Abraham Part 7 - Circumcision

So – here we are.

A baptismal Sunday. Busy church – lots of visitors, some of whom may not be in church very often.

And especially on a Sunday like this I want to bring a good message. Something that’s relevant and connects with where people are.

So............ Circumcision!

Not really the subject I would have chosen for today, but a couple of months ago I got myself organised for all the Sundays between now and Christmas and this is where we happen to be as we follow the story of Abram.

But these seemingly unpromising texts often have more to say to us than we’d realise at first, and I think that’s the case today.

So for the sake of those of you who are visitors, let me bring you up to speed with where we’re at.

Christians, Jews and Muslims all trace their spiritual ancestry back to a man called Abram who lived something like 4000 years ago, and week by week, we’ve been following his story as it’s set out in the book of Genesis.

And the story begins when Abram and his wife Sarai receive a call from God to leave their homeland and travel to Caanan, where God promises to bless them with land and descendants.

But the fulfilment of those promises ended up taking far longer than they’d expected; and two weeks ago, we read Genesis 16 where a frustrated Sarai, ten years into their stay in Caanan and still childless, gave Abram her maidservant Hagar to sleep with in the hope that they could start a family through her. That was one of the ways infertile couples did things in the ancient world.

But although Hagar produced a son for Abram, a boy they called Ishmael, the tensions around this pregnancy and this child were awful. Sarai wasn’t happy, and as a consequence neither was Abram.

But as we join the story today, God re-iterates his promises to Abram and reassures him that things are still on course. But this time round there are a couple of new elements in what God has to say.

Abram’s described as fathering nations: not just descendants. And for the first time, Sarai’s reassured that she herself will bear Abram a son.

So Ishmael, who’s 13 by this stage, isn’t the end of the story. There’s another son to come, and if you know your Old Testament, you’’ll know that that boy, Sarai’s boy, would be called Isaac.

So from the line of Abram and Ishmael come the Arab peoples, and eventually Islam. From the line of Abram and Isaac come the race of people we call the Jews, and the religion of Judaism. And from the line of Abram and his descendant Jesus come the spiritual race of people called Christians.

So with that destiny in view, God gives Abram the new name ‘Abraham’ – which means father of nations.

And at the same time, Sarai becomes ‘Sarah’, which means Princess. A suitable name for the mother of future kings.

But there’s another development in this re-statement of the promise that’s different from what’s gone before.

Up until now, God’s acted unilaterally in bringing the promise to Abram.

But now God’s asking for a greater commitment from Abram, and summoning him to be an active partner in this covenant.

“I covenant to be your God, and to bless you with the land and the descendants I’ve promised you” says God.

“And in response, I want you and your male descendants to be circumcised, as a sign of the covenant that you’ve entered into with me”.

Now that might sound like a strange command to our ears; but we have to hear it in its original context.

Circumcision was already quite widely practised in Abram’s day, but more often than not it was associated with puberty and the transition to manhood and marriage. And that’s still the case in some cultures, even today. In his autobiography, Nelson Mandela tells the story of his circumcision at the age of 16 – without it he wouldn’t have been considered a man among his tribe, and he wouldn’t have been able to inherit anything from his father.

But setting aside what we think of the issue – and it is a controversial practice – there’s no denying that leaving a permanent mark on your body of one kind or another, makes powerful statement. And it has done for generations.

For today’s teenagers, tattoos are often a statement of rebellion and independence. But in many cultures, including the Maori, tattooing started out as a religious practice.

The problem is once a tattoo’s there, it’s there, unless you go in for laser treatment. So if you’re going to get one you’d better make sure it’s one you can live with!

 


And piercings are more popular than ever before, whether you’re talking about something that’s discrete but slightly subversive like an eyebrow - Or alternatively the face-full of hardware approach on the right!

Why do folk do these things to themselves?

 

To make a statement. They’re saying ‘this is who I am. this is the way of life I choose”.

And in that sense, they’re not a million miles away from the kind of religious rite that we’re talking about this morning.

For Abram and his community, circumcision became a sign of belonging. It marked them out as the people who’d been drawn into this covenant with God.

And the instruction to circumcise on the eighth day, and not at puberty, was a sign that these children belonged to God from the very beginning of their lives.

Incidentally, as a wee aside, why the eighth day?

Well, whether this is co-incidence or part of a plan I’ll leave you to judge, but scientific research has established that two of the essential clotting agents in your blood – vitamin K and prothrombin – are dangerously low for the first few days after birth, leaving the newborn baby susceptible to the risks of bleeding. But once the baby’s liver function has fully kicked in, the clotting agents are produced and they reach their optimum concentration on – the eighth day. There’s no better day to be cut, if you have to be cut.

And to this day, both Jews and Muslims continue this practice that their forefather Abram received. A sign in their flesh to remind them of who it is they belong to and what they have to do in response.

“I Am God Almighty” says God in verse 1. That’s who they belong to. And what do they have to do? “Walk before me and be blameless”.

Now let’s pause for a wee minute and think about those words “walk before me”. 

What does God mean there, do you think?

As I thought about it, I found myself picturing a catwalk at a fashion show or a stage in the theatre. The people who are up there doing their thing are doing it in a way that’s mindful of the audience – they’re aware that they’re on show.

So when God says “walk before me”, what he’s saying is “Live out your life mindful of me. Live out your days in a God-conscious way, and live them as well and faithfully as you can”.

That’s what it’s all about. In and of itself, circumcision doesn’t really mean anything or do anything. What it does do is remind the circumcised to live out their days mindful of God. And I think that’s why God gave that particular sign to Abram and his descendants.

Now here’s the thing.

Any ritual or ceremony, over time, can lose something of its meaning.

I've told this before, but like all good stories bears repeating…

A woman was preparing a roast in the kitchen with her daughter, and before she wrapped it up in tin foil, she carved off the last quarter or an inch from each end of joint and set the meat to the side.

 

"What are you doing that for?" asked her daughter. "It makes the meat taste better" said her mother. "My mother always said that a fresh cut gave more flavour in the cooking".

 

"That's nonsense!" said the daughter. So they went and asked the grandmother about it to verify the story. "Yes - that's right!" she said. "My mother always did the same".

 

So they sought out the great-grandmother. "Great-Granny, do you remember when you were cooking a roast? Why did you cut off the ends before you put it in the oven? Was it to make it taste better?". "No!" she laughed. "My roasting tin was never big enough!"

 

The ritual, in that family, had become separated from its meaning.

Now come forward with me 2000 years from the time of Abraham.

A new movement’s begun within the family of Judaism; a movement centred around the man they called Jesus. He himself was a Jew, as were his followers, but he was persecuted and put to death by his own religious leaders because they felt threatened by him. But growing numbers of people are coming to believe that he’d risen from the dead and that he was God’s messiah.

Some of these new believers are Jews, but many are non Jews. And one of the burning questions for the early church was ‘are these non-Jews who believe in Jesus required to obey all the Jewish laws – laws about diet, and customs and circumcision”?

The Apostle Paul, who was himself a Jew and persecuted the church before his conversion, said ‘no’ – they’re not. And in his letter to the church in Galatia – a church struggling with this very issue, he says “In Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision has any value. The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love”.

Here, 2000 years after Abraham, Paul is saying the same thing all over again. Circumcision, at the end of the day, counts for nothing. What counts is faith expressing itself through love. What counts is that you live out your life mindful of God, and walk before him as well and as faithfully as you can.

The danger of a practice like circumcision is that we keep the ritual but forget what it really means.

And in Christianity, it’s no different with the practice of baptism.

I spent a good few years studying what you might call sacramental theology. The religious theory behind the sacraments. And I have to say, a good amount of it sounded rather like people with too much time on their hands debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

And after all that study, I came to the conclusion that baptism, like circumcision, is of no value in itself unless it leads us to walk before God and live well and faithfully in this life.

Baptism, without discipleship, is as much use as a chocolate fireguard. Unless it issues in discipleship, it counts for nothing. The only thing that counts, says Paul, is faith, expressing itself through love.

I’m aware, as we read through the story of Abraham that anyone with half a brain must wonder sometimes where Abraham’s God is. This God who keeps popping up and having face-to-face conversations with people. Why doesn’t he do that with me? Or better still, why doesn’t he do that with Richard Dawkins?

Part of the answer to that, I think, is that in Christ God gave us his definitive word for all time.

You want to know that God is with you and for you? Look at the lengths he went to to come and live among us in Christ. Look at where that journey took him – to the pain and suffering of the cross, where he died to take upon himself the consequences of your sin and mine.

It’s a covenant that God made at the cross: a new covenant sealed by Christ’s blood.

But just like today’s covenant with Abram, it’s bilateral. A response is required. A response of faith and discipleship. And without that in adulthood, our baptism has very little meaning.

“Walk before me” God says to Abram. Live out your life in a God-conscious, God-faithful way. That’s what circumcision is meant to signify. That’s what baptism is meant to signify.

 

 

In very old churches, the font is often near the front door of the building to signify that baptism’s the way in to the family of the church. And that’s good theology, as long as we remember that baptism is the beginning of a journey and not the end of one.

You may have undergone the rite of baptism, as a child or as an adult, but the real question is - are you living out of your baptism? Are you making your way through life conscious of God? Consciously serving him.

The only thing that counts, says Paul, is faith expressing itself through love.

May God bless us with a faith which does just that.

Psalm 128. On obedience or lack of it.

It would be unfair of me to ask you what I was preaching on two years ago. To be honest, I don’t think I could remember what I was preaching on two years ago if it weren’t for the blog!

But those of you with good memories will remember that we started looking at the Psalms of the Ascent - 15 Psalms numbered 120-134, which were sung by pilgrims as they made their way up to Jerusalem for the great feasts of their faith: Passover in spring, Pentecost in summer and Tabernacles in early autumn.

These gathering were a huge event in the lives of the Jewish community – several days of feasting and worship and fellowship – and the songs they sang as they travelled dealt with the stuff of life, lived under the rule of God.

We left off at Ps 127 and between now and Remembrance Sunday we’re going to be looking at the remaining 7 Psalms, beginning today with Psalm 128.

And as I prepared for today I remembered something from two years ago – I always find it really hard to get past the first couple of verses!

“Happy are those who obey the LORD, who live by his commands” says the Psalmist

Does that sound familiar? Given that the Hebrew word esher also means ‘blessed’ it might remind you of the Beatitudes in Matthew 5 which we studied last year. And you’ll remember from that series that the Beatitudes aren’t pithy good advice – they’re a declaration of how things are. The Psalmist isn’t offering advice here – he’s saying: “This is how things are’ – if you obey God, and you live by God’s commands you will experience blessing.

So it’s a promise – but the problem is, the promise only holds for those who……. obey.

I wonder what your gut reaction is to that word ‘obey’?

I know that I don’t like it. I found myself reacting to it, and for a preacher that’s always sign that there’s something there worth exploring.

So I started to dig down into my associations around that word ‘obey’. And the first thing that came to mind was Barbara Woodhouse!

For those of you under 30, for whom that cultural reference will mean nothing, Barbara Woodhouse was a bossy, matriarchal figure who appeared on our screens in the early 1980’s and had a rare ability to train dogs and get them doing what she wanted.

Her signature move was to bark ‘sit’ at them, at the same time as making a sharp hand gesture, and amazingly the dogs seemed to respond!

And part of me associates ‘obedience’ with that kind of image. Obedience implies a definite pecking order, and I don’t like where I am in that pecking order. I want to be the one giving the commands, not taking them. And I don’t think I’m alone in that!

I wonder how many married women here took vows promising to obey your husbands?! How are you doing with those vows, I wonder. I can tell you now, your daughters and grand-daughters won’t be taking vows in those terms!

And men – why is it we find it so hard to ask for directions when we’re lost? When the flat pack furniture arrives, why are we so reluctant to read the instructions?

The answer is, we don’t like being subordinate – not even to a stranger we’ll never meet again, or to a piece of paper!

Implicit in notion of our obeying is the understanding that we’re not in charge, and that doesn’t sit easily with our egos.

We like being masters of our own destiny and we don’t like being told what to do, even if it’s God who’s doing the telling.

So that’s the first thing to note from Psalm 128: We have this resistance within us to obedience; a resistance that’s largely to do with our egos.

But there are times in life when we do find ourselves being obedient.

And broadly speaking, those times fall into three categories – Times when we have to be obedient, times when we’re afraid not to be obedient, and - more positively – times when we want to be obedient.

Sometimes we have to obey people for no other reason than that they’re above us in the pecking order.

They’re the boss and we’re the worker, They’re the teacher and we’re the pupil. They’re the drill sergeant and we’re the private out square-bashing.

They have a status to which we have to defer. They may not use it well, they may not even deserve it! But the rules of the game say that within reason we have to do what they ask us to do.

We obey because we have to.

Then secondly there are times when we obey because we’re scared of what will happen if we don’t.

Ever noticed how all the traffic on the A90 suddenly slows down to a sedate, law-abiding 65mph when we spot a police car cruising up ahead?


If you were standing at the cashpoint one evening and felt a knife pushed up against your ribs, would you think twice when the mugger told you to hand over your money?


And if the flight attendant announces that it’s time to buckle your seatbelt and adopt the brace position, you don’t argue with her. You just do what she says.

We readily obey when we’re afraid of what will happen if we don’t obey.

But I think the third instance of obedience is the most interesting, Sometimes in life we obey because we want to.

We see something in the other that inspires us because of its beauty or its skill, or its accomplishment. And we want to be like that.

The way they handled that situation; or danced so effortlessly; or filled the room with music; or swung that golf club, or ploughed that field; or showed such courage.

We want to be like them, and so we apprentice ourselves to them. We readily accept everything they’re ready to offer by way of instruction because we’ve seen something of the art in what they do and we want it for ourselves.

Eugene Peterson, who I often quote, was the son of a butcher, and from an early age he was raised to work in his father’s shop, learning at the elbow of men who had been dealing with meat all their lives.

He says “The day I was trusted with a knife, and taught to respect it and keep it sharp, I knew adult hood was just around the corner. “That knife has a will of its own” old Eddie Norcrist, one of my dad’s butchers, used to say to me. “Get to know your knife”. If I cut myself, he would blame me, not for carelessness but for ignorance – I didn’t ‘know’ my knife.

(Under their instruction) I also learned that a beef carcass has a will of its own – it’s not just an inert mass of meat and gristle and bone but has character and joints, texture and grain. Carving a quarter of beef into roasts and steaks was not a matter of imposing my knife-fortified will on dumb matter but respectfully and reverently entering into the reality of the material.


Not so much by words but by example, I internalised a respect for the material at hand. The material can be a pork loin, or a mahogany plank, or a lump of clay, or the will of God, or a soul. But when the work is done well, there is a kind of submission of will to the conditions at hand – a cultivation of what I would later learn to call humility. It is a noticeable feature in all skilled workers – woodworkers, potters, poets, pray-ers, and pastors. I learned it in the butcher shop.


What Peterson’s just described to you is a brilliant description of discipleship. The apprentice, the disciple, willingly sets ego to the side so they can learn from someone who knows more and knows better than they do. They accept their status and become teachable because they want to have what the master has. They obey because they want to.

So to summarise, there are three reasons people like us, people with egos, obey. We obey because we have to, because we’re scared not to, or because we want to.

“Happy are those who obey the LORD, who live by his commands”.

To the extent that you are, why are you obeying God this morning?

Is it out of duty? Do you feel that you have to for some reason?

Is it out of fear? Do you worry about what will happen to you if you don’t?

Or is it because you want to? Because you’ve come to understand that everything you love about life, everything that makes your soul sing and your mind marvel can be traced back to him. You stumble and fall and mess up and start again but always this thing’s ahead of you – this deep truth that somehow, life at its best, is all about him.

I love those opening exchanges in John’s gospel we heard earlier, and especially Jesus’ opening gambit to these two guys who are doing a not-very-good job of trying to follow him.

“What are you looking for?” he asks them. And you know, I don’t think they had much of a clue how to answer that. They just knew that there was something about this man that made them want to be with him. The best they can offer by way of a reply is pretty pathetic. “Where do you live, Rabbi?”.

“Come and see” he answers kindly. And they do. And so begins a lifetime of discipleship.

Over the years I’ve come to believe that God wants our obedience not for his sake, but for ours. He wants to teach us how to live; and to bless us in our living. But he can’t until we’ve signed on as a disciple - a lifelong learner.

The days of the week are your school. The Holy Spirit is your tutor; the Bible is your source text. The assigned task for each day is to learn how to live well and faithfully in this place and with these people. This workplace, these colleagues, this family, these neighbours, this church.

That situation that could be so much better.

That criticism that came out of nowhere

That need that suddenly became apparent

That task that’s needing some attention

That person who’s needing some help

This is the raw material God gets us to work on – Peterson’s slab of meat, or plank of mahogany or lump of clay. This is the stuff you have to work with each day. How will you work with it?

This is more than Sunday mornings, folks. This is life lived in apprenticeship to the Holy Spirit of God. Discipleship, by another name.

The promise of today’s Psalm is that if we apprentice ourselves to God, we will find blessing.

Our homes, our family life, our relationships will become places where we know the peace and presence of God, even in hard times.

It comes at the cost of obedience. But for a disciple, that’s a small price to pay.