New Names

Sticks and stones may break my bones –
But names will never hurt me!

Actually, though we all knew that saying this Christmas morning – none of us were willing to defend it. In fact, we all know how much it hurt when others name us negatively. My own examples were of being called ‘sir’ and offered carry out service due to my age by young women at check-out counters – but others had more painful examples in their minds – even the children.

Not only as individuals, but as members of community or group or religion, we know how wrong names can cut the legs out from under us. It’s awkward to admit that one is Christian – let alone a suburban Protestant. We are quickly dismissed as fatuous fools, obsolescent service clubs without the service, glee clubs without the glee – or lumped together with fundamentalists.

We’ve accepted secularizing names for a full generation now, since Harvey Cox’s Secular City proclaimed the inevitable decline and oblivion of the movement that paid his salary. We accept that it is just a matter of time till people outgrow childish faith, and mature into generous charitable paragons of vague virtues of liberal democracy, each with full equal human rights.

‘Secular’ in its basic sense means ‘of this time or age’. We generally mean that we frame what is real or matters in terms of objective empiricism. Where once the secular frame was smaller and subordinate to the sacred one of God’s time, and ages of origin and destiny, now the sacred is construed narrowly and subordinated, limited to privatized subjectivity and fantasy.

Taylor distinguishes our secular age from the ideology of ‘secularism’, which opposes the sacred and seeks its abolishment. Those who assure us that ‘Darwin disproved the bible’ and deride believers as fanatics or fools, make a lot of money selling books. Taylor accepts a secular age, but not the ideology of secularism – a position I commended to your attention this morning.

We heard a chapter of 3rd Isaiah this morning, reflecting that time when exiles had accepted the names given them by Babylonian empire, calling them an obsolete former nation and people, ‘Forsaken’ and ‘Desolate’, only to hear Cyrus of Persia say ‘go ahead – go home, build your temple, who’s stopping you?’ What will they call themselves now: ‘My Delight’, ‘Sought Out’?

What’s next? 3rd Isaiah sings of posting sentinels on the walls of Jerusalem, to remind God of this promise of restoration, of entering its gates, building up the highway to it, and flying a flag. People who grow grain will eat it, and vintners will drink the wine they make themselves, instead of doing all the work, only for others to reap the rewards of their labour. There’s a promise!

Religion does not seem to be disappearing in compliance with the secularizing hypothesis. Charles Taylor published A Secular Age in 2007, then reported on commission hearings in Quebec on ‘reasonable accommodation’ – revealing the vitality of religious concerns. The secular is newly positioned in relation to the sacred, but the latter is not going quietly.

The challenge is to us, in the first person present tense: what about me and us? T.S.Eliot put it this way in “Choruses from ‘The Rock”:

Thus your fathers made, /Fellow citizens of the saints /Of the household of God
Being built upon the foundation of apostles and prophets
Christ Jesus Himself the chief cornerstone.

But you, /Have you built well,
That you now sit helpless in a ruined house?....

…. You, have you built well, /Have you forgotten the cornerstone
Talking of right relations of men /But not relations of men to God…

We need, and our tradition and community offers, a discourse between this time or age, secular frames, and sacred frames including ages of origins and destinies, between empirical objective data and subjective even mystical knowledge and experience. Penultimate mixing with ultimate, spirit and flesh, mortal and eternal – can you imagine such a thing? Of course – a baby’s birth!

So I closed with a bit of W.H.Auden once more, Joseph’s exchange with the boys in the bar:

Mary may be pure /But Joseph, are you sure? /How is one to tell /Suppose, for instance… well…
Maybe, maybe not, but Joseph, you know what /Your world, of course, will say /About you anyway…
All I ask is one /Important and elegant proof /That what my love had done /Was really at your will
And that your will is love
No, you must believe /Be silent, and sit sill

Here we are again, God of grace, on the morning of, the morning after, the 1st morning of our new life. We barely know what to expect: once we had grieved the good old days, after we had accepted that faith is obsolete, our tradition foolish, and we with it – what was left, except to trudge into oblivion? We could use some vindication, God, to sing from the walls, through the gates, along the roads, to fly the flag – that it’s not simply trivial and privatized, some song to sing that’s not a dirge, some melody that is neither triumphant nor minor key, so that we won’t keep silent, so that we can’t rest, until vindication dawns and shines out on a Christmas morning, and we claim our new names again, as children of God, as Christians in a world not only secular, but also sacred. We give thanks for the gift of this day, Christmas come again, and we welcoming it. And yet as we offer our thanks, we find their edges and limits, that cut us deep, with what’s missing, or lost and not yet found. Teach us new names for ourselves and for one another: gifts of God, children of God, Christians – then help us live worthy of our names. Bless us once more, and we in turn will bless your world. Amen.