Taking Adoption for Granted

Sunday within the Octave of Christmas

    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  Sometimes we get so used to something, that we forget how amazing it really is.  I personally take for granted that, if I need to travel across the country in a short period of time, I can get on a plane and travel in a few hours what would take days to drive (and even that it only takes 2-3 days to drive at speeds of 70 mph would have been unheard of in the earliest days of automobiles). 
    When we hear St. Paul describe in the epistle today that we are sons and daughters of God and heirs of his inheritance, we probably take it for granted.  We have heard the phrase “children of God” so often that it doesn’t seem so spectacular for us.  But to be an adopted son or daughter in the Son of God is anything but humdrum.  This revelation makes up part of the good news of the Gospel that God revealed to us.
    This news of our adoption in Christ connects to our celebration of the Nativity, which we are still celebrating today.  As a side note, I took some clothes to the dry-cleaners last Tuesday, and I wished the woman at the counter Merry Christmas.  She said, “Belated Merry Christmas to you, too.”  I responded that as Catholics there’s nothing belated about it.  We celebrate Christmas Day for eight days, and the Christmas season even longer than that, because it’s too big of a celebration to be fit into just one day.  She mentioned that she thought it was only Chanukah that was eight days long, but I told her that Catholics love celebrating, and we celebrate for eight days as well.  When I went back on Friday morning to pick up the dry cleaning, she asked if I was still celebrating Christmas, and explained how long we celebrate Christmas.  It’s simple opportunities like that where we can share our faith.
    But back to the point about our adoption in Christ.  In Christ, God took our human nature to Himself.  And because of that, humanity was joined to God in a way that never happened before.  But that didn’t mean we immediately became co-heirs with Christ.  The Incarnation set the stage for this great news, but wasn’t the accomplishment of it. 
    God allows us to become His adopted children through baptism, when we die and rise with Christ in the waters of redemption.  Through holy baptism, God joins us individually to Himself, just as He joined us corporately to Himself through the Incarnation.  The redemption that Christ won made possible our status, no longer as servants, but as sons and daughters in the Son of God.  The Father remade us, as it were, by the power of the Holy Spirit which the Father gave us in holy baptism. 
    And St. Paul outlines that, while we serve God, we are not servants.  No, God exalted us to a status far beyond any servant.  Think about it: a servant has no rights in the family, but exists only to take care of the family’s needs.  He can be let go for any reason, or no reason at all.  He lives in the same house, but only because that is his occupation; it is not, properly speaking, his house.  He has no expectation to anything that belongs to the family, other than just compensation for the work actually accomplished.
    As a child in the family of God, we have rights.  And these rights are not based upon anything we have done, but only upon our status as a child.  Think about your own children: especially when they are babies, but even when they are older but acting like babies, they don’t really do anything for you as parents.  A baby sleeps, eats, dirties diapers, and cries (usually because he or she wants to do or has done one of the first three activities).  Yes, there’s a certain amount of love that a baby brings, but the baby isn’t really trying to be cute and lovable.  They just are.  And yet, simply because the baby is the child of the parents, the parents commit themselves to feeding the child, to clothing the child, to providing shelter for the child, to helping the child develop physically and intellectually (and spiritually, for believers).  Parents can’t simply say, “I’m tired of waking up the middle of the night.  Let’s send the baby away so that we don’t have to deal with him anymore.” 
    In a similar way, we don’t do anything for God, not by ourselves anyway.  We cry out a lot to Him; we ask to be nourished by His grace and the Eucharist; we dirty the diapers of our souls.  We add nothing to God in Himself, and we’re not all that cute or lovable all the time.  But, because we are joined to Christ in holy baptism, God makes a commitment to us to provide for us all that we need to be saints and to be with Him forever in heaven.  We don’t deserve it, but God gives it anyway.  We did not earn any good thing from God, but as a loving Father, He showers His blessings upon us. 
    Again, we are used to this exalted status.  But it did not have to be that way.  God did not have to offer us a place in His household.  But out of His great love for us, He invited us to a greater status than we could have ever imagined.  May Christmas help us remember not to take this great gift for granted, but to treasure it and operate out of our identity as sons and daughters in the Son of God, who with the Father and the Holy Spirit live and reign for ever and ever.  Amen.  

God Sees His Son

Nativity of the Lord, Mass during the Day

            Have you ever noticed how everyone seems to soften in the presence of a baby?  It makes sense that mothers are very soft and tender in the presence of a child because of their motherly instincts.  But it even happens with the gruffest, toughest men.  In the presence of a baby even the sternest face can be softened by a smile, and the epitome of a man’s man starts talking gibberish, trying to communicate with the child and get it to smile back.

            Today we rejoice in the fact that, in the fullness of time, right when God wanted it, when all the conditions were as God knew in His Divine Wisdom they needed to be, the invisible God who could not be seen, the Word through whom all things were made, and without whom nothing came to be, became visible in the flesh.  God was made known to the world as a baby.  While we have grown used to this fact over 2,000 years of Christian activity, this was unthinkable, truly awesome, and even somewhat scandalous to Jews and Gentiles alike.

            In the past, as we heard in the second reading, “God spoke in partial and various ways to our ancestors through the prophets.”  From the very beginning, when God created Adam and Eve in His own likeness and walked among them in the Garden of Eden, God had wanted to be close to the crown of His creation.  He wanted to be with us in all things.  And even when, through Adam, sin entered the world, He continued to reveal Himself partially to the Chosen People: to Abram, telling him to leave Ur of Chaldea and go to the land of Canaan, where he would become Abraham, the father of many nations, and in the form of three visitors to announce the conception of Isaac, the son of the promise; to Moses in the Burning Bush and on Mount Sinai; to all the Chosen People in the form of a pillar of cloud and fire, leading them through the desert; through the prophets, those chosen by God to speak for Him to a people who constantly preferred to wander away from God, rather than be close, especially Isaiah, Jeremiah, Elijah, Ezekiel, and others. 

But this was always a partial revelation of God.  In Bethlehem, when Jesus was born, we had the chance to see that God had fulfilled the prophecies that a Virgin would bear a Son and would name Him Emmanuel, God-with-us.  In the Nativity of Jesus according to the flesh a marvelous exchange took place, what the Church Fathers called admirabile commercium.  In this great exchange, God took our sinful nature to Himself, though He was free from sin, and united it fully to His divinity, so that we could live forever in heaven united to the Son.  In the words of St. Athanasius: God became man so that man could become God.

This is what St. John is speaking of when, in the Gospel passage we heard today, he writes, “But to those who did accept him he gave power to become children of God, to those who believe in his name, who were born not by natural generation nor by human choice nor by a man’s decision by of God.”  In Baptism we were made members of the Mystical Body of Christ, and our nature was joined to Christ, just as Christ joined His nature to ours at the Annunciation, which we celebrated 9 months ago. 

The Gospel, the Good News that this truly is should astound us!  Because if we have been baptized and united to the Mystical Body of Christ, then when God looks down on us, he no longer sees a child born of natural generation, but His only-begotten, beloved Son, just as when Mary and Joseph looked down at the Christ child, they did not just see a baby, but the eternal God in flesh.  In baptism, where we are born again by water and the Spirit, we become a son or a daughter in Christ the Son. 

This participation in the Sonship of Christ is no small thing!  “To which of the angels did God ever say: You are my son; this day I have begotten you?  Or again: I will be a father to him, and he shall be a son to me?”  Because Jesus joined our nature to His, humbling Himself to take on all that it means to be human: hunger, thirst, pain, temptation, we have a higher dignity than the angels of God.  You are a higher creation than an angel, because Christ was not an angel, nor did He become one of them.  He chose to join our nature to His, and so we join in the dignity of Christ who is “as far superior to the angels as the name he has inherited is more excellent than theirs.”

Do not cheapen, then, the great gift you have been given this Christmas, the gift of knowing that we can be united to Christ.  Do not count as worthless the great gift of being a part of His Body, the Church, with all the great gifts and duties that come along with membership in the People God has claimed for His own.  As Pope St. Leo the Great wrote in his Christmas sermon:

Acknowledge, O Christian, the dignity that is yours!  Being made a partaker in the divine nature, do not by an unworthy manner of living fall back into your former abjectness of life.  Be mindful of Whose Head, and of Whose Body, you are a member.  Remember, that wrested from the powers of darkness, you are now translated into the Light and the Kingdom of God.  By the sacrament of baptism you have become the temple of the Holy Spirit.  Do not, by evil deeds, drive out from you such a One dwelling with you, and submit yourself again to the bondage of the devil.  Because your price was the Blood of Christ; because in strictness He shall judge you Who in mercy has redeemed you, Who with the Father and the Holy Spirit, lives and reigns, world without end.  Amen.