Sundays after Pentecost Proper 12 [17] Year B
Some of you may have heard me tell this story before and I ask you to be gracious towards me.
Some of you may have heard me tell this story before and I ask you to be gracious towards me.
I was
talking with Galal about how people got their names in Sudan. In the basic system a child is given a name
when they are born and then their second name is the name of the Father, and
the third name is that of their grandfather.
So Galal is Galal Angalo Bashir, but his son is Nathaniel Galal Angalo
and his daughter is Najila Galal Angalo.
And of course, we all know that women do not change their name when they
marry – but they do carry their father’s name and their grandfather’s name.
I asked
Galal if it could ever be, did he think, that a girl child would have her
mother’s name and her grandmother’s name.
I was thinking that would be a nice modern and feminist twist on things. Galal looked at me incredulous that anyone
would even think of such a thing and simply said to me “That wouldn’t work.”
Of course in
Sudanese culture that patriarchal line is important in determining who you
belong to and Galal tells of his grandmother encouraging him and his brothers
to be able to remember the names of their ancestors for ten to fifteen
generations. I had to look at it in a
book but I could go:
John, Bruce, Will, Zeph, Will, John, John, Edward and Abraham
That’s only
going back 8 generations and it takes my family time back to the early 1700s.
It cannot be
denied that for many generations in our culture, when she got married, a woman
took her husband’s surname – indeed not so long ago, Jan over there would have
been known as Mrs Alan Salter.
So given
this tradition we share of claiming our identity through our fathers and sometimes
our husbands, what do you make of this opening sentence from Ephesians we read
today (3:14-15):
For this reason
I fall on my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on
earth receives their name.
For me,
these words affirm the idea found in other texts that we are known by God in
ways that precede our physical life and which will continue when this life
ends.
It affirms
those words of Jesus in a number of places that we are children of our Father
in heaven.
Happy are those who work for peace:
God
will call them his children. (Matthew 5:9)
and
Love your
enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may become the
children of your Father in Heaven. (Matthew 5:44-45)
But perhaps
the most significant thing about this is the sense of God’s intimate involvement
with us all – so intimate that it is from him that we have all received our
name.
And that got
me thinking. What does it really mean that
God is our Father?
Near the end
of Matthew’s Gospel he has a collection of little sayings that Jesus used probably
many times and in many different places than just where this is found. Jesus says:
You must not
call anyone here on earth “Father” because you have only one Father in heaven. (Matthew 23:9)
What I think
he is saying is not that you should not call your priest “Father” but that you
can call him Pastor, or even just John; rather he is saying that even your more
intimate relationships on earth, like to your Father, are to take second place to
your relationship to your Father in Heaven who has given you your name.
Indeed, Jesus
clearly tries to distance himself from his earthly family when they come after
him one time, wanting to speak with him:
"Who is my mother? Who are my brothers?"
Then
he pointed to his disciples and said, "Look! Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does what my Father in
heaven wants is my brother, my sister, and my mother." (Matthew 12:48-50)
Our primary
relationship is with God who is our Father in Heaven. Next comes our relationship with each other
as brothers and sisters because we all share the same Father in Heaven.
Do you think
this is hard?
I think it
can be, because sometimes it looks like it means we have to neglect the
relationship with our earthly family in favour of our relationship with God and
our siblings in God. Some of you may
know stories of a person or another who chose this way and with tragic
consequences for their real family for whom they had both a natural and proper responsibility
to care for.
Fortunately this
is not a case of either / or. But our
relationship with God is still our primary one and one that we should nurture
every day. We will go through times, I
am sure, when many many things compete with the time we need to give to our
relationship with God. But we are not to
give up. We are not to lose sight of our
true Father who has given us our true name.
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