Love Knows Your Name

Matthew 1: 1 – 16, Luke 2:1 – 20, Isaiah 9: 6 – 7

December 24, 2024 - 8 p.m.

The prophet Isaiah proclaims that he is named:

Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
                                   Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

 

Big names for a tiny baby born to young parents among livestock in Bethlehem – the City of David.

 

Big names that tonight are placed alongside the genealogy from Matthew’s gospel – a genealogy that notably includes five women. Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba, and Mary.

 

Do you know about these women? Do you know why their names appear here?

It is unusual for women’s names to appear in the genealogies of the ancient middle east and so their names are not a mistake. They are here to tell a story – a story that we claim as our own, a story into which we have been adopted as followers of Jesus. A story that includes our names as well.

 

Tamar was a woman passed as wife from son to son in Judah’s line and who eventually tricked Judah into impregnating her. As a result, she protected her own future in a brutal patriarchy, and the line of Judah continued on, with her son Perez listed among the ancestors of King David.

 

Rahab may have run a brothel, or she may have been a prostitute. She protected Joshua’s spies as Joshua and his armies prepared to cross the Jordan into Jericho and to the promised land. She did this because she believed in her heart that God was on Joshua’s side. She, as a Canaanite, was drawn into the people of Israel in recognition of her role in protecting them.

 

Ruth was a Moabite woman who chose to cling to her mother-in-law Naomi when both women were widowed.  She committed to being Naomi’s kin and to she committed to worship the same God – the one God – that Naomi worshiped. She married Boaz and bore Obed, father of Jesse, father of David.

 

Dubbed only “the wife of Uriah” in Matthew’s genealogy, Bathsheba was seduced or maybe even raped by King David. She doesn’t get the consideration of her own name in this text, but she is clearly among the women. The child conceived by her pre-marital union with David died in infancy, but Bathsheba went on to bear more children with David, including Solomon, who would build the Temple in Jerusalem.

 

And Mary, a young girl stunned by an angel’s revelation, was from humble origins in Nazareth, a backwater village in Galilee. She had everything to lose turning up pregnant and unwed – and she said yes to God’s call with hope for a better future for those overlooked by the power structures of the day.

 

Isn’t it shocking that the Messiah who is Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace is also the descendent of ordinary women who found themselves in difficult – sometimes heartbreaking – circumstances, and managed to survive to bear generations of people?

 

Isn’t it shocking that human foibles and failures and hardships were part of the blood that flowed through Jesus’ veins?

 

Beloved, in the big God story, God has watched generations of humans trip all over themselves, and could have chosen to act from somewhere out in the cosmos. 

 

God could have chosen to enter into history in another place, another time. But God chose to join humanity a fleshy, helpless baby boy born in Palestine to an unwed teenage mother. Go dchose to be born into a place of messy-ness and disorder, into a line of folks who had lived through the school of hard knocks. This is where God chose to become one of us.

 

I hope you experience some comfort in that.

Perhaps a sense of belonging or connection.

 

I think the choice God made is love in action. 

Love that is willing to get dirty and do hard, unimaginable things. 

Love that is willing to live in solidarity with the hardships of being human. 

Love that sees brokenness and shows up in the midst of it.

Love that knows birth, companionship, laughter, grief and death.

 

That is love that knows what it means to be you and me. 

That is love that knows us.

That is love that knows your name.

 

As we’ve prepared for Jesus’s birth here at Faith, we’ve used the metaphor of quilts – bits and pieces of fabric combined to make something larger and more functional. Sometimes fabric used first in other ways – as clothes, as table cloths, as curtains – recycled and made new. Many of us found during the journey that we had fond memories of quilts that told a story or quilts that bundled new babies home from the hospital or comforted us when we were sick or alone.

 

God’s willingness to show up to people is like thread that draws together disparate stories – from Adam and Eve to Abram and Sarai to David and Bathsheba to Mary and Joseph. That thread weaves its way through time and distance like a thread that stitches together our family heirloom quilt – the thread that holds the fabric of this life and that life and that life together in union, creating community and belonging and comfort. 

 

God’s love draws all of the hard things and brokenness together. Into something whole. Into something bigger than the sum of its parts. Into something that has a story and makes a difference for those surrounded by it.

 

And you and I are part of that. Sewn into the big quilt. A beloved part of something that is whole and good and useful.

 

And I have to think that in the intimate act of stitching it all together, God knows each piece and part, each beloved one of us by name.  Our humble names are known by the one who is Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. The one who is love.

 

Tonight, as you consider the Big God story that you might have heard many, many times, my prayer is that you will see yourself as part of it. That you will see its continuation through you and all your foibles as you share the story of God’s love in your words and actions, in your service and your work. 

 

Beloved.

God is love.

And love knows your name. 

And your name.

And your name.

Pass it on!

Amen.