A Fourth Church Sermon by Joanna M. Adams

June 15, 2003 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Adopted

Joanna M. Adams
Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 29
John 3:1–7
Romans 8:12–17

“For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption.
When we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God.”

Romans 8:15–16 (NRSV)

We thank you, O God, for the joy of this Sunday morning,
for the happiness of seeing other faces gathered for a few precious moments before you.
We thank you for your presence among us, for the risen and living Christ,
for the wonder of your word made flesh and real.
As a hen gathers her chicks, as a shepherd assembles his flock,
gather us here and now, that we might be blessed by your word
and filled anew with the spirit of life.
For the sake of Christ we pray. Amen.
(Adapted from Prayers for My Village)

When you hear the word God, what do you picture in your mind? A poll of Presbyterians taken two years ago revealed that 94 percent of those surveyed were likely to imagine God as father. Thirteen percent were likely to think of God as mother. Both, of course, are legitimate biblical images. The prophet Isaiah identifies God with a mother who cannot forget her nursing child (Isaiah 49:15). In Luke, God is likened to the father who welcomes home the prodigal son, no questions asked. Kill the fatted calf, for the one who was lost is found. Forgiveness. Welcoming grace in the form of a father (Luke 15:11-24). Many times in the Gospels, Jesus himself uses the word Abba, an Aramaic word, the closest English translation of which would be “Daddy,” to intimately address the one who sent him.

We can never claim that any one way of speaking of God captures the fullness of the ineffable divine mystery, but people have, throughout the ages, been drawn to parental images for God. It is a good and comforting thing to imagine that God cares for us and loves us as a good father or mother would care or love. It’s wonderful to think of God as one who does not play favorites but who loves all the children. I would like to think that God is not like the harried father of several young children, who said, “When our first child dropped his pacifier, we boiled it for ten minutes. When the third child drops her pacifier, we just ask the dog to fetch it, please.” That father went on to say, “When I pray for my children every night, each one is different, but my affection for each one is exactly the same. I suspect God must feel that way too. For God, every child is a firstborn.”

What do we mean when we hear the word God? Paul wanted his friends in Rome to understand God in terms of father. You are children of God, he told them. You have received the spirit of adoption, so that you have become not only children, but you are inheritors of the gracious promises of God. You are heirs of God, joint heirs with his son Jesus Christ, with all the privileges and honors appertaining thereunto, including the privilege of suffering with him (Romans 8:15, 17).

When Jesus wanted Nicodemus, leader of the Jews, to understand how he could become a citizen of the realm of God’s Spirit, Jesus used the image of birth (John 3:3). He said to Nicodemus, “Unless one is born anew, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” Nicodemus was baffled by the biology of such a statement. “How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?” Jesus understood that the real challenge Nicodemus was facing was that Nicodemus was trying to make God into what Nicodemus thought God ought to be. “You must be born from above,” Jesus said to him, meaning that only God could give birth to a new Nicodemus, one who would be free of the need to have everything fit into his own preconceived notions of how God worked and what was possible in a world in which God was in charge.

Nicodemus was a leader, you will recall, in the religious establishment of the day. He came to Jesus as a representative of that religious establishment, trying to make sense of Jesus, who did strange things—healing the sick, welcoming the outcasts. He could not understand how what Jesus did fit into the conventional wisdom about how God worked in the world and who belonged to God, who was in and who was out. Nicodemus wanted a chart. He wanted something he could put on the wall and say, “Yes, I have God pinned down right here.”

I have sympathy for Nicodemus. We are all trying to make sense of things. We spend our lives seeking to understand the great mystery that is God. Last week, I talked with a new friend, a woman who is the director of a fine international institution. In the course of our conversation, I asked her how her organization defined success. She looked at me and said, “Joanna, I will be very happy to answer that question when you tell me how your organization defines God.” Now that was a conversation-stopper around the dinner table!

What do we mean in the Christian church when we say God? In this Christian church, we begin every worship service by naming God as the One from whom all blessings flow. What do we mean when we say God? One of our Presbyterian Confessions puts it eloquently and brilliantly, I think: “In life and in death, we belong to God. Through the grace of Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit, we trust in the one Triune God, the Holy One of Israel, whom alone we worship and serve” (“The Brief Statement of Faith,” PC(USA)).

On the Christian calendar, today is Trinity Sunday, the only Sunday in the year dedicated to a doctrine. The Twenty-Ninth Psalm, the reading from John’s Gospel, and the reading from the letter to the Romans all speak of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Creator who is the sovereign power behind the universe; the God who makes all things new; God whose love is poured out for the whole world in Jesus Christ. Paul, who was entirely capable of writing out a well-thought-out treatise on any theological topic was able only to exclaim in joy, “When we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God” (Romans 8:15). The Holy Spirit bears witness to our human spirit to the great core truth of Christianity, that through Jesus Christ we belong to God. There is nothing we can do to sever that relationship. We have been perpetually, eternally adopted by God.

The cry “Abba, Father” reminds us that God is not an impersonal, immovable force. Life does not work like clockwork, and the universe is not a machine in which you and I are cogs, living out a predetermined role in life. I wonder if you have seen the movie The Matrix: Reloaded. It has all of America talking. It is said that the movie is deeply philosophical and theological. There are biblical allusions, to be sure, but it seems to me that The Matrix, while it represents a certain type of spectacular Hollywood entertainment, is not remotely similar to Christian theology. The movie says that there is a force that is impersonal, omnipresent, and always in control. There is no escaping the force. There is nothing one can do to win the heart of this impersonal force. Christianity, on the other hand, maintains that God loves, God cares, that God hears us when we pray. Christianity maintains that God wants to set us free from any form of slavery. We are chosen to be God’s own images. Through ever-deepening levels of connectedness, we are first children, then heirs, then heirs with Christ, sharing the breadth and depth of the Creator’s love and grace.

“In life and in death, we belong to God through the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ.” I find great meaning in those words. But I also believe that when we who are baptized into the Christian faith say that we belong to God, we need to take care, lest we imply that other people do not belong to God or are less precious to God. How tempting it is at this very point to take a wrong turn and to come to the inverted conclusion not that we belong to God but that God belongs to us. The mascot god of our group is on our side, as over against all the people of the world who are different from us. Do you remember several years ago that one of the leaders of one of the largest Protestant denominations said that God did not hear the prayer of a Jew? In recent months, particularly since 9/11, some Christian leaders have spoken in strident and mean-spirited ways about people of the Muslim faith. I hope that kind of judgmental rhetoric will cease, both in the Christian world and in the Muslim world, lest the world come to a terrible turn. I can think of nothing that would bode more ill will for God’s creation than the triumph of religious triumphalism.

Here is the crucial question: does God belong to us, fitting exclusively into our categories and assumptions, or is God free? If the latter is the case, then we need to be prepared to learn and to grow in our understanding that God’s ways are not limited to our ways, because God and God alone is “the Maker of heaven and earth, visible and invisible,” as the Nicene Creed puts it.

Here Nicodemus can be a great help to Christians, I think. He came to Jesus with deep theological questions. He wanted answers he could pin down, but Jesus offered him something larger—a life based on the biggest truth in the universe: “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whosoever believes in him shall not perish, but have eternal life.”

John 3:16—I know that for many people this is the most prominent gatekeeping passage in all of scripture. They see its purpose as making clear who receives eternal life and who doesn’t, who is favored by God and who isn’t. They think of it as being like that arm that goes up and down in the parking lot—believe and you are in; don’t believe, and you are out. I want to challenge you to look at John 3:16 in a different way today. Remember, Jesus was not speaking to a person of another faith or a person without faith. Nicodemus was a religious leader. He was at the synagogue when the doors were opened. Consider that John 3:16 might be a verse directed toward insiders who have difficulty accepting the freedom of God to love and redeem as God sees fit.

I am not saying that what you and I believe about Jesus Christ is unimportant. I believe it makes all the difference in the world. But I also believe that what God decided about the world in Jesus Christ is much more important than what you and I decide to believe. I have been asked more than once in my life if I have been saved. I always answer that I have. If anyone goes on to ask, “When did it happen?” I tell them that it happened on the day that Jesus was nailed to a cross outside Jerusalem. That was the day that the old order in my life and in the world was overthrown once and for all. I was baptized into that new life when I was carried in my parents’ arms down the aisle of the church when I was too little to walk on my own. With just a sprinkle of water and the power of the Holy Spirit, I was baptized into Christ’s death and adopted once and for all into the new life that Christ makes possible.

“See what love the Father has for us, that we might be called children of God.” There is nothing that can take that identity away from us. We have been adopted forever.

John Buchanan and I received a letter this week from the Mayor of Chicago, asking that we focus our worship service today on the plight of children and young people in Chicago, particularly with regard to violence, drugs, and guns. I have thought about how this has to do so essentially with our understanding of God. The children who live in Cabrini-Green—they are not somebody else’s children; they are God’s children. They have been adopted too. Because they belong to God, we belong to them and vice versa. Where do theology and ethics converge? They converge at the place of respect for the dignity of others, of standing up for people who are not like ourselves. They converge at creating a society that lives in peace. If your theology tells you that God loves only you, then you act in a certain way. But if you understand that God is as gracious and embracing as a good father, then there is every reason for God’s people to be embracing and gracious ourselves.

I want to close with a word about Gregory Peck’s character, Atticus Finch, in To Kill a Mockingbird. Atticus Finch is the attorney in the small Southern town described in Harper Lee’s novel, a person who understands the essential dignity of other human beings. He is ostracized and condemned for defending a man who has been wrongly accused of a violent crime.

Atticus Finch tries to help his children, Scout and Jem, understand why he has to do what he is doing. At one point he tells his daughter Scout, “You never really understand a person, Scout, until you consider things from his point of view. You have to climb inside his skin and walk around in it for a while.” I love that statement. It reminds me of what God did. God stepped inside human skin and walked around the earth for a while. We call that form of God Jesus Christ, who gave his life for the sake of the world.

Finally one evening, Atticus Finch, after reading the paper, held out his arms and invited Scout to come sit in his lap. He comforted her, knowing that there would be trouble ahead for her when people would sneer at her for the actions her father had taken on behalf of the ostracized and cast out. He knew the community would judge him, and she would have to pay. As he tried to explain his actions to his daughter, he said, “Well, all I can say is that maybe when you and [your brother] are grown, maybe you’ll look back on this with some compassion and [you will see that I tried not to] let you down. . . . [This kind of thing, standing for the defenseless,] goes to the essence of a man’s conscience. Scout, I couldn’t go to church and worship God if I didn’t try to help that man.”

How can anyone come to church and worship God and not try to help one another? We are members of one human family, aren’t we? Of course we are, because we are all beloved children of God.