Pentecost 12A (lectionary 21A)
Text: Matthew 16:13-20
Sermon by Rev. Robert Klonowski
Faith Lutheran Church, Homewood, IL
August 23, 2020
Name It
In the Gospel lesson for this morning Jesus does his Beyonce imitation: Say my name, say my name! Come on now, you disciples, he says; this Gospel of Matthew is half over now, you’ve been listening to me for 15 chapters, so if you ain’t runnin’ game, the time has come to say my name.
In response the disciples, at first they lead off with a whole lot of nonsense. You know why: when the time comes to speak a difficult and challenging and maybe even a dangerously risky word of Truth, you … well, you want to avoid that if you possibly can! You want to consider other possibilities; you wave around in the wind; you dither. “I guess some say that you’re channeling John the Baptist,” the disciples venture. “But some others do say Elijah, and we can’t discount the possibility that you may be Jeremiah or one of the prophets.” They call him names, all right, but they call him by the wrong names, by false names; they call him by names they made for him, and not the name God created for him.
Jesus will have none of this nonsense from us. He comes back at you right then with the most direct, the most life-defining question in the Gospels. It is the most agitational question of your life:
Jesus asks you: Who do you say that I am?
The title of the sermon this morning is: Name It.
Just how important is it in life to name it, and to get the name right? Think of the importance of this in the recent Black Lives Matter protests, with people chanting “Say the names!” and then “George Floyd! Breonna Taylor!” Why is it that to name the names is so important? Because it’s when we say the names that we’re living into the truth of what happened. Name it!, then.
Think of how this works in the dynamics of alcoholism. Just as the confession of Peter is the turning point in the Gospels, so it is the turning point in someone’s addicted life when we name the elephant in the room. I mean, when the elephant is that big, somebody has got to be able to point at it and say, “You know? That right there? That’s an elephant!” You name it, and you nail it!
And that is why you have to name yourself in an AA meeting. Recently I ran into my old friend Father Len Dubi, who even in his retirement and even in this pandemic time is still kicking, serving the Roman Catholic community of St. Anne’s, just up Dixie Highway from us in Hazel Crest. I heard him a couple of weeks ago telling a group of people how he introduces himself at his AA meetings, like any other participant: “Hi, I’m Lenny, and I’m an alcoholic.” To speak at an AA meeting you gotta name yourself, and you gotta name your disease. Name it! Can you hear?, can you imagine? the liberation that is for you there, if you can name it with all clarity and courage.
Think of how important this naming business is, in terms of gay and lesbian identity. When the writer Oscar Wilde was put on trial, because at the time homosexuality was a criminal offense, he called it “the love that dares not speak its name,” and hasn’t that been the truth over the years? Thanks be to God, people don’t have to grow up anymore – at least, not as much – as the gay people in my extended family have, with no one around them ever saying what it was, what it really is.
Or as one person in our Faith Lutheran Church community puts it – this is someone who describes herself as one of our “older Lesbians” – “for half my life,” she says, “I didn’t even have a name for it, what I knew I was. In my lifetime, this has all changed. Now, I can say it,” she says. Can you hear the liberation in her words? ‘Cause if you can name that truth, why, that is a truth that will set you free. Name it!
Finally I want you to think with me about how important it is to name it!, when we’re talking about racism, about that centuries-old and still-persistent system of caste, privilege versus suppression, in America. People of God, people of America, oh!, we don’t like it! We resist it, like a six-year-old who doesn’t want to take his medicine. But we CAN; we CAN name it! We can name ourselves as woefully short of the promise on which this nation was founded. It won’t kill us to do that! In fact, far from it: to name it is the only way of *life,* going forward. Only by naming how we have fallen short – racism – can we live into the glorious and sacred promise that is us, that is our national prospect, that is a renewed and free America.
It is the agitational and defining question of your life: Jesus asks you, Who do you say that I am?
Name it, then!; just as Peter did: Jesus Christ is Lord. Yes; Jesus Christ is Lord of my life. I will live in the truth, following Jesus. I will name what is right; I will live in no falsehood. I will pull no punches; I will live no lie about myself. In the name of Jesus I will brook no injustice; under the name of Jesus, I will build a better world. And we will name things for what they *are,* when we say, Jesus Christ is Lord.
Hear the words of St. Paul, in the letter to the Philippians: “Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, 10so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, 11and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.”