Happy New Year, everyone!
And, to my Christian friends, a blessed Feast of the Holy Name. That’s right. New Year’s Day is also a church holy day. Drawn from the New Testament story of Jesus’ circumcision eight days after he was born, it celebrates the divine name.
In this Sunday Musings, I reflect on beginnings and naming — and the freedom that comes from knowing who we are in God. We began Advent with a reflection on “the fullness of time” and today we return to that theme, not now with worry but through the joy of new birth.
The texts below are from the Revised Common Lectionary assigned for January 1.
Galatians 4:4-7
When the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children. And because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, "Abba! Father!" So you are no longer a slave but a child, and if a child then also an heir, through God.
Luke 2:15-21
When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, "Let us go now to Bethlehem and see this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us." So they went with haste and found Mary and Joseph, and the child lying in the manger. When they saw this, they made known what had been told them about this child; and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds told them. But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart. The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them. After eight days had passed, it was time to circumcise the child; and he was called Jesus, the name given by the angel before he was conceived in the womb.
Without a doubt, one of the oddest stories of 2022 was that of George Santos, a man elected to Congress who fabricated his work history, his personal experience, his qualifications, his education, and even his religion. No one knows where he was born, whether or not he has a criminal record, or who his father was. A few journalists have suggested that perhaps he even made up his name. If that is true, he chose an interesting moniker — “santos” means “saints.” Ironic, isn’t it? A man without a past — or a shady one — may have invented both an identity and a story based on a name implying devotion and virtue.
In most cultures, naming is one of the first things that happens to us, typically within a traditional period of time following birth. Naming affirms a child’s place in a family, has to do with legal matters and inheritance, and serves as the opening act of one’s life story.
Names occasionally change during a lifetime — through marriage or divorce or adoption, in religious rituals (such as becoming a monk or nun), after a life transition, taking on a new vocation (like an actor with a stage name), via immigration, or to reflect one’s journey of self-awareness (I have a couple of trans friends who took new names this year). Whatever the case, naming and renaming is serious business, reflecting our parents’ or ancestors’ aspirations for us or our own hopes and dreams for who we wish to become.
Many liturgical churches celebrate the naming of Jesus — The Feast of the Holy Name — on January 1. Like Christmas, Holy Name doesn’t always fall on a Sunday. Instead, it is a moveable feast, celebrated eight days following Jesus’ birth. The commemoration is based on the Jewish practice of naming found in Luke’s gospel: After eight days had passed, it was time to circumcise the child; and he was called Jesus, the name given by the angel before he was conceived in the womb.
Of course, Jesus wasn’t really born on December 25 (most scholars believe he was born in April), and thus January 1 is simply a date falling a week later. Eventually, on the western calendar, the naming of Jesus became conflated with the opening of the year. And so, the Christian calendar overlaid with the secular one gives us the confluence of a new name with the new year.
The Feast of the Holy Name is about the naming of the holy child: God is named. Luke gives us only that brief sentence of circumcision and naming. But what a sentence! In a few words, two remarkable things are noted. First, the baby from Bethlehem is marked bodily with the covenant between God and Abraham and named as a child of Israel, the son of Joseph and his wife, Mary. A Jewish boy, of Jewish parents, and despite the rumors around his birth, accepted as an heir of the ancient promise. Circumcision and naming gives Jesus, the human baby, a family, a people, and a story.
Second, the naming is a theologically profound event, one that echoes an important moment from Israel’s history. In Genesis, Moses encounters God in a burning bush and asks God’s name. God answers with the sacred name: YHWH, “I am who I am.” God names God’s own self as Being, Presence, or Passionate One (there’s a host of interesting discussion as to the meaning of YHWH in both Christian and Jewish scholarship). The naming — and the Name — frame Israel’s long story. In Luke’s story, the one known as Emmanuel (“God with Us”) receives a family name: Jesus. Christians believe that the naming of “God with Us” initiated the new age — the Kingdom of God among humankind.
The naming of God is provocative and invites theological speculation — most of the sermons I’ve heard over the years explored only this dimension of the day’s texts. But there’s an often overlooked aspect to these readings. Not only is God named in Luke, but in Galatians, we are named. “In the fullness of time,” says Paul, we humans are adopted and become the children of God. We have a new parent — Abba — who delivers us from slavery to be heirs — and names us children — of the sacred promise.
One of the great evils of slavery is that it strips people of their names, of their families, of their ancestral communities. Slavery cuts the enslaved off from their stories, the hopes that their parents treasured for their lives when they were born. Slavery steals identity, taking from its victims their past and their future — and that is, perhaps, the most vicious of all thefts.
On occasion, I’ve heard people protest that they didn’t like being called the “children” of God, as it seems to infantilize believers. But, in this passage, the context points in a different direction. “Children” isn’t used in a diminutive way, as in childlike or childish. The contrast is between slaves and children — between those robbed of their inheritance and identity and those who are secure in both. In the ancient world, slaves were victims whereas children were protected by their relationship to their father.
Thus, “in the fullness of time,” those who had been enslaved are adopted — brought into a new family, gifted with a story, provided the rights of inheritance, and given a name. One can only imagine how these words must have sounded to those who first heard them — the ones who were actual slaves, people functionally held in slavery as an oppressed people in the Roman Empire, those cast out due to their ethnicity, religion, or gender. You matter. You have a family. You are a person of worth and value.
Paul’s proclamation — So you are no longer a slave but a child, and if a child then also an heir, through God — was nothing less than total liberation. When we are named children, we are invited to solidarity with the rest of the human family. Indeed, Paul prefaced today’s verses with this radical promise: There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female. We are named for freedom, to live with and for others, beyond the boundaries of race, class, and gender that separate us, birthed into a new community to write a new story of love and justice. We are no longer branded by a cruel master; rather, we are called into tender love by Abba.
January 1 is renaming day. The first day of a new year, of new possibilities for meaningful life. “God with Us” gets a name: Jesus. And we get a name: Abba’s children. Both are holy.
And we don’t have to invent it or make it up. The angels sang this invitation, the shepherds responded, Mary pondered it, and Jesus’ parents acted on it. The Name and the naming — this is the most ancient of hopes and promises — maybe it should be called The Feast of the Holy Names.
If you were invited to take a new name this year, what name would you choose? What does this name say about your spiritual journey and your hopes for 2023?
INSPIRATION
My name is beautiful to me when you say it:
A new name.
No one ever had this name before:
Your voice changes it.
It is a new name,
Sacred;
Never till now spoken, or any touch laid on it.
— Helen Hoyt, “Name” (1918)
17
Today the train too fast
they said too soon they
said not yet they said
to Washington all
right now a black
man to the White
House on the train.
18
On his way to the Capitol largely built by slaves
who baked bricks, cut, laid stone—
on his way
to stand before the Mall where slaves were held
in pens and sold—
on his way to a White
House partly built by slaves, where another
resident, after his Proclamation, wrote:
If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.
19
One hundred years later, King said
and said to the crowd on the Mall,
Now is the time and We can never
be satisfied as long as, he
dreamed: every valley
exalted, all these years until
not an end, they said, a beginning
— Martha Collins, from “Grayed In” (the numbers are part of the poem)
Something’s moving in,
I hear the weather in the wind,
sense the tension of a sheep-field
and the pilgrimage of fins.
Something’s not the same,
I taste the sap and feel the grain,
hear the rolling of the rowan
ringing, singing in a change.
Something’s set to start,
there’s meadow-music in the dark
and the clouds that shroud the mountain
slowly, softly start to part.
— Matt Goodfellow, “Poem for a New Year”
Here is your first gift
(this blessing, this echo):
sound you’ll answer to
turning, always, to see who spoke.
Here is your name,
which people we don’t know
will call you years from now,
when your infant face
with its astonished look
is just a picture
and our huge, parental love
a blur of hands.
— Jody Bolz
SOUTHERN LIGHTS 2023 is in TWO WEEKS!
Y’all join us online!
On January 13-15, on St. Simons Island in Georgia, Brian McLaren and I are hosting extraordinary guests including Irish poet Pádraig Ó Tuama, theologian Reggie Williams, and Franciscan sister and scientist Ilia Delio in a weekend festival of reimagining faith in words, for the world, and in context of the cosmos — poetry, theology, and science!
Please join us virtually online.
And, if you are the spontaneous type, there are a couple of in-person tickets left to attend in Georgia. CLICK HERE for complete info and registration!
JANUARY Online Cottage Gatherings:
Those who are part of the PAID SUBSCRIBER community, mark your calendars for TWO Zoom events this January. Reminders and links will be sent out shortly before the events.
January 19 at 8PM Eastern: Third Thursday with Simran Jeet Singh
Simran Jeet Singh is the Executive Director of the Religion & Society Program at The Aspen Institute. We’ll be talking about his bestselling book, The Light We Give: How Sikh Wisdom Can Transform Your Life, and the idea of “light” in Christianity (since it will be the season of Epiphany) and Sikhism.
January 26 at 7PM Eastern: Special Book Discussion with Otis Moss
Otis Moss III is the senior pastor of Trinity UCC in Chicago. He’ll be sharing his new book, Dancing in the Darkness: Spiritual Lessons for Thriving in Turbulent Times.
I am so grateful to be a child in the family of our Abba. Blessings to you in the New Year.
Happy New Year!