Circumcised for Us

“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.

For Meditation: "trust God's present power"

"Trust. We often use “trust” as a synonym for “faith”, but it isn’t really. “Trust” is a strange English word, originating from words meaning encouragement and the cheering of others. Then the word “trust” came to connote a kind of intimacy and sharing, and only last did it come to connote a certain reliance. In a way, the word “trust” combines all three of the theological virtues: faith, hope, and love together. Trust is bound up with the One who comes close, holds on to us, fills us with cheer.

Ministers who trust, as I charge you to be — who trust God, and trust God’s life in Christ, and trust God’s present power in Christ’s death, resurrection, and ascension — such trusters are precisely those who can know that the Church is God’s, and who can be obedient: Who can stop counting. Who can just follow. Who do not lose hope. Who can “let goodness happen” amid the lies of the occupiers. Because only God is good, as Jesus says (Mark 10:18), goodness is therefore sovereign — utterly, sheerly, magnificently."

Ephraim Radner, Ministry in Enemy-Occupied Territory, Covenant 2 June 2016,

Ponder: "We do not strategize"

We are never inventing, or constructing the Church anew, as if your congregations or dioceses or national structures — as if Israel — could be invented anew or constructed by the Israelites. The issue is not invention; it is always and ever “obedience.”

We tend to pursue our ministries on a continuum between activism and quietism, which orders most of our lives: do this; build that; organize, strategize. Clergy conferences are all about that, as are all the books and blogs of the world. And if that’s too much — as it surely is — we then give in to fatigue, withdraw, hide. Most clergy end up doing that.

But there is an alternative continuum to the activism/quietism spectrum. It is simply to do what God asks; to follow where God leads. And only that. No more, no less.