“God Calls Us By Name”

Isaiah 43:1-21

A Sermon Preached by The Rev. Douglas M. Donley

January 11, 2004

University Baptist Church

Minneapolis, MN

 

            How are you known out in the world?

            I mean, are you known by what you do?

            Are you a skier? A snow bird?  A trekkie?  A skater? A bell ringer? A student?  A professor?  An IT guru?

            Or how about by what you believe?

            A Conservative? A Liberal?  A Baptist?  A liberal Baptist?

            How about by your affiliation?

            Are you a card carrying member of the ACLU, MinPIRG, HRC, MPR, NPR, BPFNA or even UBC?

            We have all sorts of identifiers that we use.  It’s the way we make sense of our world.  It’s how we put people into categories so that we think we can know something about them.  And it works until it doesn’t.  We like having liberal Baptist on our sign because it makes people stop and say, “huh?”  We are so good at prejudging people.  We are so good at categorizing people.  We are so good at defining ourselves as not like them.

            Luckily, the God we follow does not act as petty as we do.  This God calls each of us by our name.  And I’m not talking about our belief system or our political affiliation or our membership.  God calls us by our very names.  God sees through all of the posturing and calls us like God sees us.  And God calls us to be the best “us” we can be.

            Confused?  Let me make it plainer.  Hear these words from Isaiah 43:

            “Be not afraid, for I have redeemed you, I have called you by name and you are mine.  When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk though fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you.  For I am YHWH, your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior…Because you are precious in my sight, and honored, and I love you…Do not be afraid for I am with you.”

            Isaiah was writing to the people who were in exile.  They had been forcibly removed from their land.  They were having trouble singing the sacred songs in the strange land that they were in.

            Many of us feel as though we are in exile these days.  With so much violence that has the name of religion.  With so much disregard for the poor and outcast, with so much judgementalism and fear-mongering, it sometimes feels like we are lost.

            But in the midst of the exiles of our lives, God comes and gives us words of hope and deliverance.  When it seems like the whole world has forgotten us, God remembers us.  And not just as a people, but each and every one of us.  God knows us all and calls us by name.

            The Psalmist, also writing at the time of the exile, says in Psalm 139: “O God you have searched me and known me.  You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from afar.  You search out my path and my lying down and are acquainted with all of my ways.  Even before a word is on my tongue you know it completely…where can I go from your spirit, where can I flee from your presence?”

            Many of us forget that God loves us.  Many of us forget that we have a purpose from God.  Many of us forget to examine our own lives as much as God examines our lives.  We try to flee from God’s presence.  We think we have it all together and we dabble in the idolatry that we can make it on our own without God.  Most of us can during the good times, but it’s when the rough times come that we need to look again at and for God.

            This is where the words of Isaiah confront and confound us:

            God says to you and I, “I have called you by name.  I have a purpose for you in this life.”

            The Isaiah passage begins, “…you are precious in my sight, and honored, and I love you.”

            Some people never hear those words from someone in their lives.  We could all stand to hear those words a whole lot more often:  “you are precious in my sight and honored, and I love you.”  If we don’t feel precious to anyone else or honored or loved, then we are prone to lose our way or exhibit destructive behaviors.  It’s also hard to love anyone else.

            GLBT folk are seven times more prone to suicide because they don’t hear “you are precious in my sight and honored, and I love you.”  Religion tells them the opposite and people inspired by that religion reject the holiness of the lives of our GLBT sisters and brothers.

            At my first church in urban Hartford, CT, we were surrounded by warring gang factions.  Young people were lured by the gang culture.  Part of it was about power and violence.  Some of it was about the hopelessness people feel when all the cards are stacked against them.  But most of it was about love—a sick, twisted kind of love for sure.  As I spoke with some of those young people, they talked about how the gangs were their families.  The gang was a family that they knew they could depend upon.  The gang was the family that always had their back.  I began to realize that the only thing to counteract a gang was to give young people something more compelling, more trustworthy, more exciting, and more life-giving.  That’s a tall order for the church and it was ultimately too tall an order for us back then as we saw one by one our young men get into gangs.  Ironically, many of the ones who stayed out of gangs escaped poverty by getting into the military which offered them the same kind of family sense of group cohesion and sense of purpose.

And yet, today’s scripture calls us to remember that we are part of a larger plan.  And part of that plan includes making our corner of the world safe for all people.  This means that the violence at the core of a gang in Hartford or in Minneapolis, or in Iraq, or the occupied territories, or in Israel, or in the Pentagon must be called into question in order to see if it serves God’s higher purpose.  Isaiah 43:8 says “Bring forth the people who are blind, yet have eyes, who are deaf, yet have ears!”  The book of Revelation puts it this way, “Whoever has ears to hear, listen to what the Spirit is saying to the churches.”

Many of the problems in the world are blamed on the fact that people think they are hearing from God.  Osama Bin Laden claims to speak for God.  Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell claim to speak for God.  Many people claim that George Bush speaks for God.  Many of our elected leaders play God all the time, so do gang members.  But is it the same god who calls us to this ethic of peace?  There’s the rub. 

God calls each of us by name and loves each of us.  God wants life for each of us.  Our challenge as faithful people is to do our God-inspired work so that the people that God loves individually and collectively will be safe, free and living into their calling as children of God.  In short, our work ought to be focused on making the world or at least our corner of it safe for all people.  That’s why our activism is so important.  That’s why our work with Families Moving Forward, and Loaves and Fishes and Meals on Wheels and Second Baptist Church in Leon and Soulforce and the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, and Rainbow Families, and Green Lake and Micah and Isaiah and the Interfaith Campus Coalition are all so important.  Each one of these groups is an expression of our faithful commitment to making the world free.  It is because we know that God knows each and everyone of us.  By name.  Personally.  And we seek to know God.  These groups help us to see God more clearly.

If God calls each of us by name, then none of us can hide from God behind some coalition, behind some affiliation, behind some label.  If God knows our name then we know that our mission is personal, our relationship is personal.  There is no cookie-cutter faith, no cookie-cutter action, no cookie-cutter response.  What is required is a personal response of some kind.

            A couple of you have responded by joining this church.  Liz and Robyn, we don’t all know your name and you certainly can’t be expected to know all of ours, but I do know that God knows your names, just like God knows ours.  I can’t wait to see what new things happen when we walk this road together as church members.  Thank you for honoring us with your presence on this journey.  I hope and pray that we can earn your trust so that we might see what God already sees in each of you.

            That’s really what I wish for all of us.  That we see this New Year as a time when we recognize the Holy that is all around us.  This includes the holiness in each other.

            God says in Isaiah 43: “When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk though fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you.  For I am YHWH, your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior…Because you are precious in my sight, and honored, and I love you…Do not be afraid for I am with you.”

            I hope and pray that we might be able to say those words to each other.  When you pass through the waters, I will be with you.

When you are in deep water, they shall not overwhelm you.

When you walk through fire, you will not be burned.

Because you are all precious in our sight and we commit to doing everything we can to keep you safe and to help you live into your calling. 

The scripture doesn’t say keep out of the waters, or avoid fire. 

It says when you do these things, you won’t be alone.  “I know who you are,” says God. 

            As we traverse the waters and the fires of this New Year, may we do so encouraged by our new friends; enlivened by the new discoveries that will reveal themselves over the coming year; empowered by the ever-present spirit of God; and remembering that God knows and remembers each and every one of us by name some of whom are Char, Terri, Drew, Liz, Jean, Michael, Robyn, Thor, Carolyn. 

            When we hear our name, our response makes all the difference in the world.