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.  

Entrusting our Family to God

Feast of the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph

Last week my sister and brother-in-law celebrated their 9th wedding anniversary.  I remember the day of their wedding pretty clearly: I wasn’t a priest or even a deacon yet, so I was in charge of cantoring the Mass; there was lots of snow on the ground, but it was about 50 degrees, so it was very foggy; there were 5 priests concelebrating the wedding (including now-Bishop Raica, now-Msgr. Vincke, two priests from the Diocese of Lansing and one from the Archdiocese of Detroit; perks, I guess of having a seminarian for a brother, and a dad who works for a parish in DeWitt).

I also remember, a little more than 5 years ago, when they told us that they were pregnant with their first daughter, Evelyn.  I remember wondering how my mom would take being a grandmother, because, generally, grandma is a word that is associated with those who are a bit more mature (a kind way of saying older), and I wasn’t sure my mom was ready for the very real and public acknowledgment that she was, in fact, more mature.  But, I couldn’t have been more wrong!  My mom was very excited to be a grandmother, and she has loved spending her time with her two granddaughters, my niece Evelyn and my niece and goddaughter Adelaide.

We heard in our first reading and our second reading about Abraham becoming a father with his wife, Sarah, for the first time, at an age which would be described as really mature (that is, really old).  And God fulfills His promise to Abraham through Isaac, who is the beginning of the descendants of Abraham more numerous than the stars in the sky.  Abraham must have wondered if God was going to fulfill His promise, but Abraham trusted in God to be true to His word, and it happened.  And that trust was put to the test when God asked Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac.  Of course, God stayed Abraham’s hand before he could complete the sacrifice, but even then, Abraham trusted that God could raise from the dead an heir as we hear in the Letter to the Hebrews.  Of course, the author to the Letter to the Hebrews, traditionally St. Paul, sees in Isaac and Abraham a foreshadowing of Jesus, whose Father, God, did not stay the executioner’s hand, but let His Son be sacrificed so that we could go to heaven.

And that’s where our Gospel comes in.  Even as an infant, being offered to the Lord as the firstborn by the sacrifice of two doves, Jesus’ destiny is set.  Simeon, the just man, awaiting the Messiah, sees Jesus and knows that God has, again, been faithful, in not letting Simeon see death until he saw the Messiah.  But he also prophesies that Mary, Jesus’ mother, will have her heart pierced by sorrow, which is certainly the case when Mary had to watch her own Son die, naked on the cross.  

Children are, more often than not, the fruit of family life.  In fact, in order to be married, you have to be open to children (unless you’re past childbearing age).  It’s one of the goods of marriage, and even for those who are of childbearing age who cannot conceive, adoption is a great way of having children.  In either case, having or adopting a child should be the response to God’s will for a husband and wife.  Look what happened to Abraham when he tried to take God’s promise into his own hand: he and his slave, Hagar, conceived Ishmael (Sarah at first said it was ok, but then mysteriously changed her mind after Abraham started spending a lot of time with Ishmael).  When we try to replace God’s plan with our own plan, it tends to mess things up.  And we know, by what Jesus has said through His Church, that natural conception or adoption are the only good ways to bring a child into the world.  Sometimes, yes, that conception has to be helped by hormone treatments or vitamin supplements.  But when processes like in vitro fertilization are used, or when people decide they have a right to have a child on their terms, and not as part of God’s plan, our relationship with God is damaged by the sinful means or by selfish desires.  Children, no matter how they are conceived, are always blessings.  But we always want to be sure that the way we welcome a new life into a family is according to God’s plan, and not only according to our plan.

Instead, the Lord invites us to entrust our families to Him.  And that goes not only for how to welcome a new child in the family, but even before that.  The Church requires that Catholics get married in a Catholic Church, or get a dispensation from the local bishop from that requirement, because as a new family is formed, the Church wants to make sure that God is a part of that decision and is involved in the life of the new family.  And when that family, by natural conception or adoption, brings a new child into the picture, then the family is also invited to help that child with the life of faith by having the child baptized and living out that faith daily with the child.  This means going to Mass each Sunday (don’t worry if the baby or little child acts up or is noisy; it’s what kids do); praying at home before meals and sometime during the day or night (for me it was usually right before bed); showing unconditional love and forgiveness to the best of our ability; treating others as we want to be treated and as we would treat Jesus.  All of those things go into making a family holy, like the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.  And that all starts by trusting God, by having faith in God and His plan, just like Abraham did.  We sin, and we mess up, when we take matters into our own hands, as Abraham himself did a few times.  But God invites us to trust in Him always, and so find salvation for ourselves and our families.