Episodes
Monday Feb 25, 2019
Monday Feb 25, 2019
Known By What Name?
Preached at Foundry United Methodist Church—February 24th, 2019—William E. Green
What names are you known by? Are there pet or nicknames your closest friends and family call you—names that help you know you’re deeply loved? Are there titles and relationships —Doctor, Dad, Aunt, Pastor—that help you know that you’re part of something more, establish for you a since of space and place in the world? Are there names that cause fear and isolation? Socially ascribed categories like ‘addict’ or ‘unemployed’ or ‘divorced’ or ‘refugee’ that injure and undermine your sense of self?
To name something is to practice a special kind of social magic. Names carry the weight of our expectations—and establish boundaries for how we relate to others. Our name can set us free—to know that we are loved, cared for, respected, desired. Or they can enslave us—consigning us to a single way of seeing ourselves and relating to other people.[1] In other words our names, both those we choose and those we’re assigned, matter.
In the cultures which gave rise to the biblical texts, names were not just used to identify a person or place, but to capture something of the essence of the person or place who bore them. And our poor friend, Jacob, well…in some ways he was doomed to fail.
His name, meaning ‘heel-grabber’ or ‘supplant-er,’ was assigned to him when at birth he emerged clinging to his older brother’s heel[2]. Its suggestion—that he was set from the beginning of life to be at odds with others—is something he spent the next several decades really living up to. To make a long—and soap opera-worthy—story short, Jacob does the following in a few short chapters:
- Tricks his hungry brother into trading his rights to an inheritance as the first-born for a bowl of lentil soup;
- Tricks his dying and blind father, Isaac, into thinking he was his much hairier brother Esau—by wrapping his arms with lamb’s skin;
- Flees to his mother’s cousin, Laban—Esau wasn’t exactly happy about 1 and 2—where he himself is tricked into marrying the sister of the woman he loved and then working seven more years to marry the woman he was originally supposed to;
- Uses questionable husbandry skills to swindle Laban out of the majority of his own flocks before—at God’s direction—fleeing Laban in the middle of the night to return to the land of his father where, oh by the way, big brother was still waiting to make good on a few death threats.
True to the expectations set forth by his name, Jacob’s relationships with everyone around him were toxic. And he was left alone, even absent his family as they left him there on the banks of the Jabbok to await the arrival of his brother. Then God shows up. And Jacob, the heel-grabber, the leg-puller, the one consigned by his name to wrestle for his place in the world wrestled yet again…with God. Clinging to one another, with neither able to prevail, Jacob and this divine being engage in a bruising battle that ends with Jacob yet again asking for a blessing. One is
But this time, rather than birthright, wealth, or status, his blessing is a change of name. longer the heel-grabber or supplant-er, Jacob becomes Israel, or ‘one who struggles with God and prevails.’ And although Jacob-now-Israel’s name change alone is not particularly important—such name changes are common in the Bible—the way he and God clung to one another in the struggle, and resulting transformation, are. Our story ends in the verses following our reading when Israel—even him—faces his brother, without fear, and proclaims with joy “to see your face is to look upon the face of God[3].”
One gets the sense, at least I do, that part of what Jacob was really wrestling with that night on the banks of the Jabbok was the question of his place and space in the world. The ways in which his name defined him, and places where he desperately longed to be free from it. And the blessing he received as he clung to God and God clung to him is just that. The freedom from the defining characteristics of his former name. Freedom to find healing in broken relationships and envision a new way of relating to the world.
Like Jacob it is easy to become victims of the names we assign to others or have assigned to us. To find ourselves caught in the tension between who we deeply know ourselves to be and the script set forth in the way others say we are. To limit our worth or value in the world to easily to the easily understood categories of our immigration status or political preference. To allow words like “incompatible with Christian teaching” define our sexuality and ability to give and receive love.
Jacob’s story reminds us God joins us in our brokenness and wrestles alongside us, with us, in us. That God clings to us for dear life saying over and over again: You are mine. My beloved. Hold on. Do not let go. No matter if your family is against you and your relationships in shambles—I will be with you.. No matter if your country is against you and your homeland feels unsafe—I will not abandon you. No matter if your church will not welcome you or honor you or receive your ministry—I have already chosen you.. You are mine and I am with you in this battle. I will not let you go.
And why? Because God does not desire our conscription to the broken names and definitions placed on us by the world, but our freedom—freedom to be healed and whole through God’s love so that we might become agents of the world’s healing through God’s love. Imagine how much freer we would be to love ourselves. To release the anxiety and worry and work of fighting for our place or demanding recognition. Imagine how much freer we would be to love one another. To let go of the names that define and divide us from one another so that we can truly look upon the face of everyone we meet—even those with whom we have disagreement, discord, and strife—and proclaim with joy “to see your face is to look upon the face of God[4].”
I adopted the name “Will Ed” in the months leading up to the 2008 General Conference in Dallas, Texas. I’d begun a term of service on the Reconciling Ministries Network Board of Directors, alongside Foundry’s own Ralph Williams, with another queer, clergy-to-be named—you guessed it—Will Green. Ostensibly this change in my signature line was because Will the Lesser, as I’d come to be known, was just not cutting it.
In retrospect, this shift in the way I asked people to identify me was as much, however, about signifying a shift in my own identity. In the months prior to my ‘name change’ I was outed my process toward ordination in the Arkansas Annual Conference. In the weeks that followed, it was made clear by my bishop and clergy mentor that, though my service was appreciated and my leadership as a local pastor valuable, that should I want to pursue ordination I’d have to find another annual conference to do it in. I was forced to ask—by the Church that called me their own-- in what I place the most value—the state and family and people I loved—or the God and Church that I knew deep in my soul I was called to sacrificially serve.
Today, I stand before you not because I had the strength to hold on myself, but because in those moments God held on to me. In the voices of people throughout our connection who reminded me over and over that I was called, gifted, and worthy. In the hope of congregations—just like Foundry—who were in principled defiance creating spaces for queer folk to serve. They were, in the moments of a great vocational struggle, the voice of God saying in the heat of battle, you are mine. My beloved. I will not let you go. And Will Ed, as simple and silly as it may sound, was the cry of my heart proclaiming, I won’t let go either.
Today, in St. Louis, Missouri, elected delegates and those witnessing to a variety of perspectives and positions have gathered to begin determining a ‘way forward’ for The United Methodist Church and it’s acceptance—or not—of the faithful work and witness of LGBTQ+ persons who for the last 40 years of our life together have been named “incompatible with Christian teaching.” We bear in our bodies, and in the bodies of our congregations, the bruises and broken places of queer lives lost, of congregation members now absent, of calls left unrealized and communities left unreached. We hold in our memory the pain of hateful words and hurt left to fester in our hearts. For those of us who’ve been holding for ever, it may indeed feel like our strength is growing thin—like maybe, just maybe, it’s time to let go.
But, do you know what else is happening today? Today we will gather around water and we will baptize two people into the life of the Church. We will speak their true name, Child-Of-God, as we celebrate the abundance of God’s grace which was available to the whole world long before the church ever thought to exclude anyone at all. We will remember the faithfulness of God, who enters into this beautiful, broken world and who promises to journey with us every day of our lives. We will profess vows of support and care, creating a covenant community for these persons which guarantees to them here, in this place, that we will walk and worship and fight and pray and love right alongside them, even as we recommit ourselves to being the same for each and every person who calls Foundry Church home. And today, even if just today, we will be the Church. Not an institution on the brink of potential schism. Not a congregation caught up in a fight over an inclusive love we already know to be the Gospel. But the Church united across time and space through whom God has spoken the same truth again and again—you are mine, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. There’s no vote or structure or stance that can take that which God has already proclaimed over us away. And that, at least for me, at least today, is something I can cling to.
I do not know what will happen at the conclusion of General Conference next week, and friends I will confess my own deep pain and concern. And it may feel as if we, like Jacob, are standing on the banks of the Jabbok waiting on the world we’ve known to fall apart. But what I do know is that the Church can’t change in baptism what God has already done. That we will continue to gather at the font and baptize and name God’s children at every age and stage who they are: beloved, beautiful, gay and straight, young and old, black and white, progressive and conservative, hopeful and fearful, believing and doubting children of God who’s place in the Church has already been established. That whether at the end of this week our name is United Methodist or not, we have another name which no one, no vote, no action can take from us. No matter what our institutional church might look like, the body of Christ who is the church finds its life not in Book of Discipline but in the vows taken at baptism. And above all, I know that God goes with us into the fray—though the journey may be yet long and tiring, though the road have no end in sight. And that where God is, there is hope still—even for The United Methodist Church—to step into the light of a new day free.
Hold On, Church. Because God’s holding on to you.
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-power-of-names
[2] Genesis 25:22-23
[3] Genesis 32:9b
[4] Genesis 32:9b
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