An Open Table where Love knows no borders

The labour pains of adoption!?

A sermon on Romans 8:12-25 by Nathan Nettleton

Many women who have experienced giving birth, and for that matter many men who have been present as the women they love went through labour, might be tempted to think that one of the advantages of adoption is that you get a child without having to go through the trauma of giving birth. There are a few women around who find giving birth to be an easy, or even in some cases pleasurable, experience, but in most cases, despite the undoubted joy and sense of accomplishment, it is still an anxious and physically harrowing experience that takes weeks, if not months to fully recover from. Adoption must seem very cushy by comparison. Fill out some forms, go to a few interviews, wait till your name comes up and then drive over and collect your new child.

In our reading from the letter to the Romans, Paul gives us a wonderful and perplexing juxtaposition of images when he speaks of us as being adopted as children of God, but then speaks of groaning and labour pains as being associated with our adoption. The whole creation, filled with the presence of God, groans in labour pains as it awaits with eager longing the revelation of God’s children.

There is no need to try to reconcile or make sense of these seemingly contradictory images. Both are metaphors, and like most metaphors both have limitations, so Paul uses both to try to get through to us what he’s saying.

One thing that is made clearer by the adoption image is that when we become children of God we leave behind an alternative possibility. Of course a child born into a family leaves something too, the warm darkness of the womb, but it’s not as though there is an alternative in that case. The life support system in the womb has a use-by date and a baby who doesn’t come out will die. But a baby or child who is adopted could have stayed or gone elsewhere. Perhaps it was in an orphanage or with a temporary foster home, but there is more than one possibility for where it is to go. The baby must leave one environment, one way of life and support network, in order to be adopted into the new family. There may be ongoing contact, but you can’t be fully in both.

So it is with our adoption as children of God. We are adopted from something old into something new. We can no longer have our primary allegiance to the world that we are leaving behind. We cannot live as children of grace and truth and love and still live as though we belonged to the world that says you are what you spend and your worth is shown by the rank to which you have been promoted. You can be adopted into the love of God or you can cling to McWorld, but you can’t do both.

And perhaps that’s why in reality adoption can be every bit as painful and traumatic as childbirth. Different, but nevertheless wrenching and scarring.

One thing that is made clearer by the birth image is the unchangeability of our relationship with God. An adopted child has a legal and relational relationship with their parents, but no genetic link. But we, with God as our Father and the Earth as our Mother, we bear both divinity and humanity in every fibre of our being just as surely as I bear the genetic inheritance of my natural parents.

But Paul’s focus on the birth image in this reading is more on the deep groaning labour required to bring us forth as God’s children. This is not just filling the paper work and collect your child. This is the sum total of all the pain and suffering that has gripped our world. This is God taking on all the agonies and travails of a planet gone made and internalising them, and then beginning to weave them into the pain of creativity, the wave upon wave rhythmic pain that results not in death and despair but in joy and hope and new life. Truly we have a God who is worthy of all our love and all our worship, for who could imagine taking on the futile pain of others, not just in solidarity but in order to transform it into something worthwhile the birth pains of the new heaven and the new earth.

But even though this God is so awesome, so utterly beyond what we can comprehend, yet God invites us into a relationship of intimacy and joy that is almost childlike in its simplicity. The awe and wonder might have us falling down and grovelling like slaves before a “Lord and Master”, but Paul says we are not given a spirit of slavery, but a spirit of adoption, and as adopted children God would rather we throw ourselves into the loving arms of a God who is like a Daddy or Mummy to us. He says the Spirit within us has us crying out to God, “Abba! Father!” I’ve often heard and read discussion of the meaning of Abba and understood that perhaps our closest translation would be “daddy”, but it is amazing how you can know something without it really sinking in. But one day a few years ago, I was standing in a queue at the bank down in Carlisle Street and there was a big orthodox Jewish man standing at the counter filling in a deposit slip. Suddenly a cute little girl of maybe four years of age ran up to him gleefully shouting “Abba, Abba!” and threw her arms around his leg. Suddenly Paul’s words got me in the guts instead of just in the head. Can I approach God with the gleeful abandon of that little girl? It’s even stronger for me now that I have little girl of my own. She toddles up as fast as she can and throws her arms round my leg yelling “Dog! Dog!” It’s one of only five words she knows and it’s her favourite one so I know it is a term of endearment!

We quite rightly give our very best to the awesome God who can absorb all the pain and trauma of the world and transform it into the birth pangs of the new world, and so I think it is absolutely appropriate that we have given so much thought and planning to our worship in recent months. But whatever we do and however we reform our worship, if our approach to God doesn’t contain some of the playful delight of an excited toddler jumping on a favourite parent, then we’d be better off getting out of here and doing something useful.

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