Part 1 of 4: The Stories of Our Births & Names
Pastor Anthony preaching on: “The Stories of Our Births & Names.” Scripture focus is: Exodus 1: 15 - 2: 10. Preached on July 11, 2021.
This is the first sermon of a four-part series on: “Let Your Life Speak.”
Copyright 2021 by Rev. Anthony J. Tang and Desert Mission United Methodist Church.
Almost twenty years ago, I found a stray dog in my neighborhood, a cute little Chihuahua-mix that had really soft fur. With no tags and no microchip, I posted signs around the neighborhood and started to take care of her in the meantime. As the days passed, I finally got to the point where I thought she needed a name. So, I looked at her and looked and tried to see if I could identify the right name for her and then it popped into my head and I said out loud: “Molly!” and immediately, she perked right up and started wagging her tail. And I knew I had the right name; but maybe not exactly. You see, a few weeks later, I was walking her around the neighborhood and as we passed by a house, suddenly Molly stopped and ran in circles a few times and I said, “Molly, do you know this house? Is this your house?” So, I walked up to the home and rang the doorbell and when the person answered, he exclaimed, “Polly! It’s you!”
It still amazes me at how close I almost got to matching the name her family had given her. It also explains why she responded so well to me calling her Molly.
What do you think? Was this just coincidence because all of our names are, for the most part, randomly given? Or are our names connected to our souls from before we are ever born? Or, could our names be connected to our story of what we do and who we will be?
In 2002, three researchers at the State University of New York at Buffalo wanted to answer the question, “Why does Susie Sell Seashells by the Seashore?” That question is a little bit tongue in check. They were really asking whether our names might influence what professions we worked in. What they discovered is that people named Dennis, as opposed to Jerry or Walter were more likely to pursue careers in dentistry. People named George or Geoffrey were more likely to pursue careers in geosciences.
When comparing the last names of people who owned hardware stores verses roofing stores, hardware store owners were more likely to have a last name that started with H, while roofing stores were more likely to have last names that started with R.
Is this ridiculous? Maybe, but then again, where do many names come from? Smith comes from those who were blacksmiths. Surely you can guess where the last name, Farmer, comes from. Or Fisher. And, of course, I’m using English names for familiarity to most of us, but if we look at various cultures, we can often find a connection between names and meanings, if not a specific vocation.
This also includes our Bible. For many of the names we read about in our scriptures, we are given explanations of why they are called what they are called.
In today’s scripture, we hear of the birth of Moses.
If you are familiar with the story of Joseph and his technicolor dreamcoat, or his coat of many colors, this story immediately follows that one. Joseph helped his family move to Egypt in order to save them from the famine. But the years passed, Joseph’s family grew to be huge, the new Pharaoh (which is just another name for an Egyptian monarch or king) did not remember Joseph or how much he did to save the Egyptians, and then Pharaoh tried to kill off the Hebrew people by killing their baby boys. This is the environment Moses is born into.
Saved by Pharaoh’s daughter, she names him, Moses because he was drawn out of the water. The name Moses is connected to the word for drawn out, brought out, or delivered. We can understand why Pharaoh’s daughter named him this, because he was drawn out of the water.
But there’s also a deeper meaning to his name, though, right? When we read the rest of the book of Exodus, what do we know, after Moses grows up, he is the one who God calls from the burning bush to deliver or draw out the Hebrew people from the land of Egypt. Moses is the one who draws out the people from the Red Sea after the waters were parted. So the name Moses bears is not just a description of the circumstances in which he was born and saved, but it’s also a description of who he is and the calling God has for his life. It’s all connected.
And it’s not just his name. You see, all of the events around the birth of Moses also helped to shape him and make him the uniquely perfect person God created him to be for the job God had for him to do.
For example, after Pharaoh commanded the midwives to kill the baby boys, they refused to and disobeyed Pharaoh because of their faith in God. Furthermore, they again rejected and undermined Pharaoh by lying to him. They let the boys live because they knew it was the right thing to do, and yet they told Pharaoh that the reason they hadn’t killed any boys was because those Hebrew women vigorous and give birth before they can arrive. They subverted Pharaoh to save the Hebrew people.
Then, the mom of Moses also subverts Pharaoh’s order by hiding Moses until he was too big and then she put him in a basket of reeds and sends him downstream. She disobeys Pharaoh in order to do what is right.
Finally, Pharaoh is undermined by his own daughter. She has found Moses and refuses to kill him, but instead makes him her own. And, amazingly, the older sister of Moses offers to get her someone to feed the baby, and retrieves his birth mother, so that she’s able to get paid to feed her own baby in the safety of Pharaoh’s daughter.
These amazing, subversive, defiant, and creative women are able to not only protect Moses, but they have established for him a birth story that not only defines who he is, but also foreshadows that he will be the one to fight against the abuses of the Pharaoh and help deliver his people out of slavery into freedom and life.
Now, when we look at our own lives, our names may not be quite as symbolic as Moses and we may not have as much drama as having been floated down a river, but that doesn’t mean that our lives are any less connected.
There is a Hasidic tale (Hasidism is a Jewish sect or like a Jewish denomination that started in the 1700’s in Eastern Europe). Again, there’s Hasidic tale about a rabbi named Rabbi Zusya. When he was an old man, he is known to have said, “In the coming world, they will not ask me: ‘Why were you not Moses?’ They will ask me: ‘Why were you not Zusya?’”
Similarly, the question for us is not “Why are we not more like Moses?” but rather: “Why are we not more like ourselves?” There’s no good that can come of comparing our lives to Moses. The more meaningful question for us is: who are all of the people and what are all the events from our lives, our names, our births, our childhoods, our families, that speak to who we are, who we have become, and where we are going?
If I can put this in another way, perhaps it is one out of ten billion or even one out of a hundred billion people that get a burning bush, a blinding light, or an angelic vision. But it is one hundred percent of us that God uses our lives to speak to us and to help us prepare for the lives we will be living.
Similar to the way that the events around the birth of Moses foreshadowed his calling later in life, how have your stories created a framework for the life that you are living?
Perhaps you can ask yourself or see if you can find someone who can answer for you these questions (and I’ll be sure to reprint these on our web site and in the newsletter for you):
Where did my name come from? Why did they give me the name I have?
What were the challenges and opportunities my family faced in the same year I was born?
What were the relationships like between my siblings, my parents and my grandparents and what are the concerns and the gifts that I inherited from those relationships?
What are the themes that keep recurring that remind me of what is most important to my life?
This current sermon series is loosely based on a book by the same name, Let your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation by Parker Palmer, the Quaker educator and theologian. In it, he describes what these words “Let your life speak” means to him:
“’Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you. Before you tell your life what truths and values you have decided to live up to, let your life tell you what truths you embody, what values you represent…’” [Parker J. Palmer. Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (Kindle Locations 65-67). Kindle Edition.]
“Vocation does not come from willfulness. It comes from listening. I must listen to my life and try to understand what it is truly about—quite apart from what I would like it to be about—or my life will never represent anything real in the world, no matter how earnest my intentions.
That insight is hidden in the word vocation itself, which is rooted in the Latin for “voice.” Vocation does not mean a goal that I pursue. It means a calling that I hear. Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am. I must listen for the truths and values at the heart of my own identity, not the standards by which I must live—but the standards by which I cannot help but live if I am living my own life.” [Parker J. Palmer. Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (Kindle Locations 76-81). Kindle Edition.]
Friends, over the next few weeks, I invite you to join me in a little adventure of listening to our lives and as we do so, may we better hear, not what we are supposed to do now, but to hear who we are and who God has created us to be.
