When I Call on God's Name

Holy Name of Jesus

    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  Recently, Vince Gill, the country music star, was honored with the Country Music Association Willie Nelson Lifetime Achievement Award at the 59th Annual CMA Awards.  Vince is known for his beautiful tenor voice, and numerous hits, including “Go Rest High On That Mountain.”
    But he also has another hit song entitled, “When I Call Your Name,” where the refrain sings: “Oh, the lonely sound of my voice calling / Is driving me insane. / And just like rain, the tears keep falling / But nobody answers when I call your name.”  As we celebrate the Holy Name of Jesus, it struck me that we have a God who, when we call upon His Name, listens and responds.  It’s almost the antithesis of Vince Gill’s sad, country song.
    Indeed, the phrase “nobody answers” reminded me of the story of Elijah in 1 Kings, chapter 18, where Elijah, on Mount Carmel, had challenged the prophets of Baal, the pagan god, to consume the sacrifice they had created without lighting the fire.  The prophets of Baal called out from morning to noon.  They hopped around the altar, and even slashed themselves and caused their own blood to flow.  But the sacred author notes, pithily, “but there was no sound, no one answering, no one listening.”  
    God listens to us every time we call upon Him, especially when we call out with the Holy Name of His Son, Jesus Christ.  Our Lord promised in the Upper Room on the night of the Last Supper: “‘Whatever you ask in my name, I will do, so that the Father may be glorified in me.’”  God responds to His Name, like a loving parent responds when a child calls out.  We should not take this privilege lightly, and use God’s Holy Name in vain, but neither should we never call upon the Holy Name of God and miss out on opportunities where He wants to shower us with His love, grace, and gifts.
    Does this mean that when I go to Meijer, and buy a PowerBall ticket, as long as I pray in God’s Name for the numbers that I will win the jackpot?  Certainly not, not even if you plan to share a large chunk of money with St. Matthew parish (which you should, if you win the lottery, by the way).  God’s Name is not a magic word that forces God to do whatever we wish.  God always answers our prayers, but as another country song sings, “Sometimes the answer is no.”  
    Still, it can be tough when we have faith, when we call upon the name of the Lord, and we don’t get what we want.  It can feel like the lyrics, “nobody answers when I call your name.”  So what is going on?  Is our Lord not living up to His Word from the Last Supper discourse?
    If we are children of our loving Father, then we should only will what God wills.  The Savior spoke these words to the Apostles, His closest friends.  And while at that point, they weren’t all set on doing God’s will, and they would also struggle at times (St. Peter is a prime example of this), after they were filled with the Holy Spirit, they became more attentive to doing God’s will rather than their own.
    It is childish, not childlike to cry when God does not give us what we want every time we want it.  God calls us to childlike trust in Him, but not to childish temper tantrums if we do not get our way.  Ours should be the attitude of Job: “‘The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord!’”  When we put on that mindset, we can better accept and understand when God does not give us exactly what we want, even when what we want is something good, like the life of a child, or the cure of a parent, or even basic financial stability.  
    But we also need to accept that sometimes God answers our prayers when we call on His Name, but we are not ready to hear His affirmative answer.  There is the parable about the drowning man who was on his roof, due to a flood.  A rowboat comes by to pick him up, but the man says, “No, I’ve prayed to God; He will save me.”  A few minutes later a motorboat comes by to pick him up, but the man says, “No, I’ve prayed to God; He will save me.”  A few minutes later a helicopter comes and lowers a rope, and the troopers shout down that they can take the man to safety, but he says, “No, I’ve prayed to God; He will save me.”  The helicopter leaves, and the man drowns.  When the man appears before God, the man complains, “I had faith in you, and prayed to you for safety, but you let me drown!”  God replies, “I sent you a rowboat, a motorboat, and a helicopter.  What more could I have done?”  If we don’t have a familiarity with the way God works, we can miss out on how God answers our prayers.
    The Holy Name of Jesus is not only the name by which we are saved, it is the name that demonstrates the love of God.  When we call on the Holy Name with faith, we can be assured that God will listen to us, and that He will answer us, even if the answer is not always the one we want, in the way we want, or in the time we want.  
    Life can sometimes seem like a sad country song, where the house is empty, our loved ones have left us, and nobody answers when we call their name.  But for us, as disciples of Christ, “Our help is the name of the Lord, who made heaven and earth”: the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  

What's in a Name?

Feast of the Holy Name of Jesus
    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  Shakespeare famous wrote in his play, “Romeo and Juliet,” “What’s in a name?  That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”  Today as we celebrate the Holy Name of Jesus, we may fall into the same nominalism error that Shakespeare seemed to espouse, that names don’t really make any difference.  But names contain power and access.
    When God first reveals His Name to Moses in the theophany at the burning bush, God reveals Himself as “I AM WHO AM,” or, more simply, “I AM.”  This doesn’t sound like a name to us.  But that’s on purpose.  When we know someone’s name, we have a certain power over that person.  When I stand in a crowded room with my parents with a fair amount of noise, I might say “dad” numerous times without him hearing me.  But, if I were to say “Robert,” it would likely gain his attention.  Or, when a pope dies, to make sure he is dead, they tap him with a decorative small mallet and whisper his baptismal name, figuring that he would respond to the name his parents called him.  When we know a name, we have power, as that person’s attention is turned to us.  But even God did not grant His Chosen People to have power over His Name.  He promised to be with them and to turn to them whenever they called upon Him, but they could not say His name.  In fact, they would simply use the Hebrew word Adonai, which means “Lord,” instead of using the Hebrew word for I AM, which is abbreviated by the consonants YHWH. 

Pope Benedict XVI, of happy memory, asked Catholics not to use this sacred name in the Mass, out of respect for our Jewish brothers and sisters.  Only one time, on the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, would the high priest, standing before the ark of the covenant, utter the sacred Name of God.
    When our Lord, at least once, in the Gospel of John, referred to Himself as “I AM,” He taught us of His unity with the Father in divinity.  And the people recognized this.  They rise up to stone our Lord for blasphemy.  While some of the I AM statements in John work grammatically and could be interpreted simply as indicative statements using metaphors, the one that stands out is when Christ says, “Before Abraham came to be, I AM.”  That sentence makes no sense, unless Christ is identifying His oneness with the Father.  
    But, just as the prohibition against making images of God changes with the Incarnation, so does the relationship between God’s People and His Holy Name.  Part of the humility of the Incarnation was that God had a name that the people could freely use.  The name of Jesus means “God saves.”  It does, in a sense, define Him, as our Lord is the salvation of God.  No longer is the name not to be uttered at all, but it can be called upon freely in times of need.  Peter and John will heal a lame man “in the name of Jesus Christ the Nazorean.”  The people come to believe at this great act and Peter’s preaching, such that Peter and John are arrested and stand on trial before the Sanhedrin for what they have done.  That’s where our epistle comes in.  St. Peter proclaims that there is no other name by when men can be saved other than Jesus, a teaching the Church has continued throughout the centuries.  It is the name at which, as we heard in the Introit from St. Paul’s epistle to the Philippians, every knee should bend, whether those in heaven, on earth, or under the earth, because Jesus Christ is Lord.  Again, Lord was the term that a Jew would have used for God, so St. Paul is affirming the divinity of Christ through His Name.
    The custom of preaching during the Mass is not to use the name of Jesus too often.  I refer to Him as the Lord, or the Savior, or the Redeemer, or simply Christ.  But we should not be afraid to call upon the name of our Savior in time of need, because He has given us His name so that we can receive help.  In the Orthodox Church, there is a practice of simply saying the name, “Jesus” as one breathes in and out.  This beautiful prayer can calm us when we are anxious, and rely on the strength of the Holy Name to cast aside anything that seeks to harm us.  When exorcists cast out demons, they do so with the power of the Holy Name, at which the demons have no choice but to obey, because the power comes, not from the priest, but from Christ Himself.  
    So names are important.  The Holy Name of Jesus is the most important name, because it identifies who God is and what He does.  Whereas in the Old Testament, the name of God was used only rarely, our Lord invites us to call upon His Holy Name whenever we are in need, whenever we are giving thanks, whenever we pray as a church.  May the Holy Name of Jesus protect us from all assaults of the enemy, and may we receive salvation through the Holy Name of Jesus, who with the Father and the Holy Spirit is God, for ever and ever.  Amen. 

Voices

Fourth Sunday of Easter
    Chris Young, a country singer, has a song called “Voices,” in which he talks about the voices he hears in his mind.  But it’s not a sign of being crazy.  He sings about the voice of, “My dad saying working that job, / but don’t work your life away. / And mama telling me to drop some cash / in the offering plate on Sunday.”  Those are the voices that guide him in his life to help him make good decisions.

    Jesus today refers to Himself as the Good Shepherd, and says that His sheep follow Him because they recognize His voice, and He calls us each by name.  But it begs the question: do we listen to the voice of the Good Shepherd, or do we listen to other voices?  Do we recognize the voice of the Good Shepherd in our hearts, or is another calling for us who does not know our name?
    We often refer to the voice of God in our heart as the conscience.  The Catechism of the Catholic Church, in paragraph 1776 (quoting the Vatican II document Gaudium et spes) states:
 

Deep within his conscience man discovers a law which he has not laid upon himself but which he must obey.  Its voice, ever calling him to love and to do what is good and to avoid evil, sounds in his heart at the right moment.  […In his conscience] he is alone with God whose voice echoes in his depths.

Our conscience is the voice of the Good Shepherd.  But too often, we now refer to our conscience as what we simply want to do, which may bear no relationship to what God tells us.  It is not a law unto itself, but the law given to humanity by God, to help a person know how to follow God in each particular circumstance.
    In order to hear the voice of the Good Shepherd in our hearts, we have to know what that voice sounds like.  How do we familiarize ourselves with His voice, to make sure that it’s not merely our own?  We read the Scriptures; we learn what the Church, the Body of Christ, teaches, since Christ cannot teach one thing through the Church, and yet tell us to do something different in our hearts. 
    Part of recognizing the voice of the Good Shepherd is recognizing that He calls us by our name.  In the Gospel of John, on Easter Sunday, Mary Magdalene goes to the tomb but does not see Christ, but just the empty tomb.  Later that day, after telling the other disciples her experience, she returns to the tomb and sees a man, whom she presumes is the gardener, but it is really the risen Christ.  It is not until Christ calls her name that she recognizes Him as the same Jesus she saw die on the cross.  I think about the times when I was younger and in a crowd of family and/or friends.  If I was trying to get my mom’s attention, I might try saying “mom” a few times, but if that didn’t work (because there were lots of moms there), it always worked when I called out “Sue.”  She heard my voice and she heard her name and responded.  Jesus has that personal connection to us, and calls us by name.  Another example is that in the last moments of a pope’s life, if they are examining the pope to see if he is still alive, they will use his baptismal name, knowing that the name he was called by his parents would beckon him if he is still alive.
    Another important aspect of the voice of the Good Shepherd and calling us by name is that He doesn’t call us by our failures.  The thieves and mercenaries who want to steal the sheep and lead them away to bad pastures remind us of the wrong that we’ve done in order to keep us in that pain and hurt.  Jesus will identify our sins, when we have not chosen to follow God, but He doesn’t identify us with our failures, but still calls us by name, even as He calls us to repent.
    When it comes to our conscience, the voice of the Good Shepherd, we are not deciding what is right and what is wrong.  We have no power to call good: bad; or bad: good.  What our conscience helps us to do is to take what God has shown us is good or bad, and apply it to this particular situation in which we find ourselves.  If we find our conscience telling us to do something that God has forbidden, then we have not formed our conscience well; we have not accustomed ourselves to the voice of the Good Shepherd, but decided to wander off to other fields and listen to other voices rather than God’s voice.  As I said earlier, God will never contradict Himself.  So if we think something is right which the Bible or the Church says is wrong; or if we think something is wrong that the Bible or the Church says is right, we need to go back and evaluate to whose voice we have been listening. 
    If we are living a Christ-centered life, then we will hear voices every day of our lives.  No, not crazy voices, but the voice of God, helping us to choose the good and avoid the bad in all the circumstances of our life, which we call the conscience.  If we are following the voice of thieves and robbers, then we will miss the gate to eternal life which is Christ.  But if we follow the voice of the Good Shepherd, even if we have to pass through the valley of the shadow of death with Him, we know that we will make it through the sheep gate and “dwell in the house of the Lord for years to come.”