62:1-5 Your New Name is “ Beulah” January 20, 2013

For ’s sake I will not keep silent, for ’s sake I will not remain quiet, till her righteousness shines out like the dawn, her salvation like a blazing torch. The nations will see your righteousness, and all kings your glory; you will be called by a new name that the mouth of the LORD will bestow. You will be a crown of splendor in the LORD’s hand, a royal diadem in the hand of your God. No longer will they call you Deserted, or name your land Desolate. But you will be called Hephzibah, and your land Beulah; for the LORD will take delight in you, and your land will be married. As a young man marries a maiden, so will your sons marry you; as a bridegroom rejoices over his bride, so will your God rejoice over you.(NIV)

There are a number of methods people use to come up with a name for a child. Some look to the names of previous generations in their family. (My grandmas’ names were Melva and Gertrude, so Elizabeth should consider herself lucky we didn’t choose that path.) Others name their children after current celebrities. This doesn’t always work out, either. After a famous bike rider’s interview with Oprah this week, I’m guessing a few parents are regretting their decision to name their child Lance. Of course, if you are a celebrity, you have to give your child an unusual name to make it clear that both you and your child are set apart from the ordinariness of the unwashed masses. And that’s how you end up having to stand up on your first day of kindergarten and say, “Hi, my name is Moon Unit.” Then there are those who look to the . There are of course lots of good biblical names—names which would sort of say what we wanted them to say, names which would provide our child with a good namesake, with a man or woman of faith—Samuel, Luke, Rebekah, Sarah, Anna. If you’re looking at Bible names, you’re probably going to avoid some because they say something we don’t want people to say about our child—names like Ahab, or Lucifer, or Judas. And my guess is that most people would rule out Hephzibah and Beulah. Although those names are biblical—they are the names that God gave the nation of in our text for this morning—Hephzibah Beulah just doesn’t seem like a name that says what we want it to say. If anything, it appears to be a name that not only says, but practically begs, “Come beat me up.” Now some of you might make the point—and it’s a valid one—that what you are named really isn’t that important once you get out of about the 3 rd grade. What’s more important than your name is what people say about you. What people say about you is probably a more accurate indicator of who you really are. And what people were saying and what they were going to be saying about the nation of Judah in our reading for this morning were things like “Desolate” and “Deserted.” During the time of Isaiah the 10 tribes of the northern kingdom of were in the process of being carried off into captivity by the Assyrians, and its sister, the “kingdom” of Judah, didn’t seem to be held together by much more than baling twine and duct tape. Like a wimpy third-grader on the playground, it ran from one bully to another, attempting to make an alliance with each one in order to protect itself from the other bullies. But it wouldn’t be too long before all its alliances fell apart and the bully known as the Babylonians would come and begin raiding the land, slowly draining the nation of her people and its financial resources. Eventually, ’s military forces would invade the land and destroy Jerusalem, including the temple, and the remaining people would be taken captive. So it’s not surprising that people would look at the ruins of the nation of Judah and declare it to be “desolate.” It was a vast wasteland. There was no hope of anything growing there again, no expectation of a mythical phoenix rising from the ashes. And as people looked Judah’s current state, the explanation for it was pretty clear—it had been “deserted.” No, not deserted by the Babylonians, but deserted by God. The God who had shown it such great love, who had brought it out of and made it a great nation, choosing it out of all the other nations to be his special people—that God had left it, allowing the Babylonians to make it desolate. “Deserted” is an assessment with which God would actually have agreed. He makes it pretty clear in the that he is going to abandon his people. But God would also have argued—in fact, he did argue—and he made a very convincing case—that the nation of Judah had deserted him long before he deserted them. Like someone who, after their spouse has been repeatedly unfaithful to them, finally files for divorce, God bore no blame for the breakup. In fact, the illustration of the breakup of a marriage is a pretty good one because it is one that God himself used in quite a few places in the Bible. Earlier in the book of Isaiah, God speaks of the nation of Israel by saying “See how the faithful city [Jerusalem, the capital city] has become a harlot” (:21). Then, lest anyone miss the point, he says in Jeremiah, “Have you seen what faithless Israel [the 10 northern tribes] has done? She has gone up on every spreading tree and committed adultery there. I thought that after she had done all this she would return to me but she did not, and her unfaithful sister Judah saw it. I gave faithless Israel her certificate of divorce and sent her away because of all her adulteries. Yet I saw that her unfaithful sister Judah had no fear; she also went out and committed adultery. Because Israel’s immorality mattered so little to her, she defiled the land and committed adultery with stone and wood. In spite of all this, Judah did not return to me with all her heart…” (Jeremiah 3:6-10). Can there be any doubt about the name that God is giving to his people? Because instead of staying faithful to, instead of serving her loving God, who had rescued her from slavery in Egypt and given her the riches and wealth of the Promised Land, a land so fruitful that it was said to be “flowing with milk and honey”, because his people had chosen instead to give themselves to false gods, gods of nothing more than wood and stone, because of all this, God was calling them harlots, prostitutes. And considering the fact that at least a prostitute receives something in return, while the Israelites received nothing in return from their nothing gods, perhaps they should have considered themselves fortunate that God didn’t use a harsher—and more accurate—term than “prostitute” or “harlot.” We certainly couldn’t argue that they deserved both the fate they received from the spouse they had rejected and also the names they had been given—both by God—“harlot” and “prostitute”—and by those watching—“Desolate” and “Deserted.”

But not only did the Israelites deserve those names, so also do we deserve them. How many times haven’t we broken our vows to Christ, our husband? On our confirmation day, we took a vow before God in which we said that we would always put him first in our life— that we would rather die than put him second. Have you been faithful to that vow? How have you treated the husband who has loved you and has done everything for you, given you all that you need, given it to you in perfect love? If you’re like me—and you are—you haven’t been perfectly faithful to your Lord. In fact, at times you’ve been perfectly unfaithful, choosing instead to go and give yourself to other gods, continuing to date Satan and live in his temptations. We’ve done whatever it takes to make time for these false gods. When it comes to making choices to fill our time, we turn on the TV rather than tuning in to God’s Word. We sign up for another league or extracurricular activity, and we skip out on family devotions and worship time. Meanwhile, God sits at his house--candles lit, a 7-course meal of his saving Word lovingly prepared for us, watching the meal get cold yet again, wondering if we’re ever coming home. Or, in light of the fact that we did show up at God’s house today, maybe a better description would be that we rush into the house quickly, scarf down some food, give God a perfunctory peck on the cheek, say, “See you in a week” and then hurry out the door to go back to our adulterous lifestyle. Where is that going to leave us? Desolate? Deserted? One would think so—and in the most complete way—deserted forever in the desolate, unforgiving, hopeless landscape of Hell. But that’s not what happened to God’s people. Instead God says in our reading, “For Zion’s sake I will not keep silent, for Jerusalem’s sake I will not remain quiet…” At first you might think that what will come next is going to be a blistering and public condemnation, a trashing of her name in which God tells anyone and everyone exactly how he has been betrayed by his faithless people, a diatribe in which God shouts “Look at my people!”—a sermon in which God will not be satisfied until everyone has seen his people for what they are. And it’s true enough that God will not be satisfied until everyone has seen his people for what they are—for he goes on to say, “ I will not remain quiet, till her righteousness shines out like the dawn, her salvation like a blazing torch. The nations will see your righteousness and all kings your glory; you will be called by a new name.” Yes, God wants everyone to see his people, wants everyone to see us for what we are—“righteous.” Huh? I mean, clearly God is saying that he treasures us. (Elsewhere in our text he speaks of us as being “a crown of splendor in the Lord’s hand, a royal diadem in the hand of your God.” That is, we’re something that is so precious, so beautiful that God holds us and looks at us with almost a reverent awe for our beauty—the way that a groom looks at his radiant bride as she walks down the aisle towards him on their wedding day. Clearly God sees us as righteous, as holy, as the sort of bride who can truly wear white. How did this happen? Did God’s bride somehow get her act together, did we somehow pick ourselves up from the muck and wash away our stain of sin? Not at all. Rather, our loving God sent his own Son into the muck and the filth of our sin to be perfectly faithful in our place, and then to lovingly take us by the hand and wash away the sins that stained those hands, wash them in his blood given on the cross in our place. There on the cross, Jesus could truly be called “Deserted”, for since he carried the guilt for our sins of unfaithfulness to God, God deserted him, punished him for those sins. The result is that God is able to give you “a new name.” And it’s more than “just a name.” This name means something. When a bride is married, she takes on a new name which has real meaning. By taking the groom’s last name, she and her husband are saying something about their relationship. They are saying that they belong to each other—that he is proud to have someone like her bear his name, and that she is proud to bear the name of someone like him. God says the same thing to you when he gives you the name “Beulah”—that is “married.” And not only is God married to you, but he is proud that someone like you bears his name. We know that because he also has given you the name “Hephzibah”—that is “My delight is in her.” God has no reason not to delight in us—for the righteousness that he has given you shines out like the dawn shines out into the darkness of night. The salvation that he has given you shines like a blazing torch into the dark sea of hopelessness that seemed to exist for you. There’s something kind of exciting about knowing that there is someone who is delighted in us, someone whose heart skips a little bit when we enter the room. And there is something tremendously comforting in knowing that that individual has chosen to attach their name to ours, in knowing that they want everyone to know that they are married to us, that they delight in us. How exciting, how comforting to know that God calls us Hephzibah Beulah. And how motivating it is also. Any bride would not only want her husband to view her in this way, but would also want to live up to that image that her husband has of her, would want to live in a way that gives glory to his name. May we also live as one who is Hephzibah and one who is Beulah. May we live confidently and joyfully, knowing that God our husband is delighted with us. May we also live faithfully, showing our devotion to God our husband by the way we order our lives, by the way we focus on faithfully serving the one who has taken and continues to take such great delight in us. The next time you find that you have extra money or time to spend, ask yourself how you can spend it—or give it—in such a way as to show your devotion to the God who has devoted himself, who has devoted his Son to you. The next time you have the opportunity to answer someone’s question about where you go to church or what you believe, ask yourself how you can answer in a way that will make it clear to people that you are not married merely to Peace Lutheran Church, but married to God. Make your life a visual wedding ring that says, “I am married to God.” Hephzibah Beulah Rutschow—it’s still probably not the name that I would put on my child’s birth certificate. But it is the name that God has put on me. It’s a name that I wear proudly, for it says that I am someone with whom God is delighted to be intimately joined. To all of you Hephzibah Beulahs, congratulations on your marriage to God, and best wishes for many years—yes, for an eternity—of happiness together. Amen.