This past week—a week of preparation for my last semester of full-time teaching—was deranged. Completely deranged. I spent the week dealing with one crisis after another.
Some of the crises belonged to others—like students, who didn’t manage to get advised and enrolled in classes in the fall, and now were desperate to get into already full classes in order to stay on track to graduate.
One would like to say, “Well, your failure to get advised and into classes is not my problem.” But the truth is, one can’t really do that. And so I went to work and did what I had to do to get them into some classes.
But the hardest part about the week was that the biggest and most difficult of the crises—the hurricane of a crisis that kicked off the week—was a crisis of—guess what!—my very own making.
You see, I too didn’t get something important done before the end of the fall semester. I failed to request renewals of funding for several graduate students for whom I am responsible as Communication Program graduate coordinator.
And much to my chagrin, when I ran to the Dean’s office with renewal forms Monday of last week, I was told we were out of money.
Thus ensued a couple days of scrambling, recalculating, negotiating, begging and identifying students who either weren’t returning or had decided not to come to ULM, thereby freeing up some money. By mid-week I thought we had things covered and I breathed a huge sigh of relief.
Within hours of that sigh of relief, I received an email from a new international student I had not heard from in over a month and had decided was not coming. Her money had been used to fill a gap for another student left by my failure to do renewals.
“I’m here in the U.S.,” her email said, “ready to accept my graduate assistantship.”
I just about came unglued. I felt like the most incompetent boob to walk the planet.
I share that this morning in order to say this: The stories we tell about ourselves... are not the stories God tells about us.
Let me say it again: The stories we tell about ourselves are not the same, indeed, bear little resemblance to, the stories God tells about us.
Listen to Isaiah: The Lord called me before I was born, while I was in my mother’s womb he named me.
Brothers and sisters,, do you hear that? You, me, all of us. We were named by God.. before we were born!
Now, I’m not assuming that means God chose “Bette Jo,” spelled “b-e-t-t-e j-o,” then put a bug in my daddy’s ear. But do notice that in today’s Gospel lesson, Jesus does something like that. He gives Simon a new name—Peter—the name we know him by to this day.
So, clearly, this naming business is important. Our name, and who named us, is part of our human story. Anyone here not know who named you? Or who you might be named after?
Naming is an act of love. Whatever else God might have in mind for each of us, our first name, the name God gives us in the womb, is Beloved. Beloved, as in, the one I, God, have chosen.
The tricky part about that, of course, is that God gives that name to all humans. Indeed, all of creation, but that’s another sermon.
The moment we start thinking that we are more beloved than the next person, that immigrant over there, that person using food stamps in front of us in line at the grocery, that redneck with the beer gut, that dang Democrat, Republican or whatever… that’s when we’ve already forgotten who—and whose—we are.
And I say that as a person who forgets it.. all the time.
In May of this year, as one of my last acts of service to the University of Louisiana Monroe, I will again call the names of the students as they cross the stage to the applause of their families and friends to receive their diplomas. I spend a good bit of time getting ready to do that, finding out the proper pronunciation of the names—including the challenging foreign ones—and practicing, so as to get it right. It is one of my favorite tasks. It is a calling, and I will miss doing it.
And it is appropriate that this task I love so much is, indeed, an act of service. Note that Isaiah goes on to tell us more about who we are to God.
And he said to me, Isaiah says, “You are my servant…in whom I will be glorified.”
So we are not only God’s beloved. We are God’s beloved servants. We have work to do. We were not put here just to bask in the light of God’s love! How could we? How could we possibly respond to such love by doing nothing?
Some people say, indeed, some preachers in some religious traditions say, that if you tell people they are God’s beloved, that God loved and named them in the womb, and that God does and will love them regardless of what they do, you are thereby giving people carte blanche to behave any way they choose, any immoral, evil, ugly way they choose, without fear of consequences.
To which I say, Nonsense! That is not how it works.
To the contrary, when you see someone behaving in an immoral, evil, or just mean spirited way… pray for that person. Instantly. On the spot. In your heart might be better than out loud! But pray for them because that person has forgotten who and whose they are. That person has forgotten, or perhaps never knew, that he or she was named and chosen by God before being born.
You see, in those moments when we truly get and accept who we are—God’s beloved servants—when that resonates in our heart, mind and soul; when we claim that name—we will respond to the world and everyone in it with love, kindness and generosity. In light of such a gift, such unearned and complete grace, we cannot do otherwise.
Now..., I began this sermon with a story and I don’t want to leave you hanging. Yes, with the help of other people of good will, my grad student funding crisis was happily resolved. I am back to feeling modestly on top of my game.
Indeed, I ended the week helping a young man who flunked out of school a few years ago figure out how to get past his failure, get back in school and move on toward his goals. I’m excited! were his parting words to me.
But the larger value of these stories from academia is this: We live within merit systems. I have spent my adult life writing test questions, designing assignments, correcting, critiquing, sending things back to be redone, and ultimately awarding grades. More than once I have had to explain to unhappy students how they, indeed, earned the grade they received.
The version of the merit system that dominates your life is probably different in detail. Those of you who work in medical fields have the special stress and burden of knowing that your failure could have dire, even fatal, consequences.
But ALL of our merit systems have the ability to hurt, to wound, to frustrate, to beat down… the human spirit. It depends on how we use them. Merit systems dominate human endeavor, and that’s not going to change anytime soon.
The challenge for God’s people is twofold. First, we must remember that God, thankfully, does not operate by the merit system. And we are beneficiaries of that.
Second, we must remember that however practical and useful the human merit systems within which we function might be, they are ours, not God’s, and the people to whom we apply our merit systems—from the wayward student to the welfare recipient to the violent terrorist—are every bit as much God’s named and beloved as we are.
In the name of God, Father,
son and Holy Spirit, AMEN
