Our God by any other name is still God

"Renegade has left the Oval. Repeat -- Renegade has left the Oval." Those words will be spoken sometime after Jan. 20 by a Secret Service agent. Barack Obama, soon to be our 44th president, has been assigned the code name Renegade. The Secret Service uses such appellations (e.g., JFK was Lancer, Clinton was Eagle, George W. Bush is Tumbler) because they are readily understandable and recognizable in radio transmissions.

The Bible has a multiplicity of names for God, yet there is a name above every name. "At the name of Jesus, every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that he is Lord to the glory of God the Father." (Philippians 2:9-11) Jesus, it seems, was a fairly common name in the first century. There was, for example, a Jesus Barabbas. (Matthew 27:16) Our Jesus, then, was sometimes referred to in geographical terms as Jesus of Nazareth. He is called Jesus Christ, similarly, to separate him from ordinary men named Jesus. (Christ means "the anointed one.")

Each time we pray, the salutation used in addressing God says something about how we view the one who made us, saves us and sustains us. Listen to someone pray out loud sometime. You can tell a great deal about what he or she believes about God just by paying attention to the salutation, the spiritual "code name" employed.

If God is called "Father" in prayer, the familial suggestion of a loving and guiding parent is suggested. "Almighty" emphasizes God's power. "Gracious" stresses God's forgiving nature while "Everlasting" champions God's timelessness and permanency.

It is clear from the gospels that Jesus called God "Father," as indeed many Christians do today. At the seminary I attended, use of the word "Father" to describe God in an academic paper would result in a student being told to do a rewrite. (This remains the case there today.) Patriarchal language, the institution insists, limits God to maleness, when we all understand God is beyond gender. It is hard to ignore, however, that Jesus begins the Lord's Prayer with the salutation, "Our Father." The key is in understanding God's desire to be familial, to be family, to us. More to the point, God wishes to be the head of our families.

Youth ministers tend to overuse the term "awesome," but the holy one certainly inhabits that word. It is telling that our individual experiences of God are so diverse that we must summon many names to make description. They all fit -- and yet none of them does. No word, no term, no code name can hope to possess the immeasurability of God. Still, though, we are creatures of language, so we must try.

One code name for God that I like is "Master." Another is "Elder Brother," a title inferred but not explicitly stated in Hebrews 2:17.

I love this last one, which comes not from New Testament but from the apocalyptic literature of the Old:

"I saw one like a human being coming with the clouds of heaven. And he came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before him." Daniel chapter 7 goes on to describe the commissioning of a man by the Ancient of Days (God the Father) to be given dominion and glory and kingship. In other words, the man is Jesus, God made flesh.

I like the code name "Ancient of Days" a great deal.

Jeff Long is pastor of Centenary United Methodist Church in Cape Girardeau. Married with two daughters, he is of Scots and Swedish descent, loves movies and is a lifelong fan of the Pittsburgh Steelers.