“And at the end of eight
days, when he was circumcised, he was called Jesus.” St. Luke 2:21
I will never
forget how I came to know all about circumcision. I was in the fourth-grade class at Vacation
Bible School at Saint John’s Church. In
our little town, the ecumenical Bible School was a big deal, and there were
about twenty of us nine-year-olds gathered around tables in a corner of the
Fellowship Hall. Our teacher was Mrs.
Truax, a dignified, silver-haired lady who taught Sunday School at Saint John’s
for a half-century.
We had
memory verses each day at Bible School, and there was a little prize if you
could recite it back the next day. And
that day’s memory verse was from Galatians, “neither circumcision availeth any
thing, nor uncircumcision, but a new creature.[1]” Looking back, it was a rather complicated
text for a nine-year-old, though maybe not so hard to memorize. The thing was, I didn’t know what the text
was talking about. I had some vague
understanding that circumcision was a religious term, like intercession or consecration. This was my chance to get the matter cleared
up.
So, I raised
my hand and asked, “Mrs. Truax, what is circumcision?” And her face blanched and she began looking
around, as if to make sure that none of the other classes had heard. She then ordered all the girls to leave the
room, and then proceeded, in hushed tones, to give us boys who remained behind
a pretty straightforward explanation. It
was by far the most dramatic thing that ever happened in my decade or so of
children’s religious education. And you
can bet that every boy—and every girl, for that matter—who was there never has
forgotten what circumcision is.
