name calling
Every day our naming of the people around us gives life and takes it away.
Being rightly named means being truly known. It changes our lives.
Embedded in our words, and in our actions, are the names we give to and receive from others. Nods of recognition, glances of curiosity, looks of compassion, signs of paying attention build one another up.
"Hey bud," "good job," "I noticed … " "thank you," "join us" are little names that matter. When positive words and actions combine, such naming actually makes a life.
God created by naming: "Let there by light," and "let us make humankind in our image."
In turn, the human beings named with unflinching instinct, "This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh."
The first job God gives us is to name the creatures around us. Naming is about as primary to our being made in God's image as almost anything else we might … well, name. It carries with it our peculiar capacity for relationship, including our potential to not just see but actually perceive, acknowledge, and affirm personal identity and worth.
Love names us rightly. What need could be more primal?
Yet right from the start our very capacity for rightly naming includes our freedom to misname. "Did God really say . . ." are words that rename God's intent, and reality cracks. "This at last is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh" easily becomes "The woman you gave me."
Such misnaming reveals that things have changed and contributes to their changing further still. When "brother" becomes a mere label, there's no longer a reason to be his keeper. A tower holds aspirations of a name-privileged and proud. Misnaming misidentifies who we are and our relation to others. The tragic consequences are everywhere.
Power can be measured by our capacity to give names that stick. Middle school teaches us this, if nothing else. If we carry the wrong name given us through some powerful voice at some vulnerable moment, we can be crippled.
Every time the church gathers in worship, we gather as those bearing names not our own: Inadequate. Rich. Failure. Together. Bad Parent. Fat. We can be deluded or oppressed by the naming and misnaming we experience and perpetrate on others.
Suffering, individually and collectively, intensifies when it's wrongly named. Injustice wracks our world with the complex legacy of God's treasured creatures misnaming God, misnaming ourselves, and misnaming our neighbor. This abuse of power is our undoing.
Dalits ("Untouchables") in India are required by Hindu law to be given one name, and it must be derogatory: Ugly, Dung, Stupid. Imagine the transformation when they discover that in Jesus, God came as a dalit (itself an extraordinary shock of rightly, if unexpectedly, naming God), and that he has the power to rename them: Chosen. Holy. Beloved.
"Behold, all things are new." Indeed.