I Have Called You By Name
A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on The Baptism of Our Lord by the Very Rev. Tyler Doherty, Dean & Rector.
With three little girls under one roof–along with Leo the gecko, Olive the pug, and three guinea pigs (Dexter, Jasper, and Basil)–I’ve had some experience with “name-calling.” It’s a fact of growing up, of course, that at some point a sibling or schoolmate will call us something that cuts to the quick, that calls into question our sense of who we are, our self-worth, our inherent dignity as beloved child of God. In a perfect world, where the child’s self-concept is firmly established enough, the barb, or insult, just rolls like water off a duck’s back. Rooted and grounded in the well-attuned love of the parent or parents, the child can “pass through the waters,” without being overwhelmed. They can walk through fires of middle-school bullying without being consumed by the flame.
We call these kids “well-adjusted,” or “resilient,” or “secure in their attachment,” but what they really are is “loved.” They know name-calling when they hear it, and know it for the untruth it is. “Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me,” we all sang as kids. And that little ditty conveys a profound truth–we are not who we think we are, or who others think we are. We are not our thoughts. We are not grindingly repetitive stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. And others aren’t our thoughts about them either. They are more than the shorthand label we use to sort them into convenient shorthand categories. Those labels are but, “A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream,/a flash of lightening in a summer cloud,/a flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream.”
But often, perhaps more often than not in this age of social media where everything and everybody is voted on, ranked, held up for universal adulation or singled out for withering scorn and cancellation, the names don’t just roll like water off a duck’s back. We don’t relate to the labels like a bubble in a stream, or a flash of lightening in a summer cloud. No, instead the child begins to take the name, the label, the slur, the taunt as the final verdict on their very being. Instead of just being something fleeting and transitory, it gets solidified in a core belief about who we are. The core belief lodges in the body as a kind of sinkhole of contraction around which our whole life orbits.
Core beliefs sound just awful and we’ve all got them. They are usually some version of “not enough”--smart enough, skinny enough, funny enough, joyful enough, calm enough, spiritual enough. If a person grows up in a culture that measures everything by the standard of heterosexism, they might conclude that being LGTBQ+ means there’s something wrong with them, that they’re broken just for being who they are. Growing up as a person of color in culture that privileges all things white, a person might internalize a core belief that there’s something inferior about who they are just based on the color of their skin, their country of origin, or their mother tongue. However, we arrive at our particular core belief, it’s there in most people, most of the time. And to compensate for that core belief we develop various compensatory strategies to prevent us from feeling the pain.
If I have a core belief that I’m useless, unloveable, and stupid, I might adopt a strategy of being endlessly productive so that I can be seen as a “hard worker” and avoid that sinking feeling of not enough. Time off will seem a torture, because we’re left with ourselves–the feeling of “quiet desperation” Thoreau speaks of creeps up in a moment of just being, and so we throw ourselves into frenetic activity. I remember a colleague of mine with whom I ran a poetry in the schools project in inner city Philadelphia. We were writing a paper together about the work we were doing and making good progress when all of a sudden he stopped, crumpled over, and whispered–”I don’t know how to be.” He was smart, good-looking, successful, courageous and confident, happily married with two lovely children, and had a PhD. from Penn, but in that moment, he was a shell of a man. All the activity–the good and wonderful and activity (no denying that)--was suddenly shown up as a kind of busy cover for that anxious quiver of being he felt under the surface.
Jesus’ baptism by John in the River Jordan is the heaven-opening proclamation of the indissoluble bond of belovedness created between God and each one of us in baptism. You are beloved. In you and you and you I am well-pleased. Just as you are. You are enough. More than enough! You are precious in God’s sight, uniquely gifted talents that only you can bring to the world, to the work of building up of the Kingdom that this world might come to resemble more closely God’s Dream for it, instead of the human-created nightmare it often is.
When we’re baptized into Jesus’ Name, we participate in the very same belovedness that Jesus experiences in his relationship with the Father. That same Abba, Poppa, Daddy, just as we are intimacy with the ground of all Being is our birthright. It’s indissoluble. It can’t be broken. “I have called you by name, you are mine,” writes Isaiah. Beneath all the thoughts, and worries, and problems. Beneath the stories of not enough. Beneath all the strategies we employ to avoid the pain of the internalized core belief that there’s something wrong with us is an indestructible core of belovedness that no human-all-too-human name-calling, no label, no shaming can ever touch. It shines forth as the great imperishable I Amness that is the doorway to our union and communion with God in Christ through the Holy Spirit.
Resting in, abiding in, wasting time gracefully in our I Amness, our Beingness is the Burning Bush that burns up all the chaff that we mistake for who we are. Resting as that I Amness is the winnowing fork that sorts out all the mistaken identifications with the name-calling, and the litanies of not-enoughness we’ve imbibed from teachers, parents, politicians, nation, advertisers, social media and all the rest. Resting as that I Amness is the opening of the heavens, the Spirit descending upon us like a dove who coos the unceasing hymn of our basic belovedness that’s “stronger than dirt” as the old Ajax commercial used to say. Stronger than dirt and stronger than cedar trees. Stronger than dirt and stronger than the wilderness of Kadesh. Stronger than dirt and stronger than oak trees, forests, and Mount Hermon.
When that basic fact of our belovedeness is encountered–when the gift of our baptism is unwrapped and made manifest in our daily life and when that heaven opening dove-descending well-pleased belovedness is the ground from which we live and our all our compassionate action springs–we taste first-hand the freedom of life in Christ. We’ve died to all those shaming, sham stories of who we are and our life springs up to, as, eternal life. It’s what Hopkins points us towards in the final, astounding concluding lines of “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire”: “In a flash, at a trumpet crash,/ I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and/This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,/Is immortal diamond.”
When this “Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood,” encounters its true nature, when it wakes up from the dream of shame, and guilt, and blame, when that core belief is burned up in fire of God’s love for us, we discover our immortal diamondness, and the power the strength of the Lord cataloged in Psalm 29 is unleashed within us and poured out as justicing for others. We proclaim the Good News of belovedness to all people in word, example, and deed. We seek and serve Christ in all persons loving them with the same belovedness we have encountered and made our own. We work for justice and peace for all people and respect the dignity of every human being and God’s good creation. Each person, each flower, each mountain, river and stream is seen for what it is–a shining-forth facet-face of the One Immortal Diamond that is without boundary. Unshackled from the grinding effort to be “enough,” unburdened from the need to earn God’s freely given grace, we are freed up by love to be love for others that they too might know and live from their belovedness.
Baptism and the renewal of our Baptismal promises is a reminder to place our trust in what is ultimately trust-worthy, in what doesn’t come and go. Ignoring what doesn’t change–boundless love that isn’t born and doesn’t die–and clinging fast to what is fleeting is a bad trade that brings only suffering for ourselves and others. You are called by name. Precious in God’s sight. Honored and loved. Don’t let all that name-calling convince you that you’re anything other than the one who is baptized in the Name of Jesus. Don’t call yourself, or let anyone else call you, anything other than beloved and see if that’s not just true as well for everyone you meet.