What's in a Name? The Sixteenth Sunday After Trinity (September 24, 2023)

This is my name for ever, and this is my memorial unto all generations.

May the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts be alway acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, our Strength and our Redeemer. Amen.

What’s in a name? Names signal a kind of intimacy because they unveil the relational dimension of a person. A person on an island would have no need of a name because they would have no access to relationships. And if you think about it, historically, prisoners were stripped of their name. You might remember Prisoner 24601 in the musical and novel Les Miserables. Names have power. I remember hearing the story about a family that meant to name their daughter Tempest after Tempest Bledsoe from the Cosby Show but they made a spelling error and her name ended up being Temptress. Guess what kind of life she grew up to lead? But names can have power for good, too: God changes Abram’s name to Abraham, Jacob (deceiver) becomes Israel (triumphant for God). We saw last week that the name of baby Francis is now irrevocably connected to his baptismal identity.

If you read the book of Genesis closely, you’ll see the prominence of naming. In the Old Testament, the Hebrew word for “name”, which is Shem, appears 864 times in 771 verses. The first five books of the Bible, called the Pentateuch, contains about 30% of the usage of the word “name” with 250 occurrences. Out of those 250 occurences, 111 uses (44%) appear in the book of Genesis. By the end of the book of Genesis, virtually everything has a name: God names the day, night, sun, moon, and so many other things in creation. Adam gets to name the animals, a task God delegates to him as a divine image-bearer. He named his wife, Eve. Throughout the book, parents name their children and people name places. One character, Hagar, the former slave of Abraham and Sarah who was exploited to give Abraham a son, gave God a name: El-Roi, the God who sees me. This is a beautiful testament to God’s faithfulness but it’s not his proper name so much as a title that’s assigned to him by a creature. In other words, at the end of Genesis, virtually everyone and everything has a name except the Creator who has been the main actor through Genesis. He was at work judging the world through the flood and saving Noah; he was at work judging the world at Babel and calling Abraham out of paganism to become the father of the Covenant People. He was at work preserving Joseph to preserve the people of Egypt and the future nation of Israel. But who is this God? The biblical authors force us to wait until Exodus 3 to find out.

When we pick up the reading, from Exodus, Moses is in a place of obscurity. He’s a nomadic shepherd in the middle of the wilderness. But as he’s searching for one of his sheep, he turns aside because he sees this bush that’s burning but not consumed. And from that bush, God speaks to him, commissioning Moses to be his spokesman to deliver Israel. But Moses resists God because he doesn’t know in what name he can claim he’s been sent. In response to this objection, God reveals his name: “I AM WHO I AM.” What does this mean? This is a radical name because for pagans, the gods exist in the world. In pretty much all the pagan creation myths, unlike the Creation poem of Genesis 1, the gods don’t create from nothing, the world, in some way, pre-exists the gods. But for Christians and Jews who worship “I AM WHO I AM,” we state God doesn’t exist like we do or like the pagan gods; rather God is the existence in which we participate. As St. Paul says in Acts 17, “In him, we live and move and have our being.”

The name tells us three things about God First, it tells that he is eternal. There is no beginning or end to God. If he had a beginning or end, God would be another creature constrained by finitude. But because he’s eternal, that also means he’s immutable, which means he doesn’t change. I am who I am is a statement about his nature: it is stable, it is unwavering. This makes God trustworthy: the same God who we’ve seen act throughout Genesis, the same God who we see calling Moses to rescue the Israelites from slavery, is the same God who became Incarnate and died on the Cross for us and he’s the same God who is present to us through the sacrament of the Altar and he’s the same God who regenerated Francis last week. As St. James says, “There is no variation or shadow of turning” in God; he is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow. And this leads us to a third fact about God, which is that he is impassible. When we affirm that God is impassible, we affirm that he does not suffer because of the actions of creatures. In other words, you can try all you want to “hurt” God but you won’t ever be able to. So God is eternal, immutable, and impassible. But this story affirms one more truth about God: that he is relational; that, for whatever reason, God, out of the overflow of love between Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, not only created us, but loves us and wants us to be in communion with him. “I AM WHO I AM” tells us not only that the God of the Bible is unlike the pagan gods, he’s also not like the unreachable and abstract god of the philosophers and the deists. He’s a God who is love.

If their story is our story, Moses’ response to the burning bush can be instructive for us.

First, the fact that he turns aside from the mundane to place his mind on the things of God is admirable. He was chasing after a lost sheep and could have been so caught up with the issue in his mind that he missed the burning bush. Or worse, he could have seen the bush and decided it wasn’t worth risking part of his bottom line for and left the bush so he could find that sheep. But Moses turns aside. His sheep know his voice.

A second way Moses is instructive for us is when he responds to God’s call: The bush says “Moses, Moses” and Moses said “Here am I.” This is a common response. It’s the same response Eli tells Samuel to give to God calling him at night; it’s the same response Isaiah gives to God in Isaiah 6 when God asks “whom then shall I send?”. When God calls to us and we say “Here am I,” then we are standing with an open posture, making ourselves completely open to God’s direction.

A third way Moses is instructive in his obedience to God’s command: “put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground.” Moses was in the presence of God and so he takes off his shoes, a symbol of shedding the earthly or profane in the face of the sacred. We do this liturgically on Good Friday during the veneration of the Holy Cross. The Cross gets set up and the priest takes off his shoes, and walks towards the Cross, double genuflecting every couple of steps as he approaches. But this posture that Moses exhibits is something that should begin in our liturgical worship and spiral out into our daily lives. The awareness that we are in the presence of God is why we genuflect when we get in or out of pews, it’s why we genuflect when we cross the center line, it’s why we make the sign of the Cross when our Lord and Savior is elevated during Holy Communion. We are recognizing that we live in an enchanted world, a world that is being redeemed, a world that is always in the presence of God.

But of course, Moses’ response is instructive for us in a negative way too. He triest to resist God in multiple ways: he doesn’t know what name of God to give the Israelites, he doesn’t think the Israelites will believe him, he doesn’t believe he’s a good enough speaker either because he lacked charisma or possessed a speech impediment. And so Moses tries to get out of what God is calling him to do, but God doesn’t let him and eventually gives him everything he needs to move forward in obedience.

So the question for us is what do we do when we come to a keen awareness of God’s presence? How do react when God commands us? If we follow the positive elements of Moses’ example, we will be attentive to his voice with an open posture that’s willing to obey. And we will worship God with all of our hearts, minds, souls, bodies, and strength. Just like with Moses, our encounter with God will never leave us unchanged.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.