You can’t be a Christian through the window (in lieu of several jokes about circumcision).

“17 Then Abraham fell on his face and laughed and said to himself, “Shall a child be born to a man who is a hundred years old? Shall Sarah, who is ninety years old, bear a child?… You shall be circumcised in the flesh of your foreskins, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and you. He who is eight days old among you shall be circumcised. ” (Genesis 17)

The first time you were called that word, the one associated with your heritage or skin color, your race. The first time you lost a fist fight or had the talk with a boyfriend who was trying hard to let you down easily. The first time you realized that the world was divided between families with functioning two-parent homes and your kind of family, that wasn't. The first time the racks at the store no longer kept your size in stock. When the list or the roster or the invitation did not have your name on it. Or maybe for some of us, when you sat in the pew and noticed the line of people beside you with heads bowed to someone. Someone you were convinced either did not exist or no longer existed for you. These are all formative experiences. I would say they are all formative religious experiences because they greatly impact how we understand the fundamental nature of belief in God.  

The wounds, if you want to call them that, or heartbreaks, or adverse human events, we experience as human beings, can do more than stop us in our tracks, they can relocate us. The experience of suffering in our world can define us as insiders or outsiders. They settle the question of whether we are welcome as human beings, or we are not. And I find that often the person who believes themself to be an outsider to man, thinks the same of God.  

Imagine a room, a place of real beauty. There are bookshelves full of the kind of poetry and prose that makes your heart sing. A chair by the fire. But more importantly the room has the people who mean the most to you and they're enjoying one another. The stories are deeply revealing but generous, there is something about that room that allows you to feel completely at home and at rest. The truths you tell are more true, the vulnerability you feel is not frightening but heartwarming. You are at home.  

There are two defining ways to experience that room: from the inside, as a treasured guest, or from outside the house, through the window. As an outsider hoping to earn their way inside. One experiences the truth of that room very differently depending on their location.  From the window you cannot hear the truth that happens beyond words: you get the basics, you think, but you miss the truest truth: the tone of voice that cares deeply about your story, the heat from the hand that holds yours as they tell you how much they love you. The way a friend can barely catch their breath from laughing. The way the air thickens with either mutual heartbreak or mutual joy. There are things you learn by being in that room that you cannot learn from beyond the window. 

This is the lesson of the bloody rite in Genesis 17, one of the strangest texts to preach, but also, believe it or not, one of the most humane. The world is full of outsiders, we ourselves maybe more days than not, operate a life of faith, if not all of our most precious relationships, from the windows. We are watchers instead of receivers, observers instead of lovers and laughers. And the simple truth is that for us who tend to operate as orphans and outsiders, God must make Christianity a family thing for us to believe in it. Until we were brought into the room where we could learn how to tell the real truth and how to hear the real truth, as children do. And so he moved to bring us inside, that we might believe. The arcane ritual said, above all else, that faith is a family thing, and you are family. 

Our grasp of Christian theology tends to miss this distinction, that in order for the Bible to be believed, it requires hospitality, the experience of being an insider. Our churches tend to operate faith from the windows, the confirmed believers inside and the potential believers outside. We train people to do theology from the outside looking in, hoping to earn their way into the room. But the one who only experiences true Christian hospitality after they've earned it is never truly at rest in the room, rightly suspecting that if they can earn their way in they can earn their way out, too. Might as well leave one's coat on, because you never know. Maybe you've kept your coat on in churches, or everywhere you've been, your whole life. To you, and to all of us who have trouble believing at least some of the time, this sign was given to God's people as a way to understand that you learn God the Father's love best from inside the family home being shaped by it, rather than outside the home, hoping to earn it. And so, thousands of years later, we are still welcoming people by rite before they believe a thing. By a rite of baptism that now falls on both men and women, in the shadow of the King who was cut away from us by blood, put outside, that we might be inside. 

If it's true at all, these lives lived four thousand years ago and the rituals that lit their Rembrandt worlds, it will have to be a truth that is learned not by bludgeon but by a fire. It will have to be gleaned like a wanderer, when they gleaned from the harvest fields of the promised land. If we are going to believe we will have to first be-live the welcome of God in the Church of God, where faith is heard in the pew next to someone, and exhaled in the passing of the peace, and by God it is eaten at the very Table of the Lord. A Table built for runners and outsiders, with their coats on, an eye on the door. And with the blessing, suddenly the bread and wine becomes a family meal, and one another's unbelief under their breath dissolves in the give-and-take of blood relatives. No longer strong and weak faiths, but brothers and sisters, story tellers and receivers, healers, laughers, grievers and repenters, family. May our God make us a people of his divine hospitality. May we know the honesty and determination of his welcome, so that we can, without fear, believe.