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Waiting for Adoption
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis May 9, 2004, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Genesis 15:1-6 Romans 8:18-25 John 19:22b-27
Unlike the Old Testament, which is steeped in blood and so reveals the ultimate significance of lineage, the New Testament uses the word "family" only once: "For this reason," we read in Ephesians, "I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and earth is named…." The Greek word is patria meaning lineage, clan, tribe, nation. If next you turn in the concordance to the word "parent," the few references you find bear no relation to the ever popular and religiously politicized concept of "family values." "Brother will deliver brother to death," says Jesus in Mark's gospel, "and the father his child, and children will rise up against parents and have them put to death." In Luke, a slightly more positive spin is put on the dissolution of family in favor of discipleship. There Jesus proclaims, "Truly I say to you, there is no one who has left house or wife or brothers or parents or children, for the sake of the Kingdom of God, who will not get back very much more in this age and in the age to come [will receive] eternal life." Finally in Matthew, the ante is upped on our abandonment of one another, forcing a choice between the ties that bind us and the One by whose apparently strange grace we are saved. "Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth," Jesus roars. "I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one's foes will be members of one's own household. Whoever who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me." These are not the sort of texts beckoning a preacher on such a high and holy Hallmark occasion as this! Fortunately in the epistles, we are returned from the edges of radical discipleship to the more familiar comfort of ordered family life: "Children obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. 'Honor you father and mother, that it may be well with you and that you may live long on the earth. Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord." These admonitions, of course, are preceded by "Wives obey your husbands," and followed by "Slaves, be obedient to those who are your earthly masters." All this advice comes to us, by the way, from the pen of the same man who said it is better to remain single. Yet also from his pen comes another word that offers itself to us and would seem to hold in solution our human condition-especially given a week whose revelations have left us stunned and bowed down and strangers to ourselves. We are groaning inwardly, Paul writes to the Romans, as we wait for adoption. The implication is that no matter the details of our home life, no matter how loving or loathing our parents were, no matter how fine or fair-weathered our family has been to us, no matter whether we were given into each other's care by blood or before the ink dried on the papers that pronounced us kin, we are waiting for adoption. Or to turn the metaphor around, we are orphans. Why such a metaphor? On one hand, you could say that the metaphor was chosen for strictly theological reasons. Paul coined it in contrast to a culture and a religion where blood was all, especially when it came to inheriting God's promise. "We are descendents of Abraham," the pious would cry out. Said John the Baptist to their cry, "Do not presume to say to yourselves, 'We have Abraham as our father; for I tell you God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham.'" In Paul's understanding, most of us here became these stones, Gentiles who were in Christ brought near and made members of the household of God. "We are the children of God," he wrote to Christians in Rome, "and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and join heirs with Christ." Adoption in Christ rather than the blood of human lineage became the key to the Kingdom. But I think the metaphor's meaning resounds in deeper regions of the soul than even Paul intended. We are orphans, you and I, which is to say strangers and sojourners according to the author of the Letter to the Hebrews. We are those who would make a reliable home on this planet if we could…but we cannot. How is it that all of our human efforts to secure for ourselves the love we so desperately need results more often in sadness and disappointment and grief? Why is it that, in spite of all our attempts to be taken in forever by another, we know ourselves finally as alone? By the way, will everyone who is not a member of a dysfunctional family please stand! The most obvious reason for this dysfunction is death itself. We were made to hold onto one another for dear life. But that is all…and it is never enough. We are on loan to one another. How often I have heard that phrase, especially spoken at the death of a child. Small comfort! Yet it is so for every human relationship. Thus are our parents on loan to us. We are always the child of our parent, no matter how many gray hairs we have, so that a parent's death leaves us strangely alone in the world: orphaned. Thus are our spouses, our partners, on loan to us. The vow is "til death do us part," a vulnerability from which we might have run had we been able to anticipate in the beginning the pain of such parting in the end. Friendship, as well, is under a death sentence as are extended families and, I daresay, even our four-legged friendships leave our arms finally empty in death! But long before death, there is this thing called sin, which makes of us orphans every day of our lives. We tend to think of sin as things we do wrong, eternal laws we break by what we do or fail to do. That is one definition. The more devastating understanding of sin, however, has to do with this state of separation in which we live and move and lose our being. To be human beings is to be creatures living at a distance from all with whom we were made to be one. God, of course, would appear top on the list of those from whom we are estranged. But the sin that makes of families a collection of strangers…that mutilates friendships…that destroys marriages…is in us all. Over and over again, we orphan ourselves because we cannot help it. Original sin, Augustine called it, and by that he meant that what makes us human is also what keep us from being human, is what sets us always apart from those we were given to love. Though sin has another dimension, and here I think we begin to take the turn in our time that Jesus intended to effect when he said we must love him more than brother and sister, parent and child, husband and wife, lover and beloved, if we are to be his disciples. Sin can drive us toward one another in a subtle kind of desperation. There is an anxiety at work in us (not only about death but about this distance) that makes us expect ultimately things from merely human beings…that leads us to seek from one another what only God can give. Listen to us: if only I could find someone with whom to share my life, if only my parents had loved me without condition, if my child would let me in, if my friend would be there when I need…. There is this expectation of the other as though, says Henri Nouwen, "we are called to take each other's loneliness away…" as though we could adopt one another out of sin, as though another human being could erase this ontological separation, this separation that constitutes our being human. It is a burden too great for any parent to bear, an expectation too heavy for any child to meet, a desire that will suck the life out of every one sent into our arms for love's sake. "When loneliness drives us away from ourselves into the arms of our companions in life," says Nouwen, "we are, in fact, driving ourselves into excruciating relationships, tiring friendships and suffocating embraces…No friend or love, nor husband or wife, [no family], no community or commune will be able to put to rest our deepest cravings for unity and wholeness," our inward groaning for adoption. If that is so, then Jesus' words of judgment-whoever does not love me more than father and mother, son and daughter-become a strange sort of grace…become words that would deliver us from the futility of our seeking salvation from one another, a strategy, he says, that will only end in destruction: parent against child, child against parent. So he uses the hardest words he can-the hyperbole of Middle Eastern speech-to turn us toward the God who alone can save. In effect you could say that he commands us first to be orphans, to let go of the stranglehold we have on one another. Then it is that he invites us to follow him home. He is the good shepherd who seeks us until we are found; he is the widowed mother who demands justice for us far into the night; he is the patient father who, with open arms, waits for us, watching down the road until we come to ourselves and turn toward home. By his grace alone-by this undeserved, unexpected, unimaginable love toward us-he saves us from ourselves, from our separate ways, from our deaths, from the futility of life without him, and so for a love so deep, so broad, so high that it knows no bounds. Though he does one more thing! From the height of his cross, wherein the distance we have kept from him is ended, Christ transforms who we are to be, one to another, and sets us in a family that knows no bounds: the family of Christ's church. Says Jesus to Mary, "Woman, behold thy son," and to John, the beloved disciple, "Behold thy mother." He gives us to one another not by blood but by promise, not by law but by grace. As dysfunctional as it is, the earthly family that God in Christ intends for us is, for better and for worse, the church: in the meantime, across blood lines, beyond legal documents, until the Kingdom comes. Says Christ to us gathered each Sunday in this sanctuary: behold thy son, thy daughter, behold thy mother, thy father, behold thy brother, thy sister. His love stretches our love to the limits. His love holds fast our love toward the ones chosen of God to be by our side. His love binds us by grace and gratitude, rather than emptiness and need (though most days in the church you could fool me), and sends us out to a world full of orphans with news: that, in Jesus Christ, the time has come to head toward home! Thanks be to God! |