Promise In a Name

A Sermon Based Upon Genesis 17: 1-7; 15-16, NRSV

By Rev. Dr. Charles J. Tomlin, DMin

Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership

February 18th, 2018

One of William Shakespeare’s most famous quotes has Juliet asking Romeo: "What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”  Juliet’s point was that it didn’t matter what Romeo’s family name was because they loved each other.

So, what is in a name?   When I started college I made a little fun with my name.  While introducing myself, I say something like, “I’m Charles Tomlin from a little village called ‘Charles’ and I grew up on a road named ‘Tomlin’.  With tongue in cheek I added: “My parents weren’t real creative.”  Of course, I was only joking.  Actually, I was named “Charles” after my father.  My middle name is Joseph, but my nickname is “Joey”.  The reason they didn’t call me Joseph or Joe was because “Joey” was the name I already had when my parents adopted me at nine months.   Sometimes there’s a lot that can be said with a name.

In our text today, Abram got his new name: “Abraham.”   As Abraham journeyed with God, he lived by the promise that he would give birth to a great people.   Today three major religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, go back to this “Abraham”.   We connect to Abraham through his most famous three sons; Isaac, Ishmael, and of course, Jesus who was born of ‘Abraham’s seed’ (Matt. 1:1).   What is most important, however, is not any kind of genealogical connection, but the spiritual connection we can have.  So, first, before we get to how Abram became Abraham, let’s review the most important spiritual details of this story.

I AM GOD, ALMIGHTY

This story of renaming begins, not with the renaming of Abraham, but with God making his own name crystal clear.   Perhaps, since Abram was 99 years old, he needed a reminder.  I already need a lot of reminding at this dear age of “60”.   But this is probably less about Abram’s need to be reminded, as much as, it is about God’s desire to reveal himself.   At the center of this story is one of the greatest of spiritual truths ever encountered:  We can’t fully know who we are, or what life means, without knowing this God whom we call ‘the one true God.’   “I am the Almighty God…” literally means, “I am the God of the Mountain top”, or as we might translate it:  I’m at the top of everything you imagine to be God.

For you see, Abram did not come from a land that was devoid of God, but he came from a land of many gods, many forms of worship, and many different religious understandings.   It was out of this ‘many’ that this one ‘Almighty God’ revealed himself.  This revelation did not come through a mere idea, but through a specific people who were called to live, to believe, trust, and to follow the promise of this God who would bless them, and by blessing them, would bless the whole world.   This isn’t a ‘bad’ vision of God, is it?   In a time when many people today have become afraid of religion, thinking of religious faith as a negative, harmful or meaningless, what if we could recapture this ‘vision’ or ‘revealing’ a God who blesses?

Again, Abram came out of a world where there were many gods: temple gods, national gods, local community gods, and household gods.  Hardly anyone in that day would have dared suggested that there wasn’t a god.  There was, on the contrary, a god for just about any occasion.  Giving a mind, soul, or personal name to nature or other unseen powers was the way that ancient people made meaning for their lives.  They believed that appeasing and pleasing these gods would help to control their own destiny.  Today, few would name all these invisible powers ‘gods’, but we name them mother nature, random situations, or specific circumstances.   And even though some ‘circumstances’ seem to have a mind of their own, fewer people today think they need an understanding of many gods or any God, for that matter.  While the Hebrew Psalmist wrote that “Only a fool says in his or her heart, there’s no God (Psa. 14:1, 53:1, Luk. 12:20),”  the direction of most people’s thinking today is exactly the opposite, “Only fools still say there is an “Almighty God.”

The popular Welsh philosopher of the last century, Bertrand Russell explained how modern people shouldn’t base their lives on a “God who can’t be proven”.  This was is the evolving, advancing norm for thinking people, since the European Enlightenment.  And Russell and the Enlightenment thinkers are right: The Bible never once tried to prove the existence of God.  It does not prove God, but assumes God.  The problem today is not that God has been disproven, but that belief in God is being ‘discarded’ or ‘displaced’ by people with either money of power. But even this decline of faith in God, the basic questions of life still remain ultimately unanswerable without faith.   

The most specific question that still remains is: “Do people live better and die better by the facts, or do people live better and die better when they they have ‘hope’ beyond the ‘facts’?  Interestingly, when a woman in Great Britain heard this philosopher explain that she shouldn’t believe a God who wasn’t provable, she decided to keep going to church to worship God anyway as an ‘act’ of her faith.   And the woman was right to do so.  Most philosophers today admit they don’t really live just by the facts either.  Since God can’t be proven or disproven, you simply express a specific kind of ‘faith’ when you say that there is no God.   For just as Abraham followed God by faith (Hebrews 11: 8ff), not by sight, so we who choose to have faith, we follow in Abraham’s footsteps.  The real question in our lives is not will I have faith or not, but which kind of faith will we have?  Will my faith include the revealed faith, or will my kind of ‘faith’ exclude the revealed faith with a hope that replaces God.  This is why the Biblical question is not, do you believe, but which God will you serve,  God, or Money?  Whether you admit it or not, you will still have a god. (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherhowse/7956590/Bertrand-Russell-versus-faith-in-God.html).

Several years ago, in 2001, I flew to Boston, Massachusetts twice, to interview for a position as pastor of a Baptist Church in one of the nearby suburbs.  Interestingly, I flew in and out of Logan Airport, the same Airport terrorist flew out of, only four months later.   One day, during my visit, I went into a local book store and came across a book written by local Harvard Professor of Psychiatry, Armand Nicoli.  For thirty-five years, Dr. Nicoli had taught the most popular class at Harvard.  This book was based on those lectures entitled, “The Question of God”.   Public Television had made a Documentary about the contents of the book.  The class lectures were based on arguments of the Oxford professor, C.S. Lewis who converted from atheism to Christianity, compared to the arguments of the Austrian Sigmund Freud, a Jew who became an atheist, who is thought of as the founder of modern psychology.   If you have any ‘questions’ about God, you ought to read that book, or check out the documentary.  Without making one single argument, and without making one single conclusion, by the time you finish that book, you’ll understand a great distinction between a life lived by a person of faith moving toward God, verses someone running away from having faith in God.   What is that distinction? (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/questionofgod/).

WALK BEFORE ME….BE BLAMELESS

Perhaps the greatest distinction between a faithful and faithless person, is whether or not they actually live their lives based on the moral command of this ‘Almighty God’.   This is exactly what it meant for Abram to become Abraham; the father of all revealed faith.   Abram was never given any kind of explanation, proof, or theory about God, but he was ‘commanded’ to live a higher standard of morality by this God.   

I don’t want to get into a deep discussion about proving God, but I do think it is important to understand, that what we see happening in this moral command that is being placed upon Abram, ‘to walk….and be blameless’, is precisely what C.S. Lewis wrote about in his greatest writing, Mere Christianity.   Lewis said that: “The human “conscience reveals to us a moral law whose source cannot be found in the natural world, thus pointing to a supernatural Lawgiver. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_morality).  The point is, where does our sense of ‘ought’ come from?  Does it only come from ourselves, or does it come from the God who created us, and commands us to live before him?   I realize that there are many who would argue that human morality is merely evolutionary; that morality is simply a way that humans try to protect themselves.  But how can loving your enemy protect you?  How can turning the other cheek, protect you?   How can giving your life for another person, protect you?   There are so many ways that human wish or will does not explain the high moral potential of the human person.  Personally, I think that the greatest moral sense is as a result of nothing less than the command and call of God.  That’s exactly how it came to Abraham, and it is still the highest calling ever placed upon humanity is to rise above ourselves and to live the command of God.  

And this is exactly what frightens many non-religious people today.  Many see religious faith as being very dangerous, because it is not based on logic, on mere reason, or on the facts or good that can be proven.   When a suicide bomber blows up innocent people, many of them are also claiming, not only a connection back to Abraham, but they are saying that they have been ‘commanded’ by God to ‘walk before him’ and ‘to be blameless’.  But to be ‘blameless’ as they interpret it, is to do what God says, no matter who gets hurt. 

While we can agree that religious faith can be dangerous; so can natural gas, fire, water, wind and too much air.   Anything in this world can be abused, and the greatest abuse of true religious faith is to miss the main point of ‘why’ Abram was called to ‘walk before God and be blameless’; Abraham was to be blessed to be a blessing.   When we make religion only our own private pipeline to God we’ve missed the main point of what faith in God is all about.  Faith isn’t merely about being faithful to God or responding in faith in God on our own account, but faith in God is both a call and command to ‘walk before God’ so we can ‘walk with others’.  As one Old Testament Scholar, Terence Fretheim has said, “This God who calls Abraham is a missionary God.”  This God of the Hebrews is the God who not only commands that the children of Abraham follow and love him, but he is the true God who calls and commands Abraham to by a standard of morality that enables him to bless others. (See Genesis, NIB, Abingdon Press, 1994, pp 457-461).

What we see in Abraham’s life; is not a perfect, sinless person, but he is a very moral person.   He gave his nephew Lot the first choice of the best land so there would be no scabble (Gen. 13:8ff).  When Lot was later kidnapped, Abraham got a small army together to rescue him  (Gen. 14:12ff).  After the battle was over, Abraham refused to get rich from the battle.  Instead, Abraham gave thanks by worshipping ‘the most High God’ and paying a tithe (a tenth of all he had) to the very mysterious priest, Melchizedek (Gen. 14:16ff).  And even when God decided to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah for its degradation into sin, it was Abraham who tried to talk God out of it (Gen 18:17ff).  Whatever you want to say about Abraham, you must say that Abraham is depicted as someone answering the command to a higher moral life—a kind life that is blessed to be a blessing. 

People whose lives are bound to God, can have an inner strength that ties loose ends of hearts and minds together.  This idea comes from the great psychiatrist and student of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, who disagreed with Freud’s skeptical atheism.  What Jung observed in his own study of human minds and emotions, is that people are ‘loose ends’ of feelings and commitments, without a calling, command, or loyalty to the mysterious truth of God, who is more than their individual selves ( See Interpreter’s Dictionary of Bible, Genesis, p. 608, and C.G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul (Brace & Co., 1933, p. ).   

BUT YOUR NAME SHALL BE….

Perhaps the most important part of Abraham’s life, was that after God called and commanded him, he did not live his life trying to live up to his own name, but as Abraham he lived his life toward the promise in the name God gave him.   There really isn’t that much difference in this name, Abram, or Abraham, in its spelling; but there is all the difference in the world the meaning; between living your life only for yourself, or living your life for the God who has called you by name to be more than you can be alone.   Living toward God’s promise is what makes Abraham’s story for us too.  As Christians, we are also a people given a ‘new name’ when we are baptized ‘in the name of Jesus Christ (Acts. 2:38).”   This is what the Apostle Paul meant on two occasions, once when he asked: ‘Don't you realize that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, who lives in you and was given to you by God? You do not belong to yourself, for God bought you with a high price. So you must honor God with your body” (1 Cor. 6:19-20 NLT).   In the very next chapter of this first letter to the Corinthians, he repeats this calling and command, making it even clearer that God commands your life, not to take it from you, but to give it back to you on better terms: “God paid a high price for you, so don't be enslaved by the world” (1 Cor. 7:23 NLT).

At the heart of good psychology, philosophy, and good theology too, going all the way back to Abrahamic faith, the kind of ‘name’ you live up to determines your life  (There are even studies going on today to prove our name can impact behavior, http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/why-your-name-matters).   In Christian terms, the name you are given by God in Jesus Christ, (which used to be the name given at Christian Baptism), symbolizes the power only God can give which he promises to redeem us from sin, death and destruction.  But you have to let God give you his name.   You must not only believe on his name, but you must also live in his name, “in Christ” (Rom. 8:10; 12:4, 1 Cor. 1:2, 30, Eph 2:10, , Col. 1:27), Paul says over and over.   You must determine to live our lives by this ‘name that is above every other name,… (Phil. 2: 5-11).   It is this ‘name’ that saves us by giving us a new name (Isa. 62: 2; Rev. 2:17, 3:12).

I WILL MAKE YOU FRUITFUL….

There is an old story about two young brothers who were caught stealing sheep. The punishment back then was to brand the thief's forehead with the letters S.T., which stood for sheep thief. One brother subsequently left the village and spent his remaining years wandering from place to place indelibly marked by disgrace. The other remained in the village, made restitution for the stolen sheep, and became a caring friend and neighbor to the townspeople -- an old man loved by all. Many years later, a stranger came to town and inquired about the S.T. on the old man's forehead. "I'm not sure what it means," another told him. " It happened so long ago, but I think the letters must stand for saint." God has a myriad of other names to describe his beloved children, but his favorites are names that describe a person who fulfills his purpose after he gets a name change  (From a sermon by Paul Kummer, From This Day Forward, CSS Publishing, This and the final three stories also come from his sermon).

It was this ‘new’ name that was given to Abram that put God’s promise on continual display.  As Abraham submitted to his new name, he was given promises, not just passively, but actively, because they commanded and expected Abraham’s participation in the promise:  “This is my covenant with you  (v. 4); I will make you the father of nations….(v. 4), I will make you fruitful….(v. 6),… I will give you a land,… (v. 8),…  I will be your God (v. 8).   The whole idea of promise was not just a promise that God made, but a promise that Abraham also made to live into and toward the promises of God.

After all these promises were made to Abraham, God said to him: “Your responsibility is to obey the terms of the covenant. You and all your descendants have this continual responsibility (Gen. 17:9 NLT).  The outward sign of Abraham’s willingness to live up to his responsibility of the covenant was ‘circumcision’.  In the New Testament, as a very Jewish Christianity became a world movement,   was only a spiritual form of circumcision that was required; a ‘circumcision of the heart’ (Rom. 2:29), which has always been ‘faith’ (Rom. 4:11ff).  To receive the promises of God today, as it was then, what matters most is what happens in the human heart, as a person decides to live life ‘by faith’, not only by sight (Heb. 11:1ff).  This means that we come to understand that our own life is given to us as a ‘trust’ between us and our creator, who also promises to be our redeemer with hope, through Jesus Christ.   Now, since we receive the fullness of God’s promises through the name of Jesus, we are called to live up to the ‘name’ we’ve been given ‘in him’ (2 Thess. 1:12, 3:6).

How well are we living up to the name God gave us: Christian? Once, when Alexander the Great was reviewing his troops , he walked along the straight lines, he found one scruffy, untidy, disheveled soldier. Standing directly in front of the soldier, he barked at him and said, 'What is your name, private? "Alexander, sir!" came the reply.

Staring even more sternly at him, the Emperor asked again, "What is your name?"

Again the soldier said, "Alexander, sir!"

 Without hesitation, the Commander in Chief once again asked him, "Private, I said, what is your name?" Bewildered, the soldier meekly said, "Alexander, sir!"

The leader then replied, "Well, private, either change your conduct or change your name!"

In another famous story, Francis of Assisi invited a young monk to join him on a trip to town to preach. Honored to be asked, the monk gladly accepted. All day long he and Francis walked through the streets, alleyways, the byways, and even the suburbs. They saw and interacted with hundreds of people. At day's end, the two headed back home. Not even once had Francis addressed a crowd, nor had he specifically talked to anyone about Jesus. His young companion was deeply disappointed and confused. "I thought we were going into town to preach." Francis replied, "My son, we have preached. We were preaching while we were walking. We were seen by many and our behavior was closely watched. It is of no use to walk anywhere to preach unless we preach everywhere as we walk!"  

As we walk with Christ today, just as Abraham also walked with God by faith, we also live toward God’s promises, as we live our lives ‘in Jesus name’.  And it is not just by words that we live, but it is also by deeds.  As Jesus said, “Many say Lord, have we not preached in your name….”,  but “I never knew (them)’ (Matt. 7:22).  A life lived in Jesus’ name, must be more than words, but also deeds.   A final story told from World War II, is about a church in Strasbourg, France, was destroyed and little remained, but rubble. When that was cleared, a statue of Christ, standing erect, was found. It was unbroken except for the two hands, which were missing. In time, the church was rebuilt. A sculptor, noticing the missing hands on the statue of Christ, said, "Let me carve a new statue of Christ, with hands." Church officials met to consider the sculptor's proposal. His offer was rejected. A spokesman for the church said, "Our broken statue will serve to remind us that Christ touches the hearts of men, but he has not a hand to minister to the needy or feed the hungry or enrich the poor except our hands." 

This is the calling of Christians (little Christs) and saints: to be the hands and feet of Jesus in this world. This is what is meant by bearing ‘the fruit of the Spirit’ of Jesus (Gal. 2:22), so that we live by his good name (Acts 10:38) and so we can keep ours (Phil 4:8; 1 Tim 3:7).   It was this same kind of calling that Abraham and Sarah had, and it is why God called Jacob, Saul, and Peter by new names.  To answer this calling for us today is to declare with Paul and Peter that in our lives, there is ‘no other name by which we must be saved’ (Acts 4:12) because we have found our life in his name (John 10:10).   Do you have the promise of this name?  Amen.