61 They said to her, “None of your relatives have that name.” 62 Then they began gesturing to his father to see what he wanted to call him.
63 After asking for a tablet, he surprised everyone by writing, “His name is John.” 64 At that moment, Zechariah was able to speak again, and he began praising God.
65 All their neighbors were filled with awe, and everyone throughout the Judean highlands talked about what had happened. 66 All who heard about this considered it carefully. They said, “What then will this child be?” Indeed, the Lord’s power was with him. (Common English Bible)
“The Other Holy Couple: An Advent with Elizabeth and Zechariah,” Week Three
Satenig Toumajan Mouradian lost her mother Altoon in the middle of a genocide in 1916, and she and her brother Harry split up to flee to the United States. Harry fled from Anatolia up through Russia and across Scandinavia before crossing the Atlantic Ocean from Oslo, Norway, to the United States. Satenig, meanwhile, made her way across the breadth of Russia to Vladivostok, where she first met Krikor Sarkis Mouradian.
They journeyed from Vladivostok to Yokohama, Japan, and from there crossed the Pacific Ocean, she to Seattle and he to San Francisco, and they married here in the United States. They raised three children, one of whom, Albert, would enlist in the Marines during World War II and be killed in action on Okinawa only four months before the war’s end. According to family lore, Satenig refused to decorate the house for Christmas again until the arrival of her first grandchild—my mother. But it was only now, in 2020, that I learned that this is something of an Armenian tradition—that when you lose someone who would have otherwise decked the halls with you, you do not deck the halls at all.
And another one of Krikor and Satenig’s children, Marianne, would eventually become my grandmother. Satenig and Krikor would raise not only Marianne and her siblings, but for several years, my mother and her brother Al, named for my great-uncle Albert. I only have a few, poorly-defined memories of Satenig from when I was a very young boy, but one of my memories was that she was not Satenig to me, she was the familiar diminutive version of the name.
Sadie.
When it came time to decide on a name for our daughter, Carrie and I did not know who would come out, so to speak, so we decided on both masculine and feminine names. We arrived at our daughter' s name in a matter of minutes, and never needed to look back or reconsider.
What is in a name? Sometimes, generations of love and sacrifice.
Sometimes, a moment of inspiration. Sometimes, a direct call from God. And none
of these need be mutually exclusive.
This is a sermon series for the church season of Advent, or,
in much of popular American culture, the “Christmas season.” But the Christmas
season does not traditionally begin until Christmas Day. The four weeks leading
up to Christmas are set aside in the church calendar to be a time of preparing
the way for the Lord, and in that spirit, the origin story of John the Baptist,
who preached that message of preparing the way for the Lord, seems an
appropriate sermon series for now. So, for this Advent, we will be walking
alongside the other Holy Couple of Luke’s Gospel—not Mary and Joseph (though we
will of course be at their side on Christmas Eve), but Mary’s relative
Elizabeth, and Elizabeth’s husband Zechariah. They end up overshadowed by Mary
and Joseph’s dramatic saga in the end, but there is much in Luke’s telling of
their story to capture and hold our attention as well.
We just spent a week each separately with Zechariah and Elizabeth, and now we see them in the storyline together, as their child is named in accordance with Gabriel’s instructions.
The dramatic inflection point comes in Zechariah’s powers of speech being restored after he writes out “His name is John,” but that line is originally uttered by Elizabeth, in response the rest of their family wanting to name the child after Zechariah. It is a wonderful thought, as we know from Luke’s earlier writing that Zechariah is a faithful and devoted man, and this keeps in an ancient custom that we participate in today of naming children after familial role models from previous generations.
But, what is in a name here? Naming the baby Zechariah would be full of meaning, but even for Zechariah, the person to be so honored, there is far more at stake. And there is for us as well.
John is a name given to the happy new parents by the archangel Gabriel, all the way back at the start of Luke’s narrative, and it is easy to see why: the name John, transliterated into English from Ioannes in the Greek of the New Testament, ultimately comes from the ancient Hebrew name Yohanan, which means “graced by God” or “God is gracious.” Gabriel is telling this holy couple that their child is graced by a gracious God, and that the child should be named accordingly.
I will stop here with the name-interpreting exercises, as I do not have such a good track record here—when I was in seminary, I gave a sermon on Genesis in which I proudly noted that the name Adam comes from the ancient Hebrew term for earth or dirt and said, “If your name is Adam, your name is literally mud!” Lo and behold, naturally there was a chap visiting that Sunday named Adam.
But while Gabriel appears to Zechariah at the start of Luke’s story, it is, as we noted, Elizabeth is the first to insist that their baby’s name be John. Luke goes to great lengths to describe Zechariah’s piety, by describing Zechariah’s various works as a priest and religious leader, but he goes to great lengths to depict Elizabeth’s piety. And one depiction of this piety is naming her son John. But how do we begin to emulate it?
Sometimes, choosing a name is a simple matter of branding. Other times, it is meant to communicate the very deepest of one’s values and faithfulness. Still other times, they represent back-and-forth, negotiation, and compromise. One of our denomination’s founders wanted us to be known as the Christian Church; another wanted us to be called Disciples of Christ. The result was one of the very few denominations that have parentheses in its name.
Some, perhaps many of you, have deep, rich stories behind your names just as Sadie does. You may even be able to trace the names of your ancestors back for generations upon generations. That is a gift that not all of us have. A difference I realized between my dad’s side of my family—which is Scottish-Canadian—and my mom’s Armenian side of the family is that while my dad’s side had a ready-made family tree stretching all the way back to the 1820s, there were entire branches of my mom’s family we did not know even existed until the dogged research of my cousin Hagop over the past five or six years. Genocide has a way of doing that to families. One of the things I learned from my Black classmates at Seattle University was what generations of chattel slavery did to their family trees—only being able to go back so far, because names were taken away from their ancestors right along with their freedom.
There is power in the history that names often come with, then, but precisely because there is a history for so many people of having their names taken away, the ability to choose a name--whether for a child or for yourself after years of self-discovery--is such a powerful thing. Elizabeth and Zechariah choose John as the name for their son. Yes, they are instructed by Gabriel to do so, but they could have gone along with their relatives and named the boy after his father. I suspect the rest of the story would have turned out very differently, but that was a choice available to them. Yet they chose John.
How we begin to emulate their faithfulness is, I think, to have our faithfulness to be reflected in our own choices, in our own names. Our name of Christian, the faith identity we have chosen and in many cases were raised in, is a diminutive version of Christ. We are not merely Christ followers—although we are those, too—we are Christ-reflectors. The power that is in our name is that we not meant to only learn about, read about, and hear about the love of Christ, we are called to incarnate that love ourselves, and to reflect it back out into a world that needs far more love, and far less hate.
So just as we hope that a child we name after a beloved ancestor will exhibit that ancestor’s very best qualities, so too by assuming the name of Christian do we hope that we will exhibit Christ’s qualities. That is not a vain hope; on the contrary, it is very, very necessary. We are less than two weeks from celebrating Jesus becoming flesh, and He did not come from heaven to earth only to die as a sacrificial lamb. He exhibited many more qualities in addition, and by our name of Christian, we are meant to exhibit those qualities as well, qualities that encompass the totality of His human life and not only how He died. We are called to represent, and give testimony to, the wholeness and completeness of Christ, and that must be part of our experience of Christmas.
So, what’s in a name? Sometimes, really very little. But other times…everything. In those few words, entire stories open up to us. Elizabeth and Zechariah knew this, and they knew to trust in God for the power of their own son’s name. In so doing, they added dramatically centuries of history and stories to come to fruition for the many people named John, or Johan, Ioannes, Hovannes, and all its worldwide variations. Their trust in God helped do that. It helps do that still.
May we foster in ourselves a trust that deep, and the good, in the God who made and named us.
We are three Sundays in, beloveds. The one named the Christ is well on His way.
May it be so. Amen.
Rev. Dr. Eric Atcheson
Birmingham, Alabama
December 13, 2020