The Badge Says Agency

The hook by the staff room door has three lanyards on it, and all three of them are hers.

Blue for the hospital trust, with a photograph from six years ago when her hair was longer. Green for the agency, no photograph, a barcode. Red for the supermarket, Thursday and Saturday nights, which nobody at either of the other two places knows about. She takes the green one down, because today is the care home, and she puts it over her head in the same movement she has made so many times that the cord has worn a pale line into the collar of her tunic.

Handover is in the day room. Twelve people in a loose ring round the whiteboard, and the new manager going down the rota with one finger. A name, a nod. A name, a nod. Then the finger stops on the line where she is, and the manager looks up, looks at the badge, and says, "And you're agency?"

She has been on this floor four years. She knows which resident will only take her tablets in yoghurt and which one wants the curtains open before the light comes. She knows the code for the medicine cupboard and the name of the night porter's dog. She says, "Yes." She does not say her own name, because it was not asked for, and the finger has already moved on.

Later she will laugh about it. In the moment, what she feels is not offense. It is something older and quieter. She belongs to the trust, and the agency, and the supermarket. She belongs to a church whose newsletter still lists her under a surname she stopped using two years ago. She has her mother's name on her birth certificate and her husband's on the mortgage, and she is not, if she is honest, sure that any of them is hers. Nothing in this room says whose she is. The badge says agency. That is all it says.

You know that badge. Maybe yours says contractor, or step, or ex, or the surname you kept because changing it back was one form too many. You belong to a great many things, and you have a strong suspicion this morning that not one of them would say you were theirs if the finger stopped on your line. I am not going to argue you out of that. I want to show you a verb.

The verb nobody stays for

The old blessing has three lines, and most people who grew up near a church can say them with their coat already on. The LORD bless you and keep you. The LORD make His face shine upon you and be gracious to you. The LORD lift up His countenance upon you and give you peace. Then the room stands, and nobody hears the next verse, because it is addressed to Moses, and in it God says what was happening while those three lines went over people's heads. So shall they put my name upon the people, and I will bless them.

Put. Not say, not recite, not read out. The Hebrew word there is sim, the plainest verb for setting one thing down on another, the word you would use for laying a hand on a child's head or a stone on a grave. And what was being set down was a name. Not the priest's name. God's own. While the words went over them, the people were being marked as His, in the ordinary way a shepherd marks a lamb or a laborer writes his master's name on the back of his hand so that nobody in the market has to ask.

Before I go one step further I want to sit down in the pit with you, because it is a specific one and it deserves its own name. Being agency in your own life is a particular tiredness. It is being useful everywhere and named nowhere. It is knowing the code for the cupboard and not being on the rota. It is not that nobody wants you; everybody wants you, that is the problem. Everybody borrows you, and a borrowed thing does not have a name, it has a barcode. If you have felt that, and felt ashamed of feeling it because you have a job and a roof, I am not ashamed of you. It is a real weight and you have carried it up and down that corridor a long time.

Now hear this, in the present tense: you have a name on you that you did not put there and cannot take off. I am not laying my own thought over your Tuesday. It is written, in Numbers 6:27, that His name was put on the people He was blessing, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a name written on a page and writes it on a person. It is what the verse says happened, and it is what the Spirit does.

This one will say, "I am the LORD's," another will call on the name of Jacob, and another will write on his hand, "The LORD's," and name himself by the name of Israel.Isaiah 44:5

Look at what Isaiah pictures. A day when people are so sure of whose they are that one of them writes it on his hand. Not on a lanyard, on the skin. A laborer's mark, the kind you could not hand back at the end of a shift. And notice the order of the sentence: the mark comes first, the naming of himself comes after. He does not earn his way onto the hand. He finds it there and lives from it.

Both names in one breath

Isaiah says it again, further back, and this time God is the one talking. Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine. Two names in one sentence. Yours, which He calls, and His claim, which He states. He does not say I have called you by your job. He does not say you are agency's. He says your name, the one your mother chose, and then He says whose that name is.

You were called by name before you were called by anything else, and that call is standing. Isaiah 43:1 is not a verse about a nation in general; the Spirit of God speaks it into a particular ear, and today the ear is yours, and the word says the naming was His act and not your achievement.

This is where the whole thing turns for a person under the New Covenant, so stay with me. When Jesus sent His people out, He told them to baptize into the name. Into it, the way you go into a house. Not near the name, not with the name mentioned. Into. And the first believers were called Christians, which is a word that means the people who belong to Christ, and James can write to a scattered church about the honorable name by which you were called, as though everyone reading knew exactly which name he meant. In the last book of the Bible, the risen Jesus promises the one who overcomes that He will write on him the name of my God. Written on him. Not issued to him at reception. Written.

You carry the name of Christ, and there is no higher name in existence, so there is no label on your hook that outranks it. That is not my opinion about labels. Scripture says God gave Him the name that is above every name, and His Spirit is the one who fastens that name to a person so that it is not a slogan but a fact about them. A trust badge is a fact about you. So is an agency barcode. This is a fact about you that sits above both, and it is written down.

Now I have to be honest with you about how it lands, because reading this is not enough. The way a name lands on a person in Scripture is by being spoken over them. Aaron said the words; God did the putting. Isaiah's laborer wrote it and then said it. Jesus put the moving of a mountain not in the heart but in the mouth: say to this mountain. And He set the measure of faith it takes to say it very low, lower than you would credit, at the size of a seed you would not notice on your own tunic. So the mountain here has a name and it is a badge, and you do not need a great faith to speak to it. You need to open your mouth. You have the standing to do that, because you are in Christ and He is in you, and the authority to say what is true over your own head was handed to you by Him. The word puts the blessing in a mouth on purpose, and the Spirit is the one who carries the sentence further than your voice.