter Hebrew Name, transliterated into the English letters Y-H-W-H, the name of God that pious Jews do not say aloud, or even write into a text. (In Hebrew class in seminary, we were taught to respect this Jewish practice by reading God’s name aloud as “Adonai,” or in English, “Lord,” which is how we say or sing it every week here at Grace Church, in the psalms. We have inherited, consciously or not, the Jewish reverence for the power of God’s Name.)
It’s good to rest with this truth for a moment: that God changes Abram and Sarai’s names by inserting God’s own name into theirs. God becomes embedded inside our human forebears. Their changed names are signs of God’s covenant with them, God’s intimacy with them, and God’s promise that all nations will be blessed through them.
And this brings us to the second intriguing thing about this name change: it happens when God is promising them specifically that they will be the ancestors of multiple nations. God is stitching into their names God’s promise that God will cut a covenant with multiple nations.
Said another way: God is all in with humanity itself.
A powerful image can help us open this up. Today, God in Jesus is revealed as a mother hen, filled with the desire to intimately gather her brood under her wings, warming them with her breast. Jesus Christ calls her brood “Jerusalem,” because in Luke’s Gospel Jerusalem rises as the center of the world, the prime location of Christ’s work and Christ’s triumph, Ground Zero of the Good News. But the hen’s wings stretch outward beyond that high and holy city to gather all the world in her warm embrace. As God gently but firmly leads Abram out under the night sky to show him the astonishing breadth of God’s promise, so Jesus Christ extends her wings over and around all of us, the same One who extended his arms outward upon the cross, determined to enfold all the human race in a warm embrace.
But God as Mother Hen is complicated. She is not just about fluffy feathers. Hens have the look of a stern dinosaur. Hens don’t seem to be the soft sentimental type. For all the fact that Jesus, later in Luke, weeps over the city of Jerusalem, he has no illusions about them as harmless chicks. His resurrection there is terrifying, even for his followers. We are right to imagine God with parental imagery, and contemplate with awe God’s tender care for us. But we are also right to be alarmed by God of the flaming thornbush, God who haunts Abram’s dreams with bloody visions that reveal how dreadfully serious God is about God’s promises, God who thunders with glory, God whose voice strips the forests bare. My parents loved me, but that love was not tame; it was not always tender. These days we hear about the term “Mama Bear,” referring to a mother who rises up in dreadful power to protect her young. But her claws can pierce her young, too.
Good parents are sometimes fearsome.
God the Mother Hen, like all good mothers, keeps us warm not to relieve us of all our worries and ward off all dangers, but to raise us into adults ourselves. Jesus Christ stretches her wings around humanity not to keep us cozy, but to build us up, to grow us up, to make us the wings of Christ for others.
And don’t forget that Jesus the Mother Hen gets eaten by the fox! Jesus calls Herod the fox: Herod, a personification of the deadly collusion of religious and political authority, the evil Powers of Sin and Death that raid the field and tear apart so many innocent beings whom God loves, killing the very ones with God’s name embedded in their names, the multitude that call Abraham and Sarah their parents.
We know, and Sunday by Sunday we proclaim, that Jesus the Mother Hen does not stay dead, but destroys death by death, that the power of the fox is routed, and that the innocent multitude will find ultimate safety beneath the wings of the risen Christ. This faith fires our prayers for Ukraine, and for Russia, and for all in peril. This is joyful, but it is rough! We have few illusions, and few easy answers about how and when this all works.
But God, who stitches God’s name into ours: God gives us a persistent hope, too. I bear the names of my forebears, who endured the hardships of the prairie and cared for their young with rough but powerful love. We call our Baptism candidates by name, mark their foreheads with the cross, and say this: “you are sealed by the Holy Spirit in Baptism and marked as Christ’s own forever.” That’s a lot to say. It’s rough. It’s not all about cozy comfort. It’s also about mission.
Mother Hen… Mama Bear… our parental images of God, they pack a punch. But God stitches God’s Name into ours. God, the Parent of parents, loving but also daunting — God is all in.
And so we will go forth from here to be all in with others. This is our mission. This is who we are, who we are named to be. This is what we are empowered to do whenever we call upon the One whose Name is above every name, and whose wings stretch around the whole good world.
***
Preached on the Second Sunday in Lent (Year C), March 13, 2022, at Grace Episcopal Church, Bainbridge Island, Washington.
Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18
Psalm 27
Philippians 3:17-4:1
Luke 13:31-35