Picture an attractive mother, a handsome husband, and three lucky children. The little children are fortunate because they have been adopted by the mother and father. The mother can not naturally bear children. She had a bodily imperfection when she was born which resulted in her having had a colostomy, the process where you wear a bag with a tube to empty your wastes from your body. It was a most difficult and, obviously, painful condition with which to live. Consequently over the years the parents adopted two children. Then, last year, the mother had an ovarian tumor removed which was the size of a volleyball. That’s when they adopted the third child.
In her college years the mother was the captain of the cheer-leading squad at Duke University. The great Duke basketball team was charging its way toward a national championship under Coach K. when the Atlantic Coast Conference Championship rolled into the Greensboro Coliseum. Her minister was fortunate enough to secure a ticket to the Duke-Maryland game and took his seat in section 108. That section was full of University of Virginia fans. But Virginia did not play until the next game. The few hundred fans in that section were casually eating hot dogs, sipping over-priced soft drinks, and waiting through a game in which they had little interest.
The minister stepped into the aisle and looked down and got a big smile and wave from this Duke cheerleader. A nicely-dressed woman seated next to him noticed it and asked, “Is that girl a relative of yours?” He replied, “No, just a great friend and a great person.”
Well, you know how the television camera person will pick out a pretty, athletic cheerleader to focus on during cut-aways throughout a game. The ESPN director chose her for obvious reasons. She was the prettiest. She was the most athletic. And her face radiated a sheer joy that just lit up the screen. As the game started and progressed, the cheerleader routines got more frenzied and complex. By the second time out the Duke pep band was playing faster and faster. The cheerleaders were into incredible dance steps, forward and backward flips, and body shakes and twists out at mid-court. The ESPN camera, with its long cable, was right out there at mid-court with the cameraman lying on the floor shooting the performance of this single girl.
The lady next to the minister leaned over and said, “Your friend is fabulous. She’s amazing. I’ve never seen anybody dance like that. No wonder the national television crew is focusing on her. She’s so radiant!”
“Yes,” he exclaimed. “She’s always been joyous. And it’s amazing that she does all that despite having had a colostomy as a child. She will never be able to bear children.”
It was like this lady had been hit between the eyes with a plank. Her face froze in total shock. “My God, you aren’t serious,” she declared.
“Yes,” he stated.
A few seconds later the spectator whispered something to her husband and pointed down at the cheerleaders. He, in turn, tapped the man in front of him, whispered in his ear and pointed. The process went on until, after ten or fifteen minutes, everyone in section 108 knew the secret. By the start of the second half, section 108 was boisterously cheering for Duke. And every time the Duke cheerleaders ran onto the floor, section 108 stood, clapped and shouted.
These hundreds of strangers, whose names they will never know and whose faces they’ll never see again, adopted other strangers for a brief period, as a family. They did this because of the joy and courage of one human being whose story they were able to share. They knew a secret others did not know.
Wouldn’t life be wonderful and joyous if we could know a secret that would transform all the strangers around us into a family?
The writer of Ephesians made a powerful statement to the effect that none of us are natural-born children. We were all adopted. He stated that God, as an act of love, decided before time began to adopt everyone on earth through Jesus Christ and freely give us adopted children God’s entire estate. Most of us probably do not understand the seriousness of those adoption papers. We inherit everything God owns under God’s last will and testament. We are the illegitimate children of the world who receive everything our creator leaves in the will.
The first Christians were acutely aware of the joy of being adopted. Under Roman law, adoption was a serious step. Copper money and scales were used. The biological father would put the child to be adopted on the scales and the adopting father would balance the scales with the child’s weight in copper coins. That payment was the first step. Then the adopting father had to go to the magistrate and plead his case for adoption. When the adoption was completed, the adopted child had all the rights of inheritance in the new family. All the child’s debts and obligations connected with the previous family were abolished, stricken from the records, as if they had never existed. You were, obviously, quite lucky if someone adopted you. You were doubly rich — your past was forgiven and your future held the promise of a powerful inheritance.
God, through Jesus, adopted us from a situation of loneliness, sin, and death, and gave us the potential to become a family again. Ezekiel, the great prophet, depicted Israel as an illegitimate child who, on the day of her birth, was cast into an open field and left to die of exposure. But God came by and adopted that foundling into God’s family. That, said the writer of Ephesians, is what God did for the whole world, not just one nation, in Jesus. We were lying exposed in an open world, with all kinds of human obligations. Death was the lot to which we were born. We were not going to make it. But God adopted us, paid for us with God’s only child, and gave us all there is to have.
Like the strangers to each other in section 108 in the Greensboro Coliseum years ago, we know a secret not everyone knows. Someone has tapped us on the shoulder and whispered, “God has adopted the world. We are God’s children. Through the death and resurrection of Christ, we have been bought. Those strangers around us are our brothers and sisters.” We participate equally in God’s last will and testament.
Ephesians is one of the most positive books in the Bible. It is easily the most positive of the letters attributed to Paul. He is not on the defensive when he writes it. The letter is not even written to a particular church or to address a specific situation. It is an ecumenical letter intended for circulation among many churches in the area of Ephesus.
The letter is flooded with what Leonard Griffith calls “a deluge of affirmations.”1 Paul is telling these relatively new Gentile Christians that God has finally made known his hidden purpose, determined before creation, to adopt them through Christ.
This great affirmation was especially welcomed news to that entire group of churches. No group needed an everlasting identity more than did those new Asian Christians. The first apostles tried to lend their names and their reputations to the churches in the Holy Land. They created apostolic churches. To be a bonafide apostle you had to have been with Jesus when he had lived on the earth. The Asians, on the other hand, possessed none of the big names and reputations. Jesus had not visited Asia Minor and Greece and places like Ephesus, Corinth, Sardis, Colos-sae, and Philippi. The Holy Land had the majority of the apostles, the majority of the places Jesus visited, and the majority of the money. Quite obviously, everyone focused on the New Jerusalem idea, the coming of the kingdom there. In fact, the apostles called the Greeks together and said, “We are the ones with the reputation and the history and the money. Majority and tradition rule. You fellows know it would not be right for us to wait on tables, take care of widows, and take precious time away from our valuable preaching, teaching, and praying. So you new fellows choose some people to do that and we’ll lay our hands on them and set them apart for that. We will lend our reputations, inheritance, and names to the cause. You do the work and we’ll stay here and lend our legacy to the churches of the Hebrews.” It’s all there in Acts 6:1-6.
To a divided and disordered world, including even these factions within early Christianity, Paul addressed his great affirmation. God wanted to reverse the process and restore the original unity of creation. And this was no last-minute decision. God’s invasion of the cosmos in Jesus Christ to unify the world was being worked out long before the laying of the foundation of the world. God had long ago determined that humans would need a savior. In short, you and I and these early Asian and Greek Christians were not last-minute additions to the plan. Our identity as adopted daughters and sons of God and our share in God’s inheritance was not a codicil added to God’s original “Jews only” testament. Jesus was a part of the plan since the beginning. And in Jesus, said Paul, we were “predestined” to be adopted as God’s daughters and sons.
Now, we hope, this sermon has been progressing nicely to this point. But there is that confusing Presbyterian word “predestined” being used. Before the foundation of the world, God destined those first-century Asians and Greeks and you and me to belong to God as adopted children. Please don’t confuse the concept with fatalism. Fred Anderson, pastor of Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church, New York, warns us that predestination does not mean that your life is pre-planned and there is nothing you can do about it. “Predestination is not about fatalism. It is about the love of God.”2 God, long before any human was born, destined us to be adopted because God is love and God has plans for us as God’s children.
Paul’s great affirmation provides what David Buttrick calls a “metanarrative,”3 a universal concept that enables creation, fall, redemption, and glory to provide a meaning which sweeps across time. Without a sense of a meaningful future, a telos, those early Christians in the Ephesus region, not to mention you and I, would be given to short term goals. We would not appreciate the pervasiveness of the revealed secret.
We are all adopted children of God, paid for in the blood, tears, and sacrifice of a beloved son. It gives meaning to our future.
Dr. A. J. Cronin moved to this country and took up residence in Connecticut. He and his family had for their neighbors a family by the name of Adams. Henry Adams, the father, commuted to New York City every working day, where he was an accountant. He spent his weekends working in his little garden, accompanied by his only son, Sammy. When World War II began, Mrs. Adams suggested to Henry that they adopt a refugee. Henry was not enthusiastic about the idea but finally agreed to go along with his wife. Together they went to New York to pick up their refugee. He was a little boy from Central Europe, with the name of Paul Piotrastanalsis — an undernourished little fellow. They felt discouraged at first, but then when they began to feed little Paul a good diet, he became friendlier. The Adams family members became hopeful. But as the weeks passed, their hopes disappeared.4
As Paul learned the language, he began to lie incessantly. He began to steal. He displayed no affection toward either Mr. or Mrs. Adams. He was totally indifferent toward the mother and father. However, he did develop a deep friendship with little Sammy Adams.
One day, in direct violation of instruction, Paul Piotrastanalsis went swimming in a polluted stream. Paul came home with a raging fever. With the threat of contagion being so great, Paul was isolated in a well-equipped attic room. The parents feared his contacting Sammy. They warned him to stay there until the fever passed, and gave all the family members strict instructions not to visit Paul. They carried him through the crisis, but one morning Henry Adams went to call his son Sammy to breakfast. In complete horror, he found Paul asleep in bed with Sammy, breathing straight in Sammy’s face. Four days later Sammy Adams was dead from the virulent infection.
With some indignation, Dr. A. J. Cronin wrote a letter to his neighbor Henry Adams urging him to get rid of Paul. Six months later Dr. Cronin returned from a stay in California and visited Henry Adams. As he approached the yard, he thought he was seeing ghosts. There in the garden was the familiar sight of a man and a boy working side by side. When he got closer he saw that the boy was Paul. “You still have him? You still have him?” Dr. Cronin asked in amazement.5
Henry replied, “Yes, and he is much better now. He is brighter and quieter.” Henry Adams then stood up. “And, Dr. Cronin, you need not bother any longer trying to pronounce his name. He is now Paul Adams. You see, we have adopted him.”
Cronin muttered, “All I can say to you, Paul, is that you are a mighty lucky fellow.”
What a lucky person, indeed. And what a price the Adams family had to pay to rescue an individual from his own self-destructive tendencies. Unbeknown to Dr. Cronin, it was destined to turn out that way for little Paul. The Adams family was a loving family. It had been that way from the beginning. The secret of their nature was finally revealed to their neighbor. They had plans for Paul Piotrastanalsis. So too, does God still have plans for you and for me.
1. Leonard Griffith, Ephesians: A Positive Affirmation (Waco, Texas: Word Books, 1975), p. 15.
2. Fred Anderson, “Discovering Your Destiny,” The Madison Avenue Pulpit, 4 January, 1998.
3. David Buttrick, Preaching the New and the Now (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1998), p. 18.
4. As told by C. A. McClain in Good News for Off Seasons (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1979), pp. 23-24, 31-32.
5. Ibid.
* If you are to this point in your quest for authenticity, you will note that in the first part of the sermon I refer to “the writer of Ephesians.” In the middle of the sermon I purposely refer to “Paul’s letter to the Ephesians.” I am aware of debate as to whether Ephesians was written by Paul from a Roman prison or by a follower of Paul after Paul’s death. When referring to the letter in general, I admit the difficulty. But the particular text used as the lesson for today certainly reflects Paul’s theology, even if incorporated by a follower of his into a larger letter. Consequently I refer to it as “Paul’s” affirmation.