The Most Holy Name of Jesus

Exodus 34:1-8
Romans 1:1-7
Luke 2:15-21

+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

And God said, 'Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together in one place, and let the dry land appear.' And it was so. God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good. (Gen 1:9-10)

The initial reports last Sunday indicated that the South Asia tsunami had resulted in 500 deaths. On Monday morning, The Washington Post had raised the toll to over 10,000. On Tuesday, it was 25,000; Wednesday, 58,000; Thursday, 77,000; Friday, 119,000. These include Indonesians, Sri Lankans, Burmese, Somalis, Indians, Thais, Swedes, Germans, British, Americans; they are Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Christians, and probably animists and atheists. The death toll will continue to rise, and perhaps multiply if relief efforts falter. Thousands more could die from disease. Millions are homeless. It brings tears even to the coldest hearts, even though the scale is so massive that we can't comprehend the pain and suffering.

In shear numbers, it dwarfs the horror of 9/11, and is just as unsettling, though in different ways. Human acts of terror are clear evil. God gives human beings free will, and we make choices and take actions that are good and bad and, often, a mixture of the two. Human beings may choose destruction or creativity, nothingness or life, hate or love, fear or courage, selfishness or generosity. To some extent, we can thwart human beings in their efforts to do evil, and sometimes we can make their work more difficult. But we have no control over earthquakes and volcanoes and storms and droughts.

How can God look at nature, his creation, and call it 'good' when nature causes so much human suffering? There are no wholly satisfactory answers. Ultimately, it is a mystery. God's ways are not our ways, and we can't fully understand his ways. S. Paul says, "Now we only see through the glass darkly... Now I know in part, but [after death] I shall fully understand." (1 Cor 13:12) We have faith, we trust God because we have experienced in our lives that God is good and loving, that God is in control, and therefore that his creation is good. We experience God in and through the physical world; we have communion with him through it. The physical world - nature - gives us tremendous pleasure and sustenance, spiritual as well as physical.

But why does God allow nature to cause such agony, to be so horrible? We might point out that all of creation is in the process of being created, that God's work is not yet complete. The first sentence of the Bible may more be accurately translated: "When God began to create heaven and earth. . ." - not "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. . . ." ⁽¹⁾ Jesus' coming to us, his death, his resurrection, are part of God's on-going work to perfect, to complete creation, to redeem us - human beings and all the material universe. Creation is a process, in which we exist. Nature is not complete, not perfected.

During the offertory as I bless the water that will be mixed with the wine, I say a prayer. The original form of the prayer from the missal begins: "O God, who didst lay the foundation of man's being in wonder and honor, and in greater wonder in honor didst renew the same. . ." In other words, God who laid the foundation, God who created and then - in greater wonder - renewed, redeemed his creation. I don't say the original form with its phrase 'greater wonder'. I simply say 'great wonder' because God's creation and redemption, Genesis and the cross, is all part of the same act; human redemption is not a greater wonder than creation. Neither the act of creation nor the act of redemption can be better or greater than the other because it's all one.

Many theologians argue that on account of the Fall, of human rebellion in the Garden of Eden, all of creation fell away from God. Human disobedience upset nature; human rebellion against God caused nature to come unhinged, reckless. If human beings didn't sin, there wouldn't be natural disasters. The physical universe and the unseen spiritual universe are not separate entities, but a whole. Turbulence in the spiritual realm - human disobedience - troubled the material world. There are some problems with this point of view, but it's a poetic and in some ways a beautiful, wholesome vision of creation.

Unlike human evil, the evil of nature is not moral. Certainly nature has no evil intent, no free will to exert, no decision to make. But human beings have not always understood that. Primitive religion tends to associate a natural disaster with an act of God, or of gods. The Old Testament says that God's judgment upon the wickedness of humanity resulted in a mighty flood, all of humanity perished, except Noah and his family.

Christianity, however, does not believe that God acts that way, smiting wicked people with natural disasters. We understand natural disasters to be arbitrary, the result of natural, unwilled forces, not divine forces. Jesus reminds us that our heavenly Father "makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust." (Mt 5:45) Our worldly fate does not match our moral rectitude. As the cross so definitely shows us, the holy - not the wicked - often have the roughest time in the world.

Certainly pagan religions have mostly held natural disasters to be the work of gods, gods fighting among themselves or exacting revenge upon human beings. Some pagan religion does not only understand nature as tool of the gods, but as willful in itself. Jesus has shown us the truth. The gospel has transformed the world so that we no longer believe such repugnant things.

In the ancient world before the gospel took hold, when plagues struck cities, the pagan doctors usually fled. To the pagan mind, plagues - like any natural disaster - showed that gods exacted revenge on people or didn't care about whether people lived or died. There was no compelling justification to stay and care for the sick. ⁽²⁾

Christians, however, knew God's love for people, for every individual, that each of us is of infinite value to God. Christians knew God obliges us to love one another, to help those in need. Jesus exhorted us to care for the sick, to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to visit the lonely, to encourage dispirited. (Mt 25) S. John said, "He who does not love does not know God; for God is love." (1 John 4:8) Through the ages, many of our Christian heroes - many, many saints - have gone to their grave because they exposed themselves to illness while nursing the sick and tending to the needy. The early Church grew and won converts because of the humanity, the compassion, the sacrifice of her people, because Jesus wants us to reach out to everyone.

We heard this morning the opening of S. Paul's letter to the Romans. It shows Paul's concern to unite people in Christ. He's reaching out to diverse groups of people. He's appealing both to the more conservative Jewish Christians and to the more liberal, Gentile converts. He's writing to "all that be in Rome, beloved of God," to all those who God loves. The phrase implies God's impartiality. Later, Paul says it explicitly: "God shows no partiality." (Rms 2:11) This is a major theme of the letter. God loves everyone, but none of us is deserving of his love.

Paul's understanding of the scope of God's love is enormously inclusive and expansive. It's a revolutionary breakthrough, an epiphany of the true nature of God. Paul argues that if we understand the gospel, if the gospel is in our hearts and minds, then we work for unity. One of his objectives is to unite the churches of Rome so that they work together while still preserving their distinctiveness. ⁽³⁾ Paul's trying to focus the Church on the big picture, because staying focused on the big picture, the essential truth - God's love, his life, the transforming power of the gospel - prevents petty division from creeping in and making havoc.

The Church's goal is not only to be united in herself, but to strive to unite all of humanity in the Name of Jesus. For Christians, it's not us versus them - not ever. We are not an embattled, frightened sect. Christians have always been called to reach out to others, regardless of race or creed or social position. We should seek unity among all people, whether people acknowledge Jesus or not. Since Jesus came to give life to every person, since no person is more loved by God than another, since we are all made in the image of God, we all should strive to walk humbly with one another under God.

Who knows who God will grant eternal life? Only God does. None of us does. God's love and mercy have no bounds, and my prayer is that every person who ever existed will be in heaven. In heaven, we will all be the adopted children of God, brothers and sisters in Christ. Since we don't know who's in and who's out, since we pray all are in, we should see and treat each other as brothers and sisters in Christ. In the Name of Christ, every human being is our brother or sister. This is the Christian vision, and it has transformed the world. May this standard remain our resolution in the New Year. May it continue to transform our hearts.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

1. Robert Alter, Genesis: Translation and Commentary, Norton (1996). My emphasis.

2. Robert Jewett article in The Lectionary Commentary: The Second Readings, Roger E. Van Harn, ed., Eerdmans (2001), p. 13. He's quoting Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity, Princeton (1996).

3. Jewett, p. 13.