Adoption, Attraction, Attorney

 

God’s grace, peace and mercy be with you. My sermon today is entitled Adoption, Attraction and an Attorney, and my focus is our Gospel (Luke 18:15-17). Let us pray. Heavenly Father, the psalmist wrote, “I rejoiced when they said to me, ‘Let us go to the house of the Lord.’” Now that we are within your gates, we rejoice to hear your Word. As we listen, may your Spirit enlighten our minds and move our hearts to love deeply as Jesus loved. This we pray to you, Most Holy Trinity. Amen.

The Blind Side, Tarzan, Superman, Annie. These popular, warm-hearted movies all have one theme in common. They all involve adoption. Last week, as I mentioned abortion in my sermon, I said to some that this Sunday I would talk about adoption. The word adopt means to take by choice into a relationship, as in adopting a child. The word has other uses as well. One can adopt a practice, or accept formally and put into effect, or sponsor the care and maintenance of a highway.

The Latin word adoptare means chose for oneself, take by choice, select, adopt, especially to take into a family, or adopt as a child. It comes to us from the Latin words ad meaning to or towards and optare meaning choose, wish, desire.

St. Paul used the metaphor of adoption to characterize the relationship of Christians to God.[1] In Greco-Roman law the father of the family could purchase and legally adopt a son. He knew that Israel enjoyed such a sonship to God through the covenant election. We read in Romans 9:4, “They are Israelites, and to them belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises.” Gentile Christians entered into this intimate and confident relationship with God through Christ’s redemptive death and resurrection. In Romans 8:14-15, he reminded Christians that “those led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!” We read about this in Galatians 4:5-7, as well.

As adopted children of God, we are joint heirs with Christ of God’s promises. The ultimate outcome of our adoption is final salvation, which transforms us and all of creation. Because we are adopted, we have access to the same freedom from fear, the same confidence in prayer, and the same assurance of the loving union with God as Jesus does.[2]

From adopt to attract, my second point. The word attract means to pull to or draw toward oneself or itself. We learned as children that magnets attract iron. It seems that picnics always draw ants and bees. If I want to get my dogs’ attention, I do so by offering treats. Some people make a living by attracting visitors to museums or baseball games.

The word attract comes to us from the Latin attrahere, which means to draw or pull. The word was formed by joining ad and trahere, which means pull, draw or even drag. I often drag an implement behind my tractor.

I use the word attract because it seems that Jesus and children enjoyed a mutual attraction. In the Gospels we see how Jesus attracted children and was attracted to them.[3] All three synoptic gospels record Jesus’ interaction with children, and how he chastised his disciples for shooing away these little ones. At Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem children praised him by shouting, “Hosanna to the Son of David.” This triggered the ire of the chief priests and scribes to which the Lord replied, “Do you hear what they are saying? … Have you never read, “‘Out of the mouth of infants and nursing babies you have prepared praise’?”

Each Evangelist records how Jesus used children as an example of what we call childlike faith. His feeding miracles involved children. Matthew recorded that children were present (Matthew 14:13–21; 15:32–38), and in John we read that when the crowds were coming to Jesus who then asked Philip where they would buy bread to feed them, Andrew reported, “There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish, but what are they for so many?” (John 6:1-14).

Jesus also healed children. He restored the son of an official in Capernaum (John 4:46–54). He removed an unclean spirit from the little daughter of a Syrophoenician woman (Mark 7:24–30) and cast a demon out of a boy who had been afflicted since childhood (Mark 9:14–29). He raised Jairus’ twelve-year-old daughter from the dead (Luke 8:40–56).

When the disciples were arguing about who was the greatest among them, Jesus said, “Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 18:3–4). He pointed to the way earthly parents cared for their children to teach about the depth of God the Father's love of us. St. John wrote, “To all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.” (1:12-13). The New Testament continues the theme of being God’s children and the ability to know God as our Father.

Regarding today’s text, Pastor Arthur Just[4] teaches that infants mean baby in the womb or after birth, which is very important when we are discussing the sanctity of life. “Unborn babies are deemed to be fully human persons.” These parents wanted Jesus to touch them because through his touch, Jesus healed the leper, raised the widow’s son, and restored the severed ear of the high priest’s servant (5:13; 7:14; 22:51). To touch or to be touched by Jesus brings you into contact with God’s power to restore.

Notice that the infants or babies were brought by their parents. They do not get to choose for themselves if they are going to see Jesus or not. They must be brought into Jesus’ presence. The parents’ desire to have him touch their children illustrates that these adults were convinced that the Lord’s fleshly presence conveyed blessings or gifts or grace.

The disciples saw this as an inappropriate act because they thought they knew what they were doing, but the fact is that they did not understand the nature of the kingdom of God. Jesus’ rebuke of his own disciples is the strongest since he scolded the lawyers for taking away the key of knowledge and hindering those seeking to enter God’s kingdom (11:52).

The word Jesus spoke is better translated as release. Release the little children to come to me. Release them so that they may share in the kingdom and the new creation that come through his flesh – flesh that he gives for the life of the world (Jn 6:51). To touch the baby conceived and born as the King of that kingdom meant that one participated in the blessings of that kingdom. I recall my trip to Bethlehem in 1993, and how the crowd wanted only to touch the star that marked the spot of Jesus’ birthplace. Jesus had that kind of rock star appeal – and has it even today when we touch his body and blood in Holy Communion. So, the disciples’ action of trying to prevent children from coming to him was to keep them from what was there for them.

By their simplicity, humility and inability to come to Jesus, infants and young children demonstrate for us the characteristics and posture of those who enter the kingdom. The kingdom comes to those who are the least among humanity and have nothing to offer God. Salvation is by his initiative and by his gift, and children are the best example of the humility Jesus speaks of at the end of his parable on the Pharisee and the Tax Collector. “I tell you, this man went down to his house justified, rather than the other. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.”

Luke’s point is that for a person to receive the kingdom of God by faith, you must be as humble and helpless as a child. If disciples turn away children from Jesus, they do not understand the nature of the kingdom and do not enter into it. Childlike humility and faith, given by God, are the means by which God brings people into his kingdom.

How does this apply to infant baptism? Early Christians must have asked if infants could enter into the kingdom without mature intellectual comprehension. To answer that, they looked to Luke who told us about the Ethiopian eunuch who wondered what could prevent him from being baptized, and Peter who asked what there was to prevent Cornelius and his family from being baptized. Like tax collectors, sinners and infants, they too seemed like the least to qualify for the kingdom. Jesus’ words, “Stop preventing them” implies the mandate, “Do not prevent infants or Gentiles from receiving the gifts of the King through Holy Baptism.” The reason why we baptize infants is that there is nothing in Scripture to prevent or delay baptism. Bring your infants to Jesus in the Sacrament. Bring your children and grandchildren to Church to receive Christ’s touch, Christ’s blessing, Christ’s Word. Before I begin my third point, I ask what prevents you from coming to hear and touch Christ in our church?

Now, an Attorney. Last week as I addressed the issue of abortion, I realized that there is a life-giving alternative to tragically ending the life on an unborn person, and that is adoption. One of twenty-five families with children in America has adopted a child. You may know someone who has. I know pastors and dedicated Christians who have adopted siblings of mixed races, children with special needs, and children born into other cultures and countries. All of these parents have one trait in common. They love their children.

Americans overwhelmingly see adoption as a good in society. Yet abortions outnumber adoptions in America 50 to 1. Why the discrepancy? Attorney Elizabeth Kirk is the director of the Center for Law and the Human Person at the Catholic University Columbus School of Law, where she also teaches family law. She says that the reasons for the discrepancy are complex, and that they are important for the pro-life movement to understand in a post-Dobbs world.

She and her husband adopted four children – three were newborn infants and one through the foster care system. She was also the child of an unexpected pregnancy and her single mother chose life for her and later married a “just man” when Kirk was 3 years old. The man then adopted her. She credits her father’s generous love and his gift of fatherhood, which shaped her views on adoption from an early age – and prepared her to welcome their own children.

She said in a recent interview, “My experience as a foster mother, an adoptive mother and an adopted child, the state of the current foster care crisis, the horror of abortion, and the urgency with which vulnerable women and children need help compels me to be active on these issues.”

Kirk says that there is a “soft stigma” surrounding adoption. The “soft stigma” is that 86% of Americans have a favorable to extremely favorable view of adoption. They consider adoption to be a noble institution, one that responds to a real human need – providing a home for a child who needs one, however, from the perspective of women with unexpected pregnancies, adoption is the “non-option.”

In 2020, there were 3.6 million live births and more than 930,000 abortions. The number of infants placed for adoption that year was less than 20,000. That ratio, of abortions to adoptions, is nearly 50:1. “The wildly disproportionate number of abortions to adoptions reveals that most women facing an unplanned pregnancy do not consider adoption at all.”

Kirk recalled that when President Obama received an honorary degree from Notre Dame and gave the commencement speech, he listed a number of proposals to reduce the number of abortions, including making adoption more available. For a very long time, adoption has been viewed as “common ground” in the fraught culture wars over abortion, and pro-adoption legislation is often bipartisan.

Yet, the opposite has occurred in the wake of the Dobbs Supreme Court ruling. There continue to be numerous attacks on adoption. It has become politicized and divisive. There is an enormous uptick in anti-adoption voices in academia, the popular press, and social media. This anti-adoption message will be even more difficult to overcome.

Kirk says that overturning Roe is the opportunity to embrace a model of family law that recognizes that vulnerable women need communities of support — rather than to be abandoned to an isolated, sterile ‘privacy.’

Friends, Christianity’s vision of the human person and of the family is radically different from the awful, lonely view that anti-adoptionists promote. Pregnancy and childbirth are difficult and adoption does involve suffering. Adoption always occurs in broken circumstances, but it can be the occasion for great beauty and healing.

Only in a culture where we are at our best, where we are fully alive and human, and when we give away freely and sacrificially our very selves for another does it become possible for women who are unable to parent, to have the courage to embrace the difficult choice of adoption which respects both the dignity of motherhood and the life of the unborn child. We will get there only when we model our lives on Jesus who welcomed not only infants, but also mothers and their preborn children. My friends, model your life on Jesus, because when you do, the peace of God that surpasses all understanding will keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.

---

[1] Donald Senior, C.P., “Adoption as Children of God,” The New Dictionary of Catholic Spirituality. Collegeville MN: The Liturgical Press (1993), p. 10.

[2] Ibid.

[3] https://www.compellingtruth.org/Jesus-and-children.html

[4] Arthur A. Just, Jr., Like 9:51-24:53. St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House(1997), pp. 686-690. His words are italicized.