Sermon for Sunday, September 5, 2021

 

September 5, 2021  Romans 8: 10-25  “We the Adopted”  Rev. Peter Hofstra

          From death to life.  That is the flow of our faith.  We were dead and know we are alive.  Because of Jesus.  How do we understand what God is accomplishing in God’s Plan for us?  We are being adopted as God’s children.  What does that mean?  Paul points to a loving, intimate, and supportive family.  We do not call God the Father as “Father, Sir”, but rather as “Abba”, a word that translates closer to “Daddy”.  Jesus uses this reference, in the gospel of Mark.  He is in the Garden of Gethsemane and, in prayer, he asks his dad if the ordeal he is about to undertake, for all of us, doesn’t have to happen to him.  This is God the Father, gathering us to Godself, through the work of the First Born Son, our Lord Jesus.

          Paul brings us back to the story of creation.  God planted a Garden, the perfect Garden, in the midst of creation.  We were created to be its stewards, to be its caretakers.  In punishment for our sin, the very creation fell with us.  No longer was there the abundance of the fruit trees of the garden, but we had to struggle to scratch a living from the soil.  As we went, so did the job we were given.  But, as we are restored, as we are renewed, so is the creation.

          But for Paul, this is restoration 2.0.  Because humanity, they were created as God’s servants, God’s stewards of the creation.  When Paul was persecuting the church, it was as God’s servant.  But when he received new life in Christ Jesus, when his life was turned around, when he received the blessings of forgiveness that come in the death and resurrection of Jesus, it is even more than simply restored, faithful, service.  This restoration, this renewal, is to something even more than creation.  It is more than just newness of life.  The Bible describes God as love.  Jesus is the firstborn of God, the firstborn of love, by whose work brings us into an adopted relationship with God, brings us into God’s love.  Paul uses the language of family, of an intimate family, to put in human terms this divine union.

          Because this is the heart of the Christian message, restoration to right relationship with God.  It is not a cold, judicial restoration of right and wrong.  It is not being forgiven with a stern warning ‘to do better next time’.  Rather, God, the loving father, dad, daddy, looks to the world of humanity and desires that we come to him, yes, restored from death to life, not as servants, not as created beings, but as something more, something that transcends creation, that brings us into the family of God, as Jesus is the family of God. 

          And where the children of God go, there too goes the creation.  Because the fall of humanity into sin, that fall came upon the creation as well.  It makes sense.  We are the final day’s work in the cycle of creation, created to tend what God had already made.  The world was our responsibility and that responsibility is something that we have, because we are fallen, turned into something so very destructive and painful for our world.  Paul goes so far as to use the metaphor of a woman’s labor pains to describe the pain that the creation feels in this fallen and broken world.

          So if we, as Christians, are passing from death to life in Christ Jesus.  If we, as children of God, adopted into our Father’s family, are the balm, are the cure, are the restoration that is being looked for by the creation for its own rescue and renewal, how come this work in the world has created such divisions in Christianity?

          Nuclear power?  Shall we open the door on that debate?  Global warming?  Shall we open the door on that debate?  Pollution?  Over population?  Shall we move, by extension, to secondary effects?  Holding the exploiters of the environment, those who have gotten rich off destroying the earth, accountable?  Rescuing the poor who’ve been crushed in the world of competition?  Shall we just throw open the doors to the political debate and end up never talking to each other ever again?

          How is that for the metaphor of a warm, intimate, loving family coming together for the support and betterment of all her members?  Think of the Thanksgiving dinner that turned into a free for all when the drunk one was called out for their overbearing statements?

          I may be able to say safely and with general agreement that Christians care about the planet, but I do not know how much farther we could take that discussion. 

          Would it be a relief to know that this is not the first time that the visions of perfection that are God’s revelation to us in the Scriptures have caused intense, sometimes violent, debate when brought to bear on how we act in this sinful, broken world?

          What I am thinking of is the Christian pacifist movement in various nations during times of national conflict, especially highly patriotic conflicts like World War 2.  Christians who were convinced that it was their Christian duty to fight a terrible evil, to kill if necessary, caused the persecution of those Christians who believed that to take a life was the greater good and the greater command.  What do we do with that?  They are one in the Spirit of heaven but have irreconcilable differences here on the earth.

          But that division was between an overwhelming majority and an unwavering, but tiny, minority.  Now, science, truth, evidence, reporting, it all gets slotted between balanced and ever more angry political entities.  I wonder if Christianity, to some degree, is losing its relevance in this country because people wonder how the same religion can represent such diametrically opposed points of view? 

          How can we honestly talk about being the adopted family of God where, for our family to get along, we dare NOT discuss politics or religion?  Are our options either to ignore the world as it is now, assuming that the renewal of creation comes when Jesus returns OR to risk alienating each other in the name of our political stances over our love of God and Neighbor?  Is the question one of how can we even think to talk about, as Christians, being one beloved family of God’s children?  Or are we so fragmented that we are at a place now where we desperately NEED to understand the reality of being God’s children?  Or even worse, are we so war weary from the political bashing over questions of environment, over all political questions, that we despair of God’s love and community?

          When Paul talks about the creation subject to futility, a creation subject to the exploitative demands put on it by humanity, what Paul offers as the solution for what the creation has undergone is, in the lead in to verse 22: , in hope ²¹that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.  Hope is not only the rescue of the creation, but it is our gift as well.  But it is not just creation’s hope.  Verse 24, now in hope WE were saved, we have the first fruits of the Spirit as we too await our final adoption at the resurrection of our bodies.

          Hope in God’s power, even if we are divided politically, it can give us the quiet resolve of love to put the unity of our faith above partisan politics.  It can make listening more important than talking, caring more important than winning.  We see our fellow human beings as members of our family in God, not people in dysfunctional, broken relationship, but in the loving and nurturing relationship that comes in God’s family.  We have hope in that family even if our own families of origin never provided that love and protection.   

          From death to life.  That is what is achieved in Jesus.  And it not some weird Dr. Frankenstein kind of experiment.  When we are brought to new life in Jesus Christ, it is the life that is worth living to the fullest, the life of love that is nurtured and protected in the family we have as the adopted children of God.  For some, the image of a ‘father’ may be, because of sin, an image of horror and not nurture.  But our God, our Father, our Daddy, is everything that a father is supposed to be, protective, loving, instructive, and, unlike too many human fathers, actually knowing what is best for us. 

          Paul, persecutor of the church, had his life turned around by the hope he had that he, even he, was made worthy of adoption into God’s family, to become one of God’s children.  It is the hope that extends to all whom Jesus loves and has called to be his disciples.  It is the hope of the creation itself to renewal in the wondrous power of our Father, our Creator, our God.  Amen.