Genesis 17:1-16, 23-27
Lent 2
February 28, 2021
When Abram was ninety-nine years old, the LORD
appeared to Abram, and said to him, “I am God Almighty; walk before me, and be
blameless. And I will make my covenant between me and you, and will
make you exceedingly numerous.” Then Abram fell on his face; and
God said to him, “As for me, this is my covenant with you: You
shall be the ancestor of a multitude of nations. No longer shall
your name be Abram, but your name shall be Abraham; for I have made you the
ancestor of a multitude of nations. I will make you exceedingly
fruitful; and I will make nations of you, and kings shall come from you. I
will establish my covenant between me and you, and your offspring after you
throughout their generations, for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and
to your offspring after you. And I will give to you, and to your
offspring after you, the land where you are now an alien, all the
God said to Abraham, “As for you, you shall keep my covenant, you and your offspring after you throughout their generations. This is my covenant, which you shall keep, between me and you and your offspring after you: Every male among you shall be circumcised. You shall circumcise the flesh of your foreskins, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and you. Throughout your generations every male among you shall be circumcised when he is eight days old, including the slave born in your house and the one bought with your money from any foreigner who is not of your offspring. Both the slave born in your house and the one bought with your money must be circumcised. So shall my covenant be in your flesh an everlasting covenant. Any uncircumcised male who is not circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin shall be cut off from his people; he has broken my covenant.”
God said to Abraham, “As for Sarai your wife, you shall not call her Sarai, but Sarah shall be her name. I will bless her, and moreover I will give you a son by her. I will bless her, and she shall give rise to nations; kings of peoples shall come from her.”
Of the many foolish things that I’ve done over the years, at the top of the list is a sermon that I preached on this text. I was the guest preacher at a national conference in Philadelphia. Over a thousand Christian Educators had gathered in the convention center. About eight hundred were women and I preached a sermon about circumcision. What was I thinking?
Given the audience, the sermon went better than it should have. Most of them were gracious, or at least polite. The four pieces of hate mail that I received that day all had a legitimate point: what does this have to do with us? That is often the American church’s question. What does the Bible have to do with us? And that was the theme of the conference. As we look back into the archives of the scriptures, what are the hidden treasures to bring forward here and now?
Admittedly our Bible text sounds like a text for men, and men only. It’s a risky text to read to a congregation that has always had strong female leadership. You can get the clear impression from the text that faith is passed along only to the men and the ladies aren’t included. Maybe that’s why the practice of circumcision gets spiritualized a little later in the Bible. The specific action becomes a spiritual idea. The practice becomes a principle. It happens by the tenth chapter of Deuteronomy, as Moses says, “Circumcise your hearts and do not be stubborn any longer.” (10:16). That is a text available to everybody.
Of course, some aren’t convinced. This is Jewish text about a Jewish covenant – and the argument is, “But we are Christians.” That is an old argument, as old as the country of Turkey in the late 50’s, in an area called Galatia. As the Christian movement spread westward, some Christians insisted the uncircumcised pagans had to become Jews before they could become Christian – specifically, that they had to be circumcised before they were baptized. The apostle Paul said, “That’s ridiculous.” He wrote an angry letter to those people and said, “Who bewitched you? Christian faith is about freedom.”
Well, we can guess what happened. Once his letter to the Galatians was printed in a Bible, a lot of Christians have said the Jewish covenant has nothing to say to us on us. One early Christian trimmed away all the Jewish references from his Bible. To the church’s dismay, there wasn’t a whole lot left. So the church decided to keep the Jewish material in its Bible, recognizing the Christian church comes from the Jews, as Jesus comes from Sarah and Abraham.
So I’m wondering what to say about all this. On the one hand, something that gets us much Bible ink as all this seems ancient and archaic. And yet, this is an ancient practice that could be a corrective in the church. The key is what God speaks: “This is my covenant, for you and those who come after you.” The promise is broadly inclusive. It begins with one household and extends sideways to all connected to Abraham. When the covenant is “cut,” it includes the slaves and servants and resident outsiders in Abraham’s house. When God commands it, it comes with a holy blessing.
The covenant also reaches into the future. God says, “No longer will your name be Abram, which means ‘father.’ Now your name will be Abraham.” That means ‘big daddy of an enormous multitude.” Old Abraham, ninety-nine years old and dry as an old dead stump, is promised offspring through surgically altered equipment. It’s no wonder Sarah laughed when God announced she would have a baby. Either it was too sad to be true or too impossible to comprehend. God gave them a child anyway, a child named “Isaac,” the Jewish word for Laughter.
The point here is the ritual is connected to the promise. What the Jews say of circumcision is the same thing that Christians say about baptism. This is when we are marked and claimed as the children of God. In the words of Rabbi Jacob Neusner, the great Jewish scholar, ‘A minor surgical rite of dubious medical value becomes the mark of the renewal of the agreement between God and Israel…It is meant to accomplish a specific goal: to secure a place for the child, a blessing for the child.” [1]
So it’s more an action. Words surround the action! We learn this from the Jews. A table blessing recognizes a meal as a gift. The prayer at death, the kaddish, announces God is holy and the Messiah is coming. At a circumcision, at least ten Jewish men gather around a male child on the eighth day of life. They verbally bless this child into the covenant that God has made.
Like baptism, the ritual offers a sign that is both deeply personal and profoundly communal. It announces you belong to the God who brought you out of slavery in Egypt. You belong to the God who promised Abraham and Sarah that they would flourish as parents. Through this outward sign and the words that go with it, you belong to God. The story of your belonging is marked in your skin. It is a continuing reminder of who you are. It was done before the child can say no. As I think about it, that might be the most important insight of all.
I have friends who grew up during the sixties. They were raised to question every other authority. So when they married and had children, they decided to give their kids a choice about whether they or not wanted to go to church. They let the kids sleep in until they were sixteen, and then said, “Do you want to go to church?” The offspring had never sung with other people, or prayed with other people, or listened to the scripture, or even sit and be quiet for any longer than ten seconds. So guess what the kids decided?
I have two daughters who had no choice about what they did on a Sunday morning. It’s only fair; nobody gave me a choice, so I didn’t give them a choice. I chose for my children to be baptized in the name of the Trinity; it was my responsibility to make sure they know what that means. As they were shaped by scripture and the practices of the church, they have been shaped to make choices that honor the Lord Jesus Christ. If I had given them no guidance in how to live their lives, that would have made me an unfit parent.
So this is what the Jews do: they circumcise and say, “You belong to God.” Your story is God’s story. You were in Egypt, and God freed you from Pharaoh’s brick quota. You were wandering in the desert, and God gave you a teaching. We were in the Promised Land, and God gave you milk and honey, and all along the way, God said, “Don’t forget who you are.”
All of this brings us to the primary benefit of circumcision, which is also the primary benefit of baptism. Are you still with me? Are you writing this down? The primary benefit is this: when you wake up in the morning, you don’t have to wonder who you are.
Your identity is given to you by a community that says, “You are God’s child.” You are given a story that is greater than your own stories of pain and despair and loneliness. Your life is enrolled in a story that is greater than some advertiser telling you what you should want or what you should buy or what you should consume.
That’s why we always celebrate Christian baptism. The Christian life is rooted in the moment when the church says, “You belong to God, because we belong to God.”
And I know as well as you, there are times when faith wavers, wanders, or even evaporates. The journey of the heart does not always travel in a straight line. Along the road there are detours, potholes, and the occasional dead-end. Things happen. Life happens. But that does not mean the journey is over. The road is still beneath our feet and it is God’s road. Every step we take is on the firm foundation of God’s love. Every step is a response to the claim God has on our lives.
And who knows? Maybe what we thought was a dead end is actually a new beginning. Maybe if we fear we have wandered too far off the holy highway, it could be an invitation to venture onto new land.
The greater truth is that wherever you go, wherever you find yourself, you are a child of God. God’s story is your story. God chooses you to be part of that story. God's choices precede all of our choices.
- We
didn’t choose for Jesus to be born. That was God’s decision. It was made
for us.
- When the
human race chose to get rid of Jesus, God chose to raise Jesus from the
dead. That wasn’t our decision. God did that, so Jesus can keep
interfering with us until we know who we are.
- We didn’t choose “church.” Church was God’s idea. Church is God’s experiment. God sends the Holy Spirit to fill, and inform, and commission. We didn’t choose all of this; it was chosen for us.
Now, if you’d rather do it your way, and go on your own, there’s no tell how that will turn out. Just like Adam and Eve. There’s a great line by Frederick Buechner, when he describes Eve after she and her husband got thrown out of the Garden of Eden. He says, “Like Adam, Eve spent the rest of her days trying to convince herself that it had all worked out for the best.”[2] I suppose we can convince ourselves of anything we want. As for me, I’d like to spend my time convincing you that belonging to God is more important than anything else, in life and in death.
On the eighth day of life, God says, “You shall mark the Jewish child as a sign of the covenant.” It is the eighth day, I suppose, because that’s the first day of a new creation. The top of our baptismal font has eight sides: one for each day of the first creation, and the eighth for God’s new creation. The covenant is God’s new creation, by which we are shaped and given direction. It is God’s announcement that we matter and that we have a purpose still unfolding. It is God’s blessing, given from one generation to the next, so that when our days are over, or if our days are still going on, we know that nothing separates us from God’s steadfast love.
From this day forward, we belong to God. That’s what we believe and what we teach. Through the grace of Jesus Christ, all of us are adopted into the family. And the word for our belonging is covenant.
(c) William G. Carter. All rights reserved.
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