Having A Good Name
Sermon
Sermons on the First Readings
Series III, Cycle B
Proverbs is right: Having a good name is a terribly important thing. It is important in business, it is important in society, it is important at home, in a family. When we lose our good name, we have lost our trustworthiness. Sometimes it cannot be replaced.
How do we know if we have a good name? What is the measurement? Is it the absence of gossip? Or the presence of trust? Is a good name something that we start out with only to find it comes up missing once we have done one or two things wrong? Or does a good name only begin to be threatened after three things? Again, how do we know? Indeed, do we know?
Having a good name is not just having a good name. It is a matter of the inner matching the outer -- and it is also a matter of grooming and training our inner to be good. Very few of us take the time to train. We bop along. Instead of self-definition, the inner work of outer self-presentation, we fuzz along.
Two problems plague most people I know, including me. One is short term. It is the inability to get destiny or destination in place and to act from and toward it. The other is fuzzy goals. Because I don't know exactly what I want from today or tomorrow or you or me or us or them, I often behave non-strategically. I bop along. I buzz along in a fuzzy framework of creeds, stories, scripts, theories, and ideologies. Some days end with me wondering why I moved that whole pile of paper from one side of my desk to another: What kept me from acting on at least two or three pieces of my "preposterous," the name my daughter gave at age nine to my kitchen counter. She had just learned the word and was looking for a perfect way to use it. She found it on the counter. All she could describe was the paper: She didn't see all the hidden scripted messages that were also there.
Both of these problems have positive nuances. What happens as I fuzz and buzz along is often quite beautiful. Sometimes wonderful things find me. Serendipity, what you find that you are not looking for, is a magnificent experience. I remember very well the day I met a woman who has become a dear friend. On the day I met her at a business lunch, I had vowed not to make any new friends until I took better care of the ones I had. I had just received an angry letter from a friend about why I had not responded to her phone calls. As she revealed herself to me during the lunch, I just started to laugh. I was breaking my own promise within hours of making it.
While serendipity and aimlessness are magnificent things, they also get in the way of purpose. They get in the way of art, too, the play we should be writing, the song we should be singing, the change we should be making, and the church we should be becoming. Aimlessness can make the issue of what name we have and whether it is good or not a real problem.
Strategy is good -- and to behave strategically, we need to give ourselves over to something like a name, something like a creed.
A name is something with content, something that says who we are. A name is something that goes with what we believe in. We are known by our beliefs, our commitments to those beliefs. Keeping a good name means having a good creed.
A creed is a statement of belief, within or outside of a religious context. It is the choice to commit to this rather than that. We name ourselves by X, not Y. What is good about creeds, according to Jaroslav Pelican, the best scholar on the subject, is that they save us from short term being. They link us to long pasts. They are a stay against individualism, which is different than individuality. Names are often individual parts of group goals. We name ourselves by who we belong to. This loss of individuality is as much a problem as too much individuality!
Creeds are also not so good, according to Pelican, because they tend to romanticize their own history. In his book surveying creeds from 1873 to the present, he found 200 revisitings of the Nicene Creed, most of which came straight out of their year and their nation. Creeds are patently not universal -- while often pretending so to be. Even Nicea, which came from the first global meeting of the Christian church, the Council of Nicea in 325, took 56 years to be solidified later at the Council of Constantinople. It was often sung or chanted and thereby memorized by a transnational people who called themselves Christians. The Nicene Creed replaced the Apostles' Creed, which was used primarily at baptisms before 325. The Apostles' Creed was an answer to one historical movement, gnosticism, which denied that Jesus was fully human. The Nicene Creed responded to the so-called heresy of Aryanism, which denied that Jesus was fully divine. We already see that these creeds, which pretend to be universal and objective, are patently not. They are rich in context. Pelican loves creeds because they connect us to fat and long pasts. I like (don't love) creeds because I think they are a kind of shade -- a comfort food -- a way to get above the preposterous fray and fuzz of the day and connect to my cultural and religious forebears. Creeds give us a good name. From them, we define ourselves and know what we are protecting when we take care of our good name.
I love the way the Massai people in East Nigeria rewrote the "Gem Na" creed in 1960 at their own council, called the Congregation of the Holy Ghost.
We believe in One High God, who out of love created the beautiful world. We believe that God made good his promise by sending his Son, Jesus Christ, a man in the flesh, a Jew by tribe, born poor in a little village, who left His home and was always on safari doing good, curing people by the power of God, teaching about God and man, and showing that the meaning of religion is love. He was rejected by his own people, tortured and nailed hands and feet to a cross, and died. He was buried in the grave, but the Hyenas did not touch him, and on the third day he rose from the Grave.1
I have said that I like (don't love) creeds because they give a shade, a collective comfort, to the issue of being born Christian and being part of this living room as opposed to a Buddhist or Islamic one. I have a rug on my floor, as well. Creeds keep me somewhat protected and shaded from the hot sun of my 100 years on the globe (if I am lucky) and the resulting short term it is. They also propel me intro strategic behavior while allowing me openness to serendipity. Creeds name me.
Stephen Jay Gould who sang with the Haydn and Handel societies in Boston for many years and who was a nonbeliever, a man whose creed was science not religion, said that if we had only one thing to put in a time capsule to tell those who follow us who we are and who we have been, he would put in the Bach B minor mass, "Credo in Unum Deum." I would not go that far in praising the accomplishments of Christianity. But again I note the clarity such a mass gives. It gives us ethnic, national, and "birth" Christians a stay against individualism. It gives us an invitation to that place that exists between a welcome pluralism and a disturbing relativity. It gives us a good name to protect.
It is very important to stop every now and then and just think about who we are and what we stand for.
Why do I think it important to step back and think? Because knowing what we believe and why we believe it is important to how we behave, whether we matter, whether we live in the world we make or the world others make for us. Absent creedal thinking, which I mean in the broadest and most strategic of senses, others will be happy to do our thinking for us. They will move their couch and their lamp into our living room and we will sit on it. Let me redefine what I mean by creed: It is our name and its measurement, our epistemology, our theory, our ideology, our script, our screen, and our filter. It is not all these things at the same time but can be any of them at any given moment. While I don't want to go all the way to a fully measured or strategic or directed life, I do want to avoid fuzz. I am too aware of the power of ideology to control me.
Dorothy Bass argues that the way most Americans measure our lives is by whether or not we are authentic, whatever that is. Whether or not we had free choice, whatever that is. Whether or not we made our own choices about who we are. I fear these versions of authenticity drip with individualism. Just drip with it. We are "self-made," like my favorite all-American character, straight from the work of Robert Bellah, the sociologist, who tells us "I am a self-made man" only to discover that he inherited the car dealership from his father! We are the victims of other people's creeds if we don't have our own. We are victims of what other people name us instead of choosing our own names.
Americans think we are self-made. We are not. We are made by each other. In Thomas Friedman's new theory, one I happen to buy, the price of oil and the pace of freedom move in opposite directions. We are made by the price of oil as well as what we had for breakfast and what we learned in school and whether we were born Christian or not.
Surely some people -- I think of many foundations and most school testing -- take the notion of measurement way too far; contrarily, many of us take it not far enough. How would we measure if our church were a successful congregation for the next chapter? How would we know? If we felt good? If we made our own choices? Or if we had a driving vocation that matters to someone else besides ourselves? The creed matters here: Jesus mattered to someone besides himself. How would we know if our own lives, however long or short, measured up to goals we had set for ourselves? One goal could be to maximize serendipity. Another would be to leave a legacy of beauty or excellence or good jokes. A third would be to be a good parent or good school board member. Knowing our destination is a matter of creed. It is a matter of shade: under which tree do we stand and think and sift and strategize? It is also a matter of what furniture is already in our living room and whether the room in which we live is cluttered with old stuff, like our parents' or our teachers' or the oppressive voices, which inhabit most of our minds. Interior decoration is not a small matter: It is often the act and art of aesthetic strategy applied to our own lives and spaces. A good name is a good thing.
I was compelled by what Jaroslav Pelican said about creeds and their use. I was not surprised to be reminded by him that Saint Augustine concluded his creedal book of thousands of pages with the words, "We have said this not in order to say something, but in order not to remain altogether silent."
Mystery remains long after measurement collapses in the issue du jour. I also found my way to a book by Walter Moseley, Life Out Of Context. This book is a long essay about Moseley's redecoration of his own African-American living room. Moseley's previous book was Working On The Chain Gang: Shaking Off The Dead Hand Of History. In that book, Moseley argued that economic globalism was pushing our lives all the time. Not free choice. Not personal authenticity. Just plain old capitalism slotting us into which couch and which colors to buy.
The new book Life Out Of Context is a direct challenge to the creeds and theories, that bind us. He questions the way "America" stands front and center in all our lives, black and white. Why not Africa? Why not the global South? Why is the only story we tell and know is the one where the American team wins? Why not think of:
*Cameroon and HIV/Aids?
* Ghanian's project on Grasscutter Production for Environmental Conservation?
* Kenya's Kibwezi's Goat and Honey Project?
* Mozambique's Introduction of Draft Power?
* South Africa's Khulani Tsoto Goat Project?
* Tanzanian's Fish Farming Development Project?
* Zambian's Chikupi Women's Goat Project Phase?
* Zambian's Water Supply for Sustainable Livelihoods?
* China's Goose and Duck Project Phase II in Jiangsu?
* India's Capacity Building of Marginalized Rural Communities?
* Indonesia's Micro Credit programs?
* Nepalese Itahari Women's Livestock Raising?
* Vietnam's Youth Project in the Mekong Delta?
* Albania and Armenia's Azerbaijan Bull Calves Project?
I have only gone through one quarter of the globe. Why are these places so far from us? Is our name just American or is it global? How do we protect a good global name?
I shiver to think how much my contexts are at war with my creeds -- and that I don't take the time to sort them through or to stand in their shade long enough to redecorate my living room -- to know what I believe, what I think, who I think it with, and what I am going to do about it. I shudder to think that I am not thinking or seeing or knowing. I shudder to think that I have been duped by something as small as America rather than by something as large as Nicea. Both, of course, are contextual. One context is simply better -- global not national, universal not individual, and these matters matter to what I do today in my living room. How I get past my lack of strategy is by taking the time to creed, to think, to sift, to sit under the shade tree and think. There I protect my good name. Amen.
____________
1. This was taken from a worship contest in 1960.
How do we know if we have a good name? What is the measurement? Is it the absence of gossip? Or the presence of trust? Is a good name something that we start out with only to find it comes up missing once we have done one or two things wrong? Or does a good name only begin to be threatened after three things? Again, how do we know? Indeed, do we know?
Having a good name is not just having a good name. It is a matter of the inner matching the outer -- and it is also a matter of grooming and training our inner to be good. Very few of us take the time to train. We bop along. Instead of self-definition, the inner work of outer self-presentation, we fuzz along.
Two problems plague most people I know, including me. One is short term. It is the inability to get destiny or destination in place and to act from and toward it. The other is fuzzy goals. Because I don't know exactly what I want from today or tomorrow or you or me or us or them, I often behave non-strategically. I bop along. I buzz along in a fuzzy framework of creeds, stories, scripts, theories, and ideologies. Some days end with me wondering why I moved that whole pile of paper from one side of my desk to another: What kept me from acting on at least two or three pieces of my "preposterous," the name my daughter gave at age nine to my kitchen counter. She had just learned the word and was looking for a perfect way to use it. She found it on the counter. All she could describe was the paper: She didn't see all the hidden scripted messages that were also there.
Both of these problems have positive nuances. What happens as I fuzz and buzz along is often quite beautiful. Sometimes wonderful things find me. Serendipity, what you find that you are not looking for, is a magnificent experience. I remember very well the day I met a woman who has become a dear friend. On the day I met her at a business lunch, I had vowed not to make any new friends until I took better care of the ones I had. I had just received an angry letter from a friend about why I had not responded to her phone calls. As she revealed herself to me during the lunch, I just started to laugh. I was breaking my own promise within hours of making it.
While serendipity and aimlessness are magnificent things, they also get in the way of purpose. They get in the way of art, too, the play we should be writing, the song we should be singing, the change we should be making, and the church we should be becoming. Aimlessness can make the issue of what name we have and whether it is good or not a real problem.
Strategy is good -- and to behave strategically, we need to give ourselves over to something like a name, something like a creed.
A name is something with content, something that says who we are. A name is something that goes with what we believe in. We are known by our beliefs, our commitments to those beliefs. Keeping a good name means having a good creed.
A creed is a statement of belief, within or outside of a religious context. It is the choice to commit to this rather than that. We name ourselves by X, not Y. What is good about creeds, according to Jaroslav Pelican, the best scholar on the subject, is that they save us from short term being. They link us to long pasts. They are a stay against individualism, which is different than individuality. Names are often individual parts of group goals. We name ourselves by who we belong to. This loss of individuality is as much a problem as too much individuality!
Creeds are also not so good, according to Pelican, because they tend to romanticize their own history. In his book surveying creeds from 1873 to the present, he found 200 revisitings of the Nicene Creed, most of which came straight out of their year and their nation. Creeds are patently not universal -- while often pretending so to be. Even Nicea, which came from the first global meeting of the Christian church, the Council of Nicea in 325, took 56 years to be solidified later at the Council of Constantinople. It was often sung or chanted and thereby memorized by a transnational people who called themselves Christians. The Nicene Creed replaced the Apostles' Creed, which was used primarily at baptisms before 325. The Apostles' Creed was an answer to one historical movement, gnosticism, which denied that Jesus was fully human. The Nicene Creed responded to the so-called heresy of Aryanism, which denied that Jesus was fully divine. We already see that these creeds, which pretend to be universal and objective, are patently not. They are rich in context. Pelican loves creeds because they connect us to fat and long pasts. I like (don't love) creeds because I think they are a kind of shade -- a comfort food -- a way to get above the preposterous fray and fuzz of the day and connect to my cultural and religious forebears. Creeds give us a good name. From them, we define ourselves and know what we are protecting when we take care of our good name.
I love the way the Massai people in East Nigeria rewrote the "Gem Na" creed in 1960 at their own council, called the Congregation of the Holy Ghost.
We believe in One High God, who out of love created the beautiful world. We believe that God made good his promise by sending his Son, Jesus Christ, a man in the flesh, a Jew by tribe, born poor in a little village, who left His home and was always on safari doing good, curing people by the power of God, teaching about God and man, and showing that the meaning of religion is love. He was rejected by his own people, tortured and nailed hands and feet to a cross, and died. He was buried in the grave, but the Hyenas did not touch him, and on the third day he rose from the Grave.1
I have said that I like (don't love) creeds because they give a shade, a collective comfort, to the issue of being born Christian and being part of this living room as opposed to a Buddhist or Islamic one. I have a rug on my floor, as well. Creeds keep me somewhat protected and shaded from the hot sun of my 100 years on the globe (if I am lucky) and the resulting short term it is. They also propel me intro strategic behavior while allowing me openness to serendipity. Creeds name me.
Stephen Jay Gould who sang with the Haydn and Handel societies in Boston for many years and who was a nonbeliever, a man whose creed was science not religion, said that if we had only one thing to put in a time capsule to tell those who follow us who we are and who we have been, he would put in the Bach B minor mass, "Credo in Unum Deum." I would not go that far in praising the accomplishments of Christianity. But again I note the clarity such a mass gives. It gives us ethnic, national, and "birth" Christians a stay against individualism. It gives us an invitation to that place that exists between a welcome pluralism and a disturbing relativity. It gives us a good name to protect.
It is very important to stop every now and then and just think about who we are and what we stand for.
Why do I think it important to step back and think? Because knowing what we believe and why we believe it is important to how we behave, whether we matter, whether we live in the world we make or the world others make for us. Absent creedal thinking, which I mean in the broadest and most strategic of senses, others will be happy to do our thinking for us. They will move their couch and their lamp into our living room and we will sit on it. Let me redefine what I mean by creed: It is our name and its measurement, our epistemology, our theory, our ideology, our script, our screen, and our filter. It is not all these things at the same time but can be any of them at any given moment. While I don't want to go all the way to a fully measured or strategic or directed life, I do want to avoid fuzz. I am too aware of the power of ideology to control me.
Dorothy Bass argues that the way most Americans measure our lives is by whether or not we are authentic, whatever that is. Whether or not we had free choice, whatever that is. Whether or not we made our own choices about who we are. I fear these versions of authenticity drip with individualism. Just drip with it. We are "self-made," like my favorite all-American character, straight from the work of Robert Bellah, the sociologist, who tells us "I am a self-made man" only to discover that he inherited the car dealership from his father! We are the victims of other people's creeds if we don't have our own. We are victims of what other people name us instead of choosing our own names.
Americans think we are self-made. We are not. We are made by each other. In Thomas Friedman's new theory, one I happen to buy, the price of oil and the pace of freedom move in opposite directions. We are made by the price of oil as well as what we had for breakfast and what we learned in school and whether we were born Christian or not.
Surely some people -- I think of many foundations and most school testing -- take the notion of measurement way too far; contrarily, many of us take it not far enough. How would we measure if our church were a successful congregation for the next chapter? How would we know? If we felt good? If we made our own choices? Or if we had a driving vocation that matters to someone else besides ourselves? The creed matters here: Jesus mattered to someone besides himself. How would we know if our own lives, however long or short, measured up to goals we had set for ourselves? One goal could be to maximize serendipity. Another would be to leave a legacy of beauty or excellence or good jokes. A third would be to be a good parent or good school board member. Knowing our destination is a matter of creed. It is a matter of shade: under which tree do we stand and think and sift and strategize? It is also a matter of what furniture is already in our living room and whether the room in which we live is cluttered with old stuff, like our parents' or our teachers' or the oppressive voices, which inhabit most of our minds. Interior decoration is not a small matter: It is often the act and art of aesthetic strategy applied to our own lives and spaces. A good name is a good thing.
I was compelled by what Jaroslav Pelican said about creeds and their use. I was not surprised to be reminded by him that Saint Augustine concluded his creedal book of thousands of pages with the words, "We have said this not in order to say something, but in order not to remain altogether silent."
Mystery remains long after measurement collapses in the issue du jour. I also found my way to a book by Walter Moseley, Life Out Of Context. This book is a long essay about Moseley's redecoration of his own African-American living room. Moseley's previous book was Working On The Chain Gang: Shaking Off The Dead Hand Of History. In that book, Moseley argued that economic globalism was pushing our lives all the time. Not free choice. Not personal authenticity. Just plain old capitalism slotting us into which couch and which colors to buy.
The new book Life Out Of Context is a direct challenge to the creeds and theories, that bind us. He questions the way "America" stands front and center in all our lives, black and white. Why not Africa? Why not the global South? Why is the only story we tell and know is the one where the American team wins? Why not think of:
*Cameroon and HIV/Aids?
* Ghanian's project on Grasscutter Production for Environmental Conservation?
* Kenya's Kibwezi's Goat and Honey Project?
* Mozambique's Introduction of Draft Power?
* South Africa's Khulani Tsoto Goat Project?
* Tanzanian's Fish Farming Development Project?
* Zambian's Chikupi Women's Goat Project Phase?
* Zambian's Water Supply for Sustainable Livelihoods?
* China's Goose and Duck Project Phase II in Jiangsu?
* India's Capacity Building of Marginalized Rural Communities?
* Indonesia's Micro Credit programs?
* Nepalese Itahari Women's Livestock Raising?
* Vietnam's Youth Project in the Mekong Delta?
* Albania and Armenia's Azerbaijan Bull Calves Project?
I have only gone through one quarter of the globe. Why are these places so far from us? Is our name just American or is it global? How do we protect a good global name?
I shiver to think how much my contexts are at war with my creeds -- and that I don't take the time to sort them through or to stand in their shade long enough to redecorate my living room -- to know what I believe, what I think, who I think it with, and what I am going to do about it. I shudder to think that I am not thinking or seeing or knowing. I shudder to think that I have been duped by something as small as America rather than by something as large as Nicea. Both, of course, are contextual. One context is simply better -- global not national, universal not individual, and these matters matter to what I do today in my living room. How I get past my lack of strategy is by taking the time to creed, to think, to sift, to sit under the shade tree and think. There I protect my good name. Amen.
____________
1. This was taken from a worship contest in 1960.
