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+ + + In Nomine Jesu + + +
Please join me in prayer: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.
The Church began its new year back in November, with the First Sunday in Advent, but, on our secular calendar, today is New Year’s Day, the same day on which the Church observes the Circumcision and Name of Jesus. That today is both New Year’s Day on the secular calendar and the Circumcision and Name of Jesus on the Church calendar is not just a coincidence, in the sense of separate things happening at the same time by chance. Rather, the Gregorian calendar that society follows was intended to begin with the Incarnation of Christ and eventually came to have uniformly as its first day the day on which the Christ Child was circumcised and named. (Working some 500 years after the fact, the calendar’s designer may have missed the precise year of Christ’s birth by a few years, but we, nevertheless, from the Gregorian calendar’s use, get our abbreviations “B-C” for “before Christ” and “A-D” for Anno Domini Latin for “in the year of the Lord”. However, in an effort to eliminate references to Christ the Lord from our dating system, some today have changed the designations “B-C” to “B-C-E” for “before the Common Era” and “A-D” to “C-E” for “Common Era”.) Since we here at Pilgrim with Advent have already observed the start of the Church’s new year, today we focus on our Gospel Reading and ask the question, “What’s in a name and circumcision?”
With the Gospel Reading, St. Luke by Divine inspiration is continuing to give an orderly report of Jesus’s origins to Theophilus in order for Theophilus to have certainty concerning the things he had been taught. St. Luke writes that eight days after Mary gave birth to her firstborn Son and wrapped Him in swaddling cloths and laid Him in a manger, she and Joseph, as part of their Son’s circumcision, named Him “Jesus”, the name given separately to each of them by an angel of the Lord. St. Luke does not tell us where in Bethlehem they were living at this time or even whether or not they were still living in Bethlehem at all. Rather, in his usual understated way he simply reports both the circumcising and the naming, though the emphasis is clearly on the naming.
“What’s in a name?” What do your and my names mean? “Stephen” is from the Greek word stephanos, meaning “crown, garland, honor, and reward”. “Carl” is from the Old Norse word for “free man”, and “Carolyn” is a feminine form of the same name. “Angela” is a feminine form of the Greek word angelos, meaning “messenger”, and “Jayson” is from the Greek word iasthai and means “healer”. Do our names today mean that Stephen is a reward, that Carl and Carolyn are free people, that Angela is a messenger, and that I am a healer? In Biblical times such as today’s Gospel Reading, names were “more than a mere label only incidentally associated with the [people who bore them; names were] an indispensible part of the personality.” Over time, philosophers debated whether or not names reflected reality, the true essence of a person or thing. Playwright William Shakespeare may be reflecting such philosophical thinking when he has Juliet ask Romeo the rhetorical question (fans of the Texas Shakespeare Festival may know), “What’s in a name?” Some Stoic philosophers thought that one God’s having many names was an honor, and they tried to do away with the idea of many gods by saying the many different names just reflected one God’s different modes of operation. One has to wonder whether St. Peter had that Stoic view partly in mind when, referring to Jesus, he told the Sanhedrin that “there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.”
How do you and I do with the idea of the name of Jesus as the only means of salvation? Do we think that the Jewish god named “Yahweh” and the Muslim god named “Allah” are the same as the Christian God named “Jesus”? Do we think that calling on any of the three names can lead to salvation? What about the god of the Mormons or the god of the Jehovah’s Witnesses? The matter gets even more complicated when different Christian denominations use the same name “Jesus” but believe different things about Who He is, what He does, and how He works. Even if you and I do okay answering those questions, how do we do with our use of God’s Name stipulated in the Second Commandment? Even if we “may not curse, swear, use witchcraft, lie, or deceive by [God’s] name”, do we “call upon [God’s Name] in every trouble, pray, praise, and give thanks”? Or, do we greet every bit of news with “O-M-G” and have in mind no god at all? Do we, as we pray in the Lord’s Prayer, let God’s Name be holy among us by teaching the Word of God in its truth and purity and by leading holy lives according to it? Surely you and I sin in these and countless other ways, for we are sinful by nature, and we deserve nothing less than eternal separation from God in the torments of hell.
Such eternal separation from God in the torments of hell is not what God wants for us, of course, and so He calls us to repent: to turn in sorrow from our sin and to trust Him to forgive our sin. So, we repent—we turn in sorrow from our sins of thinking all gods are the same and equally save, we turn in sorrow from our sins of misusing or not hallowing God’s Name, we turn in sorrow from all our sins, and we trust God to forgive our sin, whatever it might be. When we so repent, God truly forgives our sin; He forgives our sin for Jesus’s sake.
When the angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and told Joseph to name Mary’s Son “Jesus”, the angel said to give the Son the name Jesus because the Son would save His people from their sins. The name “Jesus” comes from the Hebrew name we know as “Joshua”, which essentially means “the Lord saves”. The name “Jason” may be another variation on the name “Joshua” but like people named “Jesus” today, none of us so-named save or heal the way Mary’s Son named “Jesus” does. In the New Testament, the name, person, and work of Mary’s Son Jesus is “inseparably linked” to the name, person, and work of God, because Jesus is God in the flesh. The eternal God in the eight-day-old flesh of Mary’s Son with His circumcision began His perfect keeping of the law for us and shed His first drops of blood for us. His life of obedience for us, His later bloodshed on the cross for us, and His resurrection on the eighth day for us completed our redemption. The God-man Jesus lived the perfect life we fail to live, and He paid the price for our failures to live it. He truly lives up to His name as the One Who saves His people from their sins. We who believe in Him have the forgiveness of our sins, salvation, graciously given to us in specific ways.
We have talked about “What’s in a name?”; so let us consider “What’s in a circumcision?” Last May an anti-circumcision group in San Francisco got enough petition signatures to put a ban on circumcision on that city’s November ballot. The group denied circumcision any significant health benefits and said that circumcision was a form of mutilation that inflicted suffering on little boys. A judge kept the ban off the ballot, saying it would violate state and federal freedoms, but the controversy is typical of today’s secular debates over circumcision, even as Greeks before the time of Jesus prohibited Jewish circumcision as barbaric. In the Christian Church today, we are free to circumcise or not. That Old Testament ritual that set someone apart to God and brought the person under the covenant of grace and thereby into God’s people has been fulfilled in Christ and superseded. In the New Testament and beyond, Holy Baptism sets us apart to God and brings us under the covenant of grace and thereby into God’s people. In writing to the Colossians, St. Paul makes clear that the circumcision of Christ is Baptism, the Holy Spirit’s washing us by water with the Word, which buries us with Christ and raises us with Him through faith. Before Baptism and faith, St. Paul says we were all dead in our sins and the uncircumcision of our flesh, but God makes us alive and forgives us. Just as eight-day old infants were circumcised in the Old Testament, so eight-day old infants are baptized in the New Testament. As St. Paul writes in today’s Epistle Reading, Baptism is the great equalizer of the order of redemption. Just as circumcision led to one’s partaking of the Passover, so Baptism leads to one’s partaking of the Sacrament of the Altar—receiving Christ’s body and blood in, with, and under bread and wine, for the forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation. God’s having worked through circumcision certainly seems unreasonable to fallen human minds, just as God’s working through water, sinful men, and bread and wine seems unreasonable. But, why does our fallen reason get to judge God’s Word?
Receiving the Sacrament of the Altar, watching parades and football, shooting off fireworks, plunging into ice-cold water, eating black-eyed peas or pickled herring in cream sauce—all are various traditions and customs (though certainly not equal ones) for New Year’s Day, what some regard as “the world’s only truly global public holiday”. We who this day in the Church have concentrated on the Circumcision and Name of Jesus have heard “What’s in a name and circumcision”. We know that we may not live up to what our names mean but that Jesus lives up to His as Savior. While we continue to fail—whether to confess Jesus as the only Name of salvation, to use God’s Name rightly, to let God’s Name be holy among us, or to fail in any other way—each and every day of each and every year, we continue to live in the forgiveness of sins He graciously gives us in His Word and the Sacraments. We rejoice that God blesses us, whether He blesses us with the threefold Name of the Lord as in the benediction given to Aaron in today’s Old Testament Reading or whether He blesses us in the Trinitarian Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit used so often by the apostle Paul. Regardless of the form of the benediction, the blessing of having God’s Name upon us is the same—the forgiveness of sins—and the response from all God’s people is the same: Amen.
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +