To give a child a home, with security and love, is one of the highest callings anyone can follow. When you share of yourself with a child, you are living up to God’s intention that we be fruitful and replenish the earth. When you give security and love to a child, you are fulfilling humanity’s calling.
And when you give that security and love to a child who is technically not your own, you are imitating the self-giving love of God Himself. Adopting a child who is not your own flesh and blood, but who needs you, is truly participating in the Kingdom.
Adoption is in the news these days. You’ve read about the Cuban boy picked up in the water, whose relatives in Florida want to adopt him. You’ve heard of the child who has been cared for by a police officer after being born to a woman who had already killed one of her children. You know of the countless Korean and Romanian and Bosnian orphans sought by American couples. Adoption is in the news. I’m just glad I don’t have to be Judge Solomon, figuring out who belongs where!
Some of you have been through the adoption process. Every Christmas I think of a family living in Silver Spring; they were members of one of the churches I served as interim pastor. This couple had one daughter of their own, but then they went out and took on two of the most helpless, most needy children you could imagine. The boy was mildly retarded, unable to hear very well, clumsy, uncoordinated. But at least he was trainable. The girl they had adopted was completely deaf, almost blind, confined to a wheelchair, pitifully thin, hopelessly impaired, and already past her life expectancy. I think of this family at Christmas because, in that church, as in ours, the children would sing and read poems and do drama and laugh and shout around the Christmas tree. And these two severely challenged children would be taken up there, just like all the rest, not able to understand what was happening, but smiling because they at least caught the spirit of it all. I can see this father and this mother and their own teenage daughter, so incredibly full of joy. I wanted to cry; but they were full of joy. I wanted to run out of the room; but they stood with pride, along with all the parents of normal children, and acted as though they were the luckiest people in the world!
Adopting a child who is not your own flesh and blood, but who needs you, is truly participating in the Kingdom.
I think of a friend who adopted a college student. He and his wife were on the border of middle age. When they had married, she was a widow with two children; he had adopted them at that time. And now this college student came into his life, and, as he worked with her and tried to counsel, he found that her emotional instability stemmed from never having had a home. Her father and mother had separated, and she had lived all over the map. This young woman felt alone, abandoned, and unsettled. What she needed was an authentic family life. And so my friend and his wife added to their collection of adoptees one more, a twenty-one-year-old student, already legally an adult, but just somebody who needed the security of love and the nurture of a family.
Adopting a child who is not your own flesh and blood, but who needs you, is truly participating in the Kingdom.
But, on the other side of the ledger, I have known people who were themselves adopted. I have listened to them talk about how that felt. I especially remember the day one of my students at the University of Kentucky came rushing in. Breathlessly, she plopped down into a chair and shouted at me, “I just found out something. I just found out that my parents are not my parents. They just told me that I was adopted. After all these years, and I never knew it! Why did they keep it a secret? What happened when I was born? Who are my real parents? Why did they abandon me? Why … why …why?” Elizabeth was consumed with questions, and, as our conversation went on, she was caught up in anxiety. It’s hard to accept that somebody didn’t want you. We started a whole series of counseling sessions on that; Elizabeth was really letting her life get off track. This thing of adoption can be complicated.
So now put yourself in the shoes of Joseph, the carpenter of Nazareth. Imagine the decisions he had to make. They were adoption decisions. You know the story – how Joseph was engaged to a young woman, Mary. And how they had indeed kept themselves pure, as God’s law required. But one day Mary whispered to Joseph, “I have a little secret to tell you.” And the secret was really a doozie! I’m sure Mary was not the first woman to tell her significant other that a new life was on its way. And I am equally confident that there have been millions more since then. But how many men have had to deal with this kind of revelation? “Joseph, I have something to tell you. I’m going to have a baby. No, I have not been with another man. This child is special, very special. This child is the child of the Holy Spirit.” Wow! Put yourself in Joseph’s shoes! What would you have said? “Yeah, right. Get real, Mary!” “Mary, you’ve messed up. Just when everything was going so well, and we were on the way to marriage.” Can’t you just hear Joseph? “Mary, this is crazy. What will everybody say? Just as we were on our way. I have to say this: your timing is lousy.”
Well, and then on goes the story. If Mary’s timing is all wrong, it gets worse. Just about the time the baby is to be born, along comes a decree from Caesar out there in Rome, demanding that everyone go to his ancestral hometown to be registered for taxes. How like politicians to pick the wrong time to do something and expect us to jump! The timing is all wrong. You don’t want to be somewhere else at nine months and holding. It reminds me, personally, of April 1964, when I took Margaret to the Berea College Hospital and dropped her off, as Mr. Bryan had decided to make his debut. I dropped her off because I had to go and play the organ for a revival service at Berea Baptist Church! The doctors all said, “Where’s your husband?” and she had to say, “We didn’t realize this was going to happen during revival week.” Well, Caesar Augustus didn’t seem to realize how inconvenient a time it was for Joseph to go and be registered, but sometimes you have to do what you have to do. The timing was all wrong.
And then, when they got there, to Bethlehem, no matter where Joseph went, there was no room. It was all booked up. He would have guaranteed his reservation on his Visa card, except for a couple of realities. There was no such thing as a Visa card. And I doubt there was any such thing as a reservation. So once again, the timing was all wrong. Joseph must have felt absolutely miserable. You could forgive him if he had wanted out of the whole business. The timing was all wrong.
Except that in the economy of God the timing was right. In the heart and mind of God the timing was exactly right. The apostle Paul interprets it,
But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children.
God’s timing had come. God’s timing was right. It is we who have to decide how to respond to God’s timing. It is we who have to discover what time it is in our own lives. And it is we who have to acknowledge that we are at an adoptable age.
I
What time is it in your life? Is it a time in which God is at work to redeem you and to adopt you as His child? What time is it in your life?
Maybe it’s a time when unexpected things are happening. Maybe for you it’s a time like it was for Joseph, when the game plan is going astray. There are things happening that you didn’t count on.
Joseph had not planned for any of this. Everything in the Scripture points to a steady, forthright, stable man, a man who tried his best to do things right. I can imagine that as Joseph’s strong hands shaped wood in that carpenter shop, making fine tools and strong furniture, he was a planner and a plodder. The kind of craftsman who measures twice so that he cuts only once. The kind of man who thinks before he speaks and who ponders a long time before he makes a decision. But, for all that, the kind of man you put your trust in. Solid, stable, dependable. His life was going according to plan. He had had his eye on that neighbor girl, Mary, for quite a while, and had asked for her to be his wife. It was all moving slowly, steadily, and surely, according to his plan.
But God had another plan. God had a plan, not just for now, but for the fullness of time. God had a plan, not just for Joseph, but for all humanity. Unexpected things were happening; Joseph had to see God in it all.
We are incurable dreamers and planners, aren’t we? We lay down all sorts of plans, only to have them interrupted by things we hadn’t counted on. A young man goes to college and gets excited about his career, only to run up against academic demands that are more than he can ever master. That degree is not going to come. A young woman dreams of marriage and children and a home, complete with a vine-covered cottage, only to have it all come crashing down in the dregs of divorce. A businessman works night and day to build his company and see it through a marketing plan, only to find that his closest partner has been stealing and the firm is on the point of collapse. A middle-aged couple, having poured their very hearts into their children, are jarred one night out of their satisfied slumbers by a call from the police, telling them that the life they sustained has been snatched away in a terrible accident. We are dreamers and planners; we lay down all sorts of plans, only to have them interrupted by things we hadn’t counted on. The timing seems all wrong, terribly wrong.
But God has another plan. God has a plan for the fullness of time, God has a plan for the right time. And it is a redemptive plan. Joseph learned that his own plan needed to be subordinated to God’s plan, and that, in fact, in submitting to God’s plan there would be freedom and release. Paul said it very well a few years later, “We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.” He didn’t say that everything that happens is God’s will; that would be absurd. But he did say that when you focus on the purpose of God, God will take the circumstances of your life, its confusion and its uncertainty, and out of it will work something for good. God will take the stupid angry mess that we make when our plans get derailed, and God will weave that into the fabric of His plan. Because He loves us. Because He is redeeming us and is adopting us as His children.
What time is it in your life? If it is a time in which your game plan is unraveling, and things you hadn’t counted on are taking place, then, like Joseph, pray to see what God is doing. And know that in His love He will capture you for His own. If it is a time in which things are happening that you didn’t count on, you are at an adoptable age. God is waiting to receive you as His child. When things happen that you hadn’t planned for, you are at an adoptable age, and God is ready to do something through you. You are at an adoptable age.
II
Again, what time is it in your life? Maybe it’s a time when you feel that your chances are running out. Maybe it’s a time when it feels as though many of your opportunities have passed you by. It’s not so much that things are happening that you didn’t count on as it is that you have missed out on lots of things you could have done. You think it is too late to be what you wanted to be, too late to do what you wanted to do. If you think it’s too late in your life, then you need to hear the good news all over again, that God does what God does in the fullness of time. In the right time. In the right time to redeem us and to adopt us as His children. God does what He does in us at an adoptable age, when we are truly ready.
We don’t know very much about Joseph. We don’t know his age, for example. Tradition holds that he was quite a few years older than Mary. The suspicion is that Mary was just a teenager when Jesus was born, and that Joseph may have been fifteen or twenty years older. We know, of course, that he was still around when Jesus was twelve years old, because there’s that story about the boy Jesus in the Temple. But Joseph’s name never comes up again after that, and when Mary, the mother of Jesus is mentioned – standing at the cross or sharing in the life of the early church – Joseph is apparently absent. We presume he had died. Tradition says he was already well along in years when Jesus was born.
I wonder, then, whether Joseph felt that this baby thing meant that he was not going to get to do all that he wanted to do. I wonder whether Joseph thought, “Oh, my soul, a baby. I’m too old for this. Babies are for young men who can stay up all night and play catch without getting winded. Babies are for young people who can carry them when they fall and can catch them when they need discipline. Babies are for people who have all kinds of time ahead of them and are not worried about making their mark while they can.” I wonder whether Joseph ever felt that his lifetide was ebbing, and that taking care of a tiny, helpless, squalling thing was just too much. I couldn’t blame him if he did feel that way.
What time is it in your life? Does it feel like it’s too late? You’re in a dead-end job, one that you hate, but it feels like it’s too late to do something different? You never finished your degree, and, now, with your own kids in school, isn’t it too late to go back and hit the books again?
You’re close to retirement. And when you started this job there were a host of things you were going to accomplish. You were really going to make good on it. You were going to make a name for yourself. I saw on TV the other night a woman who was a contestant on a game show; she said she had made a list of fifty things she wanted to accomplish, and that being on this game show was Number One on her list. I wonder how many of the other forty-nine she will achieve. Most of us somewhere in the back of our minds have a little list, too, of the things we set out to achieve. Do we now think it’s too late in our lives?
Even young people have this issue. Even those who have many years ahead of them come up against this thing of “too late.” Young people get into drugs, and you never meant to, but now they’ve got hold of you, and you feel like it’s too late, you’ll never be free. Maybe one night the music and the moonlight mixed into a madness and a sexual encounter just happened – so now you feel like it’s too late. Too late to be pure, too late to be right, just too late.
How many of us feel as though it’s too late in our lives? Too late to be effective, too late to correct our mistakes, too late to unlearn bad habits, too late to take back harsh words, too late to undo the tangled web we’ve woven. How many of us feel it’s too late?! Then hear the good news:
But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children. And because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, "Abba! Father!" So you are no longer a slave but a child, and if a child then also an heir, through God.
What time is it in your life? The wrong time? A confused time? A busy time? An awkward time? An overloaded time? An uncertain time? Those are your labels. But what is God saying? “This is the time for which you were born. This is the fullness of time. I can redeem the wrong time, I can unravel the confused time, I can center the busy time, I can give confidence to the uncertain time.” God is saying, “This is the right time. This the time when you are at an adoptable age. Because you feel your need, I can do something for you. Because you know your need, I can send Jesus Christ in. I can adopt you as my own. You will be my child. You are at an adoptable age.”
My student Elizabeth, whom I mentioned a while ago – after a long time, lots of counseling sessions; after ventilating all the “why” questions; after crying her heart out because she believed that if she told her fiancé, he would reject her; after all of that, I tried one more thing. I put a five-dollar bill on the desk and I said to Elizabeth, “Here, take this. I want you to have it.” She said, “Why? It’s not mine, is it. Why are you giving me five dollars?” I said, “Because I want you to have it. It’s not for anybody else. It’s not for any of the other students. It’s not for charity. It’s for you.” She picked it up and looked at it, fingered it a little, started to slip it in her pocket – but then she took it out and tried to hand it back, “I don’t understand. Today is nothing special. It’s not my birthday – at least I don’t think it is. You don’t owe me anything.” I just smiled and said, “Exactly. I don’t owe you anything. But I want you to have it.” For the first time in eight weeks I saw a smile break through the tears on Elizabeth’s face. “Oh. Oh, I think I see. My parents – the ones who raised me – they didn’t owe me anything. They didn’t have to do this. They just did it, didn’t they?” We sat a moment more, in silence. Elizabeth put closure on the whole thing: “I guess being adopted is pretty special, isn’t it?”
Adopting a child who is not your own flesh and blood, but who needs you, is truly participating in the Kingdom. And God’s adopting us, in our need, in our sin, in the pitiful wreckage we’ve made of it all – God’s adopting us, that is the Kingdom itself.
When the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, and Joseph had to decide what to do with this unexpected thing, this too late thing.
When the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, in order to redeem us, so that we might receive adoption as his children.
What time is it in your life? Isn’t it time, now, for Jesus Christ? Aren’t you at an adoptable age?
