In Ursula Le Guin’s fantasy novel The Tombs of Atuan, young Tenar is identified as the next high priestess of the tombs of the Nameless Gods. In an initiation ceremony, Tenar is stripped of her name and labled “Arya,” which means “eaten one.” She is consigned to live the rest of her life as merely a cipher of the Nameless Gods in the tombs, without personhood, integrity, or her own meaning. As time goes on Tenar’s lack of identity smothers her, and she desires nothing so much as to be given back her true name.
Both today’s Old Testament and Gospel readings are all about naming, and the power of naming, and the burden and grace of a name. In Genesis, God renames both Abram and Sarai, and in Mark, Jesus seems to give Simon a terrible name.
We know all-too-well the power of naming. Recall the devastating name someone gave you in childhood or adolescence. Perhaps it was a teasing friend who didn’t realize her ability to harm. Perhaps it was a bully who knew exactly what he was doing. Perhaps it was a teacher who misunderstood the struggles you were facing and mistook them for lack of care. Perhaps it was a parent who spoke to you in anger. Whatever the label cast and by whom, I suspect you are still haunted by that name. I know I am.
That pattern continues throughout life, as we all know. We receive names from those known to us, by strangers, and by society-at-large, often cast in carelessness as much as in cruelty. And these names, too, strip us of our given names, viciously stealing our identity and replacing it with one that we find difficult to escape.
It should be said, the name that strips you of your true name may not even be given by another. It may be the name you whisper of yourself in the morning mirror, because you don’t like the person whose reflection you see. We do great harm by the names we cast on ourselves.
Lest we mistakenly believe we are only on the receiving end of such naming, we must remember that we also name others, sometimes deliberately and sometimes carelessly. Indeed, the most God-like power God gives to Adam in the second chapter of Genesis is the power to name.[i] I learned this most starkly during the decade I served at Christ Church Cathedral in downtown Houston. Literally every day, I had to walk past, through, and over the multitude of homeless women and men who congregated and slept on the Cathedral blocks. The clutter, the intransigence, and the headaches that accompanied so many people on the street were frustrating and wearying in the extreme. And each day, I had the choice to name in my heart and soul these neighbors as either “worthless bums” or “children of God.” Some days, the effort required to choose the latter name was mighty. But making that choice made all the difference.
As with Tenar in Ursula Le Guin’s novel, the names with which we are burdened, and the names we cast on others, threaten to devour us. Our God-given power to name seems as often a curse as a blessing.
But in today’s scripture, God acts, and God names, and God declares that God’s own renaming supplants all other names. God says to Abram, “No longer shall your name be Abram, but your name shall be Abraham; for I have made you the ancestor of a multitude of nations. I will make you exceedingly fruitful; and I will make nations of you, and kings shall come from you…And Sarai your wife shall become Sarah. I will bless her…and she will become the mother of nations.”
By God’s renaming, God not only gives Abraham and Sarah new signifiers; God charts a new path for them. God writes the first words of a new story for Abraham and Sarah, a new identity that will go somewhere, leaving behind who and what Abram and Sarai were, and revealing a new avenue for Abraham’s and Sarah’s whole life. That is the power of naming. That is what happens when God grants a new name.
When we turn to the Gospel, things appear to get a bit tricky, because here Jesus refers to Simon as “Satan.” (Can you imagine the therapy bills you’d rack up if Jesus Christ named you Satan? That would be a name difficult to shed.) But is that really the name Jesus casts on Simon? This passage should not be read in a vacuum. It comes immediately after two other namings. Four verses before today’s reading, Jesus asks the disciples to name him. Who do they, and the gathered crowds, believe Jesus to be? And Simon alone grants Jesus the name that resounds to this day. Simon says, “You are the Messiah—the Christ—the Son of the living God.”[ii]
We miss much if we fail to recognize that it is Simon’s naming of Jesus that grants Jesus himself the confidence and courage then to announce for the very first time Jesus’ plan to go to Jerusalem, to enact his Passion. And it is in response to the incredible name Simon has given Jesus that Jesus responds with a name of his own. In Matthew’s account, it is then that Jesus says to Simon, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah…I [name] you Peter—the Rock. On the rock of your faith in me, I will build my church, and not even the gates of hell will overcome it.”[iii]
This is the name—Peter, the Rock—that Jesus gives to Simon. Simon has named Jesus truly, granting Jesus the courage and strength to move forward in God’s story, and so Jesus names Simon truly, granting Peter his own role in God’s story.
Abraham; Sarah; Peter; Christ…these are today’s new names that grant identity, integrity, and meaning. They propel not only the stories of individual characters, but also the salvation history—God’s larger story—in which each of these characters finds meaning and of which all are an essential part. Unlike Ursula Le Guin’s Tenar, who becomes nameless in service to gods of darkness, our God grants new names that empower us to shine and, through us, further God’s project of grace in the world.
It is time, sisters and brothers, to shed the old names cast upon you in your life, to say “begone!” to all those names and labels that plague you. It is time to gaze into the mirror and imagine the name gifted to you by the God who creates you each day in love.
From the moment you accept God’s new name, God opens the path to a new story for you, and for me. And that story will graft you as an essential part into God’s great story, the epic of love that saves the world.
As I wrote this sermon, a youth group song looped through my head, a song that in those vulnerable teenage years when the names cast on us can do their worst always lifted my spirits and allowed me to let go of the labels that were imposed on me and that I imposed on myself:
I will change your name
You shall no longer be called
Wounded, outcast, lonely or afraid.
I will change your name.
Your new name shall be
Confidence, joyfulness, overcoming one
Faithfulness, friend of God,
One who seeks my face.[iv]
[i] Genesis 2:19
[ii] Mark 8:29. It is in Matthew’s account, at 16:16, that Simon adds “the Son of the living God.”
[iii] Matthew 16:17-18
[iv] Written by D.J. Butler
God in the Midst of the City 