On the Holy Name

[Sermon delivered at St. Mary's Episcopal Church, Phoenix, Arizona, Sunday the 23rd of March, 2025, the Third Sunday in Lent (Oculi).

One note...the platform seems to be having issues putting footnote numbering to the RIGHT of Hebrew letters, so the notes giving the transliteration and translation are called out BEFORE the Hebrew word or phrase...apologies!]

✠ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, the Trinity, one in Essence and Undivided. Amen.

So many preachers open their sermons in the Name of the Holy Trinity, but how many of us have stopped to ponder what indeed is the Name of the Most Holy and Undivided Trinity? We invoke it all the time, but instead of one Name we call out each of the Three Persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, but these are the names of the Persons, not the Name of the Godhead. We say in our psalms “Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me bless His Holy Name!”[1] or “Blessed be the Name of the Lord, from this time forth and for ever more.”[2] Yet we do not call out the Name. Every Mass we say, “Blessed is He Who comes in the Name of the Lord.”[3] Again, we invoke the name and not speak the Name itself. We extol the name of Jesus Our Lord and Christ, the Incarnate Word of God, “For there is no other name given among men by which we must be saved,”[4] a wondrous and glorious name indeed, but a name that does not belong to the Godhead as a whole. That Name we call out occasionally in our Psalms and readings, but ever so rarely in our prayers, the Holy Name יְהוָ֔ה. [5]

Why?

Perhaps this will begin to clear it up for us. “You shall not take the Name of the Lord your God in vain; for the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes His Name in vain.”[6]

There gradually arose within the Holy Tradition in Israel an aversion to speaking the Holy Name, based on this commandment. Although the Name appeared frequently in the pre-exilic texts, it came to be eventually in the Tradition that the Name that God revealed to Moses in today’s reading[7] remained unuttered, except by the High Priest only on Yom Kippur in the Holy of Holies of the Temple in Jerusalem. In daily discourse it became הַשֵּׁם,[8] whereas in prayer it became אֲדֹנָי.[9] So when the Scriptures were written out, the Name of God was faithfully written down with much prayer and preparation, but never directly pronounced. Frequently, when vowel markings became all the rage in Hebrew writing, to encourage using אֲדֹנָי instead of the proper Name the vowels for אֲדֹנָי were used with the consonants of יְהוָ֔ה, yod, he, vav, and he, which led to the KJV oddity Jehovah, a complete mashup of the Holy Name.

So why all the angst regarding four Hebrew letters?

When God gave Moses His Name in our reading today, we read, אֶהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה,[10] or “I AM THAT I AM.”  We see it on Orthodox icons of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ as the relative clause of that statement as ὁ ὤν, an abbreviation of ἐγώ εἰμι ὁ ὤν, which means the same as the Hebrew, more or less.[11] Linguists point out that this Hebrew verb has various meanings, whether it is “to be,” or “to become,” or “to renew,” or “to cause to be.” It is safe to say that all those meanings are carried within that statement, that God is the One that exists, Who continues actively to exist, and Who is the source of all existence, without Whom nothing can exist. Therefore, that Name is a summation of the very essence of God, Who and What God is, Who was and is and is to come,[12] terrifying and incomprehensible in just how absolute and boundless and intensely personal and all-knowing HE IS.

So, one should not be surprised that directly invoking all of this in one Name is in all seriousness absolutely terrifying and doing so flippantly, needlessly, or falsely is gravely stupid. The fact that:

a)      this Being has created us and all around us, and that

b)     this Being actually takes notice of us, and that

c)      this Being actually loves us,

should fill us with awe, dread, thanksgiving, and a desire to live up to this Being’s expectations and aspirations for us.

Yeah, about that.

Any student of Holy Scripture, or of History in general, anyone who is observant of current events, anyone who is at least somewhat self-aware comes away with the knowledge that Humanity falls quite short of the appropriate sense of awe, dread, and thanksgiving, and falls even more short of this Being’s expectations and aspirations for us. Indeed, “All have sinned,” each and every one of us, “and fallen short of the glory of God.”[13] However, because God loves His Creation, because God loves each and every one of us, because God is unwilling that any should perish,[14] God the Son, the Holy Word, became flesh and dwelt among us, full of Grace and Truth,[15] so that all who believe in Him do not suffer the final consequences of unbelief, the separation of themselves from Him That Is and Who is the very source of our being.[16]

That brings us to our Epistle and Gospel lessons today. I will not bring down the hammer as so many are accustomed to do with these passages. We all know our shortcomings, and we all know that these shortcomings are neglect or rejections of the path God has set before us to be like God, to share in the Life of God, to stay in the Light and Protection of God. We know that to do evil is to break away from God, and it is that separation from God which we should fear. St. Paul is enjoining us to stay close to God, to avoid those things which God will not, indeed cannot, do.[17] For us to depart from God is to cut ourselves off from Life itself. We hear “life affirming” all the time, but do we really consider closely whether all our actions are indeed life affirming, our lives or anyone else’s? We can be thankful that we have an opportunity to turn our lives around, to forsake the paths of Death and Corruption, that God continues to call us to repentance and amendment of life so that we fully embrace the Being that is the very source of our being.

That said, we know we still fall short, that we have fallen short, and that in all likelihood we will continue to fall short, because our very nature and the nature of all that is around us are corrupt and tend toward further corruption. God knows that as well, for as the Being That Is All Being He knows all that has gone before and knows us better than we know ourselves. God knows that our natures are corrupt. God knows that we must be redeemed from Death, which is the state of our separation from His Being, the source of Life itself. This is why God chose to take flesh, to unify the Person of the Son in the Person of Jesus Christ Our Lord, and that He suffered, died, and rose again to rebuild our nature and wrest it from the Void that is Death and Corruption. For human nature unified to divine nature in Jesus Christ our Lord cannot be held by Death, Death cannot endure in the presence of Eternal Life, Darkness cannot prevail in the presence of the Uncreated Light, Corruption cannot progress in the face of Eternal Renewal, Sin cannot be in the embrace of Eternal Holiness.

Because Jesus our Lord won the victory over Sin and Death, we can avail ourselves of a new nature. We can put on a new and uncorrupted nature. We can through Jesus Christ our Lord put to its final death our old and corrupted nature. In our baptism we chose to participate mystically in the power of the Holy Spirit to put on this new nature and use it to supplant the old nature careening and spiraling toward nothingness and oblivion. Yet we must strengthen and sustain this new nature. It profits us nothing to take on the new nature and then suffocate and starve it as we sustain the greed and destruction of our old nature, spinning like a massive black hole to consume all around it, becoming a greater and greater pit of nothingness. We must actively feed the new nature in the Sacraments, participating in the sustaining grace of the Holy Spirit sent by God to strengthen us. We must actively seek to walk in the ways of God and to follow the example and teaching of Our Lord Jesus Christ to become more like Him and to embrace fully the path of Life and Wholeness, to embrace Him Who Is, Who Causes to Be, Who constantly Renews.

Rather than pronounce the Holy Name, we need to embrace the Holy Name. Rather than pronounce the Holy Name, we need to walk in the ways consistent with the Holy Name. Rather than pronounce the Holy Name, we need to allow the Holy Name to indwell us so that His Being sustains ours, that His Being renews ours, and that His Being truly is the source of ours. I encourage each of us this Lent to walk in the way of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the way of His Life, Passion, Death, Burial, and His Resurrection, that at the end of this age we be fully transformed into His likeness and participate fully in the incomprehensible wonders of the age to come by reflecting in this age those same wonders to the best of our ability through the grace of Our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ.

✠ Through the prayers of the Most Holy Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary, Holy Dominic, and all the saints, Saviour save us. Amen.

[1] Ps. 103.1

[2] Ps. 113.2

[3] Mt. 21.9, Lk. 19.38

[4] Ac. 4.12

[5] Yahveh, “The One Who Is”

[6] Ex. 20.7

[7] Ex. 3.1-15

[8] Hashem, “The Name”

[9] Adonai, “My Lord”

[10] Ehyeh asher ehyeh

[11] Ho Ōn, and Egō Eimi Ho Ōn, “That Am,” and “I Am That Am.”

[12] Rev. 1.4, 1.8, 4.8

[13] Rom. 3.23

[14] 2 Pet. 3.9

[15] Jn. 1.14

[16] Cf. Jn. 3.16-21

[17] Cf. 1 Cor. 10.1-13