"I Have Called You by Name"

Maya Lin, designer of the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial Wall was asked why her monument has so gripped the hearts of the American people. "It's the names," she said. "The names are the memorial.”  People often fall to their knees and weep in front of a name on the wall, or place flowers, or reach out and touch the name, or pray.  It is the best way we have found to say simply and profoundly, "We know your names.  You are not forgotten!"

It’s easy to feel forgotten in our kind of world.  I called a church publishing house this week to place an order.  Of course, a real voice did not answer on the line, but rather the annoying computer voice that presented me with a menu.  After I made my selection "the voice" followed me through three more menus.  I was never asked my name, only my customer number - you know the routine. 

We are surrounded by cultural forces that wish to reduce us to numbers and digits; but yet at the same time we long to be known by our names; but yet at the same time we put little effort into learning the names of others, even those we are frequently around; like our Christian friends at church.  Instead of risking a little embarrassment and extending ourselves to one another, we often choose to live in a kind of consensual anonymity in one another's presence. Why is that?

We have name badges in this church, but yet only a small percentage of us ever wear them, but yet there seems to be an expectation that after a few weeks I would know everyone’s name!  What about the stranger and visitor in our midst.  What are we saying to them by not identifying ourselves?

There is perhaps no better time to hear your own name than when you are broken, shattered, defeated, grieving, hurting, troubled, lonely, guilty, confused, or ill.  

That's exactly the historical context of these verses from Isaiah. Isaiah is writing these reassuring words to God's troubled and shattered people living in exile in Babylon. They are strangers in a foreign land and many of them feel as if God had forgotten them.

Through the prophet Isaiah God speaks to his people words of deep affection and love, "I who created you, O Jacob, I who formed you, O Israel.  I have redeemed you; I have called you by name and you are mine."   These were assuring words to a people who felt cut off and abandoned.

Notice that God did not promise them a life of comfort and ease.  "When you pass through the waters… rivers… and walk through fire…"  But God did promise he would never forget or abandon them. "I have called you by name, you are mine."

Sometimes it's not a matter of feeling forgotten by others, but it’s a matter of forgetting our own names.  Oh, not literally, but we feel the pressure to be different people in different situations. 

Who are you?  Do you allow situations and circumstances to define you? Or are you the essentially the same person in every situation? Or, is the person you present here on Sunday mornings not the person the world sees, or your family sees the rest of the week?  Is their a solid, definable center to your life, or is the center of you life soft and non-descript?   Think of all the different faces you wear in any given day or week, each one signifying a different role?

The face of a parent; friend; spouse; the face of a boss or employee; the face of a teacher or student; a neighbor; scout leader; coach or player; the face of a member of a Bible Study; the face of a person at leisure doing your favorite activity; the face of a competitor; church member; service club member; the face you wear with the group you hang out with when under peer pressure.

Think of the pressures and expectations that come with each face, forces that press in relentlessly to shape you and define you?   Who are you?  Are you essentially the same person at home with your children that you are at work with your boss?  Are you essentially the same person in the Bible Study and the locker room at the health club when someone tells a racist or sexist joke?  Are you essentially the same person at the hockey game as you are sitting in worship? 

Arlen was a strapping, handsome active out-doors-man and civil engineer who had traveled the world. He died of cancer in his late 50's. I became close to him and his wife the last months of his life. Those last months and weeks his body became ravaged and depleted by the disease. The cancer spread to his brain. He became blind, affecting his mind, and near the end at times delirious.  Everything good and wonderful that he was his disease slowly and insidiously ate away.

Every time I visited him he would request that I would read one particular passage! So that became our practice. I would come. We would talk, pray, have communion, and then, before I left, I would read the passage; this passage from Isaiah:   "But now thus says the Lord, he who created you... He who formed you… Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name and you are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, the flame shall not consume you.  I am the Lord your God, the Holy One, your Savior.”  

“I have called you by name you, are mine."  Arlen requested that I read those words every time because he felt the disease overwhelming him, victimizing him, defining him. He wanted me to read those words, even if he was delirious, because he said that was who he really was: named as God's child by God himself in Jesus Christ. Arlen trusted that nothing could ever change that Good News. He trusted there was no power or no force strong enough to redefine him in such a way that he would be left an orphan in the universe.  He was a man with a rock solid center!

"Do not fear, I have redeemed you, I have called you by name and you are mine."   I read those words at his last breath. That's the way he wanted it, for that is who he was, a named child of God.    He was defined by the power of that truth from the inside out.

Jesus came to John to be baptized, and in the experience of his baptism he heard a voice that declared, "You are my son, the Beloved." I believe it was that voice and the knowledge that he had been named by God that sustained Jesus every moment of his life and carried him through every circumstance. It defined who he was. That was his solid center, and it empowered him to not be grotesquely misshaped by the forces of evil and sin that pressed in upon him, but rather to be beautifully shaped by the energy of God's love expanding from the inside out regardless of what was happening to him from the outside.

It empowered Jesus to love in the face of hate, and in every circumstance of his life to be God's person about God's business, doing God's loving will in the world.

Isn’t that what we all really want and all really need?  Is it not a solid center of love growing within us that that can withstand all the pressures pressing in upon us that would reduce us, define us and victimize us?

God has already called you by name, when you were baptized, and God has been calling your name every day ever since. It was at the font, that magnificent grace that you first heard your name called; at the font you were given the gift of the knowledge of who you really are, to whom you really belong, of what really defines you--defines you eternally!  You can receive it anew every day through faith, like my friend Arlen always asked me to read the same verse every time I came.

"I have called you by name, and you are mine."  From the cross and empty tomb Jesus Christ calls your name, and he promises to call your name in every moment of your life; in every circumstance; every situation; so that you need not ever be afraid, but can live with the presence of the living Christ as your solid center knowing who are, and to whom you belong - reconciled to God, to others and to yourself.  

I close by sharing an entry from my journal, an entry I wrote in 1993 at a very low and despairing time in my life.  I had been reflecting on this very passage from Isaiah and afterwards I wrote this:

“On a day when I was so confused that I had almost forgotten my own name, God spoke to me and said, ‘The most important thing you can ever know is that I created you out of my marvelous imagination. There is no one else like you anywhere in the entire universe! You are unique.  I have given you a name. It's a name that is so special to me that I will never, ever forget it.  Your name is forever etched in the most intimate place of my heart.  You will hear me call your name in all the moments of your life... whether it be the panic times of raging flood when you feel like you are up to your neck and sinking fast... or the times when you are burning up and being consumed by the flames of sin and guilt... or those moments when you feel like you are being carried away by currents totally beyond your ability to manage.  At those times you will hear the sound of my voice calling your name, and it will ease your fear, for you will remember that there is no place that you can ever go that is out of the range of my voice.  Even if you feel like you have been broken into fragments and scattered upon the face of the earth and forgotten, the sound of my voice will gather the pieces and bring you to me... for I created you out of my marvelous imagination and I will recreate you.  My child, I know your name. You belong to me!’”