Amazing Grace
A Sermon by the Rev. Rob Lee
Ephesians 1:4-13 | Unifour Church
The Seventh Sunday After Pentecost | July 11th 2021
Won’t you pray with me?
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight for you and you alone are our strong rock, and our redeemer. Amen.
Today’s text from the letter to the Church at Ephesus is something I feel both uniquely prepared and unprepared to preach about—adoption after all is part of my day-to-day life and yet so new to me, I find myself staring at Phoenix and Athena wondering how in the world I got so lucky. In a very real sense with both Stephanie and the girls I should buy a lottery ticket because I hit the jackpot twice. Can I get an amen?
But today as a church that also works uniquely with adoption, I thought we would explore what this form of adoption, being adopted by God is and what it means for your life in the here and now and the hereafter. So, to do so I have homiletically crafted three points as to what adoption in the Spirit of God is and three points as to what adoption in the Spirit of God isn’t. I will start with the latter and work to the former, and I will hopefully allow us to see the work we do with foster and adoptive care at Unifour Church isn’t that different from what our Creator and Redeemer God does for us. I will also note that while I am using the writer of Ephesians’ words for adoption, it could also be translatable to fostering as well. That said there are shortfalls you might see.
The first thing adoption isn’t is time-spent. If you are in jail while your trial is going on, often the judge will give you time-spent in their sentencing, meaning you get credit for the time-spent in jail already toward the balance of your sentence. Saint John Chrysostom, the famed 4th century preacher preached one of the most famous Easter sermons of all time and in it he chronicled how everyone regardless of their time as a believer in the goodness of God’s grace would receive their reward and shouldn’t be ashamed. So, whether you were baptized into the faith as a young child or come to know God in your dying breath you will receive the fullness of credit for what God is doing. Everything we do, regardless of whether we acknowledge it or not is on a trajectory of grace. So don’t be afraid if you have not the full vocabulary or the seasoning of faith yet—God is still at work and will be at work to the point where you receive the fullness of God’s embrace.
The second thing adoption is not is an abdication of the past or the freedom to forget. When Stephanie and I adopted Phoenix and Athena we like many of you had to attend the trauma-informed parenting class and I learned something remarkable there. Our bodies can hold trauma in them regardless of whether we know it fully or not. Stephanie and I will see our girls shrivel up because of past trauma and part of me knows they know not what is going on. They have no idea and yet they remember. The same is true for us, just because you know Jesus doesn’t mean you act like him. In the same capacity, just because you know Jesus doesn’t mean you are free to forget the pain you may have caused. To seek forgiveness and to forgive is part of the adoption process that I didn’t realize. The power of saying I’m sorry or the pain of not hearing it is something that is imposing down the road of your life. Don’t be caught in the pain but instead claim the power of forgiveness.
The third thing adoption is not is easy. These past two weeks the girls have been home from day care due to a COVID outbreak, and we were challenged to find care while simultaneously doing our day jobs and sometimes we failed miserably. Sometimes we messed up. And while loving the girls is the easiest thing, I’ve ever done it is also incredible work that is difficult and daunting. It is the paradox of parenting. It is knowing that we love God but sometimes we falter—and I want to be clear I don’t think adoption is just hard for the parents but for the child as well. To be plucked up from one life and thrust into another and made to believe everything is sunshine and daisies is daunting at best.
But it can’t all be hard. So let’s see what adoption is that makes this easy for both God and us.
If adoption is all those things then adoption is also the equivalency of a pregnancy experience. I can’t stand when some look down on adoption as the second fiddle to what is going on in mine and Stephanie’s life. Stephanie and I like so many others chose adoption as a means for which we would complete our family. In the same spirit God does not delineate between us and the firstborn of the resurrection which is Christ because God accomplished everything through Christ on the cross—there is no reason to believe we are less than anyone because Christ died once for all.
The second thing adoption is for all of us is that it is a two-way street. When Athena and Fifi call me dad, they do so in the knowledge that they have another biological dad. However, that does not detract from my being their dad or them calling me dad. There is a two-way street in which they choose by their own commission to name me for what I am. In that same way we must name each other for who we are—and for who God is. We must name God the Lord of our life because God first called us heirs to the promise of life in abundance.
The third (but not final) thing adoption is for me and for all of us is that it is pure joy. I was talking to my cousin Jasmine this morning and she was about to induce labor for another member of our family, while she obviously isn’t adopting she was both pure nerves and pure joy—and in some ways I sensed the same expectation that first night the girls spent at our house, and every day since then. I have felt an inescapable joy that I am a dad and that I have two precocious, amazing, and kind daughters who are going to rock this world. If I have the capacity to feel that way, if Jasmine my cousin can feel that way then we are both reflections of the way God feels for God’s children. God has found in us a people that God cannot and will not give up on. That grace bestowed upon us in our adoption is both amazing and demanding, kind yet full, incredible, and incomparable.
At bedtime at the Lee house, we sing songs, and sometimes we take requests. The task has been left with me to put Fifi to bed while Stephanie puts Athena to sleep. And often Phoenix as she is learning vocabulary has a code for most of the songs. For instance, “Elsa, Anna” is a song from Frozen II, “sunshine” is “You are my sunshine”, “Jesus” is Jesus loves me and “Grace” is Amazing Grace. I want to hone in on that last one—Phoenix has no conception to understand what I’m talking about when I use phrases like “That saved a wretch like me” and yet she loves the song. I promise you it is not because of my singing abilities that she likes it. Instead I hope it is because she is diving deep into the waters of her baptism in knowing that God is both with her and for her—as God is for all of us. If we are to be attune to the Spirit, then we know that our story is both being written and complete. Let’s enjoy the adoption ceremony. Thanks be to God. Amen.