Bless God's Name

“I will extol you, my God and King, and bless your name forever and ever. Every day I will bless you, and praise your name forever and ever.” Psalm 145:1-2

This week Mary and I are celebrating our 18th wedding anniversary. Like any thoughtful, liberal couple in 1990 we faced the dilemma of names: Should Mary change her name? Should we become a hyphenate? Do just leave our names be? If so, then what happens when we have kids? If we hyphenate, what will happen if our children marry other hyphenates? Will they wind up with three hyphens? What about the generation after that?

Our solution was for us to be Joneses and to have Mary’s maiden name, Sundet, as a middle name for both of us. That she took my name as her own meant something to me, and still does. I’m not enough of an Old Testament scholar to say much about what the ancient Israelites meant when they sang of blessing God’s name. But I know Mary blessed my name and all the weight its personal and family histories carried. She set apart my name as a thing of honor and a handle to be cherished. She transformed the name which is me into the locus of her love.

Apart from faith given as a gift, what could possibly have drawn the Psalmist to honor and cherish the Lord’s name? The Psalmist’s song comes as no choice, nothing his will has conjured up from the depths, no option among many. Drawn to the bosom of God, the song is drawn forth. As the old gospel song says, “How can I keep from singing?”

The trust in such a one’s heart is formed from the outside in. Who knows what Mary ever saw in this doofus who noticed her wedding day zit before he noticed the beauty of her wedding dress? But her very being claimed me. I know I could not help but want her name and the name of her family as my own. That required paying a fee for a revised wedding license, but it was worth it.

This is what the Psalmist sings of. God’s name is the sharing of God’s own self: God’s justice and nearness, God’s watch over the downtrodden and destruction of the wicked, and, in the end, God’s very enfleshment in Jesus Christ forsaken and killed on the cross and raised on the third day. Such a name it is that the sinner can only say, “You, Lord, would let me, even me, bear your name?”

The name came to me first in a white clapboard church in Newell, SD, for than forty years ago as God started drowning and raising the baby and full-fledged sinner that was and is me. Eighteen of those forty-odd years I’ve enjoyed God’s name made manifest in a woman named Mary. If that’s the kind of God we have, then the Psalmist is right: “My mouth will speak the praise of the Lord, and all flesh will bless his holy name forever and ever.

(Happy anniversary, MSJ!)