On Names that “Preach”

 

"The Lord Himself will give you a sign: Behold, the young woman is with child and

shall bear and Son, and shall call His name Immanuel"

(Isaiah 7:14)

 

A sermon by Siegfried S. Johnson on the Second Sunday of Advent, December 10, 2006

First United Methodist Church, 605 East 6^th, Mountain Home, Arkansas 72653

 

I want us this morning to think about names.  Have you ever wondered what’s behind a name?  One of the most interesting branches in the field of etymology is that of the meaning of names.  Surely you’ve wondered and perhaps have sought out the meaning of your name.  In biblical times, names had an anatomy.  By which I mean to say, names conveyed a message – be it religious, cultural, or moral.  Our text is an excellent example, Emmanuel meaning, “God with us.”  This was no exception, but the norm.  In ancient Near Eastern cultures names preached entire sermons. 

 

Our culture has de-emphasized that, selecting the names we give our children for the sound rather than the meaning or, at most, to preserve our family heritage.  Rarely, though, do we find precise religious and/or moral messages in the naming of our children.  One hilarious English exception to that generalization came from a group of strict Puritans in 17^th century New England.  Evidently, the principle doesn’t operate in English like it does in Hebrew and other Semitic languages.  In English, names with religious/moral overtones sound silly.  So ridiculous do they sound, in fact, that we are left to wonder if, after all, the Puritans were just kidding.  I assure you, they were not.  Dead serious was the young Puritan couple who named their new baby boy "Kill Sin."  So, Mr. Kill Sin Pimple shows up in a marriage list of official county records.  (Wonder if his friends called him by his first name, Kill; or by his middle name, Sin.  Or, perhaps they used a nickname, some Puritan equivalent of Bubba!) 

 

Then there was Mr. and Mrs. Fowler, who named their boy based on Paul’s words to the Galatians about the fruit of the Spirit.  They named him, "More Fruit."  We learn from court records that Mr. More Fruit Fowler was seated as a juror in a trial in 1607.  

 

Paul’s letter to Timothy was used as a Book of Baby Names for the White family, who picked up Paul’s phrase, Fight the Good Fight of Faith as a name for their baby boy.  Fight the Good Fight of Faith White was a name stressing that Christian living requires determination and endurance.  These poor fellows were tagged at birth with names that “preach,” transforming them into living, walking, breathing religious bumper stickers!

 

Suppose this were common practice today.  Let’s imagine that Mike and Kelly Hagaman wanted to emphasize their belief that Christ is coming again soon.  So instead of Alex and Ben and Christian Hagaman, we might have on our church records, “Jesus Is Coming Soon” Hagaman, “New Jerusalem Come Down from Heaven” Hagaman, and “In the Hour You Think Not” Hagaman.  Imagine Kelly scolding Christian for doing something he shouldn’t.  “In the Hour You Think Not, I think not – put that down right now!”  Or, perhaps Charlie and Alissa Benefiel, who lit our Advent candles this morning, were concerned with declining morals in our country.  So instead of Maria, Jamie, and Lanie we might have on our church records, “Police the Internet” Benefiel, “Keep Sex and Violence off T.V.” Benefiel, and “Just Say No” Benefiel.

 

Now, before I leave this bit of fun, let me tell you my favorite sermon in a name from Puritan New England.  It comes from Mr. and Mrs. Andrews, who sought a name for their child that witnessed to their convictions regarding sexual purity.  So their poor little boy was stuck for life with the name “Flie Fornication.”  I’m telling you the truth.  Can you imagine the young Mr. Andrews being introduced to a pretty girl at the high school sock hop?  “Betty, I'd like to introduce you to my good friend, Flie Fornication Andrews.”  With a name like that, one learns the value of nicknames!  “Hello, my name is Flie Fornication, but you can call me Junior!”

 

Now, my own name doesn’t preach any sermons but I did go through a time when I, too, thought I might prefer using initials.  Few children starting school in Pine Bluff in 1960 bore the name Siegfried Sigmund.  I recall cringing just a bit on the first day of class at elementary school, worried how badly a new teacher might botch my name.  As she called the roll, she would breeze through the more common names -- the Jims and Joes, Debbies and Margarets.  She effortlessly called the names, at last coming in the alphabet to my name.  If an irregular, sustained pause ensued after Peggy Johnson’s name, I knew I was in trouble.  As the teacher scratched her head and studied my name I imagined her saying to herself, “just who the heck is this foreign kid?”

 

So as I said, I toyed with the thought of going by initials.  My father, whose name is Hans Siegfried, is known by many of his business associates and friends as H. S. Johnson.  I always thought those initials had a sturdy, dignified sound.  I thought to give it a try, but found that all initials are not created equal.  “S. S.” Johnson didn’t have nearly the elegant touch of “H. S.”  Imagine Mike Crotts, Chair of our Staff-Parish Committee, introducing me last June.  "We would like to introduce to the congregation our new pastor, the S. S. Johnson."  No, no.  Sounds too much like a pastoral battleship patrolling turbulent church waters!

 

Well, I digress.  I started to tell you about names that preach.  In that category “Emmanuel” is the grandest of them all, a name from which millions of sermons have sprung.  Emmanuel means “God with us.”  Never, perhaps, was this truth more eloquently expressed than in John’s gospel.  “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God.”   With God.  NOT with us.  But wait.  Verse14 announces, “The Word became flesh and tabernacled among us.”  

 

Emmanuel.  Our acquaintance with Isaiah 7:14 is, for the most part, as a Christmas snippet, scissored out of its context and pasted into our Christmas songs and sermons.  Matthew’s quotation made this verse famous.  It would not, I think, be recognized as a messianic prophecy without Matthew’s contribution.  Standing alone and within its original context, the verse comments on an historical situation with no apparent messianic implications.  Very few Christians would recognize any single verse within a chapter in either direction of Isaiah 7:14.  That’s because the ancient history providing the backdrop for Isaiah’s Emmanuel prophecy is dry stuff to us.  Make no mistake, it was the stuff making Headline News then.  This prophecy was not spoken in some mysterious theological vacuum having nothing to do with history and everything to do with Christmas crèches.  Isaiah was addressing a flesh and blood situation, an extremely serious political crisis. 

 

Are you up for a history lesson?   In 735 B.C. the Middle East was in turmoil.  “So, what’s new?” you ask.  If our policy makers stumble over how to handle Iran and Syria concurrent with the Iraq situation, the stuff of our headlines, the troublemaker stirring things up in those days was the Assyrian king Tiglath-Pileser III.  Talk about names that preach entire sermons.  We learn through cuneiform royal inscriptions that in Assyrian his name is Tukulti-apil-esarra, “My trust is in the first-born son of the shrine Esarra.”

 

Judah was ruled by King Ahaz.  Let’s sneak into the Situation Room at the Jerusalem White House.  Tiglath-Pilesar (T. P., for short), the Assyrian king, was a threat to the stability of the region.  Again, nothing new.  Syria is still regarded as such. 

 

In the same way the United States in our time has sought to forge a coalition of nations, Allies to alleviate the threat, several nations in the region joined in an anti-Assyrian coalition to strengthen themselves against Assyria.  Perhaps King Ahaz saw the alliance as a lost cause.  In any event, he refused to be pressured into joining the coalition.  This made the anti-T. P. alliance most unhappy.  The coalition turned against Jerusalem, attempting to destroy Ahaz in order to set up a puppet regime that could be forced to join the alliance.  Isaiah says (7:2) that when Ahaz heard that the alliance now included nearby Ephraim, “the heart of Ahaz and the heart of his people shook as the trees of the forest shake before the wind.”  These were frightening days of instability and of terror.

 

Now, if that paragraph sounds a bit more like an ancient CNN or Fox News Alert than an Advent sermon, it’s because I want, for just a moment, to have you hear this prophecy without the imagery of Bethlehem and the manger, the shepherds and the wise men.  Our cultural art tends to sanitize a very precarious world situation.  We hear Isaiah 7:14 with Christmas pageants dancing in our heads.  I want you to remember that these words were spoken in the midst of a de-stabilizing political crisis.  With Ahaz fearing that his decision had secured the defeat of his own people, enter into that Situation Room Isaiah, whose message is, “Do not fear.  Do not let your heart be faint” (7:4). 

 

To underscore the divine source of his message, Isaiah offers Ahaz a sign.  “A young woman shall conceive and bear a son and call his name, Emmanuel.”  The prophet assures Ahaz that before Emmanuel is a toddler, the kings Ahaz feared would be destroyed.  Isaiah’s words, then, are first addressed to a contemporary situation.  “How can that be so?” one asks.  “How could there have been TWO virgin births?”  The answer to that question resides in the Hebrew word translated “virgin.”  The word is ‘almah “young woman,” not bethulah, “virgin.”  (The RSV of 1952 got it right when it translated the word as “young woman,” though that accurate translation didn’t do much for the popularity of the version).  This prophecy clearly had an immediate fulfillment, perhaps recorded a few verses later in chapter 8, at the birth of Maher-shalal-hashbaz (“quickly to the spoil”), and a dual, messianic, fulfillment.

 

Does, then, a proper translation of Isaiah 7:14 leave us without a basis for believing that the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem was a virgin birth?  No.  Matthew, following the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament), translates Isaiah 7:14 using the Greek word, parthenos, a word which can allow no other meaning than “virgin.”  He points to the dual fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy, to Jesus who is, in the highest sense, Emmanuel.

 

Names are important.  Choosing a name is an exciting time for parents.  My favorite part of the baptism liturgy is when I take the child and ask the parents, “What is the name given this child?” It is a Naming Ceremony, and it is vitally important, bequeathing to a child not only the name their parent’s have chosen for the child to be called, but also the family name of Christian, a follower of Christ. 

 

Susan Baker of Shelbyville, Kentucky tells of finding a beautiful puppy that had wandered onto her back porch.  Her husband was assigned the task of writing an ad for the "Lost and Found" column in the local newspaper.  He first wrote, "Golden Lab, male, approximately nine months old, no collar, very friendly, found on Rockbridge Road."  But Susan was worried that the excessive detail might encourage just anybody to claim the dog.  She asked her husband to abbreviate the ad.  With each rewriting she suggested that the clues still provided too much information.  Susan sent him back to try again.  Growing frustrated at his wife’s editorial rejections, he continued to trim the wording of the ad.  At last Susan's frustrated husband submitted this ad.  It said -- no kidding -- it was actually printed in the paper just like this: "Guess What I Found?"

 

Too often, I think, we trim our testimony, scissoring away the vital details, reducing our testimony to initials or nicknames.  As a result, our Christian witness is a timid "Guess Who I Am?"  I don’t suggest that we fall back to the Puritans’ method of naming children, but let’s convey to our children that part of their name is their Christian identity, something for which they should be rightly proud.  "Let my name be identified with a follower of Christ.  I remember my baptism, my naming, and am proud of my belief in the resurrection of Christ from the dead, proud to be a member Christ’s Church." 

 

And this Advent season, let us rejoice that God’s Son took the form of human flesh, “God with us,” Emmanuel.  Quite a name. 

 

Sources and notes:

 

A. Kirk Grayson, “Tiglath-Pileser,” in The Anchor Bible Dictionary.

 

Henri Cazelles, “Syro-Ephraimite War,” in The Anchor Bible Dictionary.

 

The story of Susan Baker and the lost lab is from Reader’s Digest, October 1994, p. 90.