A Reflection/Poem for Feast of the Holy Name All Saints Church, Southern Shores, NC
Thomas E Wilson, Guest Preacher January 1, 2023
Numbers 6:22-27 Philippians 2:5-11 Luke 2:15-21 Psalm 8
Holy Names
When I was a student at UNC Chapel Hill, they taught me so many things. One of those important lessons was a fight song for cheering on the Carolina Athletics teams: “I'm a Tar Heel born/I'm a Tar Heel bred/ and when I die, I'm a Tar Heel dead!/ So it Rah, Rah Carolina- lina/ Rah Rah Carolina/ Rah Rah Rah!
Actually, despite what I sang at the time, technically I was not born in North Carolina, but my parents had met and fell in love at Chapel Hill, so “I am a Tar Heel born” in proxy, but there was never a doubt in their mind that I would go to UNC. I was bred at Carolina by: learning how to sneer at other school's athletic prowess, learning semi- pornographic chants about Duke and absorbing worshipful biographies of some of the historic racist governors and Confederate warriors whose names decorated buildings on Campus. But at the same time I was challenged to look deeper, past the propaganda and to work for a new future where I could take the best of Carolina into a new life, until that time, closer than I ever imagined then, that I would be a “TarHeel dead”. As David Brooks in his this Thursday's New York Times Opinion Column reminds us; “As the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre once observed, you can’t know what to do unless you know what story you are a part of.”
It is like any relationship; first there is the attraction, then there is the acceptance on the limits and then you grow. It is what Jesus does in being a Jew. He was born and raised by a couple of devout Jews. On the 8th day, which we celebrate today, he was given the name Jesus, a Greek translation of the Hebrew “Yeshua”, meaning “God saves”, a reminder that there are limits to any merely human endeavor, without the power of one greater than ourselves. When he was circumcised, his blood was shed for his Jewish heritage. He was raised with daily Jewish prayers. He was taught the Hebrew Scriptures in his synagogue and community; maybe a Yeshiva. He probably had said over him daily the Aaronic blessing in today Hebrew Testament lesson
God
bless you and keep you,
God
smile on you and gift you,
God
look you full in the face
and make you
prosper. ( Eugene Peterson, The
Message
Translation}
Jesus felt God looking at him full in the face and deep into his heart. He learned the Jewish tradition to love the neighbor and to care for the poor. In a hope in life in, and with, God; he drew the outlines of his ministry from the paths of the Jewish Prophets. In the end, he continued by giving his blood by dying underneath a sign sarcastically proclaiming he was the “King” of the Jews. He was, as the old song could have gone,”born, bred and dead a Jew”. He knew what story he was part of.
There is an interesting story in the papers about a recently elected House of Representatives member, who, it was found, lied about his educational experience, employment career, and about his religion. When the lies were uncovered, he tried to say that while he was really raised a Roman Catholic; he was, an interesting word, “Jew-ish”. I know it sounds a little like my Proxy explanation about technically not being born in North Carolina. Maybe I could find solace in being “TarHeel-ish. In popular culture, with its latent and sometimes blatant antisemitism, almost all of the pictures of, and movies about, Jesus show him as a Northern European, One of the faults of Christian thought is that many of the Conservative wings, think of Jesus not as a Jew but “Jew-ish”. As was stated before Jesus was “born, bred and dead a Jew.”
Jesus took his Jewish heritage seriously, but is was more than going to “worship services”. Frederick Buechner wrote: “Phrases like 'worship service' and 'service of worship' are tautologies. To worship God means to serve God.'” Jesus , Mary and Joseph saw life as serving God and not just as attending religious services.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a 20th Century Protestant Theologian warned us about what “serving God” means;
We have become so accustomed to the idea of divine love and of God’s coming at Christmas that we no longer feel the shiver of fear that God’s coming should arouse in us. We are indifferent to the message, taking only the pleasant and agreeable out of it and forgetting the serious aspect, that the God of the world draws near to the people of our little earth and lays claim to us. The coming of God is truly not only glad tidings, but first of all frightening news for everyone who has a conscience.
The apostle Paul, a 1st Century fellow Jew, wrote in today's Epistle lesson to the church in Philippi, about what Jesus did and how we are called to daily follow;
“Think of yourselves the way Christ Jesus thought of himself. He had equal status with God but didn’t think so much of himself that he had to cling to the advantages of that status no matter what. Not at all. When the time came, he set aside the privileges of deity and took on the status of a slave, became human! Having become human, he stayed human. It was an incredibly humbling process. He didn’t claim special privileges. Instead, he lived a selfless, obedient life and then died a selfless, obedient death—and the worst kind of death at that—a crucifixion. ( Eugene Peterson, The Message Translation.]
Yet, in the mist of “selfless obedient” life, there was a trust that all things could be redeemed. While he was “a man of sorrows', to use Isaiah's phrase, there was also a joy in life. With the number of jokes he told in the parables, there has to be, to use a phrase I read in a new mystery book I was reading on the day after Christmas about a detective, “ a man whose deepest creases in his face came from laughter.”
Jesus the Jew goes deeper into his faith. Too often “going deeper” is an academic term to go narrower and become an expert in minutiae. I remember taking Greek classes in Seminary in order to find the right definition to particular words. But the deeper I got, the more I discovered that there were multiple definitions based on the context; the words became bigger, wider. I came to appreciate that the “WORD” was not a technical science of facts which limits imagination; but a complex poem of love to be shared. In the same way, for Jesus the Jew, it meant going wider and expanding the message of reconciliation with enemies, with strangers, with sinners, with outcasts. The Kingdom of God no longer had rigid boundaries. I, and most of you, are gentile followers of Jesus the Jew, who loved enough to love even us more than we can imagine.
As we begin this new year of 2023, let us please ask ourselves, how we can expand the boundaries of our faith. Let us know more fully what story we are part of. Let our New Year take on New Life in which we can enter further into a selfless, obedient life until we then die a selfless, obedient death.
Holy Names
Singing Tar Heel, born, bred and dead,
was once a way I hoped to define me.
Giving a way to fit in for others to see,
if they could be fooled by words I said.
Jesus had a bunch of names to him given,
living into them, trusting where it'd take
him in a mission to do a creation remake:
earth to no longer separated from heaven!
His mission led him deeper than just walking,
but something else was going on in his head,
in his path as good Jew, born, bred, and dead
meant shedding his life blood as his talking.
His life was his Word.
Oh pray it's daily heard!
.
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