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You folks may remember back in the year 1977 ABC ran a miniseries called Roots which told the story of a young man named Kunta Kinte. There was a remake in 2016 by the same name. Kunta Kinte was a Mandinka man from Gambia captured by white slave traders in the early 1760’s. He was taken to America and lived enslaved on a plantation in Virginia until he died in 1822.
The naming and renaming of Kunta Kinte is significant in the story. In the 2016 miniseries shortly after his birth his father takes him out on a dark, beautifully starry night and tells him, “You must hear your name first. You are Kunta Kinte, son of…..You must always honour your ancestors, the ones who love you and watch over you. Your name is your spirit. Your name is your shield.” He then holds the baby up to the starry night sky and says “Allah Akbar” which means “God is Great” and then says to the baby, “Behold, Kunta Kinte, the only one who is greater than you.” When Kunta Kinte was captured, it is said that his father wrote on paper that his name will be remembered until the end of time. Well, it’s been remembered for two centuries now.
Kunta Kinte was “the slave who fought back”. He tried to escape four times and then they cut off half his right foot. Moreover, he repeatedly refused to let himself be called by his slave name which was Toby. That all ended with a scene of him tied up in front of everyone and being whipped with a bullwhip. The whipper would say “What’s your name?” He would answer, “Kunta Kinte” and get whipped for it. Finally after being whipped nearly dead, he broke and said the name, “Toby”. An older slave named Fiddler, his friend/father/mentor, then cut him down, gave him some water, and tried to comfort him saying, “Don’t you care what that white man call you. Make you say Toby but you can’t. You know who you be, Kunta. That’s who you always be. Kunta Kinte.” Though Kunta Kinte was beat into submission, he still held out to near death and he didn’t let that moment of submission define him. He remained the staunchly proud and defiant Kunta Kinte.
Names and naming probably aren’t as important to us today as they were long ago and still are in more traditional cultures. Your name was more than a label. It was your essential being. It shaped your personality. You took on some of the characteristics of the name. (I guess it’s quite unfortunate my name is Randy.) For example, Jesus renamed a disciple named Simon giving him the name Cephas in Aramaic and Petra in Greek or Peter as we know him which meant “Rock” because that reflected his character and his leadership role among the disciples.
Your name tied you to your ancestors. If you were named after a deceased relative, you were to develop aspects of that relatives character and you were tagged to assume the role that relative played in the clan. My middle name, Stuart, is the same one my great-grandmother had. She was Lena Stuart Benson nee Thompson born 1896. S-T-U-A-R-T would associate us with Scottish Highlanders, Jacobites back in the 1700’s who wanted the Stuart Lineage restored on the British throne. Interestingly, my great-grandmother died on my birthday. Some of my Chesley folks will perk up when the name Thompson is mentioned, but I’m reasonably sure it was spelled with a “P” while most around here lack the “P”. Names can carry a lot of history. There’s a lot in a name.
When it came to gods, names were also important. You may remember in the story of Moses and the Burning Bush how Moses repeatedly tried to get God to tell him his name. God finally got fed up with him and told him the name “Yahweh” which is a form of the verb “to be” and means “I am who I am.” Moses wanted to know God’s name because people back then believed that you needed the name of the god to be able to call on that god. Being able to invoke the name of a particular god by saying and acting in its name gave a person a certain amount of power over that God as well. By revealing his name to Moses as Yahweh, God was basically saying “I am who I am and you can’t control me.” In essence, it was a nameless name. Being able to invoke the name of more powerful gods made one more powerful as well. It was a very bold move, maybe even a gamble, to declare to have done something in the name of a particular god. If you were Greek and went to war at sea, you would certainly want Poseidon, the god of the sea, on your side. Aries, the god of war, wouldn’t have been enough. Every god was a god of something so you had to know the names of the gods and what god did what so you could stay in their good graces enough to call on them.
I hope you are kind of getting the feeling for the importance of names and the role of naming in the ancient world with respect to ourselves and our names and to the gods. For me, it feels hard to define the importance because in our culture, God forbid, somebody’s identity be shaped by the external actions of other people such as naming. Our culture at its extreme would opt not to name a child, but rather let it grow up and discover who it is and then let it name itself and make its own name great. Our culture’s emphasis on “I am becoming who I am,” quite frankly broaches on blasphemy. It puts me, myself, and I and everything about me in the place of God. But that’s a sermon for another day. Let’s look at the Lord’s Prayer and how Jesus taught us to address God.
The Prayer begins, “Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be your name.” I’m going to reserve the Father talk for next week which is Father’s Day and instead look at the “hallowed be your name” part. I hope you can grasp that when we mention God’s name, we’re essentially talking about who God is – God’s personality – and about God’s will and power to get things done. The only name for God that Jesus gives us here at the opening of the Prayer is “Our Father”, which is a pretty bold if not brazen way to address God or any god for that matter. Outside of that, the name remains nameless, so to speak, void of defining characteristics. Jesus just says hallowed be your name.
So, what does “hallowed” mean? Hallowed means to make holy. The word holy can be confused with things like moral purity or good in every kind of way. But its meaning is really simple. It just means “set apart” for a purpose. For a person to be holy means that person is set aside for God’s purposes. For our Father to be holy means that God is utterly set apart from the way things are in this creation as it is infected by the disease of sin which culminates in death. So also, God is not pridefully bent on self-annihilation as humanity is. God does not deal in death. God is set apart from all that.
God is hallowed also in that Our Father is utterly different from all the other gods. The other gods didn’t care about human beings or the creation. We are just tools and pawns in the grand soap opera of narcissists that was the behind-the-scenes world of Mt. Olympus. The gods must be bought off. Whether or not you performed a ritual correctly dictated whether that god would help you. The gods were fickle, caring only about themselves. Our Father, on the other hand, loves us each as much as he does his only begotten Son, Jesus, who died for us, was raised for us, and rules for us. God works all things to the good for those who love him. God delights in us. Smiles over us. The God who created all things is for us simply because he loves us. God is partial to the weak, the poor, the widow, the orphan. There is no other god we could describe that way. Our Father is the God who heals, cleanses, forgives, restores, delivers, raises the dead, gives reason to rejoice, reconciles, gives new life. He dwells in and among his people because he wants to. I could go on. Our Father is totally unlike, totally separate from the other gods. Totally not like them. Our God is holy.
One more thing to say about God’s name being hallowed, God is totally not like us. God is God and we are not. Unlike in the ancient world we can’t do rituals or make bargains with God to get God to do what we want. We have to accept what God wants for us, which is what is for our best. The God of all creation is for us because God loves us beyond what we can understand. This is where we would move on to praying “Your kingdom come, your will be done” but that sermon is a couple of weeks away.
To wind this down, it is important for us to know the personality, the character, the “way”, the nature of the God we pray to. Our God, “our Father”, is not a capricious narcissist God who has to be bargained with or bought off. Our God loves us and wants to hear our prayers. Our God loves us and went through death to do what’s best for us. Our God loves us and is for us. God is inclined towards us with a love we cannot comprehend. Sure, feathers hit the fan. Indeed, bad things happen to good. Sometimes things are so foobarred by evil and the hurt done to us so frilling un-understandable that the only way God can answer our prayers is to give us for now a taste of his very self, the Holy Spirit (and that’s all we ever really need). God can’t answer those prayers now because the answer to them, the BIG healing of what evil and the Evil one has done to us awaits the day of our Lord’s return and we’ll get into that in the coming weeks. But to close, please remember the God we pray to loves us and that’s what makes our God holy. Amen.
