Isaiah 7:10-16
Matthew 1:18-25
December 23, 2007
           
Our names are important.  They represent our identities.  Our reputations are associated with our names. People associate our personalities, traits, and abilities with our names.  In the business world name recognition has become extremely important and valuable. 
           
“Namespace,” a territory within which all names are distinct and unique, has become the modern business battleground, with lawyers and marketers girding their loins for a fight over the economic value of what a company or product might be called. The stakes are high, considering a name like “Nike” is thought to be worth about $7 billion and “Coca Cola” 10 times that much.
           
There was a time when if you were dreaming up a name for a new company or product you could draw it up on the kitchen table and hang the shingle outside. For example, if you made machines that businesses could use all over the world you could easily call yourself “International Business Machines.”
           
Here are some easily recognizable names and how they came into existence. 
           
Google — the name started as a humorous boast about the amount of information the search engine would be able to search. It was originally named “Googol,” a word for the number represented by 1 followed by 100 zeros. After founders, Stanford graduate students Sergey Brin and Larry Page, presented their project to an angel investor, they received a check made out to “Google”!
           
Kodak — Both the Kodak camera and the name were the invention of founder George Eastman. The letter “K” was a favorite with Eastman; he felt it a strong and incisive letter. He tried out various combinations of words starting and ending with “K.” He saw three advantages in the name. It had the merits of a trademark word, would not be mispronounced, and the name did not resemble anything in the art. There is a misconception that the name was chosen because of its similarity to the sound produced by the shutter of the camera.
          
Nintendo — Nintendo is composed of three Japanese Kanji characters, Nin—ten—do, which can be translated to “Heaven blesses hard work.”
           
Xerox —the inventor, Chestor Carlson, named his product trying to say “dry” (as it was dry copying, markedly different from the then prevailing wet copying). The Greek root “xer” means dry. (“List of company name etymologies,” Fact Index Web Site, Fact—index.com.)
           
There was a small congregation in Kansas City that didn’t have a place to meet.  Eventually they found a local funeral home where they could meet on Sundays in the chapel.  What would you call your church if you met in a funeral home?
           
The Church of the Resurrection, of course! And that’s precisely what Kansas City’s thriving United Methodist congregation, under the pastoral leadership of Alex Hamilton, did. You’re meeting in a funeral home: You call your church The Church of the Resurrection.
           
But it’s not always so simple. The Internet has expanded the global marketplace exponentially, and with so much stuff and so many people making it or selling it, the pool of available brand and domain names has apparently dried up. There just aren’t enough original names to go around.
           
Onomastics, the academic discipline of name study, tells us that expanding social structures means expanding name systems. In other words, when people lived in the agrarian society of the tribe and village, a single name for each person was enough — no need to fight about it. But as cities and societies grew and became more complex, so did the complexity and conflict over naming rights. The more people, the more confusion.
           
Ask any potential parent about baby names and they’ll roll their eyes. They’ve looked through all the books and will likely tell you some version of “all the good names are taken.” Stick your head into any elementary school, for example, and yell for a Hannah and you’ll likely draw a crowd.  There is an organization known as “Doris.”  It is for all the people who have the name “Doris.”  Their recent convention drew several hundred participants. 
           
The names chosen for children say more about the parents giving them their names than they say about the children.  However, as children grow and become known they give meaning, interpretation, and reputation to their names. 
           
Many years ago when our daughters, Melanie and Danita were very young, we visited Peggy’s Aunt Stella in Ft. Meyers, Florida.  After dinner while having conversation, Aunt Stella blurted out, “Where’d you get those dumb names for your kids?” This was an interesting question coming from a woman whose husband was named Barney and whose brother was named Bink.   
           
Our daughter and son-in-law took an interesting approach in naming their son, our grandson.  They had several names under consideration.  As the birth date drew near, they narrowed the list down to two names but concluded they could not choose a name until they had seen the baby.  Once they saw him, Carter seemed to be a much better name for him than Kyle.
           
Naming, whether it’s people or products, can be a frustrating, costly business.  Unless, of course, you truly do come up with something original, something unique and identifiable, some name that provides the ultimate brand recognition, longevity and connection with the consumer, something that will leave its stamp on people forever.  Then, it is an important and valuable process because the name eventually comes to communicate the essence of the person or the product.
           
Leave it to God to be the ultimate name dropper.  In today’s passage from Isaiah, the prophet is directing King Ahaz to ask for a sign to strengthen his faith about what to do about his kingdom being threatened by invaders. Ahaz, however, refuses to ask God what to do, following in the tradition of other Israelite kings who were often more infatuated with their own names than with God’s brand stamp. But Isaiah tells Ahaz that God will provide a sign anyway (7:14), “Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel.”
           
The sign is the impending birth of Isaiah’s second child, symbolically named Immanuel, “El/God is with us,” with whom “the young woman” is pregnant (v. 14). The young woman is not specified, but she is very likely the prophet’s wife. The Hebrew noun ’almah means a young woman, unmarried or married.  In the context of Isaiah’s writing, there is nothing significant about the mother of the child, the child’s conception or the child’s birth. The only significance attached to the child is that before he is weaned (“knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good,” v. 15), the lands of the threatening kings Rezin and Pekah will be deserted (v. 16).
           
The child’s symbolic name, Immanuel, refers to the divine promise that God will put his name (i.e., presence) in the temple erected in Zion, the Jebusite citadel captured by David and dedicated to the worship of Israel’s God. As the locus of divine presence in the temple, Zion/Jerusalem was understood by the theologians attached to the court (which coincidentally happened to be in Jerusalem) as inviolable: “In this house, and in Jerusalem, which I have chosen out of all the tribes of Israel, I will put my name forever” (2 Kings 21:7). Isaiah intended to reflect this royal theology in the naming of his second child.
           
Biblical names are never accidents. You don’t see Abraham and Sarah, for example, sitting around looking at Canaanite baby name books before naming
Isaac. Every name is descriptive of its holder. Names are unique and not easily changed except by a higher authority. God changes Abram to Abraham, Jacob to Israel, just to name two. Even God’s name, YHWH, had a powerfully descriptive quality in its declaration, “I am who I am.”
           
In Isaiah’s time, God does the naming of the child who will represent his message of hope to people through a dark time in their history. The boy named “Immanuel,” who the context suggests was Isaiah’s own son (8:3), is God’s logo of love, a sign that God will not leave them to fend for themselves.
           
God has a sign for us at Advent, and the sign is a Son, and the name of the Son is Immanuel. It means, “God with us.”
           
Immanuel. The name stuck   Matthew quoted part of this passage from Isaiah and the name Immanuel had new life breathed into it later when
Matthew picked up on Isaiah’s prophetic theme and name image in his birth narrative of Jesus. Jesus, too, would be an “Immanuel,” but even more so, not simply a representative of God, but God himself come in the flesh among the people to rescue them from despair, Immanuel in the fullest sense of the name: a unique, one-of-a-kind, powerful, brandable and memorable name.
           
Interestingly, however, “Immanuel” is not the name that we google up first when we think of the incarnation. We use the more common name “Jesus” when we talk about Son of God or Savior. Jesus, a form of “Yeshua” or “Joshua,” was a pretty common name in first-century Israel. After all, Joshua, a hero of the Exodus, was a titanic figure in the history of Israel.
           
It would be an apt name for anyone important, but particularly for one who would “save his people from their sins” (Matthew 1:21). But still, in and around Bethlehem and the rest of first century Israel, Jesus was a “been there, done that” name, easy to lose in the crowd. It’s a name that could have wound up as the “John Smith” of the ancient world.
           
But perhaps it’s that commonality that makes Jesus, the Immanuel, so much easier for all of us to embrace. In his commonality, “God with us” became in very literal terms “one of us,” a common man, but with an uncommon mission.
           
Of the birth stories of Jesus, Marcus Borg says, “I do not think they are historically factual, but I think they are profoundly true in another important sense. . .  I do not think that virginal conception is historical, and I do not think there is a special star arising on the shepherds above a stable in Bethlehem.  Thus I see these stories not as historical reports but as literary creations.
           
As the latter, they are not history remembered, but metaphorical analysis that use ancient religious imagery to express simple truths about Jesus’ significance . . . Yet I think these stories are true.  To use familiar terminology, I see these stories as history metaphorized, that is, as metaphorical narratives.  And the history that is being metaphorized is not the birth itself but the Jesus story as a whole.
           
The birth stories affirm that Jesus is the true representation of God.  Implicitly, these stories leave us with the question: Where are you going to see your God?  In the power and wealth of Herod and Caesar, of Kingship and empire?  Or in this Galilean Jewish peasant who saw things very differently?  Where are you going to see the precise manifestation of God?  In the domination system?  Or in Jesus who was executed by the domination system?
           
Thus, the birth stories confirm what God is like.  The name and the interpretation Jesus gave to his name have both existential and political dimensions.  Existentially, we are in bondage to many things, but to learn from and follow the one named Jesus is the path of personal liberation.  Politically, the life and ministry of Jesus challenge systems of domination in the name of God’s passion for justice.  It is no accident that the rulers of this world, both at the beginning of Jesus’ life and at the end destroyed him . . . The important questions are: “Is Jesus the Light of the World? Does Jesus reveal what God is truly like? Is how Jesus lived the way we are to live? Answering these questions lays claim to our whole lives.
           
In one of his Christmas sermons, Meister Eckhart spoke of the Virgin Birth as something that happens within us.  That is, the story of the Virgin Birth, the story of Christ being born within us through the union of the Spirit of God in our flesh.
           
Ultimately, the story of Jesus’ birth is not just the birth in Bethlehem, but about the internal birth in us in the present.” (Marcus Borg, “Light In the Darkness,” The Christian Century, December 16, 1998, pp. 1219, 1221).