From the Book of Genesis:
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.”
(From the Daily Office Lectionary – Gen. 17:9-14 (NRSV) – January 1, 2013.)
Today, people all over the world go all sort of crazy making resolutions about how we will improve our lives in the coming year – it is New Year’s Day! But on the calendar of the church it is the Feast of the Holy Name, also known as the Feast of the Circumcision.
The law of Moses (as this bit of Genesis shows) required that newborn boys be circumcised on their eighth day of life. So on this eighth day after Christmas Day, we commemorate Jesus’ early submission to the law as recorded in Luke 2:21: “After eight days had passed, it was time to circumcise the child; and he was called Jesus, the name given by the angel before he was conceived in the womb.” (This verse also explains the first alternative title of this day.)
It seems to me appropriate that this feast day of the beginning of a new covenantal relationship between God and one of God’s children falls on the day the secular world also celebrates a new beginning. It reminds me of Carl Sandburg’s famous statement that “a baby is God’s opinion that life should go on.” The coincidence of New Year’s Day and Holy Name Day reminds us that life in relationship with God should go on. Here’s Sandburg’s full comment:
A baby is God’s opinion that life should go on. A book that does nothing to you is dead. A baby, whether it does anything to you, represents life. If a bad fire should break out in this house and I had my choice of saving the library or the babies, I would save what is alive. Never will a time come when the most marvelous recent invention is as marvelous as a newborn baby. The finest of our precision watches, the most super-colossal of our supercargo plants, don’t compare with a newborn baby in the number and ingenuity of coils and springs, in the flow and change of chemical solutions, in timing devices and interrelated parts that are irreplaceable. A baby is very modern. Yet it is also the oldest of the ancients. A baby doesn’t know he is a hoary and venerable antique – but he is. Before man learned how to make an alphabet, how to make a wheel, how to make a fire, he knew how to make a baby – with the great help of woman, and his God and Maker. (Remembrance Rock, Harcourt Brace:1948)
The coincidence of the Feast of the Circumcision with New Year’s Day is a reminder that, first day of the new year it may be, we know “as of old” how to live the life it presents us. Every year we make resolutions, new covenants perhaps, to do the things we’ve always known how to do, the things we’ve always known we should do. St. Paul wrote to the Romans that “real circumcision is a matter of the heart – it is spiritual and not literal.” (Rom. 2:29) John Wesley taught that this implies humility, faith, hope, and charity. Let us resolve, let us covenant to live out these qualities in the year ahead.
Happy Holy Name Day!
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Father Funston is the rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio.
Sort of buried in Jude’s moralizing about false teachers and those who follow them is an Advent message: “Look forward to the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ that leads to eternal life.” As I’ve been saying pretty consistently throughout the season, here and in my sermons, Advent is not so much about celebrating the birth of Jesus, wherever it was and whenever it was about 2,000 years ago, as it is about getting ready for his return, the parousia as seminary-educated folks like to say.
Although from a modern perspective, the prayer of the Pharisee is rather bigoted, but we should try to see it from his perspective and from within his culture, which Jesus shares. When we do so, we can see that Jesus is not criticizing the individual, but rather condemning an entire system of religion which divides and categorizes people. Jesus is denouncing any system, religious, social, or political, which separates people on the basis of bigotry and fear.
“This election is the most important, ever. If that candidate is elected, it will be the end of the world!” The first time I heard that was during the campaign of the first presidential election I paid attention to: the race between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon in 1960. I heard it as my family watched the televised debate; it was said by my older brother who was then a freshman studying history and political science at the University of Texas, so of course he knew everything. “That candidate,” by the way, was Richard Nixon. We heard it again in 1964; remember the television commercial with the little girl plucking petals from a daisy and the atomic explosion? “If Barry Goldwater is elected,” it suggested none too subtly, “it will be the end of the world.” We hear it every election, “This election is the most important election of our lifetimes.” And, to be honest, that is a correct statement. Those in the past are no longer important; they’re done and other with. Only this election can impact the future so, at this time, up to now, it is the most important. But truth be told . . . none of them, including this election, are really all that important in the grand scheme of things.
My father-in-law died a week ago; he will be laid to rest later today. His ashes will be interred next to those of my mother-in-law, his first wife, who passed away sixteen years ago. Marge was a Christian and an active church member; Paul was not. I’m not sure he was ever baptized but, if he was, he left that behind long ago. (Yes, I know the theology of baptism – once baptized, always baptized – and that may true from the church’s point of view, perhaps even from God’s perspective, but that was not Paul’s reality.)
From time to time, people tell me that they have appreciated something I’ve said or done and I try to remember to say, “Thank you.” But inside, I really don’t think about compliments very much. It’s not that I don’t appreciated them, but I don’t do what I do to be complimented, and I really don’t think that I have much to do with it when whatever I do has gone well or had a positive impact on someone. I sort of take Paul’s attitude from the Letters to the Romans and the Galatians: “It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me” (Gal. 20:2) and “I will not venture to speak of anything except what Christ has accomplished through me” (Rom. 15:18). So I do think, generally, that the answer to Eliphaz’s question is, “Yes.” Mortals can be of use to God. But there are times I would answer otherwise. 
As the letter to the Romans draws to a close, Paul sends greetings to several persons by name: Phoebe (named here), Prisca, Aquila, Epaenetus, Mary, Andronicus, Junia, and many others. As I read through there names, I cannot help but wonder who these otherwise forgotten church members were. What were their roles in the church? What did they do outside the church?
I once served under a bishop who used a slightly edited version of this text as his final blessing at the conclusion of a eucharist, adding “and may the blessing of God Almighty (etc.)” to Paul’s admonitions. Whenever he would recite these words, my mind would stumble over that last sentence: “If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.” Doesn’t it always depend on us? Isn’t that the point of the gospel mandate, to live peaceably with all even when they don’t want to? Isn’t that what “turn the other cheek” and “give even your cloak” and “go the extra” (Matt. 5:39-41) mile are all about? It is always in our power to do the peaceable thing.
My church, the Episcopal Church meeting in its 77th General Convention, took two incredibly large steps today which, I believe (and hope and pray), will make us conquerors. First, the House of Deputies unanimously passed a resolution to set in motion a process for re-imagining and possibly restructuring the church. Second, the Deputies voted by a 3-to-1 majority (in both the clerical and lay orders) to concur in an action of the House of Bishops adopting a provisional rite for the blessing of the life-long committed relationships of couples of the same sex; the Bishops had approved the rite by a greater than 2-to-1 majority. Although the second action will get (and has already gotten) by far the greater press coverage and will generate the greatest amount of “heat” and public interest, it is the former that is of greater importance. ~ In preaching on this passage, a former mentor of mine often said that the most important potential obstacle included in the “anything else in all creation” that cannot separate us from God in Christ is . . . ourselves. In passing the resolution to re-imagine and restructure the church, the General Convention has said that we will get out of the way; we will get out of the Spirit’s way, we will get out of our own way! ~ There is much work to be done, but it seems to me that the hardest work will be the letting-go and stepping-aside . . . letting go of old ways of doing and being church, letting go of expectations of how it has been done and how it ought to be done, letting go of office and power by those who have governed the church for generations, letting go of the hurt and pain of change . . . stepping aside to allow new leaders to come forward, stepping aside to let the Holy Spirit come in, stepping aside to free the center to be filled with something new and different. ~ I commend and congratulate the bishops, lay deputies, and clergy who made this decision and have the hard work of letting-go and stepping-aside to do. I pray for the new generation of leadership that will lead the re-imagining and restructuring; I hope that I can join them in the effort. And I remind them that “we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.”
Stenagmoi alaletoi is the Greek for what is here rendered as “sighs to deep for words.” Another translation might be “groanings not to be uttered.” Just a few verses before, Paul has used the root verb to describe the whole of creation as “groaning in labor pains” and specifically Christians who “groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies.” (vv. 22-23) ~ This is not simply a sigh (I think that translation understates Paul’s meaning), this is a troubled lament, an anxious longing, a deeply distraught sense of inexpressible misery. And it is here in the deepest recess of human sadness and frustration that we encounter God; it is here where God joins us in the struggle, where humankind no longer wrestles with God but God joins us in our wrestling with existence, with our weaknesses, and aids us in overcoming them; the Spirit intercedes joining, and perhaps giving voice to, our inarticulate groanings. ~ When we are unable to voice our prayers, God nonetheless understands. Once, when I was in seminary, I asked that prayers be offered at Evensong for the repose of the soul of friend who had just passed away. The person leading the prayer service did not know me and, apparently unable to read my handwriting, identified the deceased as a “friend of Ernie Funston” (which occasioned some chuckling from friends and colleagues). On the way out of the chapel, one of my professors assured me, “Don’t worry. God has spell-check on prayers.” I think that’s Paul’s meaning here. We may only be able to offer only the incomprehensible and indistinct sobs of the deeply troubled, but God searches the heart with God’s spell-checker.
