Remember Who You Are

This week feels different as we turn the corner toward Christmas. It isn't lost on me that I preached Advent 4 on the Winter Solstice. We endured the longest night, the most darkness of the year - and then we turned toward the light that is to come.

As I prepared this sermon, I realized how near God feels when we pay attention to the small things—the names spoken over us, the stories we carry, and the hidden places where God’s presence presses close enough to steady us. Advent has been drawing me inward, asking me to notice the ways God is reshaping me, calling me, naming me.

I’ve been thinking about how God meets us right where we are, not where we think we should be, not where we’ve been, but in the vulnerable truth of this exact moment. And I’m sensing that some names, some callings, some moments of grace arrive right when we need them most.

I invite you to consider, as you move through this week:

• What name—what truth about who you are—is God whispering to you now?

• Where is God-with-us becoming not just a promise, but a lived experience?

• What tenderness or calling is taking shape in you in this particular season?

Sermon: Remember Who You Are

Church of the Nativity

4th Sunday of Advent, Year A

Nativity

Matthew 1:18-25

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It is good to be with you again on this fourth Sunday of Advent. For weeks, we’ve been inching our way toward the manger as the anticipation builds. Advent is my favorite season. It’s so full of rich imagery and metaphors that speak to our hearts. But this year, the image that has carried me through Advent isn’t a candle or even a waiting manger—it’s been the quiet, persistent work of growth.

Earlier this season, we talked about stumps and shoots—those places in our lives where something has been cut back to almost nothing, where it seems as if no life could possibly return. And last week, while I was preaching at my home church, St. Paul’s Newnan, I explored how joy doesn’t wait for ideal circumstances; it springs up in the wilderness and reorients us toward the God who is already coming to meet us.

And today, as Advent draws us closer and closer to Bethlehem, the lectionary gives us one more image of growth and new life. Matthew begins the story of Jesus not with angels or shepherds or stars, but with roots and names and generations.

When a child is born, parents labor over that name long before the child arrives. Sometimes we name for the future—what we hope a child will grow into. Sometimes we name for the past—a grandmother we remember, a father’s name to be carried on by the son, perhaps.

Names shape identity long before we can live into them. So it is no accident that the story Matthew tells just before today’s gospel is a litany of names. We tend to skip over genealogies in the Bible and, indeed, we did in today’s Gospel account, but I don’t want us to miss what this list of names can tell us about who this coming Messiah is. Tucked inside this list of names is the quiet return of that Advent image that has been carrying us all season—hope growing in unexpected places.

This genealogy has roots reaching deep into Israel’s history, branches spreading through stories we’d expect and stories we wouldn’t. It’s Scripture’s way of reminding us that the shoot Isaiah promised didn’t rise out of nowhere. It grew from a people, from imperfect ancestors and surprising grafts. In other words: God has been tending this tree for generations, and now, in Jesus, the long-awaited fruit is finally beginning to ripen.

In the ancient world, names weren’t just labels; they were about honor, family, and identity. Anthropologist Dr. Richard Rohrbaugh explains the concept of the honor-shame biblical culture like this: The overwhelming way in which you get your honor rating is from your birth. It's what anthropologists call “ascribed honor.” Nearly all honor was inherited. You got your standing when you “popped out of the womb,” he says.

A genealogy was a map, telling the whole village where you fit in the hierarchy, what could be expected of you, who would eat with you, and who you could marry. He explains that among non-literate people, which was about 96% of the population, genealogies would be very short. Only upper-class wealthy people have written genealogies. In fact, people in the Roman world who became newly wealthy would hire genealogists to create fictive genealogies for themselves so they could move up the social ladder. Your family name, who you came from, mattered immensely.

And Jesus comes from a no-name family in a no-account village. A carpenter’s home. A place where no one expected greatness. In an honor-shame world, Jesus’ ascribed honor is minimal. So when Matthew begins his Gospel with a genealogy, he’s not giving us ancient trivia. He’s telling us that God is unusually, intimately involved in this birth.

Matthew is telling us who Jesus is, and stunningly, he’s doing it through a list of people who are anything but perfect. In the only genealogy of Jesus that includes women, we suddenly find ourselves standing in the middle of a story that refuses to tidy up the past or hide the complicated parts of the family tree. Their presence in Jesus’ genealogy is not an oversight; it is a proclamation.

We see Tamar, who had to trick her father-in-law to secure justice. We meet Rahab, who is a foreigner, a prostitute, who saved Israel’s spies. Ruth was the Moabite whose boldness shocked her own community. Bathsheba, named only as “the wife of Uriah,” has a story marked by violence and sorrow. And then we have Mary, young and pregnant in a way the world would never understand.

These are not the names you include if you’re trying to clean up a lineage. These are the names you include if you are proclaiming, before the Messiah even enters the world, that God writes salvation through imperfect but astonishingly brave people. That God is not embarrassed by human mess but chooses to enter it fully.

Which brings us to Joseph—faithful, righteous Joseph—caught in the tangle of names and stories he never expected. He learns that Mary is pregnant and, out of kindness, resolves to separate quietly. Then God steps into his dream life and calls him by a name he has likely forgotten belongs to him: “Joseph, son of David.” Son of the great king. Son of a lineage that stretches farther back than fear.

And then Joseph is given something utterly astounding: A naming assignment. “She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.”

In the ancient world, naming was not a sentimental act. It was legal, public, and binding. Joseph’s willingness to stay with Mary is already remarkable, but what Matthew wants us to see is even deeper. When Joseph gives the child the name Jesus, he isn’t just following angelic instructions; he is adopting him. He is bringing this child into his own lineage, into the line of David, giving Jesus the social and legal identity that will fulfill the promise spoken generations before.

Naming him Jesus is Joseph’s act of courage. It is a quiet but radical trust in what God is doing. In a world where reputation was everything, Joseph stakes his own honor on the belief that this child, conceived by the Holy Spirit, is indeed the one who will save his people. He speaks the name aloud, and with it, he claims the story God is writing.

Jesus means “Yahweh saves” or “Yahweh is salvation.” Jesus did not come to save the Jews from political oppression, like most of his followers come to expect when he begins his ministry. His mission in coming to earth was to save His people from their sins.

And Matthew adds another name on top of that: Immanuel, God with us. Matthew quotes the prophecy in Isaiah, the virgin shall be with child and bear a Son, and they shall call His name Immanuel. This name confirms Jesus as the foretold Messiah. It proclaims Jesus’ deity and the presence of God in human form. And it highlights how God will save humanity by being present with them. Immanuel means God refuses to love us abstractly. God loves us by taking on our nameable, embodied world.

This genealogy and this visit from an angel tell us exactly who Jesus is. He is given two names: Jesus, the one who saves and Immanuel, the God who is with us. One name describes his mission. The other reveals his nature.

And both together give us the heart of incarnational faith that is at the heart of the gospel. God does not save from a distance. God saves by being with us. God is not hovering above the world as spirit and power alone, but enters the world—into a body, into a family, and into the beauty and vulnerability of human life.

Incarnation means that God chooses to be nameable. In the Old Testament, God’s sacred name was not spoken; it was too holy. God was known through titles—The God who provides, the God who sees—but never through a personal name you could address. But in Jesus, God becomes someone you can call to, cry out to, and argue with. Someone held in human arms. Someone who sits at human tables.

And perhaps most beautifully, the God who is named becomes the God who names us.

When we baptize a child in this church, before the priest takes the child and presents them to God, the parents speak the name they have chosen. That name speaks to our identity given to us by our human family. But baptism tells an even deeper truth: that before we accomplish anything or prove anything, God names us Beloved. Chosen. Marked as Christ’s own forever.

And that name—Beloved—is meant to root our identity for our whole lives. But you know, as well as I do, we often forget who we are. Because every one of us carries, somewhere inside, names that are not ours to carry. Names like not enough, or too much, or failure, or imposter, or unlovable, or simply forgotten.

Maybe we stray from our baptismal vows, the church, or from God altogether. Perhaps life has handed us suffering we didn’t expect or trials that feel too heavy to bear. Maybe we think we have gone too far from God to ever find our way back.

I was thinking about this idea earlier in the week, and the movie The Lion King came to mind. It was one of my favorite movies as a child, this story of a lion who lost his way. He was the son of a King and deeply loved by his father, named next in line to rule. But in a fog of grief and self-doubt, he runs away from it all. He thinks he’s failed his father, couldn’t possibly be redeemable. Simba had forgotten his lineage and his calling.

The turning point of the movie comes when his father, Mufasa, appears to him and tells him in that rumbling God-like voice only James Earl Jones can deliver: Simba, remember who you are. The change in Simba comes not when his circumstances change, but when he remembers the name spoken over him from the beginning—son of the king, heir of a story larger than his fear. It is both an affirmation and a summons. He realizes he must live into his calling. He runs home to reclaim his throne.

To me, Advent is God’s version of that moment. Each year, we pause for four weeks, and we focus on God coming again into our lives, interrupting the narrative. It’s a voice that comes to us again and again: Remember who you are. Remember you are adopted into the lineage of Christ, one with him, coheirs to the Kingdom of God. Remember the identity that is deeper than fear or shame or whatever names the world tries to give you.

I have been thinking about names a lot these past weeks because a little over a week ago, during my ordination to the Diaconate, Bishop Wright placed hands upon my head and spoke my name in a prayer that will forever change my life. It is a profound and humbling thing—to have someone say your name, not to label you but to call you deeper into who God made you to be. I am still getting used to the name Dr., and now I have added another name to the list, Reverend.

It’s profoundly hard to see myself that way. It’s not that anything magical happened on that day at the cathedral, and yet, I received a new name, a new calling. And now it is my job for the rest of my life to live into that name and calling, to be a servant of God’s people. Names really do have power.

The Gospel of Matthew stacks these names intentionally—Jesus, Immanuel, and all the names that came before—so that by the time we reach the moment before the manger, we already know what kind of God this is. A God who steps into the tangled, ordinary, painful, beautiful web of human life. A God who writes salvation through real people with real histories.

Because the story Matthew tells is that long before we name God, God names God’s self as the One who will be with us. And long before we live into the fullness of our own calling, God speaks a name of belovedness over us, too.

That is the promise we walk toward as we prepare for the child whose very name is salvation. That is the heart of Advent.  Not that we find our way to God, but that God finds us and calls us each by name. Not that we earn God’s nearness, but that God chooses to dwell with us.

In a few days, we will kneel before the manger. We will hear the angels sing. We will stand before a God who comes not in power but in vulnerability, as a child who reminds us of who we are and whose we are.  

Because the child Joseph names Jesus will bear another name forever: Immanuel. God with us. And God still is.

Amen.