Sermon
for Sunday, August 11, 2013
Heidelberg
450 Series: Lord’s Day 13
First
Presbyterian Church ▪ Lake Crystal, Minnesota
Rev. Randal K. Lubbers, Pastor
& Teacher
“Adopted by God”
Mary Jo was too young to remember this… but she told the story to
my friend Jeanne… and Jeanne retold the story some years later... and, today, I tell it to you...
Mary Jo was just a baby when her parents saw her for the first
time. Her mom and dad chose her—yes, CHOSE her!—out of several infants at a
home for unwed mothers. They picked her because she was the one child actively looking
around the room—not just lying passively. Two years later they adopted a son.
And when Mary Jo was around 11, her mother, at 38, became pregnant quite
unexpectedly and gave birth to Hope, a daughter.
All along, Mary Jo’s Dad and Mom made her feel just as loved as
Hope, affirming her, saying, “We didn’t wait for you for nine months, Mary Jo,
we waited for you for three years!” and “Remember, Mary Jo, we actually went
out and sought you.” Even before Hope’s birth, Mary Jo had latched onto the
Bible verses about adoption.
We heard one of those passages earlier this morning…
Before the foundation of the world
[God] chose us to become, in Christ, his holy and blameless children living
within his constant care. He planned, in his purpose of love, that we should be
adopted as his own children through Jesus Christ… (Ephesians 1:4-5).
Yes, Jesus is the only natural
Son of God, but we are his brothers and sisters. We are adopted children of God; adopted
by the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ.
“Good news!” Right?
Yes, good news. And yet...
Yet the theology of adoption can be problematic
for adopted children, as a colleague of mine, Rev. Paul Janssen, reminded me recently.
The idea of adoption is very comforting “…for those of us who are in our blood
families… [But] for many who are adopted (literally), the voice they hear, deep
down, before the good news of ‘adoption’ is the bad news of ‘rejection.’” Some adoptees struggle all their lives with
depression, suicide, anxiety…
In the book The Spirit of
Adoption, Jeanne Stevenson-Moessner says that for many of the adult
adoptees she’s talked with, “…Adoption was like an amputation. The wound of
relinquishment left them with a sense of emptiness, abandonment, and
alienation. Knowing that they’d been chosen by adopting parents revived the
knowledge of being ‘unchosen’ by birth parents.”
There is real grief here, and there are no easy answers for the
feeling of loss, the sense of being abandoned—even in the midst of loving
adoptive parents. It isn’t enough to know God as an adoptive parent; and not enough to know God as birthing parent—a metaphor flowing out of the root word for compassion (that is, the womb-love of God) and flowing out of the
many OT references to God as conceiving, suffering labor pains, giving birth,
nursing… and protecting like a mother eagle or even like a mother bear. And
yet, for many adoptees, acknowledging and entering into their own pain of
relinquishment allowed them to break new theological ground.
Jeanne Stevenson
Moessner describes it this way:
They entered into God’s woundedness
and brought Christ into the adoption circle of faith. Their point of entry, I
believe, was the aloneness of God… [the aloneness of Christ] in Gethsemane, the
cry of abandonment on the cross…
Think of it this way: God
so loved the world that he gave—that is, he “let go of”—his natural son Jesus who gave up his own
life to make us his sisters and brothers. On the cross, Jesus cried out, “My
God, my God, why have you forsaken me.” Those words became redemptive for many adoptees
dealing with feelings of being “unchosen.”
The apostle Paul wrote,
…When the set time had fully come, God
sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the
law, that we might receive adoption to sonship.
Because you are his sons [and daughters], God sent the Spirit of his Son
into our hearts, the Spirit who calls out, “Abba, Father.”
In Christ Jesus you are all children
of God through faith, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed
yourselves with Christ. You belong to Christ! You are heirs according to the
promise. (See Galatians 3:26—4:6).
When Mary Jo was very young she had a
dream about Jesus.
I was very small, and I saw Jesus in my
dream and yet somehow my mother—my adoptive mother—was at the edge of the
dream. And a voice said, “We wanted you and love you more and not less… We
picked you out… You are our special child.”
Yes, I knew what it meant (to be an
adopted child of God), I knew it meant two things: It meant that I was not exactly the same as
God because an adopted child knows by instinct that they are not exactly the
same as their parents. By the same token, all of those stories about my parents
waiting for me and choosing me got absorbed into my understanding of the fact
that God wanted me. It really did form my soul.
Do you remember the story of the
prodigal son? Remember how the father rushes to meet his returning son even before
he can drop to his knees in humility and repentance? Even before he can mutter
his apologies…?
To paraphrase Craig Barnes who relates
how Irenaeus, an early church theologian, explained our adoption: The Spirit and the Son are the two arms of
the Father who runs like a crazy man down the road to embrace his returning
child. In those arms we find ourselves restored. We aren’t a part of this new Triune Family
because we finally figured out it was time to return to God. No, we’re safely
in the arms of the Father because he reached out to us with the Spirit and the
Son. We belong because God so loved…
And perhaps, even now, like Mary Jo, you
can hear the Voice:
Remember, my child, I didn’t wait for
you for nine months,
I chose you before the foundation of the world.
Remember,
I actually went out and sought you.
I picked you out.
I wanted you.
You are my special child.
You belong.
Amen.
Postscript
(Charge and Benediction) (After singing "Jesus Loves Me"):
Go in peace;
Live
as adopted children of God.
But
what does this mean—really?
To be an adopted child of God, what’s it all about?
To what can we compare it?
Well,
it's like The Princess Diaries. Yes, it’s like being a young girl named Mia and
“living your whole life thinking you're one person only to discover” that your
grandmother is Julie Andrews--er, I mean, Queen Clarisse Rinaldi, and then, as
Mia says, "...And then in five minutes, you find out you're a princess.
Just in case I wasn't enough of a freak already, let's add a tiara."
You
see, to be an adopted child of God is not MERELY about becoming a "joint
heir" with Jesus. It means discovering that you are living in a new
family, "called" to CHANGE, called to live out who you are.
Kicking
and screaming at first, Mia finally discovers this, telling her grandmother--basically--"Gosh,
I guess it's NOT all about me!" Actually, Mia says it this way: "And
then I realized how many stupid times a day I used the word 'I'. In fact,
probably all I ever do is think about myself. And how lame is that when there's,
like, 7 billion other people out there on the planet...."
Adoption
means that we are called to LIVE like royalty, called to value the
values of the kingdom, called to embrace a new way of living because we’re in a
new family...
But
more about all this next week...
References:
Barnes, M. Craig. Body & Soul: Reclaiming the Heidelberg Catechism. Faith Alive Christian Resources, 2012.
Stevenson-Moessner, Jeanne. The Spirit of Adoption: At Home in God's Family. Westminster John Knox Press, 2003.
"The Princess Diaries" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0247638/quotes
