The Freedom of the Glory of the Children of God
Romans 8:12-25
Jerry Gentry
When I was asked to preach, I first looked at the lectionary passages, as I usually do, to see what was scheduled for today, although, as you know, preachers here are free to go elsewhere in the Bible if we don’t like what is put before us by a bunch of dead white men. However, I read each one, and when I saw the references to adoption in Romans, I knew that would be my text.
Before I get homiletical, let me clear two things up. First, since I’m dealing with the metaphor of adoption, and since we adopted our daughter, I know some of you are thinking, -- Oh, great, this doting daddy is going to talk about his daughter the whole sermon. Your fear is well grounded. So to give myself incentive to ease up, here is what I’ve come up with. I pledge that every time I mention my daughter’s name in this sermon, I will give $10 to the building fund. I’ve enlisted Grace Herndon to help us all keep track. Every time I mention the name Jacy, she will hold up a sign that says “$10” so we can keep a running tally. So maybe my penny-pinching ways will benefit us both.
Second, you are also probably thinking, -- Since Jerry’s talking about Jacy in front of the church -- there’s the first $10 -- he’s going to weep his way through this sermon. Well, that one you’re just going to have to live with. But how about if we learn something from the African-American church tradition. If a preacher gets emotional and chokes up, often the congregation will give support. They’ll say, “That’s OK, Reverend,” or “Those are good tears, Reverend.” Or something like that. There’s no need for an awkward silence. Here’s your chance to make Brenda Wallace proud.
When I have a spontaneous reason to open the Bible and read, I rarely turn to Romans. It doesn’t have Jesus’ clever stories in which he outwits the local religious leaders; it doesn’t have all the peacemaking verses that I have come to value; and it doesn’t have as much of the personal touch as some of Paul’s other letters do. Called Paul’s most theological writing, Romans explains some of his core beliefs more thoroughly than in other epistles since it is not written to one community only. It is often called a “circular” letter because it was meant to be circulated among many Christian communities. (It’s a good thing they didn’t have email back then because if something this long were forwarded to me, it would be in the recycle bin.) It doesn’t have the responses to specific problems that many of his other writings have. Paul does have some agendas with people and communities that he addresses in Romans, but this writing is intended for a more general audience. Romans, despite my attitude toward it, has indeed had a profound impact on Christian history and theology. From reading Romans, Martin Luther was inspired to declare justification is by faith alone -- not by works. Luther wrote that Romans is “truly the purest gospel....every Christian should know it word for word, by heart....should occupy...with it every day, as the daily bread of the soul.”
So, Martin Luther, if you are listening, this sermon’s for you.
Adoption today is vastly different from that of the New Testament world in which Paul lived. Adoption then was usually a legal matter that brought a son into a position to inherit from a father. Being part of a propertied family significantly determined how well one lived. They didn’t have agencies for couples unable to conceive children. Now we have a range of options. You can try to adopt within the U.S. through a state agency, but if you want an infant, that route can be agonizingly slow. We tried that first and signed up for a child age infant through 4 of any race, attended a six-week course, and we didn’t hear a peep for 22 years. (We tried that first because it was free.) So we turned to a non-government option, using both an attorney and a church-based agency. This approach requires the adoptive parents to sell themselves to birth mothers, who are often bewildered teenagers. We put together a portfolio of pictures and descriptions of ourselves, trying to make ourselves seem a little younger than we were, fun and active, although we weren’t completely sure if that approach worked any better than anything else.
Then there are international adoptions, with which I am less familiar. They have their own anxieties, waits, and bureaucratic hassles -- as well as their own precious rewards. How painful it must be to have an adoption all arranged and then learn that the country where you were going to adopt suddenly changed their policies, and you have to start the process all over again. And gay couples face even more obstacles when only one person in the relationship is allowed to be a legal parent—and then only if they are not free to say who they really are.
It’s interesting to me that there is still a prejudice out there that an adopted child is somehow not a “real child,” but at the same time I feel a sort of reverse snobbery. After all we went through to adopt a child, I’m tempted to think that OUR way of having a child is more special than the more common way. I know that’s not true, of course. I’m simply participating in the same bias most parents naturally have, that their own is the most special. As my 4th grade teacher said, “Every crow thinks hers is the blackest.” I remember before I had a child being so annoyed by parents who expected ME to think their child was as special as THEY thought their child was. And now I’m as guilty as anyone else.
We almost adopted immediately after we talked to a lawyer. After we talked on the phone and made an appointment but before that appointment rolled around, before we had even met our lawyer in person, she called with a possibility. A pregnant 20-year-old with one child already had agreed to place her baby with a couple in Pennsylvania once he was born, but the couple had backed out, and she was due in several weeks. We met the young woman, and she approved of us, so we thought we were set. I took her to a doctor appointment a few days later, and she came out of the office and said, “He’s going to induce labor this Friday.” On Friday we drove her to DeKalb Medical Center and assisted her all evening. When the baby was born, Tina helped the nurse, and I cut the umbilical cord. We held that little boy as long as we could, staring into his tiny face. We bought a baby book, and I e-mailed everybody to let them know we would be parents. The next morning the birth mother changed her mind. We knew, of course, that was possible, and she was immature and emotionally needy. I believe she changed her mind because she realized she would get less attention without a baby than with a baby. I saw a friend of hers later, and he told me she was no longer taking care of either of her two children.
We were emotionally distraught for a while, of course, but a year and a half later, we got another call from our attorney. A 15-year-old was pregnant and wanted to place her baby for adoption. She was 8 months along. We met with her and her parents -- sharing first names only -- and soon our attorney called and said this 15-year-old approved of us. We actually had a lot in common with her parents (movies, the outdoors, the arts), and they weren’t much older than we were. We felt almost no anxiety about her changing her mind. She seemed eager to get on with teenage life, particularly with a summer trip to Europe planned with friends. She said she had successfully hidden her pregnancy from her schoolmates except for one close friend, and she seemed eager to get that ruse over with. Plus, she herself had been adopted by her parents, with whom she had a good relationship, so they had none of the adoption fears that many people have.
On a Sunday morning a little after 9:00, our attorney called and said she had delivered a girl, and we could go see her. (I hope you’ll forgive me for skipping church that day.) When we reached the hospital, the baby was in the nursery, so we came back later in the day and spent one magnificent hour with the baby who would soon be legally named Jacy Gentry Pippin. We had her home by noon the next day. According to Georgia law, a birthmother can ask for her baby back for ten days after signing the release papers -- no reason has to be given. We still felt calm, however, and we received no such horrible call. Ten days passed, and she was ours, according to the law, as well as common sense.
After this experience I had a new appreciation for parables that Jesus told that are metaphors for God, such as the lost sheep and the lost coin. Jesus is trying to say, God loves you so much, this is what it’s like. It’s like the shepherd who searches everywhere for one lost sheep even though there are 99 others. It’s like the woman who turns her house upside down to find the one lost coin. It’s like a parent who waits and waits and finally adopts a child.
When Paul used “adoption” in Romans 8, he compared it to what he called a “spirit of slavery.” He wrote, “You did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back in fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption.” One commentary notes that this harkens back to Exodus when God’s people were liberated from physical slavery. Then he follows that with this: “When we cry, ‘Abba Father,’ it is that very spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God.” “Abba” is an Aramaic word that was retained in the Greek, rather than translated. Aramaic is believed to be the language Jesus spoke, but the New Testament texts we have are in Greek. Occasionally, for special emphasis, the Aramaic is retained, rather than translated. Abba is an intimate, familial word for father: daddy or papa. My college New Testament professor told us that Jesus offended the Jewish leaders by using such an intimate word when he addressed God, but I’ve since learned that other scholars say it was used in prayer by other Jews of that day so perhaps it wasn’t shocking. Whether it was unique to Jesus or not, it’s still a beautiful image: praying to God with the same word a child uses in the home. You have probably heard Jacy call me, “Jerry,” but sometimes she likes to pretend she is a baby again, and when she does that, she looks up at me and says, “Daddy.”
Aren’t there times when we turn to God for comfort and it just feels right to use a word like daddy or mama because there are times when we feel helpless and hopeless, when we feel so burdened down by sorrow? Every so often at Atlanta Medical Center where I am chaplain, I am called on to comfort a mother whose teenage child died in a car accident, and these mothers feel helpless, and they wail like a baby. One mother whose teenage daughter died looked at me and said, “I don’t know how to do this. I know how to be a mother, but I don’t know how to do this.” Even if they aren’t crying out specifically to God and often they are too angry to do that I believe their wails are heard by the divine mama or daddy -- the Abba who has adopted us all.
Later in this section, Paul is explaining the hope that Christians have: hope for a new creation, a new life, a new spirit liberated from bondage and slavery, and what he calls “the freedom of the glory of the children of God.” This last phrase I put on the cover of our bulletin today, not because I have done careful analysis of what that phrase meant in the Greek in its historical context, but because I have seen your children and mine as they run and play in freedom. I have seen my daughter Jacy run across the yard, happy simply to be running, to feel the wind on her face and in her hair. I have seen her swimming in dead last at a swim meet, smiling as broadly as if she were in first place—happy simply to be thrashing about in the water. Our children know how to run and play into joy, and God wants even us boring, serious adults to have that joy, too.
Look at the metaphor Paul uses to describe the wait for that hope: birth pains. Creation groans as it awaits freedom from bondage, and, in v. 23, “we ourselves…groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies.” Many of you who have actually experienced birth pains may be thinking, “Who the heck does Paul think he is, using an image that he never experienced? How does he think he knows what that’s like?” I’m not going to try to explain or excuse Paul, but I will say I vividly recalled the emotional pain I felt after our first attempt at adoption when I read “we groan inwardly while we wait for adoption.” I thought of the call from our attorney with the final word that the birth mother had changed her mind, when I still had the baby’s hospital ID bracelet on my wrist. And in vs. 25 I read, “But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.”
What did I learn about my relationship with God from this experience? If the metaphor of adoption is a good depiction of God’s love, of God’s desire that we be liberated from slavery and bondage, then this experience confirmed my belief that God is certainly not in control of everything that happens. Some people believe that our experience was God’s way of preparing Tina and me for Jacy, but that would make God a cruel manipulator of human lives, not a God who adopts us as God’s own children. Instead, I experienced a God who wept with me as I cut the ID bracelet off my arm. I experienced God when I called Gary Gunderson in tears and said I couldn’t stand seeing the baby things in our house. He was over in minutes; he loaded up all those things and placed them in his basement. There they stayed for a year and a half until we brought Jacy home, and Karen Gunderson brought them back to our house. Then, I experienced God again, as I did that first time Jacy looked at me and said, “Daddy.”
I can easily imagine Jesus today telling a new parable. Right after telling, perhaps, “The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls; on finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it” (Mt. 13:45-46), he might add, The kingdom of heaven is like a couple who wish to raise a child, and they can’t conceive one, and they try this agency, that one, and another, and they think they have a baby in their arms, and the baby is taken away, yet they still hold out hope, and one day they get to give a baby a home. When they learn this, they throw all things aside -- even church attendance -- and rush off to hold their baby. That’s what God’s love is like. Amen.