Here is something to think about on this first day of the secular New Year: Jesus saves. Jesus saves.
"It's a name to remember. We frequently hear folks say, 'I can remember faces, but I can't remember names.' But people ARE NOT their faces [though they] live for long behind their faces, you see, as those of us who are in our old age know, when we compare our faces in the family album with our faces in the mirror. ……
"People ARE their names, however … It is in remembering the names of people that we pay attention to them. Our names will be intact long after our faces are dust and ashes. It is in knowing the name of Jesus that we know, ultimately, who God is, and indeed we learn the meaning of our own identity, our own names." 1
Jesus reveals our own identities. Hold on to that thought for a bit.
The name Jesus has many derivatives, but probably the best known and most familiar is "Jehovah saves." The Authorized Version, commonly called "The King James Bible", refers to the unspeakable, unspellable name of the Living GOD as "Jehovah." Today, in some versions of scripture, that name is reduced to the rather banal-sounding Yahweh. To me, at least, God will always be Jehovah: all-power, omnipotent, and often hid-from-our eyes.
Jehovah. Jesus saves.
But what do we really know about God through the name of Jesus?
"Will Durant [the famous historian of another generation] told of when his daughter was a small girl. One day she came to her mother and said, 'Mama, what is God like?' Not knowing exactly how to answer [her mother replied], 'Why don't you ask your father?'
"Next the little girl asked her teacher, but not getting a satisfactory answer from her, she finally did ask her father, 'Daddy, what is God like?' Dr. Durant, being busy, passed over her question.
"One day soon after, when Mrs. Durant was cleaning her daughter's room, she found a bit of blank verse which the child had written. It went like this:
"I asked my Mama what God is like. But she didn't know.
"I asked my teacher what God is like. And she didn't know.
"I asked my Daddy, who knows more than anyone else in the world, what God is like. He didn't know.
"I think when I am as old as my Mama and Daddy I will know something about God." 2
What do we know about God, especially during the Christmas season of the church year? During this holy season, scripture reveals many clues about God's behavior.
And one of the things we learn from scripture – and celebrate today – is that God saves. In fact, God saved Jesus very early in his life, saved him from the paranoia of King Herod's slaughter of the holy innocents, a sad feast day but a necessary one in God's plan which I surely don't always understand. It is humbling to be reminded that God's plans do not require our understanding.
Because of the way in which Christmas fell on our calendar this year, we do not hear that wonderful narrative of the Holy Family's flight into Egypt to escape King Herod's paranoia. Do remember that important incident from memory because it is essential to today's celebration. While that small Holy Family is vulnerable, the message of the story is they are also under God's protection in their vulnerability.
Almost daily we read of the persecution of Christian worshipping communities in the Sudan, in Egypt, in Nigeria because of their faith in Jesus. They live in societies where the Holy Name of Jesus is hated. For that reason we pray for the protection of the Holy Name upon these believers. We pray for them in their vulnerability.
What we hear about God during the Christmas season is that God genuinely loves us enough to be like us in our own vulnerability. And heaven only knows that most of us are vulnerable, although we do our best to keep our vulnerabilities hidden away.
Dr. Carroll Simcox has written on the subject of our vulnerabilities. He said, "One of our comforts about bad people is that if we'll be patient and wait them out they will oblige us by dying. Herod won't be with us forever. But with this comfort comes a dose of discomfort: Herod has a son, or some kind of successor, who may be as bad if not worse. There is a diabolical succession, and it never dies for lack of an heir. Exit Herod, enter Archelaus. … Our Herods are not always people. They can be impersonal evils. A man may have been an alcoholic for many years, and, by God's grace, be delivered from that evil; but what if he becomes a self-righteous Pharisee in his sobriety? Alcoholism is an evil; self-righteousness is a greater evil." 3
Most of us are vulnerable to many things, events and activities sometimes beyond our own control. The manner in which we deal with those seemingly difficult situations determines the tone and purpose of our lives. And it is precisely by invoking the Holy Name of Jesus that we are given not only protection from evil, but an ability to recognize it, and, better yet, the resolve to avoid it, to turn from it. The Name of Jesus gives us protection in life's perils.
What is important, what matters most, is that we take the time, that we take a good, hard look at what Jesus means to us, to me, to you.
The Letter to the Hebrews says it this way: Jesus Christ is the same today as he was yesterday and as he will be forever.
That statement is inherently true: that Jesus is the foundation of our faith, and if we believe what that faith teaches and says, then he must be the foundation of what we hold dear in life.
But there is another side to this person of Jesus as well. He is living, vibrant, and ever-changing and ever-challenging us to grow closer to him, to be like him, to have the same mind, as much as that is possible, as he does.
He is, after all, a living Savior, not an abstract concept confined to the dustbin of human history. He is not primarily a Teacher or a Role Model or your or my Best Friend. There is nothing living or challenging in those ideas. He is alive and well, and he encourages in us, fosters in us, the desire to be alive and well in God's love and presence.
As we stand at the beginning of a new year, we remember that Christ has come, once again, "to make all things new." He has come to give us fresh hope, a stronger faith, a whole host of new beginnings, and the opportunity once again to be like him. He wipes away the failures and the sufferings of the past. He makes our lives new.
But here is the greatest part of the Christmas story without the shepherds and the manger scene, the real business of Christmas: our God longs to make us like him! That's why Jesus came: that we might put this fragile life in perspective and plan to live forever. Christmas isn't just about Jesus, you see.
Author Donald Miller writes, "In any good story, the character wants something. The Tin Man wants a heart, Harry wants Sally, Frodo wants to destroy the ring and so on. It's true in every story, or else the story doesn't make sense. If we don't want something in our lives, our stories feel boring, long, meaningless and tired. Or worse, we pray and ask God to give us a story while the entire time He is handing us a pen -- telling us to write it ourselves. That's why he gave us a will. So may I suggest you spend a little more time thinking about what you want in the new year." 4
As sons and daughters of the Living God, Jesus' story also becomes our story, yours and mine. And our story begins with the birth of Jesus and with the gift of salvation which God so freely offers each of us.
A part of that gift of salvation is the fact that the Holy Name guides us, guards us, protects us as we move forward in faith into another year. No matter how challenged we are in and by life, no matter how uncertain the future may seem on certain days, we live with the daily reminder – and protection – that "Jesus Christ is the same today as he was yesterday and as he will be forever."
The Very Rev. Theodore W.Bean, Jr.
Dean of the Cathedral
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1 Grant Gallup in "Homily Grits", cited in Synthesis, January 1, 2012.
2 Synthesis, January 3, 1999
3 Carroll E. Simcox, The First Gospel: Its Meaning and Message (Greenwich, Conn.: Seabury Press, 1963) pp. 21-22
4 Quoted in Sunday Sermons Online.
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