Saturday, August 29, 2015

Sermon for the Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Proper 17B  ~  August 30, 2015
Holy Trinity & St. Anskar

Graft in our hearts the love of your Name

+In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity,


There are number of ways to interpret this prayer. I have, before, emphasized the mystical practice of the Jesus Prayer, by which we invite God’s Love to be united to our own personal centers.  The prayer may also refer to our story or narrative about God.  As I have also said before, name means reputation, a person's public story.  So, here is an obvious meaning: May God help us to love the story about His activity.
However, since God's activity is love for us, the "love of your Name" could also mean God's love as revealed in the story.  Not our love for the story, but God's love for us as revealed in the story.  In that interpretation, we are not asking God to excite in us feelings of piety or reverence for the Bible and tradition (although there's nothing wrong with that!); rather, we are asking that the whole import of the story — the awful Love of God — may take over our innermost selves.
Graft in our hearts the love of Your Name.
The Love of God's Name also reminds us that God has a Name known to us.  Now, a name is a word.  A reputation, a story, a narrative, is nothing but a collection of words, a description.  The presupposition of revealed religion is that God has given us a self-description.  God has identified Himself in language we can understand.  The problem is that our words are limited, while God is not.  Therefore, the story we have been given is incomplete and, in a certain sense, faulty. It has to be, because it is given in terms we can understand (up to a point), but the Object of our understanding is, by definition, incomprehensible!
Even though God has told us His Name, we must not pronounce it, because it is holy.  That means it is entirely removed from us — "utterly other."  To speak it is blasphemy.  That is the primary meaning of the Third Commandment: the Name of God is holy, and so we may not even utter it aloud. As Wittgenstein famously observed, “Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent.”
All this is a colorful way of expressing our basic problem, as adherents of divine revelation:  God has revealed Himself, but God is still Utterly Other.  We may know the Name, but we must never say it, because to do so is to describe God as less than God, to "take the Name… in vain."  So what are we to do?
At the very least, I think, we must recognize that anything we say about God is conditional, provisional, and incomplete.  It cannot be otherwise, since we are finite while God is not.  That means that it is the extreme of arrogance — rising perhaps even to blasphemy — to say that my pronunciation of the Name is right and yours is wrong.  In giving us His Name, God has not given us certainty, at least not the kind of certainty that warrants persecution of those who disagree.
At the same time, God has revealed something of Who He is.  If we must be very careful not to take the Name in vain, it is because God Who so commands has already identified Himself as our Liberator: "I am the LORD your God, Who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the land of slavery."  (The original Hebrew has the unutterable Tetragrammaton, which we render as LORD, all in capitals, to avoid pronouncing it.) Who brought you out of the land of Egypt, you see!  We can say something about this Utterly Other One, something about His identity.  We can say that God has freed us from slavery, because God has told us so.  The very One Who commands us not to take the Name in vain, also commanded us to recognize God’s acts of Love in history – and to tell of them. We may not be able to speak of God out of our own limited consciousness – “Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent” – but it is God Who is speaking here, not us, Who says
I am the LORD your God, Who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the land of slavery."  
            Of course there will be those who deny this.  We have to say that they are mistaken, because we have experienced God's liberation and heard God’s self-identification – we know God’s Name.  That does not mean that we are permitted to hate anyone or persecute them, just because they don’t acknowledge the Name.  In fact, they may know things about God that we don't.  They may know God by another Name, which is just as holy and faithful.  That is none of our business.
The paradox is that this salutary humility, arising out of our recognition of our own limitations, is commanded by the One Who has revealed Himself to us and identified Himself — Who has, in other words, told us His Name.
Lately we hear many who describe themselves as "spiritual but not religious."  I suppose this means that such people recognize within themselves the desire for the Unnamable One, a desire we would say God has given them.  In Augustine's great prayer:
You have made us and drawn us to yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.
I suppose our spiritual-but-not-religious friends hesitate to be duped by all the counterfeits available in the religious supermarket. I suppose they have come to Wittgenstein’s conclusion about the limits of our ability to name God. Finally, I suppose they may hesitate to acknowledge the Name, out of a kind of awe — an instinctive horror of taking the Name in vain.  If so, this is good.  "The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom."  
The good news is that God has spoken.  God has told us His Name.  The Utterly Other, silent by definition, is also the Word spoken from the Beginning, Who has become flesh and dwelt among us. Our own hearts are restless until that Word enters them and comes to dwell in them — until the Love of the Name grafts itself in our hearts, as a new vine grafted onto an old root, causing the steady increase in true religion, which is to say increase in our bond with Love Himself, by the Holy Spirit's nourishment with all goodness, unto the fruition of good works.

AMEN
MARANATHA

COME, LORD JESUS!

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