June 7, 2009 | 8:00 a.m. | Trinity Sunday

By Water, Not Blood

Joyce Shin
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 129
Romans 8:12–17

The principal hinge on which faith turns is this— that we must not consider the promises of mercy, which the Lord offers, as true not only to others and not to ourselves; but rather make them our own, by embracing them in our hearts. . . . In short, no one is truly a believer unless they be
firmly persuaded that God is a propitious and benevolent Father to them.

John Calvin
Institutes of the Christian Religion

“Blood is thicker than water.” This is a saying with which most of you are familiar. It comes up every now and again, at times when loyalties—loyalties to family, clan, tribe, ethnicity, or nation—are being questioned, negotiated, or stretched. Though I don’t know for certain, I would guess that every society around the world has a proverbial phrase or saying that conveys the sentiment that “blood is thicker than water.”

We don’t wonder that this sentiment is universal, because it is such a natural sensibility. And if something is grounded deep in our human nature, it also has a way of enduring. And so it isn’t surprising that everywhere families tend to put their own flesh and blood first and societies tend to serve and protect the interests of their own people first.

What is surprising is that, despite how deeply this sentiment runs through nature, it fails to account for another powerful force at work in our lives and in the world around us: the power to transcend blood ties, to cross borders that are social, racial, and religious, and simply to be free.

In his letter to the church in Rome, Paul wrote about what it means to be free. It is clear from his letters that he kept in mind all the different kinds of people making up this new church: men, women, Jews, Greeks, slaves, and free persons. All of them, like himself, were persons who had transcended blood ties and crossed social, racial, and religious borders in order to form a new community in Christ. It is also clear from his letters that from the beginning Paul recognized and was concerned about their tendencies to fall back into the ways of perceiving the world and patterns of relating to one another that were most familiar, most natural, to them. Paul saw them as falling back into what he called “a spirit of slavery.”

To be a slave in Paul’s day was to be a person who had to live within the terms of a code set by another. Although a slave could rise to positions of considerable importance and influence within a household, a slave would nevertheless remain separated in status from members of the family, and this separation could not be bridged. When Paul spoke metaphorically of slavery, he almost certainly had in mind life under Jewish law, and he did not think that living under the law—trying to live up to a standard of exact obedience and fearing one’s failure to conform—could transcend the divisions between who was in and who was out.

The law that Paul had regarded punctiliously came to be seen by him in a new light. Paul hardly condoned living free of all restraint. Rather, he promoted moral conduct motivated by filial love: the love of a son dutiful and devoted to his father. Sonship, not slavery, was the model for relating to God the Father, Christ the Son, and one another.

Now we know that being family does not always feel like freedom. The duties and responsibilities we have for family members can at times feel so heavy that it is hard to see where freedom comes into the picture at all. Furthermore, we usually have no choice in the matter of who our family members are.

There was a year in my mid-twenties when I attended at least five weddings. I remember special things about each wedding, but of those things, I remember only one sermon. In that sermon, the minister remarked on the reality that all of us are born into families and that none of us can choose the family into which we are born. We might wish otherwise, but to the end of our lives this is simply the way it is.

Then the minister looked straight at the bride and groom and said to them, “Today, you are choosing to become family.” Of course, the minister was telling them that this was their final moment of freedom to decide and that afterwards they would no longer have a choice, for they would already be family, tied together as if by blood.

When partners marry, they become family, but not by blood. When a child is baptized, she joins the family of faith, but not by blood. In Paul’s day, when Gentiles were accepted by Christ’s followers as legitimate children of God, they too became rightful heirs of God’s promises, but not by blood. In his letter to the church in Rome, Paul wrote, “You have received a spirit of adoption.” By a “spirit of adoption,” he explained, men and women, Jews and Greeks, slaves and free persons are brought into one family and are made brothers and sisters with Christ— of them children of God.

By a spirit of adoption they would take after Jesus, who, in his earthly life, showed them what it meant to be a faithful son, wholly trusting in and loyal to his Father in heaven and devoted to his Father’s cause here on earth. Like Jesus, his followers would have to trust in God to be loving Parent and would have to devote themselves to God and all whom God loved. Relating to God in this new way, with a new sense of filial familiarity and emotional intimacy, Christians could turn to God, address him, and pray to him as Jesus did. “When we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’” Paul wrote, “it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God.”

For more than one reason it was remarkable to be able relate to God as Father. It was remarkable because, as Paul wrote, it transformed even Gentiles into heirs of God. That special relationship Israel once had with God was being extended to all in Christ.

It was remarkable also because it was so intimate. According to New Testament scholar James Dunn, for the typical Jew of Paul’s day, addressing God as “Abba, Father,” “was almost certainly too bold, overfamiliar, probably considered impudent and irreverent by most.”

The use of such familiar, intimate language can take you aback. I remember when our family first moved to a small town in Kentucky. It took a while for my parents to grow accustomed to being called “sweetheart,” “honey,” “sugar” by people they hardly knew. This unexpected familiarity, however, pales in comparison to the shocking familiarity expressed each time we call God “our Father.” What, after all, could be more different and distant from us than God? What could be more foreign to us than the divine? And yet, through the Holy Spirit, God has made it possible for us to call upon him as we would call upon a loving parent.

A spirit of adoption, Paul thought, is what can make the followers of Christ family, children in relationship to God and brothers and sisters in relationship to Christ and one another. In the New Testament, the idea of adoption appears only in Paul’s letters, and it appears frequently. Paul must have thought that adoption had behind it a spirit powerful enough to transcend blood ties and to cross social, racial, and religious borders.

I believe Paul was right. When I hear stories of people who have adopted children and have loved them with all the tenacity and emotional intensity that characterizes parental love, I am always deeply moved. I’m sure all of you have a story about an adoption in your family. The story that I grew up with and that continues to move me is a story about an adoption that almost happened.

During the Korean War, my father was a young boy. The war had separated him from his parents, brother, and sister and their home in North Korea. Escaping the areas occupied by the North Korean military, he made his way, with other refugees, down to the south. While living in Pusan, a city in the southern part of Korea where U.N. forces and American soldiers had stationed themselves, my father got a job working at the harbor and lived in a tent at a military camp. While there, an American corporal befriended him. This man, whose full name my father still doesn’t know but whom he had addressed as Corporal Cease, showed a spirit of kindness to my father that he will never forget. A year later, when it came time for the young boy and the American corporal to part ways, the corporal asked my father if he would like to be adopted by him and brought to the United States. At the time, my father said no. He still hoped that the U.N. forces would advance all the way north and that in the near future he could return home to North Korea to be reunited with his family. Of course, this never happened, and instead years later he immigrated as an adult to the United States. For me, this story is a story not of an adoption, but of the spirit of adoption. I often wonder about Corporal Cease—who he was, if he is still living, who his family may be.

I agree with Paul that the spirit of adoption is powerful. It is powerful enough to overcome social, racial, and religious divisions among persons and powerful enough to create new social constellations.

Today is Trinity Sunday, a day when the church gives thanks for the way God empowers us by the Spirit to become a family constituted not by blood, but by water, brothers and sisters who, with Christ, can call upon God, Abba, Father.

Amen.