GOD HAS MANY NAMES:

VI. EMMANUEL

December 23, 1990

8:30 and 11:00 a.m. Worship Services
John M. Buchanan

Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago

Scripture
John 1:1-18

"'...the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shal} name him
Ermmanuel,' which means, ‘God is with us.'" ~Matthew 1:23 (NRSV)

Rack at the beginning, on the edge of history, a voice spoke from a
burning bush, and when the man who heard the voice asked the name of the
one speaking, what he heard was not a name but a verb...

"T am who IT am..."
"I will be who I will be..."

There is a sense in which all of religion is about that: about the
hame of God.

And there is a sense in which the uniqueness of our religion is
precisely that God doesn't have a name. God is a presence, a power, a Thou
with whom we ultimately have to do. Gur God will not be limited by a
Single name. Our God will not be contained by an idol, a ritual, a creed.
' Our God is the one who comes to be with us in our lives - in this
world, in our relationships, our fears, our hopes, our most precious
dreams. -

All religion is about that, even the story of a child's birth in
Bethiehem of Judea long ago..,,

The temptation has always been to remove the precious story from the
world, to protect it from becoming soiled, corrupted and demeaned

And, frankly, there is a lot about the holiday festivities from which
we Wish to protect the nativity. To be the church here, on Michigan
Avenue, is to know that more clearly than anyone else, We were upstaged
this year by a good six weeks. We put our wreaths and modest lights up
last, long after the Avenue was ablaze with Christmas decorations.

Because the economy did not seem very encouraging, the first holiday
wreaths, candles and bells appeared in stnres across the street before
Halloween this year. And in spite of smaller crowds this year, a
December Saturday on Michigan Avenue is an exhilarating and demanding
experience aesthetically and physically. The sidewalks are full of people
on an important mission. The Salvation Army brass quartet plays carols,
Santas on each corner ring hells and solicit donations, The lone
saxophonist plays counterpoint - “Winter Wonderland," over and over again
Jews for Jesus hand out leaflets, and sa do other people advertising
restaurants, bus tours and new brands of pizza. Two men ask if you can
Spare any change for the homeless; youngsters sell M & M's for their
hasketbal] team: across the street the anti-fur coalition is chanting; and
a suburban high schoel chorus is having at the Hallelujah Chorus. And four
police officers, two on horseback, more or less preside. I can't imagine a
scene more distant from the picture of the nativity - the silent, holy
night in Bethlehem's Little town, the dark stillness of the shepherd's
fields. There were two new features this year. Salvation Army officers
occasionally used a “boom hox” to play "Hark the Herald Angels Sings” and
just when things appear to be Settling down at the end of the day, a
drummer sets up his equipment across the street and begins to pound away as
if he's playing in the Count Basie Rand in concert. He wears a Santa
outfit and he plays for hours, sometimes joined by two friends, playing
large bongo drums,

The temptation is, and always has been, to protect “cur” Christmas
from that: to preserve its purity and simplicity from the banalities of
Santa playing bongos and eight foot tall snowmen over at Water Tower Place.

That is the point of The Best Christmas Pageant Ever (Barbara
Robinson), a story which has become something of a seasonal favorite.

It's about a Sunday School pageant in a small church and it features
the "horrible Herdmans," the “absolutely worst kids in the history of the
world."

The narrator's mother is the director of the Pageant and she must
contend with the Herdmans, who this year are determined to participate.
Imogene Herdman, in fact, will play the part of Mary. And in the person of
these not altogether implausible youngsters, the very serious issue of the
relationship of the nativity to the world, and deeper stil], the relationship
of God to the world and the location of the faithful life, is played out,

At the dress rehearsal, Imogene Herdman, playing Mary to the hilt, is
snapping at the Wise Men: "Don't touch him!" An argument erupts
about the baby's name:
"Why didn't they let Mary name her own baby?" Imogene
demanded. “What did the angel do, just walk up and
say, ‘name him Jesus?!"

"Yes,' mother said, because she was in a hurry to get
Finished.”

But Alice Wendleken had to apen her big mouth.

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“IE know what the angel said," Alice piped up. “She
said," 'His name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor,
Mighty God, Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace.'"

"I could have hit her."

"My God," Imegene said, "He'd never get out of the
first grade if he had to write all that." [p. 64-65]

The temptation, of course, is to protect the lovely story of Jesus'
birth from the ambiguous humanness, the tacky, earthy vulgarity of Imogene
Herdman. And often the effort is undertaken with great determination.
"Put Christ back into Christmas" usually means take the nativity out
of the world and hide it in church. And my concern with that this morning
is that it points to that larger dynamic.

The temptation is to spiritualize the Christian Gospel, to confine
the teachings of Jesus to the dimensions of the spirit, to isolate what
could be radical behavioral and political and economic proposals from real
life and to construct a comfortable, sentimental and irrelevant religion.
In terms of the subject we have been pursuing, the names of God, that
effort is often rooted in a basic theology which removes God from life;
contrary to the witness of our own Bible, to postulate a transcendent deity
sitting on a throne up in the sky, even though the record is that people
Keep encountering God in the most human and worldly of places and
situations; in their captivity, isolation, grieving, and in their ecstasy
and joy. The old temptation is to take this baby who became a nan, who
lived and loved and died a man, and make him into some plaster or plastic
icon. The temptation is to take his story out of history and make it over
into a sacred legend, which wiil forever remain lovely, spotless, inspiring
and insipid.

That temptation - that very real dynamic - is at least two thousand
years ojd, And it began in earnest in.the first generation after the birth
and life and death of Jesus.

The first task of the early church was to come to some conclusions
about who Jesus was... :

There's a sense in which the nativity stories are the answer to that:
Matthew with his story about the Magi recognizing a royal star: Luke with a
multitude of angels appearing to shepherds.

And there is a third effort: The Gaspel according to John. This
writer begina at the beginning. Before the beginning, actually. At that
time before there was time; at the time before the Big Bang, or the Great
Light... before there was anything, he says, there was the Word.

And in what appears to be a deliberate reflection of that mysterious
incident, back at the beginning of the story, when God speaks to Moses out
of a burning bush and says, "I am who I am," the writer says:

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the
Word was God... And the word became fiesh and lived among us."

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[t occurred to me in the middle of last week that I've been working
on that passage for thirty years at Christmas time and it is as full nf
beauty and mystery as ever, And it occurred to me that the early church
pondered this passage for 300 years: that arguments raged for years and
decades and centuries aver what exactly this author means when he looks at
a manger in Bethlehem and says:

"In the beginning was the Word, and
the Word was made flesh and dwelt
among us":

That the argument came to a kind of climax at a council of church
leaders in the year 325 in the city of Nicaea when they produced a formula
~ @ creed - which said that Jesus was "God of God, Light of Light, Very God
of Very God," ...not that it clears tp the mystery much.

What that writer named John was Saying was that it is the nature of
God, whose only name is "I am who I am," that God's nature is to be in
relationship: that God is not the unmoved mover of philosophy — the serene
and solitary deity of the Greeks. No, the nature of God is to be
in relationship: God has samething to say. And that in order to say it,
God creates. That is, in order to have someone fo whom te say the
Word, someone with whom to have a relationship ~ a conversation — God
creates the world. That is what these soaring, mystical phrases mean:

"The Word was in the beginning with Ged -
all things came into being through him."

So God says the Word and the Word God says is the creation, the
universe, the planets, the earth, the creatures, the people. And that is
quite an assertion!

The creation itself is a Word from God.

At the time almost everybody, including the first Christians, were
Flirting with the idea that the world Was a very intimidating, terrible
Place, full of suffering, injustice, cruelty and ultimately death... a
place to be delivered from.

It was a positively scandalous suggestion - that you can know
something about God not by inducing a mystical trance or meditating in your
study, removing yourself from the world, but exactly the opposite, by
looking at the physical, materia] world. But that wasn't the half of it.
That same "Word" says the writer, that same divine necessity to be in
communication, in relationship, became flesh and dwelt among us. The Word
was made flesh! God's nature, God's creative, loving power took on human
flesh - the flesh and blood of the humanity of a Galilean Jew - and lived
among us. The old temptation is ta isolate it, protect it from life, but
here the thrust is not away from life but info it. Incarnation... God in
the flesh...

Who or what is God? The Christian answer is, "look at Jesus, the
Christ."

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And so it means, first of ali, that this humanity, this flesh, this
mortality in which you and [ live far seven or eight decades or so, this
physicality which thrills us and scares us to death, this body is the same
instrument through which God chose ta speak a word. And so whatever else
you ever say about it, this remains. This is the flesh the Word of God
became,

Madeleine L'Engle who in addition to writing books, loves heing a
grandparent, rocks a grandchild and reflects:

“There is no mere beautiful witness to the word made
flesh than a baby's naked body. I remember with

sensory clarity sitting with one of my babies on my lap
and running my hand over the incredibly pure smoothness
of bare back and thinking that in touching the
particular created matter, flesh of our own flesh, we
are touching the Incarnation." [Cirele of Quiet, p. 243]

The world - our world, our physical sensual, tactile world - is not
evil. {ft is good, Our flesh is what God chose for the incarnation of a
son,

And it also means that this world is where we are called to live out
our faith and our hope and our love: that we, having seen the child, are
called to love this world, this life, not to retreat behind a wall of
piety, but to roll up our sleeves and be about the wonderful task of loving
one another, those who need us, and to show haw deeply God has loved us all
hy the passion of our own love,

Frederick Buechner writes that when we became too spiritual, too
removed from the real world, earthly interruptions will keep us on track.

“There should be interruptions in sermons too,’ he
contends, 'the sound of a baby crying... to remind us
of just what this flesh is that the word became.. When
the host is being raised before the altar to the
tinkling of bells, it is very meek and right if not his
bounden duty for the sexton to walk through with vacuum
cleaner.'" [A Room Called Remember, “Air for Two
Voices," p. 82]

So when the noise of the world interrupts your Christmas solitude,
try to remember that the worid is what God loves. And when the holiday
commercialism and vulgarity and even bongo drummers in a Santa Claus get
up, assault your eyes and ears and soul, remember that the Word became
flesh.

And when the news af a world where children are hungry, and poor
people are ingnored, forces its way into your consciousness, please
remember ~ the Word became flesh

And when your relationships are a nagging, demanding, worrisem burden
from which you would like tn be delivered, please remember, the Word berame

flesh.

a

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"In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God."
And the Word God spoke to the human race, sounds like this:
I am who I am.

IT am the essence of all being.

IT am the one who creates, who gives you Life.

T will be the one who provides what you need
for the journey, courage and strength.

I will be your father when you need a love to
come down the road to welcome you home.

I will be your mother when you need a
nurturing and strong compassion.

TI will be your brother and sister when you
need someone to stand beside you.

And I will be your lover and friend when you
heed to be valued and wanted.

I will set you free from whatever holds you
captive.

Tam not an object you can admire and adore.

I will not be a statue or an icon.

I will not be your favorite name.

I am aot hidden in the recesses of time and space,
T am who I am.

IT am the Thou with whom you ultimately have to do.

FT am the one who comes among you in this infant — this man - this
life.

"In the beginning was the Word" and the Word God spoke sounded like
this...

I love youn.
T am Emmanuel — which means, God with us.

Thanks be to God. Amen,

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