In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Glory to Jesus Christ! [Glory to him forever!]

As we inaugurate this new year of 2012, we have many thoughts on our mind, and the Church also gives us her thoughts, because we find ourselves between the feast of the Nativity and the feast of Theophany, which is the baptism of Christ. On this particular day, on this January 1, we also celebrate a particular day in the Church year, and it’s called the Circumcision of our Lord. We always celebrate that on January 1, and because this Sunday happens to be January 1, we celebrate that. So a lot of things are happening in the Church on this day. We also celebrate St. Basil the Great, and we celebrate his Liturgy today.

But let’s talk a little bit about circumcision, and let’s talk a little bit about where that comes from and what does that mean to us. If we have Jewish friends, we know Jewish families, especially if babies have been born, circumcision is kind of their rite of initiation. Eight days after a child is born, in the Jewish faith, a child is ritually circumcised; a boy is ritually circumcised. We won’t— For those of us who are adults and who understand what circumcision is, we don’t have to explain it. It’s kind of a unique thing.

I remember I was driving somewhere, and I was listening to NPR, and there was a story on NPR about Reformed Jews. So these are like Jews that don’t necessarily keep all of the aspects of the Law, like you would see somebody, Orthodox Jew, that really keeps every aspect of the Law; these are Reformed Jews, so they kind of change and they pick and choose what they want, kind of like Reformed Christians. And the Reformed Jews, some of the young families now, it’s becoming very fashionable to not circumcise the child. The reasoning goes: “Oh, you know, why do we want to put the child, who’s only eight days old, through this pain and through this suffering. This young boy, why do we want to cut his flesh like that? It’s such a terrible introduction into the world.” So they’ve substituted— some of them have substituted kind of like a naming ceremony, and they just forego the ritual of circumcision.

It’s interesting, because I think it’s very typical of our day and time to eschew this kind of ritual aspect of faith, but also specifically to say, “We don’t want to do this because we don’t want to introduce the child into any kind of pain.” And those of us that have been parents for a long time, we kind of smile, and we say: Yeah, you’ll figure it out. You’ll understand that this child is going to go through pain whether you want them to or not, and there’s nothing that you can do to kind of keep that from happening. In a certain way, this fallen life is rather painful, and this fallen life is subject to death and to the difficulties of this life, to sin. And so the ritual of circumcision, which is the sign in the Jewish faith of the covenant God makes with Abraham to say, “You are my people,” within the Jewish faith, there’s all kinds of interpretations as to what this circumcision means. Why do we cut the flesh of a young boy at eight days old?

But what I’ve been telling you for a long time is that the Old Testament cannot be understood except through the lens of Christ, through the light of Christ. All of it is interpreted in the light of Christ. And you think about every Jewish boy that has been born since the time of Abraham, virtually every one has undergone this snipping of their flesh. In other words, this shedding of blood. It is a sign, dear brothers and sisters in Christ, whether the Jews want to understand it this way or not, of the coming of our Lord in the flesh, and specifically of his voluntary suffering in the flesh and the cutting of his flesh by the nails in his hand and the nails in his feet and the spear in his side, to shed that blood for the life of the world. Every single Jewish male has gone through this sign to be reminded of the Messiah to come.

And then, today, we find ourselves in the Sunday before Theophany, and on the Theophany, on the Epiphany, when Christ is baptized in the flesh, he takes on this sign of repentance. So he kind of stands as the bridge between the old covenant and the new covenant of baptism, because it’s said very clearly in the epistle reading that we heard today; it said, “Beware, lest anyone cheat you through philosophy or empty deceit, according to the traditions of men, according to the basic principles of the world, and not according to Christ.” In other words, everything that we do in our life, as we stand on this first day of the year, if we’re going to make any resolution—I’ve got my resolutions, too, and I hope that I fulfill them—but if we’re going to make any resolution, it has to be the resolution of uniting ourselves to Christ, because it says, “For in him (Christ) dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily, and you are complete in him who is the Head of all principality and power.”

In other words, St. Paul is making an argument against ritual circumcision. This was a difficulty in the early Church. There were so-called Judaizers that said, “You know, in order to be a Christian, you really need to go through the Jewish rituals first; then you do the Christian initiation.” So they were circumcising people that wanted to believe in Christ, and St. Paul said, “No, no, no. You don’t need to be circumcised to be in Christ, because in Christ all the fullness of God dwells bodily, and you’re complete in him.” And it says—listen—“In him you were also circumcised with the circumcision made without hands.” In other words, it wasn’t a rabbi circumcising you; you were circumcised with the circumcision made without hands by putting off the body of the sins of the flesh, by the circumcision of Christ, buried with him in baptism.

In other words, our circumcision, our agreement, our covenant with Christ that we each one of us make, not just the males, is to die to the sins of this world, to die to our old life in baptism. So we’re not just snipping off a piece of flesh; we’re killing our entire life as we know it. And when we come up out of the water, we’re being raised; we’re not only participating in the resurrection of Christ, we’re being ourselves raised to a new life. And so this baptism, for us, is, you might say, the fulfillment of circumcision. It’s the real circumcision: buried with him in baptism, in which you also were raised with him in faith through the working of God who raised him from the dead.

So all of those Jewish children that are being circumcised, that circumcision for them just has the meaning of being members of the Jewish community, of the sign of the covenant that God has a chosen people. But the real meaning of it is the coming of Christ in the flesh and his shedding of the blood. That’s the sign that every Jewish male is reminded of, and they don’t get it! They don’t understand it. And for us, we also go through a baptism, not simply a human ritual, but the working of God in us, to die to our old life, to raise to a new life. And God forbid that we would make the same mistake, that we would forget that we were baptized into Christ, that we were baptized to shed our life, to die to our old life, to live to a new life, to be raised with Christ to a new way of life. That baptism gives us the gift of that new beginning.

And so on this day of new beginnings, on this day where we celebrate and we think about the new year, and we have all of our little things that we do—some people, they eat pork on this day, or they have beans and greens and things like this… I can remember when I was growing up, my mother, every single year—and I think about my mom, because her anniversary of her death was yesterday—she always—we would stay up until midnight, and I’m sure Donya would remember, and Michael would remember—she would go to the back door, and she would open the door and then close the door, and then she’d go to the front door, and she would open the door and close the door. She did that every year, and I remember the first time I noticed her do it. I said, “Why did you do that?” She said, “We’re letting the old year out, and we’re bringing the new year in.” And I always remembered that. If I was awake, I would do the same thing. [Laughter] To kind of let the old year out and let the new year in. So we have these little things.

But the substance of everything, all of these little traditions, all of these little things we have, that’s not what our life is about. Our life is about Christ, and if we’re going to make a New Year’s resolution, let’s make it so that we’re fulfilling the law of Christ, the circumcision of Christ, it says, our baptism, because our baptism is the basis of everything. As we begin this new year, I greet you with all of God’s blessings and prayers for a wonderful, prosperous, happy, healthy new year for you and your families, but I also wish for you a deepening and a strengthening of your faith in Christ so that we would put off the old man with its sin, with its death, with its pain, and we would put on the new man with its life and with its richness, and the path that Christ has set for us in this new year, because all things are fulfilled in him.

To him who is our life, with the Father and the Spirit, be glory, honor, and majesty, always, now and ever, and unto ages of ages. Amen. Glory to Jesus Christ! [Glory to him forever!]