If the local New Year’s baby this year was a boy, odds are it was named Liam, currently the most popular name for boys according to babycenter.com, one top search engine hit for baby names, though the site doesn’t make clear how they compiled their data or what regions it supposedly covers.
Liam, short for William, is not found in the Bible, though most of the popular boys names are. Biblical names are not popular at all for girls, maybe because there are fewer women named in scripture.
For boys, the Hebrew Testament names Levi and Asher make the list, as well as variant forms of Luke and Matthew, half of the evangelists. John, however, doesn’t even crack the top 50, the closest being the derivative “Jack” found in the 22nd spot.
Gen Z parents are pretty keen on ex-presidents, with Carter at 30 and Lincoln at 40. Maverick is up there. I’m disappointed that “Texas Ranger” didn’t make the list.
Poor John, that dying breed.
There is no shortage of Johns in the Christian Testament, even if you believe that John the Disciple was the author of the gospel, the three epistles, and the revelation received on Patmos. At the very least, there is John the Baptizer and John the Disciple, brother of James and especially loved by Jesus.
But the gospel attributed to John was almost certainly not written by John the Disciple, nor were the three short epistles. The tradition that the texts come from the hand of the disciple is about as legit as the resume of Republican Congressman-elect George Santos, which is to say complete nonsense. And those following after John the Disciple and writing in his name were not the dude on Patmos, who is at the very least a third John altogether, if he is John at all. The Bible is filled with this sort of thing, texts that are said to be from a particular person in a particular age that simply aren’t: the Torah, most of Isaiah, all of Daniel, two of the gospels, and half of what is attributed to Paul.
That John of Patmos maybe not John, who compares Rome to Babylon of old, old even in his time, who dreams of good’s ultimate and violent triumph over evil, offers us the vision in today’s reading, of a New Jerusalem. This is not restoration. The text says clearly that the former heaven and the former earth are passed away, are dead. John’s post-apocalyptic creation is a whole new thing.
In the gospels, Jesus does not promise to restore the Temple to some former state of glory. It is not clear that he has an earthly restoration of the Davidic monarchy in mind. Nothing about Jesus suggests turning to the past. His “Day of the Lord” language, his in-breaking of the Kingdom, is a whole new thing, a fulfillment of the purpose of creation.
While theologians and scripture scholars often put way too much stock in a single word that made the biblical canon, it is sometimes worth teasing out the choices we make when we translate the text.
As I mentioned on Christmas Eve, the name given to God in the Hebrew scripture is often translated as “I Am” or “I Am Who I Am,” in either case static, when it can also be translated “I Am Becoming,” dynamic and alive and maybe more theologically palatable.
In the same way, the opening of the gospel traditionally attributed to John the Disciple is often translated “and the Word was with God.” But the Greek preposition here implies movement or at the very least orientation. Though it is awkward in English, it might best be translated as “the Word was toward God.”
God is becoming, the Word is toward God, Jesus is looking at what is happening right then, and yet we keep constructing theologies based on the idea that there was some perfect moment in the past, that our purpose is a restoration of that moment.
We invent theologies that imagine an ideal human existence in Eden.
Some Christians imagine an idyllic early church.
Many Americans pursue constitutional originalism, though that original was intended to preserve the bold evil that was slavery.
Some long for the “good old days,” though in those good old days I watched fellow LGBTQI+ soldiers get courtmartialed and sometimes incarcerated, something that was equally possible in many states of the union for civilians who simply loved who they loved, and in the meantime a callous White House watched AIDS cut down a generation.
Maybe your past was ideal. Maybe there was some golden perfect moment when you were oblivious to the suffering of others. But the simple truth is, there was no Eden. There was no perfect early church.
People were arguing about what Jesus meant even when he was still walking the dusty streets of Galilee.
The United States was constructed on broken bodies of the enslaved and the indigenous. There has been no moment in the history of the world when our particular species of violent primates hasn’t found an excuse to brutalize some other subset of our species, much less the other forms of life with which we share this planet.
Every time someone longs for the past, I see the lynching tree, the gates of Auschwitz, Matthew Shepard’s body hanging from a fence. No thanks.
Which is just as well, since stasis has nothing to do with God, and nothing to do with this creation which is our experience of God.
Some early Christians tried to fit God into a box invented by the Neo-Platonist movement of ancient Greek philosophy, some idea of an eternal and immovable deity, but that was never the God of the ancient Israelite religion.
The god so many speak of is a contradiction and a monster, creating some humans pre-destined for eternal torment, answering some prayers for cancer cures and football championships while for others immunotherapy fails and jobs are lost.
If God is alive and creation is evidence of God, then God is growth… and everything, everything is always moving. Nothing in this universe is ever still. Nothing. We are just too brief and too dim to see all that is happening.
Existence is a dance, strings and atoms and planets and stars, and even when something stops being one thing it becomes something else, including us. We are simply temporary configurations of matter and energy, and isn’t that amazing? Imagine what you have been, for you have been everything, existing since God spoke and there was something instead of nothing.
If you could only see, the very rocks would be alive with movement.
So why do we want a dead God who is stuck in time? Why do we face backward, lying to ourselves about some perfect past? Why are we afraid of the future?
To be sure, it won’t include us, at least not in the way we exist now. But who knows what we will be next?
It is humbling acknowledging that we are not the center of the known universe, probably aren’t the reason for the universe. We can respond to that with fear as so many do, or we can respond with wonder. And me, well I’ll consult the Book of the Prophet Yoda, and the dark side, avoid, I will, choosing love over fear.
And that means new. That means change. It means stop pretending that God spoke to humans until the last punctuation mark was placed in the Book of the Revelation to the maybe John who happened to be on Patmos, just a few lines after today’s reading. Which, oh by the way, there was no punctuation, but you know, whatever…
God didn’t get struck mute some two thousand years ago. If God were mute, we wouldn’t be here. God is still speaking.
In the United Church of Christ, we abandoned the ancient creeds, not because we don’t love and honor the spiritual journeys of our Christians ancestors, but those were then and this is now, with quantum physics and mRNA vaccines, and if we stopped to articulate what we believe today, much of it would change by the next generation, for the best creeds and constitutions leave a thread loose so that they are already unraveling.
Our sisters and brother in the Reconstructionist movement of Rabbinic Judaism like to say the past gets a vote, not veto. Makes sense to me.
The one constant in creation is change, because love is change and vulnerability and adaptation, and God is love, and we are the song of that love, so what can we expect?
So as we enter the New Year, let’s welcome baby Liam or Maverick or Emily, and as Jesus taught us, encounter God’s creation like a child born anew, filled with wonder. Welcome to the dance.
Amen.