Feast of the Holy Name
Today is the feast of the Holy Name of Jesus, which doesn’t get a great deal of attention in normal Church life because, well, it does fall on January 1st, New Year’s Day when even good Christian people may be recovering from the night before or busy making preparations for football bowl games.. So unless January 1st falls on a Sunday, folks aren’t likely to be rushing out to observe this feast of the Holy Name. And although it isn’t one of the Principal Feasts, when it does fall on Sunday it takes precedence over the usual Sunday observance. The Gospel appointed for this day is basically the Christmas experience of the shepherds that you literally heard on Christmas with one final verse added, verse 21: ”After eight days had passed, it was time to circumcise the child; and he was called Jesus, the
name given by the angel before he was conceived in the womb.”
So, on the eighth day after he was born Jesus was circumcised, a ritual that marked
him as a Jew, a person of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, it said “You’re one of us, boy.” But he was also named, marked with his own name that said you are unique, one of a kind. Here’s a name that says you and only you are you. Here is your identity. And in his case it was a name selected by God, delivered to Mary before she was even impregnated. And then delivered by the angel of God to Joseph, his adoptive father.
I can remember naming my children. It wasn’t easy, especially for your first one. I remember for our first child we finally settled on his first name being Michael for my brother, Michael and for my late wife, Peggy’s brother-in-law, Mike, who’d died much too young. And then for a second name we gave him Forrest, for my Uncle who actually goes by Frosty and who’d in so many ways been a father to me. He’d taught me to build furniture and to work long hard hours. Good names from strong men. But in our Lord’s case, he wasn’t given family names, but rather a name delivered from God,... Jesus. Jesus was the name the angel gave them. Jesus, which comes from the Latin form of the Greek name which was a rendition of the Hebrew Yeshua or Joshua, which means “to save, or deliver.” Over the next 33 years Jesus lived into the identity of that name.
In a similar way we welcome infants into the Christian faith, not by circumcision but through baptism. At baptism we name them with the name their parents give them but we also mark them with the identity of Jesus Christ, we baptise them in water in the name of God; Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and then we seal them and mark them as Christ own forever. And, from that moment on the child begins living into that identity that he or she has been marked with. People live into that identity of Christ at very different rates. Some start very early while others... well it takes awhile. It is good when we can exercise some patience with other people’s spiritual growth and maybe even better when we can be patient about our own spiritual growth. If you’d like to encourage that spiritual growth forward in a steady consistent fashion I’d encourage you to consider the prescription that Paul gives the Church at Phillipi: to share the mind of Christ.
Of course we are bombarded twenty four hours a day with a very different mind, the mind of this world which says grab everything in life you can grab because you deserve it, fight your way over anyone who’s in your way to get to the top of the heap because you’re entitled. Garner all the praise and recognition you can and hang on to it for dear life because your own self success and everyone’s adoration are the only sources of salvation. Paul says that instead of giving ourselves over to that mindset we should share the mind of Jesus Christ who even though “He had equal status with God he didn’t think so much of himself that he had to cling to the advantages of that status no matter what. Not at all. When the time came, he set aside the privileges of deity and took on the status of a slave, became human! Having become human, he stayed human. It was an incredibly humbling process. He didn’t claim special privileges. Instead, he lived a selfless, obedient life and
then died a selfless, obedient death...”
I’d like to say that after working 33 years in the Church, that I’d fully mastered that discipline of sharing the mind of Christ, but I’m a real beginner. Each day of my life I realize that I must make the choice again to either share the mind that the world is thrusting at me or whether to lay claim to the name of Jesus that I was marked with at baptism, to choose to share the mind of Christ and lay down my life for others. May God give us the Grace to share that mind of Christ with ourselves and one another as we struggle forward toward the kingdom of GOD. Amen.
The Rev. Dennis Campbell
Delivered January 1, 2023
All Saints’ Episcopal Church
