Pentecost 7: the gift of a name

7th Sunday after Pentecost
Sermon by the Reverend Doctor Brutus Green
Readings: Genesis 18:20-32, Colossians 2:6-15, Luke 11:1-13

‘when you were buried with him in baptism, you were also raised with him through faith in the power of God.’

In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

While I was a student I worked for a few months as a postman in Cambridge. My induction was at 3am, by a man who had trouble reading.  He ran through some things about the postal service and then gave me a tour of the sorting office introducing me to people as we went ‘round. Unfortunately, he’d misread my name as Benny. The first time he introduced me I thought I’d misheard, the second time I just totally froze, struck with the most uncanny feeling of mistaken identity. Instead of correcting this simple mistake, half asleep and a bit anxious about the new job, the opportunity passed by. Within 5 minutes I’d been introduced to 30 people as Benny and it was just too late. For the next couple of months, guiltily, uncomfortably, I was Benny. One day, no doubt, some Cambridge postman will holler out to our mutual confusion, “Hi Benny.”

There’s something intrinsic about our name to who we are – we become our names; our names become us. My parents were particularly optimistic in choosing Brutus as a name – it means stupid or clumsy one, from the same root as Brute. Perhaps this is what the Gospel meant when it advised against giving children snakes and scorpions. Fortunately, Amanda and Nick have been kinder with their choice of Olivia. Olive trees are one of the first plants mentioned in the Bible, and it’s an olive branch that the Dove brings back to show the flood is over. So the olive is a symbol of salvation through water – very appropriate today, as well as being a symbol of peace – thus ‘extending an olive branch’.

Whether our name has an appropriate meaning or not, though, it becomes an important part of who we are. I am not Benny.

On the subject of the flood, which is a central image for baptism, by coincidence we have the other great story of judgement in today’s first reading. And just as Noah’s family are saved from the waters, we’re told that even for ten righteous people, the destruction will be averted.

It recalls us to the words in Isaiah:

But now thus says the Lord,
   he who created you, O Jacob,
   he who formed you, O Israel:
Do not fear, for I have redeemed you;
   I have called you by name, 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,
   and the flame shall not consume you. 

I have called you by name, you are mine. In baptism we’re named among the righteous, and have that promise of safety from judgement, even, perhaps especially, when the rest of the world is descending to nonsense.

And this is baptism – the gift of a name, our Christian name. It shows the specific love that God has for each of us in creating and redeeming us. At the most important times of life our name is the focus – confirmation, weddings, funerals, in court – anywhere you make a vow or promise.

Incidentally, at my confirmation the bishop asked my parents to change my name on the grounds that Brutus is not a Christian name. With great humility, he recommended his own name “David”. 

But we also use our names when we’re giving references, paying for things, applying for jobs – it’s through our name that we’re a citizen, a social person. Baptism is a celebration of the gift of that name, of our social being.

The promises shortly to be made are promises on behalf of a child, by parents, godparents and then everybody here. It’s not an individual’s choice, but the commitment of us all to God and one another, and it highlights the role we as parents, as a community, play in helping to shape each other.

It’s also a celebration of who we are and what we believe. We don’t choose whether we’re British – or, indeed European, No man is an island. But we try to pass on the best of our habits and culture. Baptism brings an individual into a community that believes that its faith and way of life are worth sharing.  As St Paul advocates: ‘continue to live your lives in him, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught.’

And if our names are theologically important so is the name of God. In the Old Testament the name of God cannot be spoken. It cannot even be translated which is why all Bibles write “THE LORD” in capital letters. Today’s Gospel gives us the Lord’s Prayer with the classic opening, “Our Father”, which seems now common to us. But God is referred to as Father only 11 times in the Old Testament. And never in prayer. Jesus, on the other hand refers to God as Father 170 timesand when he’s praying he always prays to the Father. 

Not only this but Jesus also goes so far as to call God “Abba!”, not referring to the 70s super-group, but the Aramaic word for “Daddy!” - a word never before used of God. The God of the Hebrews is the Lord of Hosts, a warrior, a judge, ‘no man shall look upon thy face and live’. He is the 1980s Arnold Schwartzenegger of the ancient near East. And Jesus calls him Daddy. In one fell swoop Jesus swings the Jewish people into the 90s by replacing the Terminator with Kindergarden Cop. 

It’s not just our name that matters, then, but also God’s. And while we may think of God as remote, indifferent, far off, the Gospel teaches us to approach God as a Father, not a judge or king.

So baptism is about the gift of a name, and promises that hold us together. It’s about valuing who we are and a commitment that these values are worth protecting. It is about a relationship between our Father who wants to be known and all of us as children of God. Finally, it is about who we are at the most fundamental level. 

There’s a famous story told by the great rabbi, Yehuda Loew of Prague:

One night the rabbi had a dream. He dreamt that he died and rose to heaven where an angel standing beneath the throne of God asked him who he was. 

“I am Rabbi Yehuda of Prague,” he replied, “tell me, if my name is written in the book of life.” 
“Wait” said the angel “I shall read the names of all those who have died today and are written in that book.” And as he read the names, many entirely foreign to the ears of Rabbi Yehuda, he saw the spirits as their names were called rising into the glorious heavens above the throne. At last the angel finished reading and Rabbi Yehuda wept bitterly because his name had not been called out. 

But the angel said “I have called your name.” 
The Rabbi said, “I did not hear it”; to which the angel replied: “In the book are written the names of everyone who has ever lived, for every soul is an inheritor of the kingdom. But many arrive here who have never heard their true name, from angels or people. They have lived believing that they know their own names; and so when they are called to their share in the kingdom, they do not hear their names as their own. They don’t recognise that the kingdom of heaven is for them. So they must wait here until they hear their names and know them. Perhaps once in their lifetime one man or woman has called them by their true name; and they must stay until they remember. Perhaps no one ever called them by their true name and they must stay here until they are quiet enough that they hear their Father calling them.” At this Rabbi Yehuda awoke and rising from his bed in tears he covered his head and lay prostrate on the ground praying “Master of the Universe! Grant me once before I die to hear my own true name on the lips of my sisters and brothers.”

This is the gift of baptism, the gift of names. In baptism we see that each of us has been created by a God who loves us, and are redeemed by the power of that love, a grace we affirm today is at work in each of us. So let us give thanks for Olivia, for the particular love that God has for her, and take up the responsibility for helping this child to inhabit this love, to grow and to flourish; and to hear her name.  Amen.

Pentecost: A Christian nation before God

Pentecost

Sermon by the Reverend Doctor Brutus Green

Based on readings: Genesis 11:1-9, Acts 2. 1-21, John 14.8-17, 25-27 

The late eighteenth century philosopher Hegel wrote that “newspapers serve modern man as a substitute for morning prayers”.  The comment reflects the secularising of society, but at the heart of what he is saying is that the thing that binds the nation together, the people’s common interest and experience, is the daily practice of reading the paper.  Reading the paper, or however else we catch the news, forms us in our personal and social identities. The two, I might add, are not mutually exclusive. Justin Welby at the start of his reign repeated the theologian Karl Barth’s dictum that we should have a Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other, if our faith is going to be relevant to the world.

Part of what is troubling about the rise of Social media is that we are no longer reading the same news, which leads to a confused and divided nation. But what I’d like to reflect on this morning how this little book gave us a new benchmark for the English nation, the English language and the modern individual.

The Prayer Book, obviously, holds God in high esteem, but the monarch comes a pretty close second. Not a service goes by without a prayer for her and usually for her family as well. Eddie Izzard was quite right in noting that, as people go, behind her big house and people with guns, she is one pretty saved queen.  This last week I have prayed and sung for her to be saved at least 20 times, so I’ve certainly done my bit, but it’s important to remember that praying for the queen is at the same time understood as praying for her government and people.

The gunpowder plot, used to provide one of the more colourful services of the 1662 Prayer Book, which was duly to be remembered each year, including the prayer to God, “who on this day, didst miraculously preserve our Church and State from the secret contrivance and hellish malice of Popish conspirators; and on this day also didst begin to give us a mighty deliverance from the open tyranny and oppression of the same cruel and blood-thirsty enemies”. The service was cut - presumably as Father Jack would have said - as an ecumenical matter.

Aside from the no doubt sincere piety of Anglican liturgists in wishing their monarchs well, the force of the Prayer book is deeply conservative, quietist and nationalistic, intended through lifelong repetition to uphold social structure that ‘we may be godly and quietly governed’.  And no surprise here. The 16th Century was still recovering from the bloody Wars of the Roses, and the Reformation and Counter-Reformation sparked political and religious wars and revolts across all of Europe. Rebellion was the great fear. 

But now for the first time, since the prior Latin rites were innumerable and diverse and incomprehensible to the ordinary folk, the people had services which would have been identical no matter where you were in the country, in a language you could understand. It was an end to parochial differences. Even the rubrics were written out so you would all be standing, kneeling or sitting at the appropriate time. It is the ideal form of ideology, even more than cricket and afternoon tea, the prayer book united the people in a common language and religion; thoroughly English.

It is particularly appropriate then that the prayer book was launched on Pentecost 1549.  The preface of the day celebrates ‘the gifte of diverse languages’ the tool of evangelism, suggesting that truth is to be pursued through the vernacular and understood by the people; against the tyrannous opacity of Latin. Being called Brutus that is a very difficult thing to say. It also brings to mind all those bad Latin jokes, like how you can decline Brutus but you can’t conjugate him. 

The point is that while in our Old Testament reading Zephaniah wants the undoing of the curse of Babel in a new ‘pure language’, the book of Acts, read through the Reformers, celebrates the gifts of different tongues praising God as the gift of the Holy Spirit, and so the hankering for a barely understood single holy language of Latin is read as the denial of the Spirit.  The use of Latin in liturgy was outlawed from Pentecost 1549. 

The nation state was not the only winner from the Prayerbook, however.  As part of the Reformation movement, a significant impetus in the new liturgy was to make the individual accountable before God. Under Catholic Latin it is the Church that is the guardian of Truth.  It is a matter beyond the competence of ordinary people. The inability of the majority to understand what is being said maintains a sense of transcendence and the radical difference of the divine. The Prayer Book, on the other hand, has a rubric that it must be “read distinctly with a loud voice”. It demands that it is understood and transparent before the people. No more secret prayers and cult practices.

And with the Prayer Book, services were laid open for the first time. The interpretation of Scripture and liturgy was suddenly open to everyone.  What had been sacred mystery and priestly power had become personal engagement and intellectual access.  This required the ordinary people to be involved in the service.  All of a sudden the service was actually about them. But all of a sudden they had to work a bit harder. 

The nation in worship moved from watching a transubstantiatory rite (try saying that after three gin and tonics) in a foreign language (1547), to a doctrinally ambiguous but inclusive and fully English service (1549), to forthright Protestantism in the second Book of Common Prayer (1552), back to Latin in the Catholic retrenchment of bloody Mary, before the compromise Prayer Book of the religious settlement of 1559.  A troubling couple of decades. The Prayer Book had two main purposes, to unite a nation in language, loyalty to the crown and uniformity of religion, and to legitimize the individual as a man or woman unmediated before God, able to work out their salvation in fear and trembling. 

The first Queen Elizabeth said “I would not open windows into men’s souls” and that has preserved a liturgy which might properly be called inclusive in its theology, and the good luck of the Church of England was to have for its liturgist a poet, Thomas Cranmer, who was able to lay the basis for a beautiful liturgy.  The same queen, however, was also to say, "I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too; and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm."

And this is the other side of the Prayer Book, a fierce nationalistic ideology, built on the humble origins of a the troubling and ambivalent character of Henry VII and a generation of religious persecution. It's an historical and cultural document which is worthy of celebration, but it also is in perpetuity, the official Prayer Book of this land, and for all its faults incredibly important in being a Book of Common Prayer, the first book of prayer for the common people of these isles.

We too can enjoy its beauty in prayer and music, reminded that we are still (just about) a Christian nation before God, but also an individual before God, called to learn his love and participate in building his kingdom.