GOD HAS MANY NAMES:

IV LTRERATOR OF THE CAPTIVES

December 9, 7990
John M. Buchanan
Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago
‘ Scripture

Tsaiah 61:1-4, 8-13
Luke 1:46-55

“The spirit of the Lord God is upon me...te proclaim liberty to the
captives,..." --Isaiah 61:1 (NRSV)

Ged has many names. And it is a matter of sane importance when you
are talking publicly about God, or thinking privately about God, or praying
ta Ged, that in order for the names you use for God ta have integrity they
must be, in some way, related to your experience of God: and in order to
have some authority they must, in some way, be related ta what the Bible says
about Goad.

What you cali anything has a way of influencing you - your
perceptions and your behavior. If you tell your child that he is stupid:
if the only thing your child hears you say is that she is not coordinated,
not smart, not adequate: she will begin to become what you have named her.
Furthermore, your own relationship with her will be shaped and confined
tragically by the names you call ber. And you will miss her brightness,
her moments of growth, her tentative but brave attempts to try something
new. You will miss who she is,

Naw, when you translate that to religion, when you call your Gad by
any name, you automatically limit Ged. You automatically start to miss the
mystery and complexity to which the word God points.

If the only name you have for God is Almighty Lord, you may miss that
part of Gad's mystery that is nat Almighty ar Lordly at all, that precious
part of God that is vulnerable and compassionate, that compe] ling portrait
of God as a grieving parent forced one afternoon to witness the death of a
beloved son.

If the only thing you ever cal] God is Father, you miss that
dimension of Gad that groans in labor at the birth of creation, the God who
lovingly nurses an infant, the God wha tenderly comforts the broken-hearted
by holding them to her boson,

Every naming ef God timits fed. Every name of God, if it jis the only
name you can use, hecomes an ido], a verhal idol as opposed ta a wenden or
stone idol. And i! is for that reason that the Rible is very cautions
Ahont the pane af Gad

When Moses is tending his shecp in the wilderness of Midian and he
hears a voice speaking to him nat of a burning bush, and the voice tetis
hin ta go down into Egypt and lead the Hebrew siaves to freedom, Moses says
“What is your name? When they ask me who sent me, what shalj I tell] them?”
And the answer Moses gots, the Rible says, is not a name at all, but a
verb, a list of Hebrew consonants that sounds like Yahweh: the translation
is "I am who I am" or "{% will be who I will be." Tell them “TI am has sent
me to you.”

Some people who have theught about it have cencluded that it is the
genius of Biblical] religion, i.e. this avoidance of a proper name for God
and instead calling God a verh which needs to be campleted. "IJ am..." TI
am your creator. I wil) be your provider. I will be a father to you. I
wil} be a mother to you. I am the one who will be there when you need me,
when you have powhere else to turn, when you have no power, no ability to
help yourself. J am the ane who hears the cries of my captive people; I am
the one who leads them out of captivity into freedom.

I am the Liberator of the Captives.

And young Mary, a frightened teenager, sensing within her own body
Gad's liberation of the world, says to her cousin Elizabeth and all of
human history... 7

"My sou} magnifies the Lord,
and my spirit rejoices in fied
my Savior,
for he has looked with favor on
the lowliness of his servant.
Surely, from now on all generations
will call me blessed;
for the Mighty One has dane
great things for me,
and holy is his name.
His mercy is for those who fear him
from generation to generation,
He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the praud in
the thoughts of their hearts.
He has brought down the powerful
from their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly:
he has filled the hungry with good
things, and sent the rich away
empty.
He has helped his servant Israel,
in remembrance of his mercy,
accarding to the promise he

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nade to our ancestors,

to Abraham and ta his

descendants forever,"
[iuke 1:46--58]

JT was reading an essay William Wiiliman wrote recently on the “hard”
Gospel. Willison has a penetrating sense of humor and he was musing over
the fact that a character by the name of John the Raptist often shows up in
the Advent scripture readings as a forerunner of Jesus... "Imagine,"
Wiliimon says, "petting John the Baptist on a Christmas Card and saying:

“Quy thoughts for you at this special time of year are best
expressed by the one wha said 'You brood af vipers! Who told you to flee
from the wrath to come.’ Merry Christmas." [In Trust, “Preaching of the
Hard Gospel," p. 19-20]

Well, that prompted my own musing for a whole new line of Scripture
Christmas cards featuring Mary, as always, a lovely gentle teenager,
brinette, perhaps framed in a window locking out onto rolling hills with a
bright star shining in the evening sky. The inscription, borrowing’ from
Willimon would be:

“Our holiday wishes for you were
expressed by one who said":

‘He his scattered the prand...
He has braught down the powerful
and iifted up the lowly.

He has filled the hungry with
food things.

And sent the rich away empty’

Merry Christmas"

It is a hard word, a strenuous, challenging word. If, as someone has
suggested, the job of the preacher is to comfart the afflicted and afflict
the camfortable, Mary's song is a Biblical word that afflicts us all,
preacher and people alike. But it is also a word about God, and what it
says about God is a very good ward.

Luke begins the story of Jesus with the women talking. A frightened
teenager, recently engaged to a carpenter from Nazareth, who finding
herself suddenly pregnant, travels to visit her elderly cousin Elizabeth -
who is also pregnant. (Her baby wil] be John the Baptist.) The women
talk...

And what Luke has Mary saying on the occasion we knaw as The
Magnificat, from the Latin for the first words, "My soul magnifies the
Lord."

What Mary says is startling. God is praised for power and goodness.
But then the focus changes. Social and political and economic realities
are introduced to the scene which until now is "made for Hallmark,’
Suddenly the high are brought low: the lowly are lifted up; the hungry
are fed and the rich are sent away empty. And, worse yet, the one

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responsitile for all this sacial upheava} is none other than the Holy One,
Ged. "boam." J aa the one whe hears the rries of the rantives and the
oppressed. Io am the one who sets them Free

Uncamfoartahto aa it makes us, it is one af the majar drieas fi the
Hible. When peeple are down and out, Gad shows ip. When people are sick
and poor and Jonely, when people are in captivity to forees, principalities
and powers, St. Paul called them, over which they have no cantral, when
people are victimized by other people, you can caunt on the great "Toam” ta
hear their cries and to come to them and start the work of releasing them
from their captivity.

When the whole ruling class of Israel had been carried off into
Babylonian exile, one of the prophets writes to them:

"The Lord has anointed me, he has sent me to brine good news
to the oppressed, to bind up the broken hearted, to proclaim
liberty to the captive and release to the priseners."

It has been called God's preference for the outsiders, the powerless,
the poor, and that always jars those of us who are not poor, who have power
and influence and are insiders. [t's not that God doesn't like rich
people: not at all. That easy ideology misses the point. It's just that
rich and powerful people sometimes convince themselves that they're already
free and se doen't need much from God. It's just that the rich and powerful
sometimes think they already have everything they need - and what they
expect from God and religion is a little undergirding of the status quo,
which after all, is comfortable. The poor, the ones oppressed by forces
beyond their control, however, know they are not free; know they don't have
what they need, know they are dependent on God. Their religion is heavy on
freedom,

When poor people hear The Magnificat, they know who the characters
are. Henri Nouwen writes in Gracias, his South American journal, that
Mary is the heroine of poor people in the Third Worid because she knows
what oppression is. When some nameless, faceless bureaucrat tells her she
has to ride a donkey for miles in order to be counted, during the ninth
month of her pregnancy instead of staying close to her home, she knows
what powerlessness is. When she can't even find a room in which to have
her baby, she knows what homelessness is. When the government starts
killing al] the infant babies in her village, she knaws about military
brutality. And se when she sings her song of liberation, poor people sit
up and listen, and on occasion, when they listen, those who are in power
decide that Mary's Magnificat may be too suggestive, too dangerous, and ask
the churches to read it in Latin, please.

“J am the one who liberates the captives." It is one of the powerful
stories in our own histery. Our Calvinist predecessors provided a theology
for the American Revolution based on God's commitment to the liberty of the
individual. And one of the great miracles of Frace in our own American
story is that the slaves — who had every reason to detest Christianity as
part of the system that justified their oppression — did not do so. Instead
Black religion heard in the Gospel the word of freedom. And when the
stories were read about Egyptian slavery and Moses going down to lead the

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people ta freedom, slave religion heard a Rihlical motif that was not heard
in the Presbyterian, Methodist, Kaptist and Episcopal churches af the slave
pwners. Black religion knew that God was not pleased with stavery, When
thay sant:

“Go down Moses te Egypt bland. Tell ole Pharaoh:
Lot my people go,"

they knew they were in Egypt and they knew who Pharaoh was and whose side
Gad was on.

The argument has always been forwarded that Christianity is a
spiritual religion, that religion and pelitics, religion and economics
don't mix; that the Gospel of Christ has to do with the interiors of your
sou] and not the structures of society, with the afterlife, mot the
canditions of this life. It is very difficult to maintain that positian
and to be open te the Biblical witness. Not that people don't try.

An article in the December issue of Reader's Digest, “Loak What
They've Done to My Songs," complete with a picture of the new Presbyterian
Hymnal and a lament that it doesn't contain the author's favorite songs,
(an extraordinary egotism, defining a denomination's Hymnal as a private
religious hit parade!) attacks mainline churches for a variety of incidents
which the author has intentionally misinterpreted and in sone cases simply
misstated. But his real problem is that he believes church leaders
"emphasize a theology that downplays the spiritual," substituting “social,
economic and political action for the real business of religion - worship,
study of Scriptures, a spiritual vision of life and death, and a code of
moral canduct.” Who says that's the purpose cf religion? Not the Bible I
read. Not Jesus’ mother.

She apparently believed that the birth of her son had something to do
with hungry people being fed. The prophet Isaiah apparently believed God
is in the business of binding up the breken-hearted, who are heart—breken
because they are being oppressed and have no hope, and proclaiming release
ta the captives. The oldest heresy in history which the Reader's Digest
rushes to embrace is that Christianity is "spiritual" -— meaning separate
from the real worid of people and politics and economics and social
reality. If you are nervous about Christian social activism, and if you
think real relipion is not concerned about justice and peace and equality
and freedom - you're poing to have to deal with Jesus' mother.

Mary thought the birth of her son would make a difference. Mary
thought that in him, the Mighty One of Israel, the great "I am" was doing
something in the worid to side with the hungry and poor and oppressed. And
so her word comes to us as God's word in this Advent seasen as challenge
and demand.

She won't aillaw us to come to Bethlehem with our eyes shielded from
the realities of the world. She won't allow us to see her child without
seeing the children. Our infant mortality rate is seventeenth in the world.
There is a long list of countries you an@ I would not cheose to Live in,
where an infant is safer and more secure and more likely to survive than in
the United States of America. Seventeenth!

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Photerms of all available data, we have a disaster on our hands, a
generation of neglected children. In six categories, “child ahuse,
poverty, teen suicide, drug ahuse, schoo] drop-outs, and infant mortality -
T9897 was the worst periad for ehifdren in two deenades." [Ser Ampriva,
March 24, 3990, p. 293, cited by Walter Bruegremani, Tiuterpretatian,
Ocfoher 1980, p. 4n0]

Pedont Vike knowing about that any more than you do. fF dou't like
the fact that in this prosperous nation there are many peaple who have na
room, na home, no place to be except the city streets

T don't like the reminders in this season of extravagance and
generosity. But Y like even loss someone suggesting, in the name of the
Gospel, that the real purpose of religion is not hungry babies and homeless
adults but something called a “spiritual vision for life." Teli it ta
Mary.

i would submit that the opposite is the truth. Christianity is not
the five-year-plan fer redistributing the wealth, but it most certainiy is
a good and strong word about a Gad whose priority is people - people in
relationship, people in society: a God who cares about nations and
societies and individuals learning te Jive in a way that affirms and
protects and enhances the precious life of each newborn infant.

I would submit that faithful followers of Jesus Christ cannot avoid,
even if they'd like to, the political and economic implications of their
theology. I would submit as an example of faithfulness a church willing to
raise the hope of peaceful alternatives in the midst of the rising
rhetoric of war, a church which can be counted on to stand with those no
one else will stand with - the children, the poor, the powerless, the
meek. That's not meddling. ‘That's what being faithful to God is about.

There is a strong and sometimes disturbing word here, but it is also a
very good word. Because what Mary is telling us is that God's name is "I
am,“ the ane who hears the captives' ery, "I am" the one who cares about you
where you — exactly where you are.

Because Mary forces the issue of life, real life, into the Christmas
Story... because Mary makes us pay attention to the real world, her word is
redemptive for us, because it is ultimately about a God who will be with us
whenever and wherever we are in captivity, whoever we are.

“I am the one who wil] cowe at just those places in
your life where you are in some kind of prison...

Perhaps it is the captivity of illness, lingering,
debilitating, frightening... JI will he there.

Perhaps it is the captivity of consumerism and
success, and the perpetual pursuit of more money to
buy more gonads to provide happiness - which is always
ohe raise away. I will be there to show you the way
toa freedom.

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Porhaps if fs the eaptivity ef unrealistic ex. led dan
your parents, yeur awn - which you never seem ti he ab:
to meet and which are as heavy as a chain around your
neek. PF wilt he there,

Perhaps it is the captivity ef goidt anc steame wh hh
you cannot shake. You can't believe what youtw co.
You can't believe anyone conld ever undci claim.
forgive. Or the captivity of addiction, nr
eedependence, or a relationship that ferts Pilko:
prison and is. Or perhaps it is boredom oi cmi.t ois-as.
Tam the one who will come ta shaw you the way bao
Freedom.

Or perhaps your captivity may be described tu fie
language of IJsaiah... the captivity of the broken-
hearted: because someone you leved has died, and the
darkness of prief has descended; or perhaps your
captivity this morning is uncertainty and the sense
that you may not have a job in two months; or perhaps
your particular captivity is the fear af the future,
fear of aging, fear of your own mortality or perhap«
your captivity is that there dees not seem ta be
reason for confidence in life or yeursrl‘ ar Peean
yau cannot imagine a day when you wili pegoice and ts
glad again, when you will sing and dance and laugh
Please know that there is one who cares, and wore [han fiero och whe
has promised to be your support, your advocate; one whe aor nates
work for your freedom from whatever is hemming you in and weaphiny you
down.

The strong and geod word of Mary is that our Gad, the pool ot Aw
one who always

~looks with favor on the Jonely...,
one who always has mercy on the frightened...

Gur God lifts up the lowly and fills
the hungry with gond things...

God has many names. Liberator of the Captives ts ane o; ‘hee
Thanks be to God.

Amen.

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