circumcision | hughdbryant

Sermon for New Year’s Day 2023 at St Dochdwys, Llandough

The Naming and Circumcision of Jesus

May God be in my mouth, and in my speaking. Amen.

Before I say anything else, let us give thanks to God for the work of Emeritus Pope Benedict, and pray for our Catholic friends, brothers and sisters in Christ, as they mourn his passing. And although the ball may be the wrong shape, we mourn the passing also of the great footballer Pelé. May both these great figures rest in peace and rise in glory.

Numbers 6.22-27

Psalm 8

Galatians 4.4-7

Luke 2.15-21

https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=538997803

It’s a bit of an upside-down sermon this morning. Indeed if you’re still waking up after last night, you might have thought that our service was back to front. Our first lesson was the blessing. It is the most beautiful blessing, which is called the Aaronic blessing. It was passed on to Aaron by Moses. But a blessing usually comes at the end of the service. It probably will still come at the end as well – Jimmy may well say it today. This is it, from the Old Testament lesson:

May the Lord bless you and keep you;

may the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you; may the Lord lift up his countenance upon you, and give you peace.

Don’t get up. It’s not the end of the service yet! Because the last bit of it in the lesson from Numbers, just after the blessing, says this:

‘So they shall put my name on the Israelites, and I will bless them’.

It is about the people of God being given their name, Israel, which means literally in Hebrew, people who have wrestled with God. That went back to Jacob, wrestling with the angel. So Jacob became Israel and the whole of the old Testament had a theme running through it, of the relationship between the chosen people of God, the Israelites, and God himself. It was like all the best love affairs, pretty bumpy. People who really do love each other have rows and they do fall out. That was certainly true of the Israelites and their God. They worshipped the Baals and the Golden Calf – and God punished them. (See Exodus 32 and 1 Kings 12).

This story of the Israelites getting their name is at the beginning of their story, and it’s appropriate on 1st January to think of our religious beginnings and where they might lead. Now today we are focusing on the other end of the Bible, on baby Jesus – I was going to say, on Jesus’ ‘christening’ – but that sort of thing worked differently in those days. Instead the baby would be named, and if he was a male baby, circumcised as part of the Jewish tradition. The angel had told Mary that his name would be Jesus. That name means, God saves us, God is our salvation. So we have moved from wrestling with God, Israel, to salvation through God, Jesus.

The mighty God who spoke through the burning bush to Moses, the God who was capable of tremendous wrath and destruction, has now come, with all that power, to be concentrated into a tiny baby. That is the miracle of Christmas. We are perhaps none the wiser about exactly what God looks like, apart from just being a baby. In the blessing, with God lifting up the light of his countenance upon us, we get the feeling that there is someone up there, beaming down with a beautiful smile. But we can’t actually see that God: No one could. But people could see Jesus and they did see him. He certainly lifted up the light of his countenance on everyone he met.

Although we can’t see Him, what is our relationship with God? In St Paul’s letter to the Galatians, God puts us alongside that little baby, so that we are children, children of God, calling God ‘Abba’, which is more like ‘Daddy’ rather than ‘Father’ in the Aramaic we are told. Saint Paul goes on to suggest that, as children, we are heirs; we inherit the blessings of God.

But there is a missing bit. We need to go back a bit to the Old Testament and look again at the people of Israel, the people wrestling with God. The heart of their relationship was what was known as God’s covenant with Israel. What is a covenant? As a lawyer, I can tell you that a covenant is an agreement or a contract. The two parties agree together and they agree to do things one for the other. That’s it. It’s very simple.

The covenant between God and Israel was indeed very simple. The Israelites agreed to worship God as the one true God, no other gods, and in return God promised to bless them and keep them, as the blessing says. And it’s a very useful idea, this covenant.

What can we say at this service, at the beginning of 2023? We have to cope with all these challenges and difficulties in the world ahead of us:

– the war in Ukraine,

– the cost of living crisis here at home,

– the energy crisis, where we are all worrying because we can’t afford to pay three or four times what we used to pay for our houses to be heated,

– and the pay crisis, all the strikes which the public servants, and in particular the nurses and ambulance crews, are involved in, because their pay has fallen back so much that many are now forced to go to food banks, which seems to me to be a very unfair development after all their bravery and sacrifice brought us all out clapping on our doorsteps while the Covid pandemic was on.

I hope that you will not think that this falls outside the bounds of what a preacher is supposed to cover, but it does seem to me that we were, and we are, very happy to rely on these dedicated public servants, and now we must provide them with a decent living. And, most importantly, there are theological reasons for supporting the workers’ fight for better pay and conditions of work.

Frankly our government of millionaires in London needs to think again, quickly, about this. We were all made equal in God’s image: not so rich and so poor, all in the same country – the sixth richest country in the world. Remember Jesus’ story known as Dives and Lazarus, the Rich Man and Lazarus, in Luke 16:19-31. Jesus surely didn’t approve of such a huge gap between the rich and the poor.

So as we embark on 2023, as we see our world facing all these challenges, what do we, as the people of God, the people in the church, do about it?

Quite a lot of Christians do something every New Year, which seems to me to be a great way of preparing themselves to tackle these challenges; and that is, they renew their covenant with God.

It’s an idea which started with John Wesley and the early Methodists. For Methodists the first service in a new year is still known as Covenant Sunday. The ‘people called Methodists’, as they used to call themselves, have recited the same or very similar words every year since 1780 to make their covenant, their agreement, with the Lord. I’ll give you a quick preview, and then we will say the whole of this covenant prayer together later on in this service. So this is just to introduce you to it if you haven’t heard it before. What the Methodists pray goes like this.

We are no longer our own, but thine.

Put us to what thou wilt, rank us with whom thou wilt.

Put us to doing, put us to suffering.

Let us be employed for thee or laid aside for thee,

exalted for thee or brought low for thee.

Let us be full, let us be empty.

Let us have all things, let us have nothing.

We freely and heartily yield all things to thy pleasure and disposal.

And now, O glorious and blessed God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit,

thou art ours, and we are thine.

So be it.

And the covenant which we have made on earth,

let it be ratified in heaven.

Amen.

‘Put us to doing, put us to suffering;

let us be employed for thee or laid side for thee ….

And now, O glorious and blessed God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit,

thou art ours, and we are thine.

So be it.

And the covenant which we have made on earth,

let it be ratified in heaven.’

Those are John Wesley’s words from 1780. They’ve been repeated every year since. That’s it. We have to do what the Lord commands us to do, just as Jesus commanded his disciples; you know, not having two cloaks, letting other people go before us, so the last shall become first: loving our enemies, not turning our backs on poor people like Dives did, on people like nurses, and instead doing things that may not necessarily be that good for us as individuals but which reflect God’s love, and which Jesus told us to do.

‘Let us be full, let us be empty.

Let us have all things, let us have nothing.’

This is the agreement which we are invited to make, and which should be our guiding principle in the year to come. We have moved from Israel, wrestling with God, to Jesus, God is our salvation.

So let’s agree on that. Let’s make that covenant. Let’s do what we have to do in order to keep our side of the bargain. It’s not just a question of words. But if we do, if we do do more than just talk: then, the blessing will come; and now, here, it will be in the right place, at the end of the service, but it will be more than that: it will be a continuing blessing. The Lord will bless you and keep you. The Lord will make his face to shine upon you, so that it will, truly, be a happy New Year.

Sermon for the Second Sunday of Lent, 17th March 2019

Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18, Philippians 3:17-4:1, Luke 13:31-35

As we woke up on Friday, to hear the news about the terrible shootings in the mosques in Christchurch in New Zealand, the New Zealand Prime Minister, Mrs Ardern, made a moving statement about the fact that it seems clear that the 50 people killed were the victims of a racist, Islamophobic terrorist. Mrs Ardern said, ‘Many of those who will have been directly affected by this shooting will be migrants, they will be refugees here. They have chosen to make New Zealand their home and it is their home. They are us.’

A bit later on, a picture appeared on Twitter [reproduced above] of a man who, if I can say this, did not look like a Moslem, but rather like Andy Capp in the cartoons, in a flat cap, standing smiling outside a mosque in Manchester with a placard which said, ‘You are my friends. I will keep watch while you pray.’

Terrible atrocities do sometimes seem to bring out beautiful and uplifting thoughts, like those of Mrs Ardern and of the man in the flat cap outside the mosque in Manchester.

In our Lent study groups we are going through the Beatitudes, the ‘blessed are they’ sayings which Jesus spoke at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5.

The second one, perhaps the right one at a time of tragedy, is ‘Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.’ This is one of those short sentences that contains impossibly dense and complicated ideas. On the face of things, for somebody to be mourning, to be sad, to be heartbroken, is not in any sense the same as to be fortunate, which is what the word translated as ‘blessed’ means.

How lucky for you that you are heartbroken; what a wonderful thing it is that you are in floods of tears. Clearly there’s something which doesn’t add up. Try telling the distraught people that were on the TV from New Zealand that they were in some way blessed or fortunate. But really it means, as it says, that those who mourn will be blessed, will be comforted in future: and that is a message of hope after all.

St Paul, in his letter to the Philippians, condemns those who live as enemies of the cross of Christ. Earlier in the chapter we had as our reading, he identifies the people that he condemns. He says, ‘Beware of those dogs and their malpractices. Beware of those who insist on mutilation – I will not call it ‘circumcision’’. Beware of people who tell you you have to become a Jew in order to become a true Christian.

Nevertheless, Paul was proud to tell everybody that he had been circumcised and that he was an Israelite of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born and bred, and a Pharisee [Phil. 3:5]. He’d thrown it all over, after his Road-to-Damascus experience, and in his letters, for example to the Galatians and to the Romans, he made the point that, in the kingdom of heaven, there is no difference between Greeks, (Gentiles), and Jews.

The Israelites had been the chosen people of God, and the others, the Gentiles, the ‘nations’, were the great unwashed. But St Paul’s mission was to bring the good news of Jesus precisely to those Gentiles, to those who were not circumcised. He said, ‘Our citizenship is in heaven.’ Ordinary nationality doesn’t apply in heaven.

But originally, Paul – and Jesus – were Jews, sons of Abraham, descendants of Abraham. The word of the Lord came to Abraham and said, ‘Look toward heaven and count the stars; because that’s how many your descendants will be.’ The sons of Abraham. They were Israelites, the chosen people of God.

The gunman is supposed to have said that one of his reasons for shooting Moslems was because he saw them as strangers, ‘invaders’. At the beginning of this week in morning prayers we were reading from the Book of Deuteronomy, where Moses speaks the words of the Lord, a prophecy about offering sacrifice of the first fruits of the land, the land of milk and honey, which the Israelites have been led into, the promised land. Moses tells them to say in their prayers that they are descended from ‘a wandering Aramean’, or from ‘a Syrian ready to perish’, that they have been led into Egypt and then eventually out of Egypt again, as strangers in the land. Even they, the chosen people, started out as strangers.

There are many passages in the Book of Deuteronomy, and in the Jewish Law generally, which St Paul would have been very familiar with, which impose on Jews a duty to care for a stranger that is within their gates, to care for strangers along with orphans and widows. That is the spirit that Mrs Ardern has so eloquently reminded us of. It is not a spirit of antipathy towards immigrants and refugees, not against strangers, not against people who are different from ourselves.

This is such a difficult area. There are so many apparent paradoxes. The Jews, refugees, made it to the promised land; they went to the holy city, Jerusalem, and set up the temple there. ‘Jerusalem the golden, with milk and honey blest’.

But Jesus points out that, because that is where the council, the Sanhedrin, is based, it is only in Jerusalem that he can be condemned, and that Jerusalem is a city that kills prophets, that throws stones at people who are sent to it.

Mrs Ardern was one of those world leaders, like Mrs Merkel in Germany, who has dared to extend a welcome to refugees. She still extends that welcome. But what about us? The challenge to us today is surely not to be fixated with ‘taking back control’, with restricting immigration and upholding national identity, however important some of those things might seem to be at first.

Jesus said, ‘Strive to enter in at the strait gate. Struggle to get in through the narrow door. For I tell you that many will try to enter and not be able to. You may stand outside and knock: say, ‘Sir, let us in.’ But he will only answer, ‘I do not know where you come from.’ [Luke 13:24]

Where do we come from? You could say that Jesus makes getting into the kingdom of heaven seem like a refugee trying to come ashore in Italy, or trying to get through at the Hungarian border or even being caught up in our own Government’s ‘hostile environment’ at Heathrow today. Contrast that with what Mrs Ardern said. ‘ … They will be refugees here. They have chosen to make New Zealand their home. It is their home. They are us.’

The challenge for us as Christians is to raise our sights above the earthly ghastliness which stems from narrow nationalism, and to seek what is truly heavenly. ‘Blessed are those who mourn, because they will be comforted.’ Let us pray that, with God’s help, we can become channels of peace, so that we too can say that they are our friends, and that we will keep watch while they pray.

New Year 2023

You are my Friends