GOD HAS MANY NAMES:

Vv. LOVER ANDI FRIEND

December 16, 1990
John M. Buchanan
Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago
Scripture

Isaiah 40:1-5, 11
1 John 4:7-12

“Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love."
1 John 4:8 (NRSV)

"...For God is Love"

Richard Selzer, a surgeon, tells about operating on a young woman for
a malignant growth on her cheek. It was necessary, in the process of the
operation, to cut the nerve which controlled the muscles of her mouth.
When she looked in the mirror and saw her mouth, she asked the doctor if it
would always look like that. He said yes. She began to-weep, until her
young husband knelt down beside her, looked at her and said, "I like it,"
and he kissed her. Dr. Selzer wrote: “I felt as if I was in the presence
of God"... [Gracia Grindal, “Preaching the Word in Good and True Words,"
Context, Martin Marty, 11/15/90] and the point of this sermon is that he,
in a sense, was.

What you call God is important. What you cal] anything has a way of
causing the name to be self-fulfilling. Furthermore, what you call people
always has a way of influencing your behavior toward them and their response
to your behavior.

Naming anything is a powerful and important gesture. Sometimes when
we want to change our behavior, the first thing we do is change our
vocabulary.- In a relatively short period of time we have changed in the
way we refer to racial/ethnic minorities and while we are not there yet,
the change in language has indicated a steady change in attitude.

So, what you call your God is important.

God actually has many names because the only real name our God has is
not a name at all. Rather it is a peculiar sequence of Hebrew consonants,
pronounced "Yahweh," and the only adequate translation is, "I am." When
Moses asks for God's name, that is the answer he gets. "Yahweh. I am who I
am.“ Some translate it "I-will be who I will be." And it has been
suggested that this is the peculiar genius of Biblical religion: a God who
has no single name like Zeus, or Baal or Jupiter, the Fertility God or the
War God or Sun God. God's name in the Bible is a form of the "be" verh

which really means God is at the heart of all “being” but also that whoever
is using it has to complete it out of his or her own experience.

And so God has many names. "T am your creator" is one of them. "I am
your provider" is another. “I am your father: I will be the one who runs
down the road to welcome you home when you are Jost in a far country. I
wili be your mother, who lovingly nurtures you and who can no more forget
you than a nursing mother can forget the infant at her breast. | will be
your liberator. I will be there when you are in captivity. I will hear
your cries, and I will come to set you free from whatever is hemming you in
and holding you down, your guilt, your grief, your fear, your despair."

Names are powerful because they not only define, they also limit
whatever we are naming. Every name limits God. Every name of God limits
the unfathomable mystery of the one who cannot be comprehended. So it is
important, Biblically speaking, to acknowledge that no single name begins
to approach the reality of God. Likewise it is important to understand and
acknowledge that if we have only one name for God, our relationship with
God will be limited and inadequate and ultimately our one and only name for
God will become an idol which is what is behind the Bible's wise reluctance
to give God a real name. If the only name we have for God is Almighty
Lord, -we will miss some very important things the Bible says about
God, namely that God is not always Almighty or Lordly; but sometimes
vulnerable and caring. If the only name we have for God is Father, we will
miss an important dimension of God which is maternal and feminine, a God
who gathers the chicks under her wings, leans down to feed the young,
comforts them in her boson.

This morning: the God who is love - who befriends us...
Lover ~ Friend - two more of God's many names.

Why Lover? Isn't that a little risky? Yes. Unnecessarily
provocative? Maybe. The tradition universally agrees that God is love:
that the highest and holiest way to talk about God is in terms of the
highest and best love we know.

“Love is from God: everyone who loves is born of God and knows Gad.
Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love." [1 John 4:7,8]
Everybody knows. about agape - selfless love.

So God is love. What the tradition never says is that God is lover.
The Judeo-Christian tradition "recoils" from that, says Vanderbiit
theologian Sallie McFague, and in an important new book, Models of God, in
which she explores new words and new ways of speaking about God, she urges
a reexamination of that traditional position. ,

I found her argument intriguing. We have said that God is love, a
philosophic abstraction; and we have not been comfortable calling God
either Lover or Friend, for two reasons, both of them having more to do
with the Greek culture in which early Christian thought ‘was shaped than
with the Bible. If love has something to do with sex, which it often does,
we have assumed that whatever we mean by God as love, it can't be that! In
fact, we are fairly suspicious of human sexuality as an expression of the
goodness of creation. wees

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The early Christian church bought into the Greek notion that
life could be divided into two realms: the spiritual and the material;
the good and the evil. Human sexuality, as an expression of the physical,
or inferior dimension of reality, was thought to he innately corrupted, to
be denied, avoided, or at least engaged in without joy by those who valued
their spirituality. Any notion of God as lover bumps into two thousand
years of tradition that celebrates virginity and celibacy as lofty ideals
and continues to define sexuality as a means for propagating the race.

But that's not the real problem with the notion of God as lover. The
real problem is it's tao close; a lover has needs, passion and enjoys the
responsiveness of the beloved. ;

The theological tradition, based on the Greek notion of the two
values ~ spirit and flesh - favors a radically transcendent God, distant,
impersonal, who — being God - has no needs. The “unmoved mover" philosophy
calls God sometimes.

"Apatheia," the Greeks said, is God's main characteristic from which
we get our word apathy: no passion, no great love, no need, no desire, but
a kind of splendid isolated detachment. ,

The Biblical tradition, by contrast, takes a very different
position. Our God is not a transcendent abstraction, but the God of
Abraham and Sarah. Our God is not the unmoved mover, but one who is moved
by the cries of captive people and goes down to Egypt to set them free.
Our God is not isolated and uncaring, but precisely the opposite, a God
whose heart is warmed by human love, a God whose heart is broken by human
unfaithfulness, who gets angry at human injustice, a God who shows up on
the side of those who need heip, a God who leads the homeless exiles across
the desert, a good shepherd God who leads us beside still waters and fills
our cup to overflowing and who walks ahead of us even in the "valley of the
shadow of death." A God who weeps and laughs, a God who dances joyfully to
the music of the creation.

The most important thing the Christian religion has to say to us this
morning is that God is a lover and a friend: that God has a passion for
this world, a deep and enduring love for the creation and for all people;
that God has needs, is vulnerable, rejoices and is glad; that God wants
the loving response of everyone of us; that our response to God's love is
pleasing to God. God delights in us. Our love "rejoices the heart of
God."

The most important and most powerful thing the Christian religion has
to say to each of us is that God will be one who loves us, one who is a
friend to us.

What does that mean theslogically? We know what it means personaily:
the fact is that we never feel better than when we are loved. There is
. Scientific data that suggests that being in love stimulates the
‘immune system and reduces the level of lactic acid in the blood ‘and
consequently reduces the feeling of being tired. People who know they are
loved are literally more alive. Not that you particularly need laboratory

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data if you are in the blissful] state, or ever have been. And if you were
fortunate enough to see Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn in "Foxfire" last

night, you know that the energizing, life-giving power of love is nat
confined to the young.

The crux of being in love is not sex, McFague suggests, but value.

"It is finding someone else valuable and being found valuable." She writes
elegantly:

“Lovers love each other for no reason or
beyond all reason: they find each other
valuable just because the other person is
who he or she is. Being found valuable

in this way is the most complete affirmation
possible. It says, 'I love you just

because you are you. J] delight in your
presence, you are precious beyond all saying
to me.'™

And here, J think, is the crux and the good news. “In the eyes of
the beloved, one sees a different image of oneself: one sees a valuable
person. Perhaps for the first time in one's life one realizes that one
might be loveable: to see with the lover's vision is to see oneself as
loveable." [Ibid. p. 128]

Now the simple truth is that not all of us know that. Perhaps none
of us knows that ultimately. Some people have been in love many times and
never feel valued. Some people have made themselves vulnerable in love,
were exploited, used, dropped and feel very specifically not valued. Some
people are not now loved by anyone else. Some people are married and don't
feel valued or loveable and worth anything. The truth is that we are not
talking merely about the magic experience which can happen between two
people. The truth is that we are here talking about something which is
close to the heart and soul of each one of us regardless of the state of
our romantic relationships.

I attended a seminar recently led by Craig Dykstra, a Presbyterian
educator who heads the religion division of the Lilly Foundation. We were
talking about what Christianity has to say to the kinds of people who
attend urban Presbyterian Churches like this one, and of course every one
of the ministers around the table was himself/herself one of those people,
so the conversation was not theoretical. I had just read Dr. Barry
Brazelton's article in the New York Times Magazine about "Why We Are
Failing Our Children," and his dramatic story about a newborn addicted to
crack. Addicted babies, he said, are hard to love; they are not attractive
and cuddly; they are either limp and unresponsive, or hypertensive and
behave chaotically. They have difficulty receiving or responding to the
stimuli of a soothing voice or face. When they are cuddled or rocked, they
react with piercing wails and jerky motions. He wrote about a little girl,
unattractive, out of control, face contorted, unable to focus visually on

anything and therefore about to be diagnosed as having permanent brain
damage, and how he literally forced her to suck her fist and held-a bright
red ball in front of her for a very long time until she focused and relaxed
and her face brightened and she followed him with her eyes.

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} had just read that and used it in a sermon and what Dykstra said
that got to me about the Gospel of Christ was this:

“What. keeps us alive? What is it without
we cannot Jive? Being Joved... Someone
else thinking my life means something

even when I don't... Infants will shrivel
up and die unless they recognize a face.
We spend our lives looking for a face

that will recognize us, love us. We

need to know we are loved in order to be."

"I am who I am. I am the one who loves you when no one else dogs. I[
am your friend when you are alone."

A former colleague of mine who knew I was working on this topic sent
me an essay. A woman was trying to pray and trying to use different names
for God,

“My mind kept wandering... suddenly the word ‘friend’
floated into my ears. No, I didn't hear a voice but
the word still seemed to loom there in my consciousness
as if it had just been dropped into my head. As J
focused on the word ‘friend' I was surprisingly filled
with emotion and tears streamed from my eyes. My
thoughts went, 'Yes, that's it. JI am friendless. TI
need a friend. I haven't had a friend in almost twenty
years. ['ve actually been wishing for a friend for
months. Could I possibly call God "Friend?" Would
calling God friend instead of God finally make God seem
alive and real to me?' It seemed feasible. It seemed
that in my most alone times, night and day, that I
“might be able to call that name - Friend - and feel
some presence was listening. It seemed like a break-
through. '"

“Tam who Iam. I am your friend..."

Most of us are rationalists rather than mystics. Our approach to God
is by way of rational proposition but there is a lovely strain of mysticism
in the Christian tradition. Its focus is not on doctrine but on persanal
spirituality. It is concerned more with prayer and meditation and the
individual's relationship with God than it is with the niceties of
theological orthodoxy.

Julian of Norwich was a mystic. She shocked her 13th century
contemporaries by calling God “our mother." Bernard of Clairvaux lived a
century before her. He wrote the words of some of our most beloved hymns.
“Jesus Thou Joy of Loving Hearts," "Jesus the Very Thought of Thee."
Reflecting on the Song of Solomon as a metaphor for God's relationship with
the world, Bernard wrote, “Jesus is God's kiss." - And I know a modern
mystic, who is confined to a wheelchair and who wrote this prayer and
shared it with me. It is very personal, but it is within the great
tradition of Christian mysticism. ~

39 /1e /an

"G God, your love is unpredictable and
catches us off guard. We blush at your
unexpected kisses. Our knees are weakened
when we are embraced in your warm and centle
hugs. Our smiles and appreciation are

spontaneous. You have more than fiattered
us, and endeared us to you."

Now I don't know how much hugging and kissing is going on in his
life, so I conclude he's talking about something very profound, about 2
God whose love for us is real: who delights in us, who values us, and in
whose love we see a new vision of ourselves.

It is, I think, what is going on in this lovely season, even when we
do not have words for it. Somehow it gets through al) the hype and noise
and frenzied shopping. We are loved and valued.

I think it is the music in the air, the combined resonances of
"Messiah," “Joy to the Worid," and “Chestnuts Roasting On An Open Fire."
There is a face that recognizes us and likes and cares for us.

It is, I think, the universal goodness of Christmas. We are, each of
us, all of us, valued and loved by the one who made us, the one who
provides for us, the one wha has been mother and father and friend to us,
the lover to whom our only response can be to love in return, to love the
world passionately, to love the loveless and needy, ta love those dearest
to us, and hold tightly to them, to love one another.

"For God is love. God's love was
revealed to us in this way. God sent
his only son into the world so that we
might live through him."

Thanks be to God.
ttt ttt ttt et

You have many names, 0 God. You are above and beyond our naming.
In this busy and blessed season, give us moments of silence to reflect on
the mystery of your love for us.

0 God, in this birth we are loved and befriended. And for that we
give you thanks. Amen. ;

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