Doubt, Action, and Circumcision

            Genesis 16 begins with another of those stories that is really unflattering to Abram.  He is 85; he has waited ten years for God to begin to fulfill His promise about descendants; and he decides (again) to take matters into his own hands—or, into his own bed, as the case is.  He impregnates his wife’s servant.  This was not an unusual arrangement in the ancient world.  The problem for Abram is the impatience and doubt it reveals about the Lord keeping His promises.

            I don’t think we should take this call for patience as a reason to avoid acting and making decisions.  Sometimes, I think that ‘praying about it’ becomes an excuse for refusing to be responsible for decisions.  I do think the story should remind us that our decisions need to be informed by God’s words and promises.  Let’s be fair to Abram:  it had been 10 years and all that the Lord had explicitly said so far was that the promised descendant would be from his body; Sarai hadn’t figured in the discussion much yet except for a repeated note that she was barren.  So, maybe it’s asking too much of Abram to 1) resist a common cultural course of action; 2) be radically faithful to his wife; and 3) wait until he was even older to have the child.  Sometimes for us, too, it’s just really hard to discern what God’s will is.  Perhaps I’m right that Christians need to act more often; or, perhaps I need to take contemplation and prayer more seriously as the appropriate response to God’s seeming inaction.  You can probably make a good argument either way:  sometimes the right course of action is wait-and-see; sometimes it is try-it-and-see.  Rarely is God’s plan written in big bold letters!

            On an almost unrelated topic, Genesis 17 introduces circumcision for the first time.  Notice that circumcision is the outward sign that Abraham and his descendants are included in God’s covenant.  (The name change from Abram to Abraham—‘exalted father’ to ‘father of many’—indicates Abraham’s changing fortunes with the Lord.  The promise is about to fulfilled!)  An external, bodily action that connects one to God’s promises?  Sounds like a sacrament to me!  The Sacraments—Baptism and the Lord’s Supper—are just that.  On the one hand, they are external acts—some water on a body; some bread; some wine.  On the other hand, they create and sustain spiritual realities.  They are means of grace, instruments that the Lord uses to connect us to the covenant of love He made with us through the death and resurrection of Jesus.

            There are those in Christianity who would disagree with me, but I see a remarkable consistency in the way God deals with His people through the ages.  Important features of that relationship include a continual emphasis on the fact that our God wants to deal with humans face-to-face.  (The current separation is the result of sin, and the Lord has been working to overcome it ever since Eden.)  And they include God’s desire to address us as fully human—body and soul—sacramentally.  Anyone who wants to say that the essence of a human is ‘spiritual’ and that the ‘physical’ is less important hasn’t been paying attention since Genesis 1.