What's in a name?

Your name may be your most important possession. As a Christian, I believe my baptism is even more critical to my identity than my name. But we never baptize anonymously. We baptize individual human beings with real names.

When my siblings and I were children, our mother used to mark our coats by sewing little name tapes into the collar, each hand-stitched with our full names. I doubt she went to this effort just to ensure the return of the coats if they were lost. My guess is that she wanted us to know, every time we put the coat on, that we were precious in her sight. Sewing our name into the collar by hand meant her love went with us wherever we went.

Rabbi Shai Held offers a fascinating interpretation of the Tower of Babel narrative. According to him, God dispersed the people because they were content to speak the same language and use the same words. They were not scattered because of their crazy ambition to undertake a tower project. It was because they had ignored their God-given uniqueness and lost their names in the process.

Plenty of 19th-century American slave stories remind us of people who sought to escape not only physical bondage but also the bondage of anonymity. “My name was Isabella,” Sojouner Truth said. “But when I left the house of bondage . . . I wasn’t goin’ to keep nothin’ of Egypt on me, an’ so I went to the Lord an’ asked Him to give me a new name. And the Lord gave me Sojourner, because I was to travel up an’ down the land, showing the people their sins, an’ bein’ a sign unto them. Afterwards I told the Lord I wanted another name, ’cause everybody else had two names; and the Lord gave me Truth.”

Each of us is blessed with our own name and corresponding significance. Faith calls us not only to celebrate the uniqueness of our own lives but also to delight in the diversity and value of all whom we meet.

See you in church!
Pastor Tuula