"The Right to Be a Child"

“The Right to Be a Child”

Robert M. Thompson, Pastor

Corinth Reformed Church
150 Sixteenth Avenue NW
Hickory, North Carolina 28601

828.328.6196   corinthtoday.org

 (© 2010 by Robert M. Thompson.  Unless otherwise indicated, Scriptures quoted are from The Holy Bible, New International Version, Copyright 1978 by New York International Bible Society.)

Adoption is God’s heart.

November 6, 2010

Our True Selves

Today’s sermon was a hard one to prepare.  For several reasons, reasons both known to a lot of people and known only to a few, it was a very draining week – physically and emotionally.  I came into my office yesterday with very little of the usual pre-prep work done.  It was time to write the manuscript, and I didn’t much feel like it.  My Attention Deficit Disorder kicked in, and I delighted in every possible distraction.

Fortunately, that doesn’t happen very often.  When it does, I revert to being a child.  I don’t mean whining.  I don’t mean going outside to play.  I don’t even mean being needy.  I mean being a child the way John describes it in chapter 1 of his gospel.  I’ll come back to that and tell you what I mean.

When I was a child, I memorized John 1:12 in the King James Version of the Bible:  “But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believed on his name.”

“Power to become the sons of God.”  Odd phrase, I now think.  Probably I didn’t know enough to think about it much as a kid.  I just memorized it.

Here’s the New International Version of the same verse:  “Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God.”

The front of your bulletin gives The Message paraphrase: “But whoever did want him, who believed he was who he claimed and would do what he said, he made to be their true selves, their child-of-God selves.”

What does that mean to you?  What does it mean for me?  Does it have any special meaning for Jessie Burel?  Or Cole Mirovsky?  Or Faith Sadowsky?

Very Hard

Faith Sadowsky is a Jewish girl from China.  By that I mean that a Jewish family from New York adopted her.  Lisa Lasecki, another adoptive mother in our church, loaned me a DVD documentary called Wo Ai Ni Mommy that tells Faith’s story.

The difference between Faith and many children adopted from other countries is that Faith was eight years old at the time of adoption.  In one particularly moving scene from the film, Faith has an argument with her new sister, also adopted from China, over a toy.  It’s been only about a week since she came to her new home.

Faith begins to cry and says in Chinese,  “I want to go back to China.  I don’t want to live here anymore.  I’m so unhappy.”

Her mother answers through an interpreter, “It is going to be difficult for a while.  But it’s going to get better.”

Faith:  “I think it’s very hard.”

Nobody said being an adopted child is easy.  But it’s far better than the alternative.

Mt. Everest

The first eighteen verses of John’s gospel are usually referred to as the “prologue.”  If the Bible were a mountain range, this may well be Mount Everest.  William Barclay says “the first chapter of the Fourth Gospel is one of the greatest adventures of religious though ever achieved.”

John the Apostle blends philosophy, poetry, history, and theology to declare the uniqueness of Jesus as God’s one and only Son, the One who created all things, was with God as long as there has been God, and is himself God.  He introduces the forerunner, also named John, but only long enough for him to shine the spotlight on Jesus, the eternal Word, who has come into the world.

Then John declares the unthinkable in verse 10:  Jesus “was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him.”  It is an understated analogy, but it’s almost as if Frank Lloyd Wright walked into Fallingwater and nobody knew who he was.

John restates the astonishing fact, in case you missed it, in verse 11.  In the original it literally reads, “To his own he came, but his own did not receive him.”  The first “his own” is neuter, meaning “his own things.”  The second “his own” is masculine, meaning “his own people.” 

Can it be?  He came to his own world, the world he personally crafted, and his own people rejected him.

“Yet,” John adds in verse 12, “to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God – children born not of natural descent (literally ‘of bloods,’ the way the ancients understood fertilization), nor of human decision (literally ‘the will of the flesh,’ or sexual desire), nor of a husband’s will (as the initiator of the union), but of God.”  John is introducing a theme to which he will return in chapter 3, the new birth.

He’s not done with Mt. Everest yet.  He goes on to utter in v. 14 the mind-boggling truth that “the Word became flesh and lived for a while among us.”  This is the Word who is “the one and only Son who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.”

Rights

The phrase that grabs me in verse 12 is “the right to become children of God.”  I’ve been thinking about it all week.

We are a culture that values its rights.

Our founding document in 1776 declared that the Creator has endowed us “with certain inalienable rights, and that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”  Is being a child of God an “inalienable right” as well?

Our constitution would not have been ratified by enough states to form our government without a “bill of rights” – freedom of religion, freedom of speech, the right to bear arms, freedom of the press and of public assembly, trial by jury, and so on.  Our founding fathers debated whether statement of these rights was necessary. 

Almost two and a half centuries later, we don’t question basic rights.  We might argue over how to apply them and whether they have limits, but we are a people who value, presume, and insist on our rights.

And not just constitutional rights.  Phrases like this are a part of our vocabulary as well –

“I have a right to be angry.”  Or, “…to be left alone.”

“That is under copyright” (the sole right to duplicate).

“I believe in the right to life” (an anti-abortion position). Others believe in “reproductive rights.”

Not just individuals, but groups claim rights.  We talk about women’s rights, voters’ rights, animal rights, states’ rights, and civil rights.

Rights are entitlements, obligations, or freedoms embedded in law or presumed in social custom or personal relationships.

Is that what John means when he says that those who believe have “a right to become children of God”?

I don’t think so.  Not if a “right” is something I can demand.  The tragedy of a “right-driven” culture is two-fold.  First, rights are insatiable.  You never feel like you’ve gotten all you’re due.  And second, Jesus clearly told us that we only find life when we choose death – when we die to self, give up our rights.

No, I think John is using another meaning of the word “right.”  The Greek is exousia. The KJV used “power” and that’s not it either.  But exousia can mean “privilege.”  The “right to be a child” of God is not something I claim.  It’s something I receive, a truth I believe. 

Maybe one reason there are orphans in the world is so that we can get a picture of our own condition outside of Christ.  We are all spiritual orphans. 

Maybe another reason is that we can find yet another opportunity for self-sacrifice, generosity, and service.  These Moms and Dads who choose to raise someone else’s biological child are spiritual heroes on so many levels. 

Just as I was writing this sermon yesterday, a pastor-friend sent me an article on how the Christian faith transformed the Roman empire.  To give you an example of that culture before Christ, a contemporary of Jesus named Seneca (4 BC to AD 39) wrote, “We drown children who are at birth weakly and abnormal.”  Infanticide was common in the world at the time of Christ.  It was Christians who challenged the culture by caring for the weak, the poor, the unwanted, the marginalized. 

Peter Corneliussen has written a song for today’s service that will be sung by Julianne Robertson.  Listen to these words as they express the heart cry of a child –

Who will hug me, hold my hand;

Who will love me, as I am?

Who will take me home with them?

Who will take me in?

Who will care for me; not abandon me?

Who will rescue me; not abuse me?

Who will make a place; call me family?

Who will take me in?

Children from heaven, God’s precious gift,

They have a right to be loved and to live;

Wanted by somebody…

Who will hug me, hold my hand;

Who will love me, as I am?

Who will take me home with them?

Who will take me in?

Who will take me in?

I pray the “Adoption Ministry Team” at Corinth will be strong and vibrant.  If God is calling you to that ministry – either by caring for a child through adoption or foster care of simply encouraging those who do – you will find such a rich blessing.

Adoption is God’s heart.  Paul writes in Romans 8:15, “The Spirit you received does not make you slaves, so that you live in fear again; rather, the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship. And by him we cry, ‘Abba, Father.’”

Voice of the beloved

In some ways it feels trivial to end this sermon like I’m going to end it, but maybe it will touch your life where you are right now.

As I said at the beginning, it was tough pulling together a sermon today.  The week’s demands were unusually draining.  I’m not sure I knew the extent to which I had been consumed body and soul.  My wife Linda was amazing in her encouragement and blessing this week.

Yesterday I just felt depleted.  No energy.  No creativity.  No sense of God’s presence or help as I often feel when I write sermons.  There were individuals and families who needed me, including Anne McAllister’s family as she lay on her death bed, and that was actually good.  And yes, pastors have a personal life as well, and there were things on my heart that made it heavy.

Like 8-year-old Faith Sadowsky, the adopted Jewish girl from China, sometimes life is very hard, even when you have been chosen and loved.  I use my example from yesterday knowing that it’s trivial compared to what many people face – but it’s recent.  Faith’s crisis was brought on by a sister who wouldn’t share her toys.  But it was real to her, and most of our crises are real to us even if they are trivial.

What snapped me out of it yesterday was this sermon and the fresh realization that “I have the privilege of being a child of God.”  This “child-of-God” self is my true self.  It’s who I am.  I refuse any other primary label or identity.

This identity is not dependent on how I feel.  My calling is not dependent on my performance in the pulpit.  My meaning in life is not dependent on successes – large or small.

As I was finishing up my work, another friend (Tim Boyd), sent me a quote by Henri Nouwen that is a good conclusion.  Nouwen spent a good part of his life living in a community of persons with mental disability.  He modeled Jesus, becoming love in the flesh for those he said feel they are no good, a burden, a problem.

It is a very important voice that says, "You are my beloved son; you are my beloved daughter. I love you with an everlasting love. I have molded you together in the depths of the earth. I have knitted you in your mother's womb. I've written your name in the palm of my hand and I hold you safe in the shade of my embrace. I hold you. You belong to Me and I belong to you. You are safe where I am. Don't be afraid. Trust that you are the beloved. That is who you truly are."

I want you to hear that voice. It is not a very loud voice because it is an intimate voice. It comes from a very deep place. It is soft and gentle. I want you to gradually hear that voice. We both have to hear that voice and to claim for ourselves that that voice speaks the truth, our truth. It tells us who we are. That is where the spiritual life starts -- by claiming the voice that calls us the beloved.

We have the privilege to say by faith, “I am a child of God.”  Humbling.

Amen.