I went to a rodeo the other week, at Cheyenne, Wyoming, where the cowboys are the toughest and the cowgirls are the prettiest. Or is it the other way around?
The skill of the rodeo riders is astonishing but perhaps the most astonishing thing of all was the names of the cowboys. Ty Fast Taypotat. Lane McGeehee. Tyler Waguespack. Jammie Tinker. And, best of all, Bubba Buckaloo. If they’d been anything but cowboys those names might seem unlikely but as it was they were perfect.
My own name is reassuringly ordinary but when I was in my mid-teens, my friends decided it would be hilarious to give me a new one and they started calling me ’Smurf’. I grinned and bore it and died a little inside until I was rescued by my cross-country coach, the great Barry Goater, who told the rest of the team that he refused to have a Smurf running for him.
I was lucky. Name-calling is easy to start and much harder to stop. No matter how often we say that names will never hurt us, they actually do.
Names are important and powerful and naming is a privilege. When we were trying to name my unborn second daughter, it took her Mum and me a four-hour lunch and (for me at least) a lot of wine to come to a consensus on Esther. We care about names, even the informal ones. I’m happy to be Jim, but also somebody’s Sweetheart, someone’s Darling.
Long before the birth of Jesus, the prophet Isaiah wrote of his coming and said that ‘he is named Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace’. Those weren’t just titles, but names that spoke to Jesus’ role, his longevity, his care, his priorities and his character.
And, remarkably, Christians believe that God names us. We are ‘called by a new name that the mouth of the Lord will give’. We are ‘The Redeemed of the Lord’. We are called, ‘Sought Out, A City Not Forsaken’. We are called ‘beloved’. We are called ‘children of the Living God’.
At a time when the news is full of whatever new and hateful names we devise for people not like ourselves, I reckon it’s worth remembering that that is what we all are, that is the privilege of our shared humanity. We are all, every one of us, named ‘beloved child’.
In contrast to Esther, Miriam and Silas were easy to name.
Wyoming is, as I have said in the past and will doubtless say again, one of the places of my heart.