If A Child, Then Also An Heir
Jun 21st, 2008 by Bryan
After I posted the sermon the other day, I remembered this older one that I rather like. It is from New Year’s Day, 2006, and focuses on Galatians 3:23-4:7. That should be it for sermons for a while, haha.
If a child, then also an heir.
John Knox Presbyterian Church
January 1, 2006
I. What makes a family?
We’ve had a chance to visit with our families over the past couple of weeks, hopefully, and one thing that sometimes comes to our minds is this question: who are these people, and how did we end up in the middle of them? Let me say that many members of my family are here today, and I mean this is the best possible sense. Brothers and sisters can be amazingly different creatures, and when you include in-laws from across the country and a brood of children of diverse ages, you realize that what brings us all together might seem like a big accident, or a sick experiment, depending on where you fall on the intelligent design issue. From my son’s one year birthday party this week, I have a photograph that includes an elementary school teacher originally from Vermont, now with a strong New Jersey vibe, an accomplished butcher who lives in an old farmhouse in Townville, South Carolina, and a nearing-retirement age minister from a small Presbyterian church in Augusta, Georgia. These were my son’s godmother, my mother’s dear husband, and my wife’s childhood minister, respectively. What do these three people have in common? Only me, of course, or at least my wife and me, taken as a pair.
Which brings up another question. How does marriage manage to create such strong bonds between two previously unconnected individuals? Once marriage has worked its magic on husband and wife, the ripple effect sucks in, I should say includes, siblings and parents, cousins and grandparents, friends and and enemies. The end result is a hodge podge of individuals, in an ever widening net of love, partiality, and duty. In short, a family is a miracle so complex that it could never have been predicted or planned, in which the whole is always more than the sum of its parts, and through which we find that we have taken on new identities that place obligations on us and give us purpose in life.
This mystical, magical quality of “the family” is one reason why “family” is used as the chief metaphor for God’s people on earth. The Old Testament people, God’s chosen people, the Israelites, were first and foremost a family. They didn’t do “evangelism” as we would think of it because the way you became an Israelite was to be born an Israelite. The metaphor, however, extends further than just centering God’s covenant on a certain family. God claims Israel as God’s first-born son. That was the message to the Egyptian Pharaoh in Exodus just before the last plague was sent: in Exodus 4:23 God says “Israel is my first born son.” The “sons of Israel,” the biblical term for the Israelites, are also, collectively speaking, the children of God, and God, metaphorically speaking, is their father.
The special bond between God and the Israelites, then, was described as a family relationship between a father and his children. This father indeed has chosen, has elected, to claim and raise these children as his own. This is what Paul is referring to when he says of his people in Romans 9, “They are Israelites. To them belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises; to them belong the patriarchs, and from them, according to the flesh, comes the Messiah” (Rom 9:4-5). This Israelite family tradition was not erased or annulled by the coming of Jesus the Messiah, but was in fact fulfilled and affirmed. Paul asks in Romans 11, “has God rejected his people?” He answers, “By no means, I myself am an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham, a member of the tribe of Benjamin.” He says of the Israelite people, God’s family, that “as regards election they are beloved, for the sake of their ancestors, for the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable.” (11:1, 28-29). Good southern families know, as good families everywhere know, that the bonds and connections formed by our ancestors can never really be erased. Paul’s view of God depends on his conviction that God cannot go back on a promise, in this case the promise made to his family, the sons of Israel. Family is a miracle, and it is also permanent.
II. What now of the Gentiles?
This brings us to the passage from Galatians in our lectionary reading this morning. Here Paul struggles with the same question he tackles in the book of Romans: in light of Israel’s family story, which culminates for Paul in the birth of Jesus, of the line of David and the tribe of Judah, how can we understand the reality that Christ’s death and resurrection made possible the salvation of all people, both Jews and Gentiles. The specific question he tackles in Galatians is this: does a Gentile (that is, anyone who isn’t a Jew) have to become a Jew first before becoming a Christian? There were some preachers who had told his churches in Galatia that Gentiles needed to become Jews in order to be followers of Christ. What is the most decisive action needed to become a Jew? Circumcision.
Briefly, Paul argues that anyone who takes on circumcision has taken on themselves the whole burden of the Jewish law, and that this disregards (even destroys) the freedom from the law that Christ made possible through his death and resurrection. In a series of arguments, Paul lays out the overall development of God’s plan from the beginning, through the story of the Israelites, finally encompassing the whole world in Christ. Salvation is not limited to “the family,” to those born children of Israel. A person does not need to be a Jew (or become a Jew) to share in the irrevocable gifts and calling of God. Is God doing something completely new with a different set of people, then? Is there no family relation between the Jews and Gentiles?
Quite the opposite, Paul says that those who follow Christ are not outside the family, they do not have to join the family. They are already IN the family, as children of Abraham. He says in chapter 3 of Galatians that what made Abraham so important was his faith, and that “those who believe are the descendants of Abraham” (Gal 3:7). The law, circumcision and all of that stuff, cannot be the ultimate test of who is a child of God, Paul says, because the law came hundreds of years later than the promises to Abraham. Those who are children of Abraham, through their faith, are heirs to those promises to Abraham. “If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise” (Gal 3:29. So, Paul does not disregard the family story of Israel; he discovers its heart and soul and shows just what this family tradition is really based on.
Which brings us to the question, how can one be a “descendant of Abraham” just by showing faith? Doesn’t that strain the definition of “descendant” too much? No, because the nature of our relationship to God our father is that of adopted children. God sent Jesus “in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children” (Gal 4:5). Being a member of the family does not require a DNA match or biological reproduction. What holds the family together is love and commitment, and these live outside the transference of genetic information. The heirs to the promise given to Abraham are the children of Abraham, in fact the children of God, those set apart by God by virtue of their faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.
III. Adopted children, heirs to the promise
This brings us to the last question, what does it mean to be an adopted child? I cannot answer that question personally, although I do know what it is like to have an adopted brother and an adopted child. When we first went on the adoption waiting list, a friend in our neighborhood said to my wife, “adoption is nice, but it isn’t like having one of your own.” I’m not sure what she based her information on, but I can tell you that having an adopted child isn’t “like having one of your own,” it IS having one of your own.
Those who wanted the Galatians to be circumcised and become Jews in order to become Christians were in essence saying that these Gentiles needed to become one of God’s children, a member of God’s family, through the religious version of biological reproduction: conversion to Judaism. Paul responds that such formal, genetic ties are not necessary, and are in fact irrelevant to true family ties of love and commitment. The truth of the gospel is that all of those who have faith are descendants of Abraham through faith, are heirs to the promise because they are children of Abraham, and are through Christ indeed the very children of God.
Through the magical, mystical reality of family, there is no distinction between those who have biological roots and those who do not; all have through faith become children of God. This is why Paul can say in Galatians 3:28, “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” As regards our relationship with God our father, these distinctions have no significance. Paul’s good news is that we who are God’s children should feel no anxiety or insecurity, and should live now with boldness and freedom, trusting in the grace of him who died to set us free for a life of love and service to one another.
One of the reasons that my sons’s first-year birthday party was so special this week was that those with us, our extended family, had suffered and prayed with us for so many years before the miracle of his coming into our lives. I know something of God’s great passion and relief at seeing a long-cherished hope and plan come to fruition, and our son has become part of our family just as surely and powerfully as anyone else. He will look around one day and think to himself, who are these people and how did I end up in the middle of them? My hope is that he will know that it was no accident, that he is part of the marvelous, mixed up group of people known as the Bibb/Allsbrook family due to the plan and provision of God. My prayer is that he will know that it was no accident, that he is also part of the marvelous, mixed up group of people known as the children of God, also due to the eternal plan and gracious gift of God’s own son, our Lord Jesus Christ.
