Names

Recently I had one of those mildly embarrassing moments when I ran into someone I knew and could not remember their name.  And it happened twice.  Within two minutes of each other.

It may very well be that I was the only one who was embarrassed.  Throughout the conversations that we had I was scanning my mind to recall their names.  I don’t know if they were aware of my efforts to recall the names as we were talking. 

To my “credit” neither person was someone who was a close friend, or whom I saw often.  The first was the mother of my older daughter’s best friend while that daughter was still in high school.  The girls didn’t hang around too much after graduating in 2005.  I run into the mother once in a while at work and she always asks about my daughter.

The other person was the mother of a young man who was in my Scout Troop when I was a Scoutmaster.  That boy left the troop in 2000, so that is a relationship that goes a bit farther back, and which is also more distant because I hadn’t seen the mother for a number of years afterward and she only began working in the hospital where I work one or two years ago.  And I only see her there very occasionally.

Funny thing is that we all wear name tags at work but in neither case was their tag visible to me in a manner where I could read their name and work it into the conversation.  My good-byes to them were friendly but not personal.  And I did remember both names about 30 minutes later. 

A number of years ago I heard a sermon, where the preacher said something about names.  I don’t remember what the preacher said specifically but the lesson I did learn, at least the lesson in the sermon for myself, was that it wasn’t acceptable to believe that “I’m not good with names.”  People matter, their names matter, and for me to have good relationships with people and to value them as individuals it is important for me to know and use their names. 

Our names are the key way in which we are identified in the world.  I’m Brad.  In one circumstance I may be Brad, the runner, and in another Brad, the occupational therapist, and another, Brad, the Scoutmaster.  And there are many more adjectives describing who I may be in different places, but at the core there is always my name, Brad. (More formally Bradley, which used to be only the province of my grandmothers but now is finding wider application…go figure!)

And one day Brad will pass from this earth.  I will no longer exist, and at some point memory of me will likely pass away as well.  I know the names of my grandparents but not all the names of the generation before them.  And I can pass that knowledge on to my children but who knows how long they will carry it?  For how many future generations will my own name be remembered? 

It really doesn’t matter to me that my name is remembered long into the future.  I hope to leave this world with a legacy of faith in Jesus, shaping the faith of my descendants and others my life has touched.  And I hope that their faith leaves a similar legacy.

And another reason, a much better reason, that the memory of my own name doesn’t matter to me is because my name, and my person, matter to God.   

The Bible is full of the names of people.  Some are very familiar and well-known to us while others are obscure.  Some are easy to pronounce and some, perhaps many more, we stumble over at best when we read and speak them aloud.  Some of the people named in the Bible give us good models of making God-honoring choices in their lives, while others provide just the opposite. 

And then there are others that are merely listed.  We read just their names and we know virtually nothing else about them.  The first nine chapters of 1 Chronicles are full of names and very little else.  They list the genealogies of the Jewish people, beginning with Adam, continuing through the twelve tribes, even including Saul’s genealogy twice.  Ezra 2 and 8 are also primarily genealogies of the exiles returning from Babylon.

One of the things we learn from the genealogies of the Old Testament is that individual people matter to God.  They matter in life and they matter in death.  God saw fit to preserve in his word the names of a great many people.  They are the names of his chosen people.  The record of them reminds us that through the work of God we are also joined into his people.  And one day we will be joined with all of God’s people, his people of the past, present and future, in eternal praise. 

I forgot, temporarily, the names of those two people I began this post with.  But I remember them now and I expect to remember their names, and to use them, the next time I see them.  And I will also continue to work on learning the names of those people I expect to meet tomorrow, and next week, and on into the future. 

And my greatest hope is that perhaps through an act as small as a remembered name that they may come to know and love deeply the person who holds the name that stands above all names, Jesus, the Christ.

Remember me

One of the things that I’ve been working on recently is reading through the Bible.  Not that I don’t read the Bible, for I do, but it is often in bits and pieces.  There will be something associated with a devotional writing; the scripture used in church on Sunday; the assigned passage for my Bible study; and whichever portion of scripture that my wife and I read during our prayer time together.  And while that is all good, it is also a bit scattered.  A verse here and a chapter there.  The idea of reading through the entire text of the Bible in a year struck me as something that would be spiritually healthy, much as regular exercise is physically healthy.

Reading the Bible in one year is the kind of thing that a person could take on as a New Year’s resolution, which is what I did the last time I attempted it.  This time I figured there was “no time like the present,” so I looked online for a plan that I liked and got started.  The plan I am following suggests passages to read each day, so that in one year’s time I will have read from Genesis 1 through Revelation 22. 

There is a lot of variety to online Bible-reading plans.  Some go cover-to-cover, from “In the beginning…” to “The grace of the Lord Jesus be with all. Amen.”  Some others go chronologically, although I’m not sure what that means.  Does it mean placing the readings in the order that the events in the text happened?  Or placing the readings in the order that they are believed to have been written?  Suffice to say, I didn’t really consider that option. 

The plan I picked is one that groups the reading by the type of writing that they are made up of.  On Monday I read law, Tuesday is history, Wednesday is Psalms, Thursday is poetry, Friday is prophecy, Saturday is Gospel and Sunday is epistles.  Which means that this week I will read from Deuteronomy, Nehemiah, Psalms, Song of Solomon, Revelation, Acts and 2^nd John.  I know that Acts isn’t technically a Gospel, but if you count Luke and Acts as two pieces of a unified work then in a reasonable sense it is. 

So this week I read Nehemiah 10 through 13, which are the last four chapters of the book.  Nehemiah was a Hebrew who served the king of Persia during the time when the Hebrews were in exile.  He received permission to return to Jerusalem to rebuild the city walls.  The first 9 chapters, which I read over the last two weeks, tell the story of the rebuilding and the return from exile, including a period of the Hebrews falling away from God’s ways.  When confronted about this, the people were read to from the law, then they confessed their sin, and lastly they renewed their covenant with God.  Chapters 10, 11 and 12 recount the sealing of the covenant, the obligations of the covenant, a list of the Hebrew leaders, and the story of the service of dedication of the wall.  There is great detail in listing the names and relationships of the people involved in these activities.  As an example there are 83 different signers of the covenant.

Chapter 13 is a bit curious.  The Hebrews have again fallen from God’s ways.  It was during a period when Nehemiah was back in Babylon, and when he returns to Jerusalem he takes a number of actions to correct the people living there, bringing them back to keeping the promises they had made to God.  Nehemiah seems to be careful to note what was done wrong, and by whom, as well as what he did to set things right.  And the final phrase of the book has Nehemiah say, “Remember me, O my God, for good.”

To me, it seems as if Nehemiah wants to make sure that he is remembered by God, and specifically he desires to be remembered for the good that he has done in God’s service.  And in Nehemiah’s desire for God to remember him well I think we can see a near universal desire of those who seek to know and love God for God to remember them.  We want God to remember us positively, and we don’t want him to recall any of the times we acted like the wayward Hebrews.  The times we turned away from God’s ways and went after the darker desires of our hearts. 

As Christmas approaches we journey through Advent and the expectation of Jesus’ birth…the Incarnation…God with us…the opening chapter of Jesus ministry on earth.  Reading Nehemiah 13 reminds me of the closing chapter of Jesus’ earthly life, with his death and resurrection to eternal life.  When we read the fuller account of God’s redemptive plan in the Bible, the writings of the New Testament, we read God’s answer to Nehemiah’s request. 

1 John 1:1-2 says, “My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.”  In these verses God shares with us the nature of his memory for his people, which is that our failings before God are made right in the work done by Christ on the cross. 

We may be like Nehemiah, trying to do good by God’s standards, and longing for God to notice what we have done.  But we are also like the Hebrews that Nehemiah was struggling with, turning away from God.  I am so glad, so thankful, that God doesn’t tally my “right” behavior against my “wrong” behavior to determine my standing before him.  He has chosen me to be his possession, now and for eternity, sealing me with his Spirit.  On the promises of his word one day I will be before him, my sins covered by the work of Christ. 

May you also rest in the sure confidence of God’s promises to you in Christ Jesus. 

Thanks be to God.