Sermon at
Lynn E. Cunningham
January 1, 2006
Holy Name
Exodus 34: 1-8
Luke 2:15-21
Last summer Dick and Kathy Hodge took Dorothy and me to the Skip Ewing benefit concert. He sang Kenny Chesney’s hit country and western song, “You had me from hello”. The song tells of a man who is smitten from the first moment of his lover saying hello to him: [For the words to the Song visit Kenny Chesney’s website]
a.
This song continues a long tradition of poetry and songs that express that sudden moment of shock and recognition when a person first encounters his or her lover and feels as if they had known that person, like, for forever.
Listen to Rumi, a Sufi mystic, writing 700 years before Kenny Chesney’s song:
b. “The minute I heard my first love story
c. I started looking for you,
d. not knowing How blind that was
e. Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere
f. They’re in each other all along.”[1]
Here are two lines from one of Shakespeare’s Sonnets:
g. “Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment. Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.”[2]
Not surprisingly religious poets and writers have used expressions of human love to express the love between God and the human soul. How a lover in the first instant of seeing the beloved, experiences a moment of recognition that seems to be rooted in eternity, that recognition is an echo of how God encounters the soul in love.[3]
Here is Rumi again:
h. There is a strange frenzy in my head,
i. Of birds flying
j. Each particle circulating on its own
k. Is the one I love everywhere?”[4]
Rumi leaves suggestively ambiguous whether he is speaking about his human lover, or his sense that God is present everywhere for him.
Listen to these lines from Psalm 91:
l. “Because she is bound to me in love, therefore will I deliver her.
m. She shall call upon me and I will answer her.”
And Psalm 139:
n. Where can I go then from your Spirit?
o. Where can I flee from your presence?
p. If I climb up to highest heaven you are there.
q. If I make the grave my bed, you are there also
And then a few verses further on, the psalmist writes:
r. For you yourself created my inmost parts, and you knit me together in my mother’s womb”
Is the Psalmist here speaking of human love or human and divine love? The two are intertwined.
Kenny Chesney can sing that his beloved “had him from hello”, because he and his beloved are in some way eternally intertwined.
There is the sense in this poetry, and in this religious writing, that the lover and the beloved are so deeply and eternally intertwined that nothing can separate them, whether the lovers are human or whether the lovers are a person’s soul and the divine. No impediment can come between them, as Shakespeare puts it.
Listen to it again in John’s Gospel, chapter 17:21ff:
Jesus says, “I pray...that all may be one, as you Abba Father are in me and I in You; I pray that my followers may be one in us, ... I have given them the glory you gave me that they may be one, as we are one, I in them, you in me, that they may be made perfect unity.”
Souls do not get much more intertwined than what Jesus expresses here in John’s Gospel.
The sudden recognition by the soul of a person that they are deeply intertwined with God and God’s love is often called conversion in Christian tradition.
Kenny Chesney’s song has a telling later verse that expresses something of what conversion feels like, that turning of the soul to God. He writes: [again go to his website for the words to the song.]
s. If you ever had the impression that Christianity is mostly about sin and penance;
t. if you ever had the impression that Christianity is mostly about sacrifice and heavy moral issues;
u. if you ever had the impression that Christianity is mostly about volunteering and fund raising:
v. think again.
w. Our religion centers on an inescapable love between the soul and soul’s deepest companion and beloved, the Holy One. Our religion, as I have come to know it, is about God enchanting your most passionate desires to open his beloved ones, you and me, up to God more fully. So fully that the bricks of our soul’s defenses against the Holy lie scattered on the ground.
This love, then, is not hidden from us. That long love poem that we call the Bible has many moments when the Holy One reveals the name of God to the people so that they may carry that name in their hearts, so that they may treasure that presence with a name, so that we may address prayers to someone with a name.
The Pauline and Gospel passages raise the importance for the beloved of being able to give a name the Holy One
Today is the feast of the Holy Name of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Perhaps having a feast to the holy name sounds rather formal. But this is a celebration of the fact that God has made known God’s presence to us in part through a name that can be spoken and read in human language. Most human beings have trouble thinking about something unless they can put a word to it. I cannot preach this sermon without words, although the person, the Holy One, that I am speaking about is basically inexpressible in human language or images.
Of course, having a name for the name of God is double edged. Thinking that I know the name not only lets me worship God with that name, but also fools me into imagining that I can invoke and control God in some way even by uttering his name. My own images of God of what I think God is, form around that name and around the stories I know about this God. I begin to imagine that I can really know and understand God as if God were some kind of natural phenomenon that can be analyzed.
I need to remember that having a name for the mystery of God, does not make God into something that can be analyzed and understood and controlled in the way that natural phenomena can be understood.
Mysteries are not to be solved, as one poet puts it.[5] Knowing the name for God does not tell me all there is to know about this mystery.
Earl Page said a few weeks ago to me and to several others, why me? Why have I had to undergo open heart surgery? What have I done or not done to lead to this massive operation?
Isn’t Earl’s reaction to his operation one that each of us have had at some time? Have you ever felt overwhelmed with questions to yourself about, How can this be? How can this terrible thing happen to me? What did I do to deserve this?
In some ways Earl expressed the sharpness of the mystery that each one of faces, I believe at each moment of life, whether casual or dramatic: what is this God up to, this God whom I can name, but whom I cannot control or truly understand. A God who is my deepest love, but a God who is a mystery. A God who continually seeks to convert me.
To me today’s Exodus passage expresses exquisitely the paradox of God’s making himself known to a person, and yet remaining a mystery
This passage that Bob Grubb has just read to us from the book of Exodus is, I believe, also another form of the love poetry I am talking about.
Let me remind you of the scene in the passage. Moses is asked by the Lord to go up on a high mountain. He is to go alone. Everyone else and all the herds and flocks are to stay off the mountain, so that Moses and the Lord will be completely alone, and so that the power of God’s presence will not harm people.
Then out of a vast cloud, a cloud of mystery, God approaches and names himself to Moses.
The passage says, the Lord passed before Moses and called to Moses, uttering the Lord’s name, a name in the passage that cannot be readily translated from the Hebrew, but that is usually translated as: “The Lord”. And the Lord utters his name to Moses twice, the Lord!”
What is going on here? Does not Moses know what is going on here and who is speaking to him? If you have read all the way through the entire book of Genesis, you have witnessed Yahweh creating the world. The readers have witnessed Yahweh leading the people out of slavery in
“Mysteries are not to be solved”, as I have just quoted. Moreover, it is in the nature of lovers to come closer to each other.
Moses had in an earlier passage gone up on the same mountain, and been given the tablets inscribed by God with the ten commandments on them. He had brought the tablets back down to the people. But when he gets back down, he discovers that the people had forged for themselves a golden calf and begun to worship that calf. The people had forgotten about Yahweh. Moses clearly was angry, and he must have felt disheartened. God had come close to Moses in the earlier passage, now, like a lover, God comes even closer to Moses. God calls him back up onto the mountain and, shall I say, strengthens his resolve as a leader by showing himself to Moses and naming himself even more clearly than he had before.
It is as if you had met your beloved for the first time, and were completely smitten. He or she had you from hello, and so on, but you were separated for a time, and your memory of their presence began to fade. We are human beings after all. The power and memory of your first moments with your beloved began to wane in your mind, in spite of Shakespeare’s admonition not to admit any impediments to the marriage of true minds.
Impediments happen to human beings. And for Moses, impediments had happened, and so Yahweh, like a true lover, calls Moses back to be with him directly again, to come more closely to him. Yahweh, after he names himself, tells Moses even more clearly of his love for him and for the people. The Lord says explicitly that he is abounding in steadfast love for Moses and his people, even unto the thousandth generation. Exaggeration is the language of love. Does the Lord exaggerate here?
And Moses reaction to what the Lord has told him is to bow his head to the earth and worships the Lord. Moses is smitten with love.
Now how it can be that human beings fall in love with each other from the first hello is a mystery. How God’s love plays out in our lives is a sacred mystery. How our souls are invited to turn, to convert, convert even continuously to being closer to God by following the pilgrim way is one of the sacred mysteries. Esther DuWaal discusses the Benedictine concept of continual conversion conversatio morum in her book, Seeking God, the Way of St. Benedict.[6]
Remember how Jesus in the early passages of the Gospel comes upon one disciple after another for the first time and says to each, come and follow Me. That is all he says, Come and follow Me. And they immediately drop everything they are doing, and get and follow Him. Talk about getting someone from hello!
Remember in the opening words of Mark’s Gospel?, how John the Baptist says that there is one who is coming after him the latch of whose sandal he is not worthy to untie. Sounds like another love story to me: lover’s do strange and wonderful things to express their love for each other.
Key to sudden conversion is how the life of the person who is converted is completely changed to take on a depth of meaning and sense of direction that was missing before the conversion.
This sacred mystery of love finding love, of conversion to the beloved, then, are so much of what the Bible shows readers.
In the coming new year, let
In Jesus name, Amen.