It's not all burning bushes?

Ashley W, from the blogroll

http://questforadequacy.blogspot.com/2011/11/forgotten-story.html

At a lodging place on the way, the LORD met Moses and was about to kill him. But Zipporah took a flint knife, cut off her son’s foreskin and touched Moses’ feet with it. “Surely you are a bridegroom of blood to me,” she said. So the LORD let him alone. (At that time she said “bridegroom of blood,” referring to circumcision.) Exodus 4:24-26.
I don't have a nice little homily about this story. We didn't learn it in Sunday school. I don't remember ever hearing a sermon about it (and I have heard a lot of sermons).

I really only have two things to say about it:

1. It's not all burning bushes and parting seas.
2. The Bible has a lot of stories about people interacting with God and some of them are just plain weird.


Oh Dear.

God quite frequently delivers messages to RantWoman in some other idiom besides nice Quakerese. RantWoman's life is particularly rich in thoughts that take form in either the Feminazi Bitch or just the Excessively Plain English subdialects. When RantWoman is being a GOOD Quaker she seasons these messages, occasionally for years, until God delivers Quakerese. RantWoman is not waiting around for Quakerese here.

RantWoman laughed for 10 minutes about item 2.

RantWoman, though, has some suggestions:

--RantWoman herself is not a particularly perspicacious student of Jung, archetypes, psychoanalytic theory, semiotics, or some associated schools of literary criticism. If RantWoman were even a slightly better student of some of these theories, RantWoman would definitely bang away at the symbolism and cultural history of both the passage and Friend Ashley's comments some more and see where the "weird" leads.

--As far as never hearing a sermon about this exact passage, RantWoman notes that lots and lots of pastors are male. RantWoman knows LOTS of men who wince when talking about neutering their pets. Even among people who believe passionately in everything associated with circumcision, it also has a gigantic wince factor. So RantWoman is unsurprised that this passage has not yet leapt to the fore as the basis for a sermon. But is Friend Ashley perhaps called to be the first to deliver such a sermon?