Call on the Name of the Lord #1 | "The Name"

0:00 Today is the first Sunday in the season of Lent. Beginning in the third century, Christians set Lent aside as a time of sacred preparation. For 40 days, fledgling believers, those new to the faith, would study the teachings of Jesus. they would serve those in need, they would fast, they would pray. And then on Easter morning, in a festive worship service clad in white robes, these individuals would be baptized and welcomed into the family of faith.

0:44 Christians still follow this ancient rhythm. For the next 40 days, we will devote ourselves to service, prayer, and faithful study. This Lent, our study is going to focus on names, sacred names, the names for God that we find in the Bible. The Good Book contains over 650 different names for God and over 200 different names and titles for Jesus. This treasure chest of names invites us to consider the varied and beautiful ways people have experienced God, have related to God, have been drawn into mysterious, powerful, life-changing encounters with God. these many names and the stories that give rise to these names offer an interesting challenge to the faithful most of us use two maybe three names for God we have our go-to ways for addressing God in prayer and here the good book prods us a bit it encourages us to get a deeper bench scriptures many names also raise important questions for people of faith does a person's experience of God and relationship with God hinge in part on the name a person uses for God?

2:33 What might happen if I were to broaden my prayerful vocabulary? What might happen if I were to borrow other names for God from the Bible? What might prompt me, like Hagar in the wilderness, like Abraham on Mount Moriah, to take a holy leap and assign a new name to God? name god that sounds like a wild thing an audacious thing maybe even a foolish thing how can a creature made from dust name the one who who sang the stars into existence and yet Scripture tells us the faithful do this. They do this a lot. This Lent we're going to contemplate, puzzle over, marvel at, and prayerfully immerse ourselves in a study of God's fascinating and evocative names. And we're going to begin today by considering what many consider to be the most important naming story in all of scripture, a passage from the good book in which a Hebrew shepherd named Moses dares ask the Holy One, how shall I refer to you?

4:05 What name do you go by? Listen now for God's word as it echoes to us from Exodus chapter three, beginning with the first verse. Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian. He led his flock beyond the wilderness and came to Mount Horeb, the mountain of God. There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush. He looked and the bush was blazing, yet It was not consumed. Then Moses said, I must turn aside and look at this great sight and see why this bush is not burned up. When the Lord saw that Moses had turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, Moses, Moses.

5:06 And Moses said, here I am. Then God said, come no closer. Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground. God said further, I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob. And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God. Then the Lord said, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites.

6:08 The cry of the Israelites has now come to me. I've also seen how the Egyptians oppress them. Now go. I am sending you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt. But Moses said to God, Who am I that I should go? to Pharaoh to bring the Israelites out of Egypt. God said, I will be with you. And this shall be the sign for you that it is I who sent you. When you've brought the people out of Egypt, you shall serve God on this mountain. But Moses said to God, if I come to the Israelites and say to them, the God of your ancestors has sent me to you, And they ask me, what is his name?

7:03 What shall I say to them? God said to Moses, I am who I am. He said further, thus you shall say to the Israelites, I am has sent me to you. God also said to Moses, thus you shall say to the Israelites, the Lord, the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, has sent me to you. This is my name forever, and this is my title for all generations. This is the word of God for you, the people of God. Thanks be to God. The name. That's the phrase that many faithful Jews use when referring to the sacred word that God shares with Moses at the foot of Mount Horeb, the name.

8:07 Whenever it appears in scripture, God's self-disclosed name looks sort of basic. It's composed of four letters. You can see those four letters on the cover of your bulletin. Four Hebrew letters floating above the burning bush, painted by Chagall. Four Hebrew letters like an autograph hovering with the sun as its background. The divine name Moses receives has these four letters. Yod, He, Vav, He. And because of this, some people refer to it as the tetragrammaton, the original four-letter word.

8:57 Within the Jewish faith, however, out of reverence for the holiness of this word, when reading the Bible out loud, when arriving at Yod, He, Vav, He, in scripture, worshippers do not attempt to pronounce these four letters, out of respect, when they encounter the Tetragrammaton, they substitute another name, Adonai, or simply insert Hashem, the name. The name God whispers to Moses in Exodus 3 is the most common name for God in all the Bible. It occurs 6,828 times. When those of us who are not observant Jews pronounce these four letters, not out of disrespect, but out of a desire to understand and discuss the name, we typically say Yahweh.

9:53 Is that how the name first sounded to Moses as he knelt in the flickering shadows caused by the flames of the burning bush? Who knows? Yahweh is something of a pronunciation guess. My friend Barbara Brown Taylor once remarked to me that Yahweh has always sounded to her like a puff of air. like a person releasing a breath after completing a hard task and finally sitting down for a rest. Yahweh. while many of the faithful have refused to say the name down through millennia others of the faithful have fiddled with it we we do this don't we we humans love to riff on other people's names some ancient believers took the tetragrammaton and actually shortened this already brief name in in both the hebrew bible and in the new testament there are places where Yahweh is rendered as simply Yah or Jah.

11:04 And the riffing doesn't stop there. This clipped version of the name gets combined with other Hebrew terms, bringing us, in one instance, one of our most famous and beloved religious words, Hallel Jah. Hallelujah.

11:24 Praise God. Literally praise Yah. Reggae singer Bob Marley made frequent use of this petite name for God. It appears throughout his songs. It grounds Marley's hymn-like forever loving Jah. It crops up in his torch song, Is This Love? we'll share the same room yeah for jaw provides the bread today's text from exodus 3 describes the scene where god offers this name to humankind the moment when god entrusts the name to us for safekeeping for reverent prayer for our use and explaining to others who it is that we follow. And this narrative begins with Moses.

12:21 At this point in the story, Moses has fled Egypt. Once a prince in that land, an adopted brother to Pharaoh, Moses is now a wanted man. His picture hangs in the post office. He's charged with killing an Egyptian taskmaster. A taskmaster who was brutally beating a Hebrew slave. Fleeing whatever rough justice awaits him, Moses hightails it to the nearby land of Midian. In this foreign land, Moses begins to put down roots. He falls in love. He marries Zipporah. Incidentally, Zipporah is itself an evocative biblical name. It means little bird. I think we need to revive Zipporah. And that's why my wife would not allow me to name our children. But I digress.

13:24 name. One day while Moses is out tending his father-in-law's sheep, he encounters a magical tree, a bush that burns but is not consumed by the flames. A voice from the crackling bush calls out to the fugitive, Moses, Moses, you are standing on holy ground. Moses, I want to talk with you. I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob.

13:59 Incidentally, this is also a fairly common way for people to name God in scripture. Here, God uses an ancestral formula. I'm the same God whom your father worshipped and whom your forefathers, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, worshipped. I find this naming convention to be rather touching. And I wonder why people of faith no longer use it. I don't think I've ever addressed God in the name of my ancestors. I've never prayed to God as the God of Audrey and Malcolm, the God of Jenny and Charles, the God of Beatrice and Edgar. and then it feels powerful to phrase it like that to associate the God I worship with the women and men who taught me the faith and who showed me how to live the faith.

15:03 again I digress but here's the thing once you start paying attention to how we name God it can send a person down all sorts of rabbit trails in this case I spent time this past week wondering if the phrase God of Abraham is technically a name for God or is it simply a way of acknowledging that we belong to a certain tradition. If faith is a river, then perhaps God of Jacob is a way of saying that this is the religious current I swim in. I worship the God who once wrestled with my great, great, great, so many great uncle Jacob in the dark of night and who filled his dreams with images of angels climbing up and down a ladder.

16:02 Maybe we evoke these names, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, to evoke their stories. And it's these stories that tell us who God is. I think that works. Although it leaves our earlier question unanswered. Is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob a name? In today's text, Moses is not so sure. God tells Moses, I'm sending you back to Egypt where there's a price on your head. I'm going to send you back to Egypt to tell old Pharaoh, you must free my people, the Israelites, from slavery. This is a dangerous task. In all probability, it's an impossible task. and it shakes Moses. Moses responds, who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?

16:57 God answers, I will be with you. And this shall be the sign for you that it is I who sent you. When you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall serve God on this very mount. Now at this point, Moses, and he's scared, gets a bit persnickety. He basically says to God, promises, promises. If I come to the Israelites and say to them, the God of your ancestors has sent me to you and they ask me, what is this God's name? What shall I say to them?

17:42 Moses is not satisfied and he does not think The Hebrew people will be satisfied with a traditional formula that names God by listing a bunch of famous ancestors. Moses doesn't want to stand before his peers and check off deceased people's names. He wants something more personal, intimate, relational.

18:06 Standing on holy ground, face to face with a talking burning bush, challenged to accept a mission and possible quest, Moses asks to see an ID. He wants God's real name. And that's when it happens. God relents. God speaks the Tetragrammaton. God whispers the name, a name that sounds like a human sigh, a name that echoes through every tuck and fold in our deep and beautiful tradition. Yahweh. Down through the millennia, the faithful have long puzzled over and argued about how best to translate, how to unpack the meaning of this mysterious name. The King James renders Yahweh as I am that I am, the NRSV, what we used this morning, I am who I am.

19:07 Many Jewish translations prefer I will be what I will be. In her fascinating new book, Naming God, British theologian Janet Soskis suggests that a good translation is, I am the one who is with you. I like that. Yahweh. I am the one who is with you. this rendering may remind you of another name that we have for God a name that we also assign to Jesus Emmanuel God with us Yahweh I am the one who is with you this translation of the name shimmers with presence with you.

20:03 I am with you. Yahweh reverberates actually the kind of magic that all names in a way hold. It evokes a presence. When I speak the name of my wife's deceased father, Phil, something enters the room. It's memories, yes, absolutely, but it's more. Names, real names, honest names conjure up a presence. my friends there's so much more that needs to be said about names we need to talk about how names get assigned we need to consider what it means to be named and what it means to take a name for ourselves we need to talk about the difference between a name for god and an attribute of god that first hand that we sung today immortal invisible god only wise are those names no those their attributes? What's the difference between a name and an attribute? Between a noun and an adjective? And there's more to be said, a lot more about how absurd it is, absolutely absurd, for finite beings to name the unnameable, to stick a label on the immortal, invisible, God-only wise.

21:32 It's a good thing that Lent is a long season. Today, though, I want to conclude by focusing our attention on this idea that a name like Yahweh has the power to evoke a presence, to connect. this past week in honor of Robert Duvall who died last Sunday at the respectable age of 93 this past week Amy and I have been re-watching Lonesome Dove I do love a good western although in contemplating today's topic I have to admit that it's a different project of Duvall's that has been in the forefront of my mind. I'm speaking of a film he directed and in which he played the main character, the Apostle.

22:30 The Apostle tells the story of an imperfect Pentecostal preacher in the American South, a man who's both a sinner and a saint, the Reverend Sonny Dewey. Like Moses, Sonny is in a heap of trouble. On learning that the youth minister in his congregation was having an affair with Sonny's wife, Sonny hits him in the head with a baseball bat. And in the blink of an eye, everything in Sonny's life is falling apart.

23:03 At that point in the movie, we find Sonny tormented by his own misdeeds, feeling the weight of sin, feeling adrift and lost and angry. We find Sonny praying. he's upstairs at his mother's house in the middle of the night praying to God ranting at God and this is what he says you have to excuse me as I try to channel the great Robert Duvall I'm confused I'm mad I love you Lord I love you but I'm mad at you I'm mad at you so deliver me tonight Lord what should I do ever since I was a little boy and you brought me back from the dead. I'm your servant. I'm your servant. What should I do? Tell me. I've always called you Jesus. You've always called me Sonny. What should I do, Jesus? This is Sonny talking now.

23:59 and then Sonny waits, his eyes dart from side to side, he waits for an answer. At that moment, the house phone rings, it's the next door neighbor, she's calling to complain to Sonny's mother about all the noise. His mother replies, ever since he was a little boy, sometimes Sonny would talk to the Lord, and sometimes he yells at the Lord, and tonight he happens to be yelling. I mentioned this scene to you today because of Robert Duvall. I mentioned this scene to you because Sonny is certain that he is on a first name basis with God. In a way, this is such a refreshing thing. I've always called you Jesus.

24:52 You've always called me Sonny. I mention this scene because it's a prayer. and when we study the names of our faith, the names that our faith uses for God, we are always, in the end, talking about prayer. in today's text Moses kneels before the burning bush he he prays he makes a request give me a name give me something that people can trust something that will pour water on on the parched souls of my family in this tough tough time at this request God smiles on Moses my name, Son, I am Yahweh.

25:47 I'm the one who is with you. I'm the sacred presence that will stand alongside you in cruel Pharaoh's court. I'm the spirit who will walk with you through the travails of the desert. I'm the one your ancestors called on in times of trouble. and I'm still here, always here.