I call you by your
name" Isaiah 45:1-7
Christchurch, 17th October
1999
I was doing my first assembly
a couple of weeks back at Lawn Infant School, and I decided to ask the children
what it was that they thought I actually did for a living. I can see some of you thinking you'd quite
like to know as well. A little boy at
the front put his hand up.
"Yes?" I asked
encouragingly.
"Um...Do you put water
on people's heads?"
What a strange concept of
what a deacon or priest does. But not
an inaccurate one for today. Because
the truth is that this is a very strange thing to do. If you went up to someone in the street and did it they would
probably give you a very strange look, and/or punch you in the face. So what it is that is going on here this
morning? Does it make any real
difference to the lives of Leon, Lauren and Sophie?
When we lived in Bristol, our
last vicar and his wife had four children who all seemed to be the models of
perfect children. They were always
well-behaved and polite in public. One
day Will and Ruth had Bishop Barry for Sunday lunch following a service. Everyone sat down politely around the table,
and they got the food ready. Then Will
said to his kids, "Right children, who would like to say grace?" "I will," said his six year old
daughter, Ellie. Everyone bowed their
heads and Will and Ruth felt a glow of pride inside. "Dear God," said Ellie. "Thankyou for the poos, and thankyou for the wees. Amen."
Your kids are always going to
surprise you! But the love between a
parent and child can be so enriching and deep, that you can let your kids get
away with all kinds of cheeky remarks, and I bet you all felt proud standing up
there with your kids. We can let them
get away with murder because we love them so much, and we can go from
exasperation to complete adoration at the touch of a button. This is the kind of love which touches us at
our most vulnerable parts, to hold a small person who has come through your own
body and bears the marks of your own identity is beyond words. They seem everything to us, and we, for a
while at least, seem everything to them.
But we all know that there is
no such thing as the perfect parent, and there is no such thing as the perfect
child. We will disappoint our children
in some ways, and they may well disappoint us.
We can give them our love, but we cannot give them what they most need
in the long run. We can never be all
that they need us to be. And that is
why we are here this morning putting water on their heads. Because the only one who will ever be able
to parent them for real is their creator, their father, their Lord. He has given them to us, not to keep, but to
look after on his behalf. They are our
gift, not our possession. When we put
water on their heads, that is part of what we are saying to God: "This child is more yours than she is
mine."
Is that a scary idea? Why should we trust God enough to hand our
children over to him? Listen to this
from our reading this morning. God
says: "I call you by your name, I surname you, though you do not know
me." Sophie - I call you by your
name. Lauren - I call you by your
name. Leon - I call you by your
name. You're too little to realise it
yet, but though you do not know me, I call you by your name.
To be known by your name is a
powerful thing. Think of a time when
you heard your name mentioned - when your teacher called out your name in
class, when you saw it in the paper, when you overheard someone talk about you. For people to know us by our name makes us
significant, it makes us stand out from everyone else, it means they treat us
as an individual person. If I were to
mention your name now, for example, you would become the focus of the whole
room. One member of this congregation
told me this week that he intended to sleep through this sermon. So let's see if mentioning his name can keep
his attention. Are you still awake
Harry?
God knows us by our
names. He knows the people who died on
the train at Ladbroke Grove by name, and he surnames all the forgotten victims
of history. And he also knows you
better than you can ever know yourself.
He understands you deeper than you can ever understand. And he loves you more than anything or
anyone. He loves these babies more than
we will ever be able to. That's why we
can relax, and let him take charge of our parenting.
People will tease these three
named children here. They will hurt
them and disappoint them. But to God,
each of us remains a prize of individual beauty. I heard of a woman who was going through a really deep time of
depression recently, and she couldn't understand why. So we she went to see a psychiatrist who tried to help her find
the origin of her problems. After a while,
the psychiatrist got her to talk about a time when she was a little girl. She had got a question wrong in class, and
her teacher called her up to the front of the classroom, gave her a piece of
chalk, and told her to write her name and I am a failure on the blackboard. Then the teacher got all the other kids to
come up to the board and write things on it.
Even her friends wrote things on the board "You're useless, you're
ugly etc. etc." "What
happened?" said the psychiatrist.
"I just stood there and cried," said the woman. "What else happened?" said the psychiatrist. "Nothing," she said. "Well, I'm a Christian," the
psychiatrist said, "and I know that something else did happen. There was someone else in that room sitting at
a desk, but you couldn't see him. And
after everyone had finished writing all those things under your name, he got up
and went up to the blackboard. He got a
board rubber and rubbed them all off, and kept rubbing until you couldn't see
any of them. And when he had finished,
he took a piece of chalk and wrote across the whole of the blackboard "I
love you."
Many people will write things
over our name in the way the speak to us and act towards us, but Jesus will
only ever write those three words.
"I love you."
And God calls us by name this
morning as well. He calls you as the
parents of these children by the names he loves. And he calls you to hear these words from our reading, "I am
the Lord, and there is no other; besides me there is no God." He calls you to let your kids know this as
the reality of their lives. As we look
at our kids we often like to say, "Who are you? What are you going to be?
What are you going to be like?"
And when people meet us and ask us who we are, we might tell them,
"I'm a coach operator," or "I'm a Chelsea fan," or "I
work at Nationwide", or "I'm chaplain of Swindon Town." At which point they might offer us the
services of a psychiatrist. But what
matters today and for every day is not who are children are, who they will be,
or who we are, but whose they are, whose we are.
"Give to God what is due
to God," Jesus said in our gospel.
That's what you are doing today with these children. But don't short-change them or God today by
thinking that somehow today is all that matters. Ruth my wife has just started a pottery course. She's been for a couple of weeks, and in the
first week she filled in her registration form. But if she'd come back at the end of her first week with a wonky
bit a clay in her hand claiming to be an expert, I'd have certainly thought she
was potty, but definitely not a potter.
Starting the course is the beginning.
I know of a mum who wanted to
get all her kids up to go to church one morning. "Come on, everyone, up you get," she said. "Mum, I don't want to go," little
Billy said. Besides, I've already
watched the religious service on TV."
"Fine," said Mum.
"You stay here, and then later, while we are eating lunch, you can
watch the MacDonalds advert."
The God who calls us by our
names doesn't want a casual relationship with us. He isn't into one-morning stands. He calls us to encourage our children to experience the real
thing. Martin Luther King said,
"Whoever hasn't got something they would die for, has nothing to live
for." When Paul was writing to the
Christians in Thessalonica, it was in the knowledge that they were becoming imitators
of the Lord, in spite of persecution.
For them, to stand up in public and show they wanted to follow Jesus
might have meant facing death. Today
Sophie, Leon and Lauren begin a journey towards knowing a God who is worth the
whole of their lives. Let's pray that
for them and for all of us, we will hear the voice of God saying to us every
day of our lives, "I call you by your name."