GOD HAS MANY NAMES:

IV. LTRERATOR OF THE CAPTIVES

Necember 9, 1990
John M. Buchanan
Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago
' Scripture

Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11
Luke 1:46~-55

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

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

What you call anything has a way of influencing you - your
perceptions and your behavior. If you tell your child that he is stupid:
if the aniy thing your child hears you say is that she is not coardinated,
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 hy the names you call her. 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.

Now, when you translate that to religion, when you call your God by
any name, you automatically limit God. Yau automatically start to miss the
mystery and complexity to which the ward God points.

if the only name you have for God is Almighty Lord, you may miss that
part of God's mystery that is not Almighty or Lordly at all, that precious
part of God that is vulnerable and compassionate, that compelling portrait
of God as a grieving parent forced one afternoon to witness the death of a
beloved son.

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

Every naming of God limits God. Every name of God, if it is the only
name you can use, becomes an idol, a verbal idol as opposed to a wooden or
stane idol. And it is for that reason that the Bible is very cautious
ahout the name of God.

When Moses is tending his sheep in the wilderness of Midian and he
hears a voice speaking to him out of a burning bush, and the voice tells
him ta go down into Egypt and lead the Hebrew slaves to freedam, Moses says
“What is your name? When they ask me who sent me, what shall J tel? them?"
And the answer Moses gets, the Bible says, is nat 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 "I will be wha I will be." Tell them "I am has sent
me to you."

Some people who have thought about it have concluded that it is the
genius of Biblical religion, i.e. this avoidance of a proper name for God
and instead calling God a verb which needs ta be completed. "I am..." I
am your creator. [I will be your provider. I will be a father to you. I
will be a mother to you. I am the one who will be there when you need me,
when you have nowhere else to turn, when you have no power, no ability to
help yourself. I am the one who hears the cries of my captive peopie: 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
God's liberation of the warid, says to her cousin Elizabeth and all of
human history...

“My soul magnifies the Lord,
and my spirit rejoices in God
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 done
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 proud 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,
according to the promise he

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made to our ancestors,

ta Abraham and toa his

descendants forever."
[luke 1:46-56]

i was reading an essay William Willimen wrote recently on the "hard"
Gospel. Willimon has a penetrating sense of humor and he was musing over
the fact that a character by the name of John the Baptist often shaws up in
the Advent scripture readings as a forerunner of Jesus... “Imagine,"
Willimon says, “putting John the Baptist on a Christmas Card and saying:

“Our thoughts for you at this special time of year are best
expressed by the one wha said ‘You broad of 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,
brunette, perhaps framed in a window looking 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 has scattered the proud...
He has brought down the powerful
and lifted up the lowly.

He has filled the hunery with
good things.

And sent the rich away empty'

Merry Christmas"

It is a hard ward, a strenuous, challenging word. If, as someane has
suggested, the job of the preacher is to comfort the afflicted and afflict
the comfartable, Mary's song is a Riblical word that afflicts us ali,
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 will be John the Baptist.) The women
talk...

And what Luke has Mary saying on the occasion we know 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. Socia) 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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responsible for all this sacial upheaval] is none ather than the Holy One.
God. "Foam." J am the one who hears the cries of the captives and the
oppressed. I am the one who sets them free

Uncomfortable as it makes us, it is one of the major ideas in the
Bible. When people are down and out, God shows up. When people are sick
and poor and lonely, when people are in captivity to forces, principalities
and powers, St. Paul called them, over which they have no control, when
people are victimized by other people, you can count on the great "I am" to
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 bring good news
to the oppressed, to bind up the broken hearted, to proclaim
liberty to the captive and release to the prisoners."

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, wha have power
and influence and are insiders. It'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 so don'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 World 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 toa have
her baby, she knows what homelessness is. When the government starts
killing all the infant babies in her village, she knows about military
brutality. And so when she Sings her song of liberation, poor people sit
up and listen, and on occasian, 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.

"I am the one who liberates the captives." It is one of the powerful
stories in our own history. _Our Calvinist predecessors provided a theolosy
for the American Revolution based on God's commitment to the liberty of the
individual. And one of the great miracles of grace 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 net 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 to freedam, sJave religion heard a Riblical motif that was not heard
in the Presbyterian, Methodist, Raptist and Episcopal churches of the slave
owners, Black religion knew that God was not pleased with slavery. When
they sang:

"Go dawn Moses to Egypt land. Tell ole Pharaoh:
Let my peaple po,"

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

The argument has always been forwarded that Christianity is a
spiritual] religion, that religion and politics, 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, not the
conditions of this life. It is very difficult to maintain that positian
and to be open to the Biblical witness. Not that people don't try.

An article in the December issue of Reader's Digest, "Look 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 some 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 - warship,
study of Scriptures, a spiritual vision of life and death, and a code of
moral conduct." Who says that's the purpose of religion? Not the Bible I
read. Not Jesus' mother.

She apparently believed that the birth of her son had samething to do
with hungry people being fed. The prophet Isaiah apparently believed God
is in the business of binding up the broken-hearted, who are heart—broken
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 world of peaple and politics and economics and social:
vteality. If you are nervous about Christian social activism, and if you
think real religion is not concerned about justice and peace and equality
and freedom - you're going 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 world to side with the hungry and poor and oppressed. And
so her word comes to us as God's word in this Advent season as challenge
and demand.

She won't allaw us to came 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 and I would not choose to live in,
where an infant is safer and more secure and more likely to survive than in
the United States of America. Seventeenth!

an

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In terms of al) available data, we have a disaster on our hands, a
generation of neglected children. Jn six categories, "child abuse,
poverty, teen snicide, drug ahuse, school drop-outs, and infant mortality ~
1987 was the worst period for children in two deeades.” [See America,
March 24, 1990, p. 293, cited by Walter Brueggemann, Interpretation,
October 1990, p. 400] ,

J don't like knowing about that any more than you do. T don't like
the fact that in this prosperous nation there are Many people who have no
room, no heme, no place to be except the city streets.

I don't like the reminders in this season of extravagance and
penerosity. But I like even less someone suggesting, in the name of the
Gospel, that the real purpose of religion is net hungry babies and homeless
adults but something called a "spiritual vision far life." Tell it to
Mary.

I would submit that the opposite is the truth. Christianity is not
the five-year-plan for redistributing the wealth, but it most certainly is
a good and strang word about a God whose priority is people - people in
relationship, people in society: a God who cares about nations and
soc¥eties and individuals learning to live in a way that affirms and
protects and enhances the precious life of each newborn infant.

fF 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 wil] 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 one who hears the captives' cry. “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.

“Iam the one who will come 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... 1 will be there.

Perhaps it is the captivity of consumerism and
success, and the perpetual pursuit of more money to
buy mare goods to provide happiness - which is always
one raise away. I will be there to show you the way
to freedon.

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Perhaps jt is the captivity of unrealistic expectation -
your parents, your own — which you never seem to be able
to meet and which are as heavy as a chain around your
neew. J will be there,

Perhaps if fs the captivity of guilt and shame which
you cannot shake. You can't believe what you've done,
You can't. helieve anyone could ever understand and
forgive. Or the captivity of addiction, or
codependence, or a relationship that feels like a
prison and is. Or perhaps it is boredom or emptiness.
i am the one who will come to show you the way to
freedom.

Or perhaps your captivity may be described in the
language of Isaiah... the captivity of the broken-
hearted: because someone you loved has died, and the
darkness of grief 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 of the future,
fear of aging, fear of your own mortality, cr perhaps
your captivity is that there does nat seem to be
reason for confidence in life or yourself, or because
you cannot imagine a day when you will rejoice and be
glad again, when you wiil sing and dance and laugh...

Please know that there is one who cares, and more than that,. one who
has promised to be your support, your advocate; one who has promised to
work for your freedom from whatever is hemming you in and weighing you

down.

The strong and gaod word of Mary is that our Gad, the great "I AH" is
one who always

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

Our God lifts up the lowly and fills
the hungry with good things...

God has many names. Liberator of the Captives is one of them.
Thanks be to God.

Amen.

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