Feast of St. Matthew, 2025: St. Matthew's Centennial

One of the biggest decisions a parent has to make before the birth of their child is on a name. We put a lot of pressure on ourselves to choose the perfect name to set our children up for success. After all, would a rose by any other name smell so sweet? That question is explored in the 2005 book Freakonomics, which discusses naming of children and questions such as the correlation between the number of books in the home and educational accomplishment of children. It turns out, neither the child’s name or quantity of books have the power in and of themselves to create little well-adjusted geniuses. The important thing is what these things say about the parents - if you have a ton of books in the house, you are likely well-educated, have the money and resources to spend on books, and to allow you to spend time reading those books to your children. Same with children’s names - it is what the name tells us about the parents moreso than what it predicts about any child.

A friend from high school named her daughter Claire. And while I know she didn’t name her daughter Claire after me - we weren’t that close - she didn’t not name her daughter after me. That is, when she and her husband were discussing names and Claire came up, she didn’t think, “no, I went to high school with a Claire and she was awful.” It really reaffirmed my memory of our friendship.

My husband and I didn’t know the sex of either of our children before their births, so each time we had a girl name and a boy name ready. There are even baby name apps that are set up like Tinder where you can link with your spouse and “swipe right” on names that you like to see if you “match”. But at the end of the day, it was a conversation at the kitchen table that brought us to our names. Our “girl name” was Ruth, not chosen for the biblical Ruth, although the story of Ruth and Naomi certainly didn’t work against her, but named for a great aunt that had served as a kind of surrogate grandmother for me. But if Ruth had been born a boy, she would have been named Matthew. We chose the name for several reasons, but among them was our family’s long history of loving and being loved by the people in this parish.

We see the significance of naming all over the place in Scripture. Places get named because the name reflects what happened at that place. So any time you read something like “they named the place something in Hebrew because there was a pile of rocks there”, the Hebrew will essentially mean “pile of rocks”. For example, the first place the Israelites stop for water after the crossing of the Red Sea in Exodus has bad water, so they named it Marah, which means bitter. The place wasn’t already named Mara, they got there, the water was bad, and then they were like, “let’s name it bad water”. This is reaffirmed in the book of Ruth, where Ruth’s mother-in-law Naomi - whose name means pleasant, after the death of her husband and sons engages a play on words saying, “do not call me Naomi, call me Mara - bitter - because the Lord has dealt bitterly with me.”

There are several different processes for naming a church or a faith community as well. Sometimes the patron saint is chosen because of a geographical connection to the location of the church - perhaps they preached there or died there. Immigrants will often choose saints venerated in their home countries - like bringing a piece of home with them to their new homes. Sometimes the patron saint is particularly venerated by the founders of the church, and sometimes a church is dedicated to a saint whose relics are placed in it. Usually the name is chosen in community by the laity and the clergy of that community.

In the words of Harold Clingerman, who wrote A History of St. Matthew’s Parish in 1975, “Nothing of record has been found to show how or why the new church chose St. Matthew as its patron saint. There was not a St. Matthew’s in the Diocese at the time, and there were St. Mark, St. Luke and St. John parishes or missions. Opinion has been offered that St. Matthew, because of his association with business and government, had a special appeal for some of the mission’s founders. The Bishop’s guidance may have influenced the choice of a patron saint. A more probable explanation is that the ground actually was broken on St. Matthew’s Day.” (4) It’s a rather disappointing story. Either we were simply completing the set of evangelists, the founders felt a connection from their personal work in business or government, we happened to break ground on St. Matthew’s Day - in which case we have the contractor to thank, or someone just randomly picked a saint. 

But the lack of a well-defined backstory gives us an opportunity to define for ourselves what it means to be St. Matthew’s. We don’t have the expectations of our predecessors beyond, again in Mr. Clingerman’s words, to “be a Trinity Parish mission which would serve member families who lived in the southeast part of the city and welcome the unchurched to whom liturgical worship offered appeal.” (2) Being a mission of another parish comes with its own baggage. We made it two entire years before Bishop Shayler had to write a letter to both Holy Trinity and St. Matthew’s establishing what I lovingly describe as “turf lines”. While he noted that this does not mean that those who already attend one church or the other must change affiliations nor that members could not be officially transferred between the two but, in the bishop’s words, “this did mean that the rector of Holy Trinity Parish and the Vicar of St. Matthew’s Mission did not have the right to perform aggressive work (emphasis mine) in the territory specifically assigned to the other, even though he had the right to perform pastoral services for his people wherever they were located.” Bishop Shayler also reminded the laity as well as the clergy that it is not our calling to recruit other Episcopalians. The way that The Episcopal Church is governed, we are not competitors. We are siblings. And so, for better or for worse, we have millions of siblings in Christ.

Journalist Kate Winkler Dawson commented that she never felt lonely being an only child until her father died. And then there was absolutely no one else who could understand what she was going through, no matter how well her husband or friends cared for her, because they didn’t have that shared history and shared relationship with her father. Because we share so much with our siblings, there is hardly an estrangement like that from a sibling. We can get into cycles through a lack of boundaries because we love one another. We can see so much of ourselves in each other that we fail to see that sometimes we aren’t helping, we’re enabling or taking advantage of our “sibling”. Sometimes calling something a “family” is code for toxicity. A workplace that is like a family tends to require more than is reasonable from their employees by using “but we’re family!” as a method of coercing or guilting those employees, while at the same time not being there when needed by those same employees - who were assured they’re a family. There’s a complete lack of familial commitment.

But what characterizes a happy, healthy family? One that you want to be a member of? Familial commitment, yes, but not a commitment out of obligation, but commitment out of love. Out of joy. Comedian and actor Brett Goldstein loves the Muppets, and in explaining the success of the Muppets he said, “The secret of the Muppets is that they’re not very good at what they do. Kermit’s not a great host, Fozzie’s not a good comedian, Miss Piggie’s not a great singer…Like, none of them are actually good at it, but they (fucking) love it. And they’re like a family, and they like putting on the show. And they have joy. And because of the joy, it doesn’t matter that they’re not good at it.” We are invited to show our joy in being Christ’s body in the world. To be, as Paul wrote in his first letter to the Corinthians, “fools for Christ”, always being more concerned with what Christ would have us do over what the world would have us do.

Oftentimes, churches will say “our parish is a family” which sadly can turn into “our parish is for families”. But there’s a reason Paul didn’t use a family analogy, but instead the body to describe the Church as the body of Christ. Although we are siblings with one another, we are parts of Christ; the body of Christ living in the world. We have been blessed here at St. Matthew’s to be the body of Christ together for the last hundred years. May we continue to listen to where Jesus is calling us as we look into our future. Amen.