A good many of us, I would guess, are less than happy with our names. What Mom and Dad decided to call us before we had a voice in the matter. Well, I suspect a good many of us would like to change.
Some of us just refuse to use our real names. We go by Butch or Bud or Sissie or some such nickname that seems to have no real meaning, to avoid calling ourselves what is on the birth certificate. A century ago eastern European immigrants came with names like Stanislaus or Woiechzelski, and changed their names because they sounded so foreign.
Others of us shorten our names. Joseph sounds so terribly formal, so it gets cut down to Joe, abrupt. When our children were on the way, we wanted to be careful to select names that could not be shortened or revised, because short names, one-syllable names, sound so abrupt with the last name Smith, and so we came up with Bryan for our son and a couple of years later Karen for our daughter. We thought, there, that's got it, no meddling with those names. And wouldn't you know it, half the time Karen calls Bryan BRY and Karen's closest friend calls her "CARE." "Care" sounds like a package you send overseas. Best-laid plans of mother and father go oft astray.
But now what interests me is the theory that so often names are intended to tell us who we are. Names are often intended by our parents to give some clue as to who we are to be, and maybe that's one reason we sometimes have trouble with them. They sometimes give us an identity we don't really want; they try to impose on us some characteristics we haven't chosen for ourselves.
For example, we name children in honor of a parent or a grandparent. George, Junior; William Third -- sounds like an English king -- little Betty. young Jane, obviously trying to say, “This child is mine, and this child is going to carry on some element of our family tradition.”
Some months ago I went up to Princeton Seminary to take a short course in family systems ministry, and the professors who taught this seminar led us to recognize how in so many subtle ways our families identify us as the carriers of family tradition, sometimes as folks who are expected to finish something left undone. We learned in that seminar that sometimes, in fact, children are named after some member of the family who has died early; and quietly, subtly, without consciously trying to set the pattern, they are expected to replace the person who died. One of our teachers told us that he had known from an early age that he was headed for the ministry: no one pushed it, no one that he could recall urged it, it just felt right. It felt, well, it felt like his own thing. So he grew up, he went off to college, he finished seminary, and on the evening of his ordination, his mother said, "Albert, I just know your Uncle Albert would be proud of you." "Uncle Albert? Who, what? I don't have an Uncle Albert." "Oh well," she said, "I guess I never told you, but you know you were named for a brother of mine, who told us one Sunday morning that he had been called to preach, but that very same afternoon, doing the chores on our farm in North Dakota, got caught in the hay bailer and was killed. Didn't I ever tell you about him?"
We receive, sometimes, our very names, as a mark of our identity – who we are and who it is somebody wants us to become.
The trouble with that is, as I've already hinted, that we may not want to become that. We may not want that identity. And we may well get into a real struggle just to know who we are, who we ought to be, who we want to be.
Imagine, then, what it would be like to own a negative identity. Imagine how hard a struggle it would be if someone were naming us and shaping us in negative ways, trying to root out everything fine and wholesome and trying to make us think of ourselves as worthless and meaningless. How would that be for an identity crisis? How would you ever get past it if your parents, your friends, your community insisted on painting you in devastatingly destructive images?
It happens, you know. It does happen that some of us get off to a destructive start in life, for no other reason than someone has named us negatively. Tell a child often enough that he is a bad boy and more than likely he will prove you right. Tell a race of people often enough that they are inferior and repeat the lie often enough, and some of them, sad to say, will act out a poor self-image. Tag a child early enough as a slow learner or as lazy or as stupid, and you will create the reality your name has named. Some get off to a destructive identity and have to struggle with that, just because they have been named, tagged.
Now imagine the prophet Hosea's children. Three children, each tagged with an identity that is fearfully negative. Hosea, that prophet who will reveal to us more of the heart of a struggling and caring God than any other in the Old Testament; Hosea, that prophet who heard the Lord's summons to go an do an impossible thing, an immoral thing, if you like; Hosea loaded down his children with names and with identities that pronounced a fearful judgment. And we can learn from them more about what it means to struggle to know who you are, because through them the Lord God was teaching us about who we are and who we have become.
Hosea’s first child, a son, was named Jezreel. Hosea heard the Lord instruct him, "Call his name Jezreel, for yet a little while, and I will punish the house of Jehu for the blood of Jezreel, and I will put an end to the Kingdom of the House of Israel." Call his name Jezreel.
Now the valley of Jezreel was the place where only a few years before, King Jehu had massacred his political opposition. At Jezreel blood had been spilled, and, in fact, it had been spilled in the name of God. King Jehu and his soldiers, in a wild frenzy fueled by a misguided reading of the will of almighty God, had slaughtered whole families, had eliminated, liquidated, a generation of people who might oppose him. At Jezreel one of Israel's kings had practiced genocide, and now the prophet hears God's call to name his own child after the place of genocide. Jezreel. Call his name Jezreel, for yet a little while, and I will punish the house of Jehu for the blood of Jezreel.
It would be a little like a German naming his child "Dachau." What an offense: little Dachau Schmidt running around the streets of Berlin, reminding the German people that once their leader had tried to slaughter a whole people. And now the presence of little Dachau, with this horrible destructive name … the presence of little Dachau says, God will not forget. God will avenge those slain at Dachau.
Or like a Baptist preacher in Mississippi calling his son Philadelphia; God will avenge the murders of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner, and this boy, Philadelphia Jones, carries that identity.
Or like a mother in Birmingham calling her son Sixteenth Street, for at that Baptist church where years ago four little girls died as victims of somebody who wanted to destroy a people; now we’ve got this little boy with an odd name, a powerful, judgmental name: Sixteenth Street Brown, Sixteenth Street Williams. And we can’t forget who we are.
You see, a part of struggling to know who we are is that we’d like to forget some of the things we are. We'd prefer not to remember. We'd rather not think about the meaning of Jezreel or Dachau or Philadelphia or Sixteenth Street Baptist Church; but God has a way of reminding us of the inconvenient, the ugly. Call his name Jezreel, lest we forget that we sin. Call his name Jezreel, so that we may know who we are4, that we are those who are able to hurt others, lest we forget.
The second child born to Hosea and his wife Gomer was a girl. And hers is not a name any of you would want, I guarantee. Her name is Lo-ruhama, Not Pitied. Or no mercy, no compassion. This time the prophet hears his Lord identify a negative self-image that none of us would want to own: no compassion, no covenant love, no relationship. Really what this little girl’s name means is Not Your Sister. Not your brother, not your sister, not related, alone.
The prophet is really trying to say that when you struggle to know who you are, if you do not see yourself in relationship, in covenant, you are nowhere, you are nobody. If you try to go it your own way, if you do not understand in gratitude how much you've derived from the gifts of others; if you do not see how much you in turn have to give others – then you have wallowed in nobodiness. You have drowned in a sea of isolation.
Call her name, No Compassion, for I will have no compassion on the house of Israel to forgive them. A deceptively destructive image; for you see sometimes we say, "Well, if everybody would just leave me alone … if I could just get some space to find myself …" wonderful buzz words of the last decade or so. To find ourselves – we say, "If I could just get off in some monastic silence, to find myself .. if I could get out of my job, get away from my family, get out from under this church … if I could just get out there alone, I could find out who I am."
But I hear the prophet naming his child, No Compassion ... I hear him naming her No Sister, No Brother, and I am seeing that this kind of struggling to know who I am will not finally help me.
And then the third child: are you ready for this? Put yourself in Hosea's shoes: you've got one kid named Jezreel, valley of genocide; and you've got another named no compassion not anybody's sister. And the third child comes along, and God says, "I have another message. I have another image. Name this child Not My People, Lo-ammi. Not my people."
The scholars suggest that one way to read this name is to see that Hosea is saying, "This one is not mine. His mother is my wife, yes, but this is not my child. Who his father is is anybody's guess. Illegitimate. Not mine. Doesn’t look like me, doesn't sound like me. I don't acknowledge him; he doesn't even belong here. Not my people."
If you really want to destroy somebody's selfhood, erase all connection with his or her family. Take him or her out of any semblance of a cultural heritage, a family tradition, a background. Destroy the family and you destroy the person.
In the early days of American slavery, the slave masters systematically and diabolically labored to destroy the self-esteem of the African workers they bought and sold, and they knew that if you destroy the family and even take away the family name, you destroy the person. He will not know who he is. And so African names were lost, taken away. English names were given instead; men and women were stripped of cultural connections. That was the way to enslave. You were nobody if you had no history. Not my people.
Small wonder that in the black power movement young black men and women sought out African names, though we could wish that they had not named themselves with the Arabic names of those who sold them in their hurry to replace the names of those who had bought them!
If you want to know who you are, you must keep hold of your culture, your heritage, the gifts given you by family and people and church and nation. Otherwise, Not my people. Struggling to know who you are means taking hold of all that you have been given, owning it, loving it, valuing it. Otherwise, Not my people.
And God is saying through the prophet Hosea's youngest child, our sin is that we have no memories. Our sin is that we do not acknowledge our pasts. Our sin is that we do not own up to what we've been and what we've done. Our sin is that we claim a nobodiness. We are no people, we are Not My People.
Struggling to know who we are, however, there is a way. There is a way to know who we are, to understand what we can become. And that way is through our brother Jesus Christ. Jesus the Christ knows who He is; he knows that he is the way, the truth, and the life, and that no one comes to the father but by him.
Jesus Christ knows who he is; he knows that he is the very image of God, the first born from the dead, in whom all the fullness of Godness dwells bodily. He is not confused about who he is, and he invites us to become his brothers, joint heirs with him, to know who we are because we are his. To know who we are because we have been given an identity through his struggling love.
Hear the words of the apostle Paul and hear them with your name on them: "When the time had fully come, God sent forth his son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts crying, Abba, Father. So through God you are no longer a slave but a son, and if a son then an heir."
As you struggle to know who you are, remember that once you were Jezreel, once you and I were those who were bent on hurting others. We thought we could be somebody if we destroyed others. But now, God in Jesus Christ has given us a new heart, and we are no longer Jezreel, we are the brothers of Jesus.
As you struggle to know who you are, remember that once you were Lo-ruhama, no compassion, no mercy, alone, isolated. Once we thought we needed nobody else and could go it alone. But now God in Jesus Christ has given us a new understanding, and we are no longer Lo-ruhama. We are the brothers and sisters of Jesus.
As you struggle to know who you are remember that once we were Lo-ammi, not my people, nobody, illegitimate, uprooted and trying to forget where we came from. Once we thought we could make ourselves; but now God in Jesus Christ has given us his own name, and we are no longer Lo-ammi, we are the family of God.
These we baptized: God has sent the spirit of his son into your hearts crying, "Abba, father." You are no longer slaves but sons and heirs. We baptize you with your names; you wear them proudly. They tell us who you are, but there is a new name written there, and it is the name of your brother Jesus. You know now who you are.
