Another day, another hashtag, another black sister or brother’s picture plastered across social media. More local police dressed like they are ready to invade a medium-sized country (wonder where the riot gear was when white men were standing in state capitols across the country armed with assault rifles for their right to get a haircut?) another lynching broadcast to the world from a smart phone where it will appear in a news feed between a meme and an ad. 

More outrage, more tears.

As my dear brother texted me last night, “It never ends.” And as I thought about his words, I thought, “he’s right…” I thought I about Michael Brown, and Trayvon Martin, and Philando Castile, and Botham Jean, and Eric Garner, and Tamir Rice (gosh that breaks my heart, just a boy, a little boy with a toy gun), and now Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd, and so, so many others. The one thing I thought about is:

I wish I never knew their names. ^[1]I feel this disclaimer is important. I say this not as a way of centering my own experience. I am referencing the way these people’s names represent larger societal sins. This is not about me … Continue reading

I say their names, I want to bear witness, if nothing else to just say to my sisters and brothers of color that I am with you, that I see you, that I will work alongside you in the Christian spaces I lead in to name and to dismantle white supremacy. But when it comes to these dear people who have been killed in the crossfire of evil, I wish I did not know their names.

You see, naming is usually a joy. My wife is on the verge of giving birth to our fourth child and we have prayed and reflected on what blessing of life, what name, what word that we will speak that will give shape to the world of our son’s life. Naming is such a gift, it expresses responsibility, we get to name this child. Naming expresses blessing, it expresses solidarity, and care, naming expresses hope and a future for the child and the family.

But this endless cycle of names, names that represent daughters, sons, brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers, children of God made in his image is calling us to read another list of names I wish I did not know: white supremacy, whiteness (not white skin but whiteness it manifests in our culture), racial difference. These powers and principalities that have taken up residence in both the American way and the white evangelical church in America.

And this sort of naming tries, it tries to expose an ongoing slavery, a demonic force that holds America and the white church in America in its grasp but we keep hushing the voice or worse yet, signing along with it. This naming sounds like condemnation but really is like the message of the Gospel of Jesus itself to embrace freedom through confession, for those who speak the name of these systemic sins under the name that is above all names it is “an aroma that brings life” but to those who silence it’s invitation to healing, it is the very “aroma of death.”(2 Cor 2)

Naming

Naming In The Beginning

From the very beginning of the story of the Scriptures, naming is portrayed as an important demonstration of responsibility and care. As God brings forth the world in delight, he blesses the world, “it is good” reaching the climax of his symphony in Genesis 1vv26-28. “Let us make people in our image, male and female, he created them and let them have dominion over the birds of the air, the fish of the sea, and everything that moves upon the land.” As he signs his name on creation, with his imago dei, every daughter every son a reflection of the God who made the universe, God cannot contain his joy: it was so very good. 

In Genesis 2, we get another camera angle on the creation of humanity. This time we see not simply the work of the conductor but that of the potter, the poet. God crafts Adam from the dust of the earth and breathes his very breath into his lungs. Don’t miss this, George Floyd, hand-crafted by God to reflect his image, proclaimed “very good”, was robbed of the very gift that God had given him. Do you know what we call those who try to take away God’s gifts, who set themselves up in antithesis to God’s good purposes in the world. They are anti-Christ. 

God charges Adam with naming the creatures (Genesis 2v19). God formed humanity, those made in the image of God as co-regents, stewarding and sustaining creation. So he brings to Adam each of the animals put under his care and sees what he might name them. Adam’s concern for creation is signified by his naming of that which he is charged with overseeing. Adam first names Eve with a song, “bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh” and even after the two have succumbed to the serpent’s lies, he names Eve, the mother of all who are living, signifying his ongoing concern and care for her. 

What’s God’s Name?

Fast forward into the future, Moses stands on the scorching sands of the wilderness, shielding his eyes from the bright blazing bush before him, he blares out the question to the voice that beckons him, “Suppose I go the leaders and they ask me who has sent me, what do I tell them?” (Exodus 3). The voice from this shrub adorned in unquenchable flame answers, “I am.” God is not being elusive here. You see, naming has its limits. The God who has no limits cannot be contained within a name, because he cannot be controlled, cannot be tamed. God doesn’t completely dodge the question and he doesn’t offer something hopelessly otherworldly and esoteric. Rather, God expresses his very nature, life, existence so affirmatively and so fluidly. God is that which is, the great I am that is always over and above the “it is what it is” of our world.

Naming The Darkness

Moving along in the story, Jesus of Nazareth as he is proclaiming the coming of the Kingdom of God confronts a man so overwrought with demons that the townspeople are trying to chain him up in a cave (Mark 5). But the manifestation of evil in this man is so powerful that he simply cannot be contained. This man is a terror to the town of and a danger to himself. Notice the question that Jesus asks him, “What is your name?” The myriad demons from within the man respond, “We are legion for we are many.” Jesus then casts the demons out. 

You see Jesus’ life demonstrates that naming the evil that is gripping a person’s life is another way of expressing care and concern. When Jesus names evil, he demonstrates his power over it. In contrast, throughout Mark’s Gospel the demonic forces recognize Jesus as the Son of God, not only in the earthly sense but in a cosmic sense. Jesus forbids these demons from revealing his identity, his true name. Jesus will only be named fully, in Mark’s Gospel, as he hangs on the cross. The Roman soldier, a centurion, part of a Legion no less, as he beholds Jesus on the cross remarks, “Surely this man was the Son of God.” (Mark 15v39)

Throughout the Gospels and Acts, the apprentices of Jesus are given the name of Jesus as the means of warfare with the dark forces of the world and the balm of healing (e.g. Acts 3v6). As God reveals his name to us, in the Jesus his son, we are not given power over Jesus, but relational access into his creative and generative, pro-life, anti-death ways. As Mary weeps outside the tomb of Jesus on Easter Sunday morning, Jesus speaks the first word of the new world, demonstrating his mastery over death. The word that he chooses, is a name, “Mary.” Jesus proclaims the dawning of the new world with the use of name, an expression of intimacy and relationship. 

Naming Our Sin

Our access into this relationship of peace, life, and ultimately power (though not power wielded for our own sake but for the sake of the world) is contingent upon us accepting the grace of the name of Jesus as our Savior and Lord and consequently naming our own sin. The clarion call rings throughout the Gospels, “Repent.” Repentance, metanoia, means to “change one’s mind, to make a change to principle and practice, to change the past.” Repentance is an invitation to name Jesus as Lord and ourselves as sinners not so we can endlessly beat ourselves down and belittle ourselves as hopeless, broken, worthless worms but so that we can be crowned yet again with the “Good and very good” of the God who made us in his image, so that we can know to need Jesus (the I Am) is to find life itself, and so that we might have power to live new (i.e. repented) lives. 

Every “Gospel presentation” I have ever heard in church has made it that simple by quoting from 1 John 1v9: If we confess our sins he is faithful and just to forgive us. Confession, the greek homologeo literally to “name the same” or “use the same words.” Confession is aligning our hearts with reality, or in another way is naming that which is so that we might no longer be slaves to it. 

It is evident from the narrative of the Scriptures that that which cannot or will not be named cannot be our concern and it cannot be controlled. If the church will not speak the names of our black sisters and brothers who are victims of a systemic conspiracy against the pigmentation of their skin, then let us not for a moment pretend as if they are our concern. And if the church will not name the Legion of demons that inhabits these eruptions of centuries of accumulated idolatry, we will continue to be slaves to their power.  1 John tells us if we confess our sins, we find forgiveness and healing but the converse must also remain. If we will not name our sins, we will find no forgiveness, no healing, and no freedom. 

Dante Stewart in a gut-wrenching reflection on the circumstances surrounding the lynching of Ahmaud Arbery wrote these lines:

How long do we have to wait for progress? How many have to be brutally murdered before people believe that we are actually telling the truth? What is the cycle of violence and apathy costing us? Why are we the ones who have to believe God has a good plan for us in the future but the best plan for them in the present? How long do we have to endure these types of talks until people realize that white supremacy is not ours to solve but their problem, their children’s problem?

Dante Stewart- Ahmaud Arbery and The Trauma of Being a Black Runner

It’s “their children’s problem.” Those children, are my children and they may be some of your children. Dante Stewart names white supremacy and he names it as our problem. The question that remains for us, will we? Or will we minimize his pain, ignore his tears, will we call it by another name —”bad luck” or “let’s wait to hear the whole story” or “see he had a criminal record.

This Sunday is Pentecost Sunday, the day we remember the moment the Holy Spirit named his new creation family, the church, giving them one language, forming them as a body. The church has always been a mosaic of differents, a scandalous interweaving of strands in society that would never cross otherwise. Paul takes this metaphor of the body to the extreme (1 Cor. 12) because for him, it is the clearest picture of what the church is to be, one organic unit with Jesus as the head. Right now, our eyes are weeping as they stare through tears in trauma and shock at the wasting sickness in our arm. What’s more the great physician has named the diagnosis: white supremacy.

As Willie James Jennings says in his commentary on Pentecost:

Speak a language, speak a people. God speaks people, fluently. And God, with all the urgency that is with the Holy Spirit, wants the dis-ciples of his only begotten Son to speak people fluently too. This is the beginning of a revolution that the Spirit performs. Like an artist drawing on all her talent to express a new way to live, God gestures the deepest joining possible, one flesh with God, and desire made one with the Holy One.

Willie James Jennings: Acts A Theological Commentary

The question is will we ignore the the invitation to wholeness, to intimacy, to healing? Will we continue to allow this infection to spread.

Or will we receive the gift of a name, a name that is bigger than our sin, a name that is more just than our defensiveness, the name that is above all names.

Will we say the name of Jesus? Will we say their names?