Sermon

Outsiders, adoption, and the kingdom of God

Scripture Text:

Exodus 1:1-10, 22, 2:1-6, 10b

Sermon:

When my mother was six years old, in 1949, she and her mother left Norway and came to the United States to join her father. In Scandinavia, it never gets much warmer than 70, but that day in New York it was over 100 degrees. When she walked off of the plane and onto the hot tarmac, she always says felt as though someone had opened the door of an oven. She went to American kindergarten and no one could pronounce her name, so she went by a different pronunciation of her name until she was 40 years old. She had to translate bills and letters for her parents. She spoke Norwegian with them until they died twenty years ago, and she still speaks with her cousins… but she says she only really speaks at about the level of an 6^th grade vocabulary, so she can’t always find the words she wants. My mom says she’s never felt as though she is completely American or completely Norwegian. She never completely feels as though she belongs.

 

Once, my dad pointed out to me that an easy way for a fortuneteller to trick someone into believing they could read your palm or your fortune was to say, “You appear confident, but no one knows that deep down, you feel you don’t belong.” Most of us, in one way or another, feel like an outsider. Or maybe you don’t feel like an outsider at this time in your life, but I imagine that you can look back and remember a time when you did.

 

The Bible is a book where over and over, God chooses the outsiders as the ones who are best able to understand the kingdom of God. Abraham was a foreign man tending his sheep in a strange land when God came to him and told him he would be the father of generations as numerous as the stars in the sky. David was a scrawny but cute little youngest brother who became the greatest King that Israel ever saw. The Assyrians invaded Israel and Judea and send the Hebrews off packing to Babylon where they lived in exile for several generations; but while they were away from home they wrote many of our Psalms and books like Isaiah and Ezekiel; Queen Esther, a Jew, married into the Persian royal family and as an outsider was able to save the Jewish people there from being exterminated; Paul was an awkward, possibly partially blind man, who made his life persecuting followers of Jesus until he turned his life around and spread the gospel to all corners of the Mediterranean. Jesus himself was a refugee in Egypt, where his parents fled to escape the wrath of King Herod.

 

Did any of those stand out to you more than the others? How do their stories connect to our stories? To my mother’s story? To my story? To your story? The Bible is a book about the ways God has acted in the lives of God’s people: just as God acts in your life now. Maybe you and I aren’t going to be kings and queens or refugees, but God is working in our lives, too. What can we learn from the people of the Bible that can help us see God at work in our own lives? Even when we feel like outsiders?

 

I wonder if parents and children who become family through adoption understand being an outsider in a special way?  And so, understand what being a Christian means and who God is, in a special way? Roger and Laura O asked to share with us in church this morning their celebration of the day they met A., almost a year ago. That got me thinking about adoption and the Christian life. Because as Christians, we choose to be outsiders to this world in certain ways. We choose to be related to one another in a ways that go beyond blood family or ethic identities, beyond politics or class, beyond who’s cool and who’s not. We choose to be family. We choose to belong to God. We’ve all been adopted as outsiders by a loving God, into family that isn’t entirely on this side of the kingdom.

 

It was only recently that someone pointed out to me that the story of the baby Moses, set in a basket on the Nile by his mother, is an adoption story.  To remind you of the story: Pharaoh didn’t want so many Israelites around, so he ordered that all baby Hebrew boys be thrown into the Nile River. So, Moses’ mother made a little basket, sealed it with tar, and she threw him in the river herself… but in that little basket to keep him safe. Then, who finds this Hebrew baby in the river but the daughter of Pharaoh, himself.  Moses’ mother put Moses up for adoption, and he became part of Pharaoh’s family. The most important leader in the history of the Jewish people was abandoned by his mother because she couldn’t keep him safe – and yet she made sure he would be safe and raised by another family, a family that would bring him up in love and abundance and help him become the person God called him to be… even if in the end, that meant leaving their family behind. Because things get a little more complicated for Moses and his adopted family later on, what with them holding Moses’ people as slaves… You can read more about what happened in Exodus or watch a great movie called “The Prince of Egypt.”

 

Adoption is a living example to us of what it means to be children of God.  And adoptive families show us that love is what makes a family, a community, a church, and the kingdom. Moses’ mother loved him enough to give him over to a family that she might have considered her enemy, but that she knew would keep him safe. And generations later, Jesus taught that we are all family – and that the family of God includes persons who we might not otherwise see as family.

 

The other strong message of the Bible is that God calls his people to show hospitality and love to others who are outsiders.  Who lives at the edges of our community? What kind of attention do we pay to the people there? I think of Muslim and Latino immigrants, the working poor, people who live in nursing homes, people with autism or mental illness, or any disability. That’s another story that the Bible tells over and over again – the story of welcoming the stranger: Abraham welcomed three strangers who turned out to be angels in disguise; the Law teaches that stranger and foreigners should be treated as equals and even loved (Lev. 19:34); In 1 Kings, a poor widow welcomes the prophet Elijah into her home and miraculously, her tiny supply of food lasts through a famine; Jesus sought out people who were definitely in the out-crowd in Jerusalem: tax collectors, lepers, beggars. How we treat outsiders is how we find the kingdom of God among us. How we treat outsiders is how we can know more about who God is. How have you done at this, lately?

 

In my own neighborhood, I’ve discovered I feel strangely and powerfully shy sometimes around the neighbors I don’t really know. This is silly: I would feel much more at home in our neighborhood knowing our neighbors better, but when I see them, raking their leaves or whatever, some great shyness washes over me or I think, “I just don’t want to bother them” and I scurry back in my house to the safety of my couch. But this weekend, Adam and I went to our first block party, and I got to meet with and talk to more of our neighbors. It was great – the extra boost I needed to introduce myself and chat with people. Not all our neighbors came and I’m trying to resolve that the next time I see them, I will go over and make some conversation with them.

 

I’ve wanted to say several things in this sermon. That we all probably feel like outsiders at one time or another, but that God has a tendency to bless outsiders. That adoption teaches us something special about choosing to be a family. That God asks us to choose to be family with each other, and especially with the outsiders in our midst. That how well we treat people who are outsiders is a way to know God better and live more fully into the kingdom of God.

 

None of us really belong, but we all belong to God and to one another.

Amen.

Uploaded on October 30, 2011 in by RevHeidi

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