Sermon Text

June 20, 2010
The Twelfth Sunday in Ordinary Time

YOU BELONG!
Galatians 3:23-29

A pastor colleague and I were talking one day, and he said to me, “We make church membership much too easy. A person can just stroll into a church on Sunday morning and, with a minimum or instruction or commitment, get his or her name put on the church roll. It’s just too easy to join a church.”

I had to disagree. In my experience, joining a church is often an extremely difficult decision for people to make. I have known folks who attended worship in a particular church, sometimes for years, joined a Sunday School class or the choir, been to fellowship activities, and even served on committees, and they still haven’t been able to make that decision to join.

On the other hand, I’ve seen people who seemed to join easily and quickly, who quietly disappeared within a few months of joining. Getting your name on the membership roll is easy. Belonging to the church is a whole other thing.

It’s what we in the pastoral trade call the problem of the “backdoor.” I think we do a very good job here at St. Philip of welcoming visitors, and sharing with prospective members the life of our church. Many of them join, coming in what you might call “the front door.” But then there always seem to be a few who, a few months later, quietly exit out the “back door.” They joined, but somehow they never belonged.

But then again, maybe the only way to get into a church, to really belong to a church, is to be adopted. Maybe the only way to really be a child of God is to be adopted.

In the Letter to the Galatians, Paul is writing to a group of churches made up of both Jewish and Gentile Christians. To the Jewish Christians, he says that they have been freed from their old life “under the law.” Now they are “all children of God through faith.” And what’s even more surprising is what Paul says to the Gentile Christians. They are now “Abraham’s offspring,” a term that used to be reserved for Jews! Through trust in Christ, even these outsiders, these Gentiles have become children of God, members of the family, inheritors of all that God has so graciously promised. They have all, both Jew and Gentile alike, been adopted.

You see, Paul came to view the law as a human effort to “get right” with God; in effect, an effort to belong. But that, says Paul, could never really work with sinful humanity. You can’t work hard to become somebody’s child! Imagine someone coming to your door and saying, “I’ve been watching your family for a while now, and I really like what I see. You seem to be a really nice group of people. What do I need to do to work real hard to get into your family?”

You can’t do that. But you can be adopted into the family. That’s what God’s amazing love in Jesus Christ has done. Jesus has broken down all the old distinctions that used to keep people apart. “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male or female,” and the list, of course, could be longer. We have been freed from having to define ourselves by such things as these. We have been given a new primary identity, as adopted children of God.

And that’s the status all of us have. There’s not one “natural born” family member among us. We’re all adopted. We didn’t earn our way here, and we didn’t get here by birthright. We’re all adopted. We belong, not on the basis of who we are or what we’ve done, but only on the basis of God’s free and redeeming love.

Nowhere in our Christian faith does God say to us, “Now if you will just do this or that, then I will love you, save you, and bring you home.” No, in Jesus, God comes to us and says, “I have come to you, found you, and claimed you as My own, so that I might bring you home and make a place for you in My house, set a place for you at My family’s table.”

More than a few times in my years as a minister, I have been privileged to walk with a family through the longing, the anxiety, the waiting, and the eventual joy of the adoption process. Many of you know what I’m talking about. I have sat and cried with prospective parents, railed at sometimes insensitive systems, written letters of reference and recommendation, and beamed and cried again along with others as a special new member of the family is welcomed.

The great mystery and the great joy of the Christian faith is that we are all special, we are all adopted, and we all belong