Adoption
Growing up my only experience with adoption was the musicals “Oliver” and “Annie”. It was “Please sir can I have some more” or Daddy Warbucks with little nuance between.
I would, of course, discover much later that more than a few of my friends had been adopted and many people in my life had “chosen ”families who had taken them in when their own relations could not or would not maintain a relationship with them. This week I have the extreme privilege of gathering with the blood and chosen family to lay to rest one such person who took under her wing many people who for short or longer periods, needed someone to love them.
In ensuring that everyone had someone they could look to as a mother, as a father, as a parent; Ellen lived a life Christ would be proud of “I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you. In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live.”
Perhaps you too have chosen a family that has adopted you or that you have adopted? My mother’s parents paid my father’s college tuition without him knowing because his own parents were neither willing nor able to be in his life. My grandmother always had an extra place at the table not for Elijah but for whoever might be without family to dine with at that moment.
Sometimes we can have shame or embarrassment about these arrangements - but we should not. This is how our relationship as Christians is with God. We are not God’s chosen people. Rather we have been grafted onto the tree, embraced with a spirit of adoption as Children of God NOT because we deserve it or asked for it, but simply because God desires to love us and make sure we have a home.
The same spirit that made the Ellens and Audreys of the world adopt you is the spirit with which God loves us and Christ saved us.
I think about this as I watch more and more of my friends and family foster or adopt children, for all kinds of reasons. Whatever practical reason there may or may not be, it is that same spirit present in God’s love for us — these are beloved children of God who for whatever reason cannot be loved by their blood relatives. Thanks be to God there are those of us who embrace that spirit of adoption and seek to love total strangers just as Christ loves us.
Adoption, of course, is not always sunshine and rainbows. Sometimes a child blends seamlessly with a family: and sometimes they do not. Sometimes it is a joyful moment when a foster child returns to their birth family, and sometimes it is terrifying. Sometimes that morning of joy takes too long to arrive.
In the readings this week we hear over and over again what it is to be children of God. What it means to be grafted onto the Tree or Jesse, heirs according to the promise. Unlike in the movies, it is not just the lucky ones who get adopted, because all of us receive God’s love and all of us have the capacity to offer a seat at the table, to be chosen family for those who are in need of adoption.