First Presbyterian Church of Watertown

Acts 2 and Romans 8

“Adopted, Accepted, Absorbed”

The Rev. Dr. Fred G. Garry

May 27, 2007

            Some people are more adopted than others.  When Paul wrote of his dream, calling us children of God, and spoke of inheritance, and crying “Abba”, he was putting forth an argument.  If this, then that, and so on.  If we are adopted and thus children of God, then we are joint heirs with Christ.  That is what the paper says.  Yet, if you have lived through the reading of wills, the complexity of families in the time of death, you know that the promise of an adopted child at the time of dividing the loot may be a bit of a mixed blessing.  You may walk away with money, but you’re more likely to leave a spirit of greater worth behind.

            As a boy I will never forget a brother and sister who lived nearby.  The brother was the eldest, but he was not the first born.  His parents tried for many years to have a child and suffered as couples will the pain of multiple miscarriages.  After many years and much heartache they took to the notion that God didn’t intend for them to have children through pregnancy, but adoption.  So they adopted an infant boy.  You can guess what happened within a year’s time - she was pregnant and it was a girl. 

            I grew up watching the two of them fight as only siblings close in age can squabble.  Yet, something happened in their teenage years, the squabbles became verbal brawls.  I can remember watching the mean-spirited exchanges escalate until there was only one trump card left to play, “You are not even their son; you are adopted.”  Chaos is the word that comes to mind when I see my friend’s face through the long reach of childhood memories.  To this he would have nothing to say.  What can you say? It just hung out there.  "You’re not really their son; you are adopted.” 

            Although nothing more was spoken, something could be seen - chaos.  Chaos could be seen in his eyes.  To this day after many funerals, marriages unraveled, fortunes lost, careers gone astray, I haven’t seen in the face of another a more intense image of how we wreck each other than what those words created.  "Some people are more adopted than others."

            Madonna was in Malawi when we were there last month.  Our presence didn’t seem to garner as much national attention.  She is, shall we say, more popular than I am, even more popular than Bob.  Her every move was hounded by the press.  Every big white Land Rover that could be found was employed to chase her about the nation.  She was there to see if her misdeed could be amended.  Coming to a nation that doesn’t allow foreign adoptions, but believing money and fame can circumvent laws and customs; she literally snatched a child after gaining the consent of his father. 

            This misdeed, though, is a fascinating way of understanding part of the Malawian culture.  A widower is less likely to want to raise a child and may cast his custody to extended family and with the raising impact of AIDS, even abandon the child.  Hence a child was obtained and with the blessing of the father who was most likely promised great things for his unwanted son.  Thus consent was gained. 

            Yet in Malawi the parents are only part of the picture.  Orphans are not children without family as they are in the US.  Orphans are those whose parent or parents have died and the extended family takes them in.  Hence, as I have gone into homes in Malawi I have met many nieces and nephews being raised by aunts and uncles, and countless grandparents starting the process of raising children all over again.  The orphans are not adopted so much as they are absorbed.

            To put a child up for what we would call adoption in Malawi requires not only the consent of a surviving parent, but of the extended family as well.  You are much more than merely the child of your father or mother, but also the child of many, many others.  This was one of the most beautifully painful pictures Africa has offered to me.  I used to imagine an orphan as a child who was lost; in Malawi it is an image of a child being found and absorbed into multiple layers of family and village.

            Into this complex web Madonna was caught.  Although the press report of her adoption, the people in the know convey she has only been granted a limited guardianship.  The difference may prove semantic, but the shading is profound.  Malawian children are not for sale and the idea that extended families may now have another threat to their strained structure is heartbreaking.

            It is possible to adopt a Malawian child, but it is very difficult.  You must be a resident for years and the extended family must be given all opportunity to step in and offer to take the child.  Unfortunately, the consequence of Madonna’s actions has been to cause the US consulate to cease all adoption procedures, those being the attempts of missionaries to adopt the truly abandoned, the discarded. 

            I may be wrong but the optimism of Paul in Romans and Luke in Acts while true and good and lovely, had yet to truly pass the challenge of chaos.  Luke records in Acts that the apostles spoke in many tongues.  The picture here is that the Gospel is for all people, all nations, all languages.  And the message Paul would preach to the Cappadocians and Cretans, Asians and Romans was that they could be adopted into the family; they could be joint heirs; they could be part of the eternal victory of Christ. 

            And this is true.  All of these people would hear the gospel and all would be offered the sacraments and the salvation that comes from knowing in Jesus Christ we are offered a spirit, not of fear, but the freedom of knowing what it means to lay aside the sin that so easily entangles, we are offered a spirit of adoption to stand with all others as co-equals in the inheritance won on the cross.

            And while the optimism was true, all of those people would soon and very soon know that while they were adopted, there were some who were more adopted than others.  There were real believers, real sons and daughters, and then there were others.  The circumcised would exclude the uncircumcised; the free would exclude the slave; the men would exclude the women; the rich would exclude the poor.  We are all taken up in this spirit of adoption, but let’s not get caught up here: some are more adopted than others.

            Paul would rail against this tendency saying, in Jesus Christ we are one: there is neither Jew nor Greek; slave or free; male or female.  And at Pentecost there is a universal appeal with the speaking of tongues as if the deep cultural boundaries which continue to divide us two thousand years later were easily overcome by the power of the Holy Spirit.  Yet, once the gospel really hit the streets and the church was truly born in small towns and villages and families, the obstacles so easily overcome at Pentecost proved a bit more entrenched.

            Although difficult, the hope of Pentecost persisted and persists today.  I shared my own take on this dream with the Vice Moderator of our denomination.  He was in town to visit our presbytery and I was given two hours to make a pitch for our floundering special committee on malaria.  My hope was to show him that he could trust the intent of the committee and with a little attention and help it could circumvent the bureaucracy plaguing our denomination. 

            I took him to the old home of the Urban Mission on Franklin Street and then to its new home.  As we went from department to department I gave him one message: friendship and partnership is the way you navigate the chaos of poverty and the indignity of a life that has fallen apart.  Again and again I tried to convey that the mission was thriving because they have rediscovered the power of people who know one another, who are working together, helping each other. 

            Later on as we talked of malaria and Malawi and trying to gain a sense of the scope and magnitude of what was involved he asked me for statistics.  I was a bit crestfallen by the request.  I didn’t want to start down that path.  For the numbers don’t convey the friendship.  I told him, fair warning, if I start giving the numbers I will get all “causy.”   For when you realize that we have 248 doctors serving just one hospital in Jefferson County and the average in Malawi is one doctor per 50,000 people (and that is in the better parts of the country), the image of some people being more adopted than others starts to emerge. 

            I didn’t want to head down that path, because it’s a false victory.  No number is going to convince you to give your life away following Christ.  No statistic is going to slay the indifference that allows millions to die each year of hunger and treatable disease as we grow more obese. 

            Numbers won’t do it.  After I rattled off the most painful ones, though, I was able to catch my breath and speak of friendship and partnership and I quoted John’s great question: "How can you say the love of God abides in you if you have the goods of the world and yet refuse to help a brother or sister who asks for your help?"  The answer of course is that they are not really my brother and sister.  Oh, they may be in a spiritual sense, some sort of Biblical image, but only people within a fifty mile radius are really my brothers and sisters; only people with white skin are truly my brothers and sisters; only people who think like I do are worthy to be my brothers and sisters.

            Last November Colonel Mike Howard was home from Afghanistan.  Talking about the challenges of this otherwise forgotten land, I asked Mike what were his victories.  I will never forget his response.  He spoke of villages and chiefs, he spoke of partnerships and negotiations; he described scenes of extreme poverty and how precarious were the lives of the people of Afghanistan. 

            He could have given all the statistics and numbers; he could have spoken of military victory and operations, yet as I have heard from so many men and women of the 10^th Mountain Division, the real battle is one of trust and friendship.  It is learning that violence will not create nor sustain a solution. 

            I heard in his voice the realization that comes when you start to see people not as a statistic or “non-combatant” but as your brothers and sisters: I heard the discovery that before you know it you are knee deep in the families and complexities of the local village, and that is where the real battle lies.  Whose son gets the car and why this family won’t let this family have their water or marry their daughter. 

            The dream of Paul and Luke, the ease of which they spoke of being one, the idea of us all being children of God, becomes fraught with chaos when we actually step into homes and villages.  Paul hints at this when he says, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified by him.  I know that Mike is scheduled to return very soon.  And even though the motto of Fort Drum is “climb to glory” most accounts, most descriptions of the life lived by those deployed will mostly like contain notions of the mundane. 

            Yet, on Memorial Day, at this time, it is right to speak of glory.  For as we remember those whose suffering was to offer the greatest sacrifice, we need Paul’s dream in spite of the chaos that persists.  Chaos is a fair word to describe the war on terror and the evil that has overcome the fanatics and the zealots.  Into the midst of this we have put our sons and daughters, in the chaos our brothers and sisters abide for us and for the world.

            The history books are filled with speeches of men and women who sought to bring peace, to make all children of God equal, to offer all a fair share of freedom and opportunity.  These speeches like this sermon stands above the chaos, hovers above the fray.  Yet we can never forget that the dream of Paul and Luke, the hope that we would be one in Jesus Christ, is not born of sermons but sacrifice. 

            Some children are more adopted than others.  Into this fatal flaw rushes all the chaos Hell can conjure.  Be it in the mountains of Afghanistan or the food pantry of the Urban Mission, the chaos and dream clash just the same.  The question we must ask is simple: are we willing to sacrifice our safety and privilege and indifference to see all as our brothers and sisters?  Does the love of God abide in us?  Do we believe in the Pentecost dream of being one?  Today, though, let our resolve find assurance in those whose sacrifice answered the question.  Let us remember by his stripes we are healed; we only save our life by losing it.  We give thanks to those who courage has made this all too clear.  Amen.