From Our Archives

Debie Thomas, They Have No Wine (2019); Debie Thomas, Many Gifts, One Spirit (2022).

This Week's Essay

Isaiah 62:2, "You shall be called by a new name." 

Last month our church celebrated the ancient practice of Christian baptism. The priest poured water on baby William three times, and then made the sign of the cross on his forehead. As he did so, he recited those beautiful and powerful words: "William, you have been sealed with the Holy Spirit and marked with the cross of Christ. You belong to God."

The baptismal party then processed down the center aisle of our church.  Leading the way was a person who held high a red banner with the words of Isaiah 43:1: "I have called you by name, you are mine." At the end of the group, William's father asperged the congregation to remind us of our own baptisms.

Fresco from the Roman catacombs, third century.

In the outward ritual of baptism we enact an inward spiritual reality — that every person has a name, that God knows my name, and that he calls each and every one of us by name. The oily cross on William's brow will wear off, but not the unconditional promise that he belongs to God. Forever. Full stop. Nothing can ever change that, because nothing can separate us from the love of God.

Although baptism is a ritual of the church, and a promise to both parents and child, it's also a sign to the world. What's true for William is true for me, for you, and for every person. We belong to God. He knows our names, and he's calling every one of us to himself. In baptism we celebrate and claim that promise of God.

The act of naming people, places and events to signify their essence recurs throughout the Bible. On the very first pages of Genesis, Adam and Eve name the animals. Jacob gave the place where he struggled with God a special name, Peniel, "because I saw God face to face, and yet my life was spared.” Children received symbolic names, like Ichabod ("the glory has departed"), and Isaiah's son Shear-jashub ("a remnant shall return"). When Sarah banished her to the loneliness of the desert, Hagar nonetheless named Yahweh "the God who sees me," and in a delightful play on words exclaimed, "I have seen the One who sees me."

Re-naming carries even greater significance. A new name signifies a new reality. Sarah and the patriarchs received new names. Pharaoh renamed Joseph. Cyrus renamed Daniel and his three fellow exiles. Jesus changed Simon's name to Peter.  After his conversion, the "Hebrew of Hebrews" Saul assumed his Roman name Paul as the apostle to the Gentiles.

In our own day, when Jorge Mario Bergoglio became the 266th pope, he took the new name Francis in order to signify a new direction for the Catholic Church. And what a difference he's made by living into the reality of his new name.

At the beginning of this new year 2025, the Old Testament reading this week from Isaiah 62 promises us a new name, and with it the possibility of a new reality.

You will be called by a new name
    that the mouth of the Lord will bestow.
³ You will be a crown of splendor in the Lord’s hand,
    a royal diadem in the hand of your God.
⁴ No longer will they call you Deserted,
    or name your land Desolate.
But you will be called Hephzibah,
    and your land Beulah;
for the Lord will take delight in you,
    and your land will be married.
⁵ As a young man marries a young woman,
    so will your Builder marry you;
as a bridegroom rejoices over his bride,
    so will your God rejoice over you.

Calling someone by name conveys a shocking sense of intimacy with the divine. It points to our deepest and most fundamental identity as children of God.

Miniature of the Echmiadzin Gospel, sixth century, Armenia.

In his own baptism, Jesus received a new name — he was God's beloved son. Writing in the Huffington Post about the baptism of Jesus, Vicki Flippin of Yale Divinity School says, "I tell folks that baptism is the church declaring what has always been true, that each of us belongs to God and only to God. The child is claimed by God above all other claims."

God created each one of us. He cares for us. And he calls us by a new name: "you are my beloved."

When Frederick Buechner gave the Noble Lectures at Harvard in the winter of 1969, he articulated what became the hallmark of his life work — the conviction that if God speaks to us at all, it is in the everyday events of our ordinary lives. The lectures became the book The Alphabet of Grace, in which he "set out to describe a single representative day of my life in a way to suggest what there was of God to hear in it." For Buechner, the "humdrum events of our lives," as he called them, are an alphabet through which God calls us by name.

In a much-quoted passage from his book Now and Then, he articulated how both his fiction and his four memoirs had the same goal: 

"By examining as closely and as candidly as I could the life that had come to seem to me in many ways a kind of trap or dead-end street, I discovered that it really wasn't that at all. I discovered that if you really keep your eye peeled to it and your ears open, if you really pay attention to it, even such a limited and limiting life as the one I was living on Rupert Mountain opened up onto extraordinary vistas. Taking your children to school and kissing your wife good-bye. Eating lunch with a friend. Trying to do a decent day's work. Hearing the rain patter against the window. There is no event so commonplace but that God is present within it, always hiddenly, always leaving you room to recognize him or not to recognize him, but all the more fascinatingly because of that, all the more compellingly and hauntingly. In writing those lectures and the book they later turned into, it came to seem to me that if I were called upon to state in a few words the essence of everything I was trying to say both as a novelist and as a preacher, it would be something like this: listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace. What I started trying to do as a writer and as a preacher was more and more to draw on my own experience not just as a source of plot, character, and illustration, but as a source of truth."

Listen to your life. God is calling you by name. Pay attention. Be still and know that He is God. Before Him, all hearts are open, all desires known, and from Him no secrets are hidden. As Buechner put it in The Sacred Journey, "He says he is with us on our journeys. He says he has been with us since each of our journeys began. Listen for him. Listen to the sweet and bitter airs of your present and your past for the sound of him."

Weekly Prayer

The Gifts of the Three

Originally from the Carmina Gadelica I, 75
Taken from Esther de Waal, editor, The Celtic Vision (Liguori, MO: Liguori/Triumph, 1988, 2001), p. 163

Spirit, give me of Thine abundance,
Father, give me of Thy wisdom,
Son, give me in my need,
Jesus beneath the shelter of Thy shield.

I lie down tonight,
With the Triune of my strength,
With the Father, with Jesus,
With the Spirit of might.

NOTE: For sixty years the folklorist Alexander Carmichael (1832–1912) traversed Scotland's Outer Hebrides isles collecting and translating the traditions of its Gaelic-Catholic people. His eventual trove contained a little of everything — their ballads, prayers, proverbs, hymns, charms, incantations, runes, poems, tales and songs. Carmichael's labor of love was published in six volumes across seventy years as Carmina Gadelica ("Hymns of the Gael") Hymns and Incantations, With Illustrative Notes on Words, Rites, and Customs, Dying and Obsolete: Orally Collected in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. Carmichael published the first two volumes in 1900. His daughter Ella continued the project. Volumes 3 and 4 were published by his grandson, James Watson, in 1940–1941. Volumes 5 and 6 were published by Angus Matheson in 1954 and 1971.

Dan Clendenin: dan@journeywithjesus.net

Image credits: (1, 2) Pravmir.com.