Genesis 17 "Space for God" Scott Hoezee

Most mature adults have a sense of "personal space." This is a kind of imaginary bubble that surrounds our bodies. It's an area of intimacy, of closeness, and so of a degree of privacy. We routinely allow other people to burst through this bubble in the very common gesture of a handshake. It's a pretty personal gesture, but not too personal, not too up-close. Now and again you may realize that even a handshake involves a somewhat intimate skin-on-skin contact as when maybe someone pulls back from shaking hands and says, "I've got a terrible cold! Believe me, you don't want to shake my hand today!"

Mostly, though, a handshake is the one "violation" of our personal space that we hardly even notice. Receiving a hug from someone is far more personal, however, and so we don't hug just anyone. I can also remember, not long after I was ordained, shaking hands at the door after church when the mundane act of handshaking was interrupted by a well-meaning older lady who ran her hand along my cheeks as a way to take note that I recently had shaved off my beard. This was an invasion of my personal space I was unprepared for (and wasn't sure I much liked!). Other times we may feel crowded if the person to whom we're talking stands extra close, "in my face," as we put it. We involuntarily find ourselves taking a half-step back! And, of course, we could easily go on along these lines. There are even certain ways by which a man may lay a hand on a woman that can be called criminal, sexual harassment. Because some touches are reserved only for lovers.

In short, there's got to be a good reason for someone to violate our sense of personal space. This morning, God's Holy Spirit, decisively popped your bubble of personal space, but I'd wager you hardly even noticed it. Some of you walked into church this morning with your sense of privacy as intact as it ever is. You would have blushed right down to your toes had another person in the narthex scooped you up in a big bear hug. Yet before this morning's service was over, God touched you in a very intimate way.

It was a sacramental touch. It was bread, it was wine. These sacred elements were taken into your hand and then placed into your mouth. From there they passed into the very fiber of your being. It's still inside you tonight, transformed now into energy that has gone into your bloodstream and cells. Eating is an act of intimacy whereby what had been outside of you actually comes inside.

The Lord's Supper, and really Baptism as well, is the Spirit's caress of us, as I put it in another sermon last year. The water touches the body, makes it wet, and so babies at the font sometimes squirm, sometimes scream. The bread and the wine of the holy supper enter our bodies, touch teeth, tongues, stomachs. The sacraments are meant to involve us physically as well as spiritually as a sign of just how tangible God's love is. They are also a sign of how all-encompassing God's gospel is supposed to be in our lives. God loves us and is with us always and in intimate ways.

Surely this was a sacramental lesson that was not lost on old Abraham. Although it may make us uncomfortable or embarrassed, Genesis 17 forces us to think about and talk about a man's most private sexual organ. Because for some almost bizarre reason, when God wanted to formalize his covenant with Abraham, the sacramental sign God gave mixed theology with a man's loins. Literally, the word "circumcise" means "to cut around," and if you've ever witnessed a Jewish Bris or the circumcision of your own child (as I did), you know precisely what it means physically.

But what in the world does it mean theologically? At the very least you would have no difficulty seeing the invasion of personal space that this sacrament involved! This is as intimate and close as it gets, and maybe that was part of the purpose. Of course, there is another fairly obvious link to the theology of Genesis when you remember that the chief promise God gave had to do with progeny, offspring, conceiving a child. Given the age of Abraham and Sarah, this was probably the most difficult part of the covenant to believe and so, if it ever happened, the birth would represent God's grandest covenantal breakthrough. So in a way, there is maybe some sense after all to have the sign of this particular covenant get located on the male organ of generation, of procreation and conception.

A sacrament, we learned to say in Catechism class, is a visible sign of God's invisible grace. It's an outward sign and seal of the inward reality of salvation. In our setting, where Baptism and the Lord's Supper are our two sacraments, we are always careful to make clear that these signs depend on God's Word. That's why here at our church the font and table flank the pulpit. The sacraments stand alongside of God's Word because they are illustrations of, reminders of, seals of, and further channels of what we read about in the Bible.

Sacraments don't add any new information to the gospel, but our participation in these rituals enlivens the gospel for us, makes it clearer, more vivid. As we said this morning, we also believe that sacraments are not just like a window through which you glimpse God and his kingdom. Instead something really happens to us through the sacraments, Christ truly is present and the Spirit really is active. We are changed, strengthened by the sacraments; our union with Christ is made thicker and more secure.

Those are among the reasons God gives sacramental signs to his people. Every time we see a baptism, we see not only God's marvelous activity in the life of the baptized baby but we are further reminded of our own baptisms and all the rich promises that cascaded over us at that time, washing over us like a wave at the seashore. Every time we eat the bread and drink the cup, we are at once reminded of Jesus' precious sacrifice and we participate in the living Christ in a way that energizes us and nourishes us for the journey of faith.

In Genesis 17:11, God tells Abraham that circumcision would be a visible sign to look at, to see, to reflect on for generations to come. But it goes without saying that this is one sign that won't be seen that often. This is a sign whose sightings will be reserved for the intimate setting of the marriage bed, a sign that is at once intensely private and publicly rich in its cosmic promise for God's blessing on the whole earth.

Now if all of this is making you feel a bit awkward--if you're sitting there right now holding your breath a little in fear of certain words you hope I won't say or imagery I won't evoke any more than I already have--maybe just this is at least partially on-target in terms of understanding God's ways with his people. But perhaps a look at the whole of Genesis 17 will be a good way for us further to understand this lesson.

Between Genesis 16 and 17 another dozen or so years have passed. That brings the total span of time since God's initial call of Abram in chapter 12 to nearly 24 years. That's a long time, a quarter-century almost. Twenty-four years ago now was 1978--Jimmy Carter was president, the Cold War was a daily reality. Those of you who retired in just the last three years had half of your career to look forward to yet in 1978, and the birth of a current high school senior was still a good seven years off--many of the parents of our young people weren't even married yet in '78! Yours truly was in eighth grade at Ada Christian School, and you can all go back in your own memories to recall where you were at that time.

The point is that within the ordinary span of our lives, a quarter-century is a pretty big chunk of time. For Abram and Sarai, those were years of increasing doubt and disbelief. They weren't exactly spring chickens when God called them out of Ur in the first place and the succeeding couple of decades had only magnified their sense of being on the high side of life's course. By all rights, next on their docket was Raybrook, not the Family Birth Center at DeVos Children's Hospital.

Now and again over those many years God popped back in to repeat his promise of progeny and land. But it sounded a little more far-fetched with each successive visit. You all know what you eventually think of the old college friend (let's call him Floyd) who, every time you see him (which is only about once every other year or so), swears that he's going to give you a call because, hey, isn't it high time we had dinner and got caught up on each other's lives!? "I'll call you this week yet, and this time I really will!" But then he never does and so although you know exactly what he'll say eighteen months down the road when you bump into Floyd again, you won't believe him. Maybe the first time or two you took the promised dinner seriously, but after a while you cannot help but chalk it up as "just talk."

So as Genesis 17 opens and Yahweh appears to Abram once again, you have the feeling that inside his head Abram was saying to himself, "Here we go again! I know exactly what God is going to say next!" And sure enough, God reiterates the promise of making Abram the father of many nations. There is one new twist this time, however, in that Yahweh re-names Abram as a further way to bring this promise of offspring home a bit more. Abram now becomes "Abraham," the "father of many."

God then goes on in verses 9-14 to introduce what we already thought about this evening: the sign of circumcision. It will be a permanent sign on Abraham's own body that God's promise is also permanent and forever. As we also already noted, it will be a sign located on a body part associated with conceiving children, and so is clearly meant to seal that vital part of God's covenant.

So the promise of land and children has been echoed yet again. God has given Abram a new name, has ordered Abraham to undergo a little surgical procedure, and finally says that Sarai, now Sarah, is on the verge of conceiving a son. But in verse 17 the apparent absurdity of it all catches up with Abraham and he starts to giggle. A giggle turns into a chortle, a chortle into a belly laugh. Finally, he falls face down in the hope that maybe God won't notice that Abraham is laughing in the presence of El Shaddai, God Almighty.

As he laughs into the dirt, he says to himself, "Right! Like it's terribly likely a century-old man and a broken-down woman of 90 are going to have a son!" It was all just too much. Why would God assign a man who has never had a child with his wife a new name that means something like "Big Daddy"? Why would God want him to start cutting on the one part he will most need if the absurd were to come true and he and Sarah were to conceive the promised son? But above all is the really big question: if God is so serious about this, why has there been nearly twenty-five years of all talk and no action?

Abraham even gives the "Plan B" of Ishmael one more whirl but God's response is the same as we saw two weeks ago in chapter 16: although God will bless Hagar's son, he won't be the main target of the covenantal promises. These will all be directed toward the boy Abraham and Sarah are to name Laughter, Isaac. This son will be born inside a year, Yahweh says in conclusion. Then God withdraws, and somehow or another Abraham finds that he has stopped laughing. Somehow or another the specificity of God's words about a son to be born by the same time next year got through to him sufficiently that Abraham wastes no time whatsoever before following through on God's command to circumcise himself and every other male in the household.

To state the merely obvious, Abraham would not have subjected himself or anyone else to this rather painful procedure were it not for the fact that, by the grace of God's Spirit, he had somehow moved from laughter to renewed faith. In and on his own flesh he now bore the mark of God's promise. He let the covenantal love and faithfulness of God settle into his own skin, become a part of who he simply was. Maybe God's appearances had been a bit intermittent over the last quarter-century and maybe over time that gave Abraham cause to wonder if God would ever do what he had vowed. But now Abraham carried around with him a sign that would not leave him, would not be intermittent, but that would be as constant as the love of God--the love to which Abraham clung in faith.

Mostly we are particular and choosy about the people we touch (and vice-versa, the people we allow to touch us), especially when the touch in question is personal, close, intimate. So it's telling that our God in Christ has given us sacraments that touch us in the tender and personal ways they do. God loves us that much. God wants this kind of close affection and intimacy with us. Maybe the sacraments are mostly for our benefit in the church, but maybe they are meaningful also to God. God, too, wants communion with us.

It's no coincidence, after all, that in the New Testament the most revealing simile for Christ's relationship to the church is that of marriage, of husband and wife. For in marriage there is a bond of loving affection that is as intimate as it gets. The two become one flesh, and though that image means more than the sexual component, it does not mean less. Husband and wife touch each other, unite with each other in a most marvelous way. This nuptial unity leads us to sexuality and the intimacy associated with it. Thus, the New Testament's parallel of this relationship to our union with Christ leads us in a real way back to Abraham and circumcision and the covenant love that first sacrament signed and sealed.

Somehow it's all saying the same basic thing: God loves us. God desires our nearness, our intimacy, our love returned back to him. What's more, this love follows us wherever we go in life. Our union with Christ needs to be carved into the flesh of our hearts (which, as you no doubt recall, Paul in the New Testament calls "the circumcision of the heart"). It needs to be that real, that central, that personal, and that all-encompassing for us.

When we began this sermon series, I said that we'd need to pay attention to what we've been calling "the education of Abraham." Why did God wait so long to come through on the promise of a child? We may not know the answer to that fully, but you'd hardly be surprised if you discovered that one reason was it took that long to teach Abraham enough trust in God that he could finally arrive at a day when he'd let his own flesh get carved up as a symbol of his devotion and faith. The Abram who failed to trust God in Egypt wouldn't have done that. The Abram who tried to make a servant named Eliezar his legal heir wouldn't have done that. The Abram who went along with the scheme to make Hagar's son the fulfillment of the promise wouldn't have done that. But somehow God's been educating Abraham all along until by Genesis 17, he goes so far as circumcision because he is beginning to trust the God who called him so long ago. His holy education still is not complete, and he'll have more trials to endure before it's all over, but he's getting there.

He's starting to see how solid God's love for him is and so how reliable the promise will finally prove to be as well. Engulfed by the mystery of God's love, he now has a new name and carries on his person a new sign. It's personal now. Actually, it always has been. It is for us, too. It was this morning as the muscles of your jaws and the saliva from your glands and the digestion of your stomachs participated in receiving the presence of Christ as surely as your heart and mind participated in it all. For in worship, and surely in the sacraments, we encounter no one less than El Shaddai, God Almighty. The wonder of it all is that this same awesome God wants to touch you. So he does. Personal space becomes space for God, and his love then remains with you. Always. Thanks be to God. Amen.