The Uncertainty Principle

Scripture: Hebrews 4:12-13

In February of 1927, a German physicist by the name of Werner Heisenberg made a discovery that had profound and far-reaching implications for scientists. Heisenberg was interested in the measurement of subatomic particles, like electrons. But Heisenberg realized that when he tried to measure the position and the momentum of a particle at the same time the results were always imprecise.

It was this imprecision that prompted Heisenberg’s startling and revolutionary conclusion. You see, Heisenberg came to believe that this imprecision wasn’t the result of some human limitation or mistake. Rather, it was simply in the nature of things. Or, to put it differently, Werner Heisenberg theorized that one of the characteristics of the universe—at its most basic and elemental level—is uncertainty.

This idea—known as “Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle”—shocked the scientific world and gave rise to furious debate among the leading theoretical physicists of the day. From our perspective, this may seem like a great deal of unnecessary fuss. After all, if you want to know whether there is a fundamental uncertainty to things you do not need to ask Werner Heisenberg or Albert Einstein. You can ask a philosopher. You can ask a theologian.

Or you can go to an even better source. You can ask a retired assembly line worker who is worried about losing his pension and his medical insurance. You can ask a fifty-year-old automotive engineer who finds himself unemployed for the first time in his life. You can ask a doctor who has to give hard news to one of her patients. You can ask anyone who has a friend or family member serving in Iraq. You can ask someone who has fallen out of love or who does not seem to be able to fall into love. You can ask someone who’s trying to decide whether to begin chemotherapy, take a failing parent off life support, or lend financial aid to a struggling son or daughter who may spend the money on drugs or alcohol.

You could have asked my father. He grew up in poverty during the Great Depression, dropped out of high school to help support his family, watched both of his parents die while he was still a young man, served in the Second World War and was shot at on two different continents, built a successful business that crashed, spent some time in prison, moved to Detroit the year of the riots, and suffered from ill health his entire life. I don’t think my father ever knew anything but uncertainty.

Yes, if you want to know whether there is a fundamental uncertainty to things, all you need to do is ask an expert. That probably includes just about everyone you know. It probably includes you, too.

And the uncertainty principle I’m describing has a deeply troubling dimension to it. For it is when we most need certainty that we may have the most trouble finding it. It is when we face life’s toughest questions that we may come to wonder whether we can find any answers, or, for that matter, whether any answers exist. And yet we have to live with this uncertainty and conflict and contradiction, because that is where life happens. The writer and naturalist Barry Lopez, in his book Arctic Dreams, puts it this way: “One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse. There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. [So] you continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.”

The biblical text before us is a letter written to a group that must have been plagued by conflict and contradiction and uncertainty, perhaps as no group has been before or since: the Hebrews of the mid- to late first century of the common era. Imagine their circumstances. They were members of the Jewish faith and followers of Jewish traditions. In all likelihood, their family, their community, their occupation, their very day-to-day existence was intertwined with that identity. But they had come to believe in the divinity of one of their own, a Jew, a man they had never met, a revolutionary who had divided the religious and political authorities of his time, an itinerant miracle worker about whom they had heard fantastical stories and who was said to have risen from the dead.

And who was guiding them in this new faith? Well, it was a motley crew: a ragtag collection of disciples; a former persecutor of Christians who wrote lots of nagging letters and who now called himself Paul; and countless others who claimed to speak with authority—and how was one to know whether they did or did not? How could you tell who to follow or what to do? Indeed, those early Jewish Christians might have sympathized with an observation made by the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, who once said—probably only half in jest—that “Everything has been figured out, except how to live.”

What the writer of this letter offers to those uncertain people living in those uncertain times is this: God watches you and knows who you are. God sees the thoughts of your mind and the intentions of your heart. God understands you as if you were naked and laid bare before Him and stripped of all pretense and deception. God comprehends your very soul.
Of course, this is not the only time we encounter this message in the scriptures. We run across it periodically and it often comes to us as a kind of warning. God sees everything and judges what He sees. God watches what you do and so you better watch what you do as well.

Now, let us be honest with each other. This message makes us nervous. It intimidates us, maybe even frightens us, perhaps more than a little. And if you have any question about that, try living just one day in a state of constant minute-by-minute awareness of the fact that God is monitoring your past and present and future, observing your every action, and listening to your every thought. It is not an exercise for the faint of heart.

Therefore, most of us, maybe all of us, do not live this way. And we can understand why: this is strong medicine, and so we take it sparingly, and after a while we stop taking it at all. So we conveniently forget that God knows everything we think and do. And, in its own way, this seductive forgetfulness makes life easier and less demanding. But when we cease remembering this basic truth about God’s relationship with us we deprive ourselves of a source of certainty that may help us in some of our uncertain times.

Let me offer an example. In the early nineteen seventies, a study was conducted using Princeton Theological Seminary students as guinea pigs. The seminary students were gathered into a classroom for a discussion period and then dismissed. As the students left the classroom they came across an individual slumped in a doorway and clearly suffering some form of distress. You will not be surprised to learn that the vast majority of those seminary students stopped to see if the individual needed help.

You may, however, be surprised to learn that the students were much less likely to stop if they were told at the end of the discussion period that they were late for an appointment. Under those circumstances, most students bustled past the suffering stranger as if he or she wasn’t there. And, ironically, the seminary students chose to keep their appointment, rather than help the individual, even when their classroom discussion had focused on the story of the Good Samaritan.

Now, we should be fair to those seminary students. Many of them probably just responded to the pressure of the moment without giving the matter any thought. And those who did consider stopping—but didn’t—might have believed that they were making an appropriate choice in morally uncertain circumstances. “Well,” they might have said to themselves, “I have a responsibility to help others but I also have a responsibility to follow the instructions that were just given to me. Lots of people can take care of this stranger. But I’m the only person who can keep my appointment.” We should be fair to those seminary students, if for no other reason than that most of us can see our own decision-making in theirs. Again, let us be honest with each other and admit that we, too, have made thoughtless or self-interested decisions like this and have tried to justify our choices by claiming that we were presented with a complicated and uncertain situation and did the best we could.

On some occasions, such justifications will be true and fair. We will have confronted a situation of genuine moral uncertainty. And we will have made the best judgments we knew how to make, trying our hardest to “lean into the light” as we went along.

But I wonder whether that is the case with the seminary students. I wonder whether the situation they faced really involved any moral uncertainty at all. I wonder whether those students would have walked past the stranger in distress if they had simply remembered that they were making that choice in the sight and in the presence of the living God. I wonder if there are times in our lives when remembering that simple article of faith might help us find some certainty where the temptations of uncertainty have clouded our vision.

Still, there is another—and, in my view, vastly more important—dimension to the idea that God is with us and watching us. It has nothing to do with judgment or correction. It has everything to do with peace and consolation. And it is this: watchfulness is an essential characteristic of love. We know this to be true. We know that this explains why every year millions of parents gather to watch their children play baseball, play soccer, play football, play in the band, play in the orchestra, or even play in the backyard. How will you know if I love you? Check to see if I’m watching.

We are made in God’s image, and so it is with God. God is not the ultimate surveillance program. God does not watch us because He hopes to catch us breaking the rules. God watches us because that is how God finds opportunities to offer us forgiveness and redemption and hope and grace. It is in the knowledge that this is so, and in those opportunities—which arise mysteriously and unexpectedly and in the most improbable ways—that we may find something like certainty even in the midst of the radical uncertainty that surrounds us.

And it is in the nature of forgiveness and redemption and hope and grace that those opportunities will come to all of us, no matter who we are or where we’ve been. My favorite contemporary bluegrass musician, a guy named Bill Bynum (who hails from—of all places—Trenton, Michigan) has a song with a wonderful refrain: “Every sinner has a future; and every saint has a past.” God knows this, because, as the Letter to the Hebrews says, “all are naked and laid bare to the eyes” of God. So God watches us; and knows us; and loves us; and comes to us. And that certainty can carry us through times when no other certainty can be found, because it is certainty enough to keep us going.

In an August evening of 1997, musician Neil Peart learned that his nineteen-year-old daughter, who had left that morning for college, had been killed in an automobile accident. Within ten months, his wife of twenty-two years had been diagnosed with cancer and had died of it. These tragedies, one hard upon the other, left Peart empty and desolate, a ghost of his former self. A year later, restless in his despair, Peart set off on a fourteen-month 55,000 mile journey on his motorcycle, searching for a reason to live.

The uncertainty principle, in its most callous and brutal form, had taken control of Neil Peart’s life. Indeed, just before he set out, Peart wrote to one of his friends, “I don’t know who I am, what I’m doing, or what I’m supposed to do.” Shortly after setting off, someone recognized him and asked if he used to be a musician. Peart responded, “I used to be a lot of things.”
Still, Peart pushed on. He “leaned into the light.” And after a while he could say “I did not really believe in a destination called ‘healing,’ but at least I had begun to believe in the road.”
Sometimes that’s all the certainty we can find: the certainty of the road and the search. And then, along the way, we discover the certainty that someone is watching us; that someone is with us; that someone loves us; that someone has come along for the ride; that someone is trying to help us see the signs and the hazards; that we are not going it alone.

And so, sitting in a Nazi military prison in April of 1943, alone but not alone, in the midst of the most uncertain circumstances imaginable, Dietrich Bonhoeffer could write these words: “It is certain that we may always live close to God and in the light of God’s presence, and that such living is an entirely new life for us; [it is certain] that nothing is then impossible for us, because all things are possible with God; [it is certain] that danger and distress can only drive us closer to God. It is certain that we can claim nothing for ourselves, and may yet pray for everything; it is certain that our joy is hidden in suffering, and our life in death; [and] it is certain that in all this we are in a [relationship with God] that sustains us.”

So what of our old friend Werner Heisenberg? Well, in my view he got it partly right. Sure, the uncertainty principle is fundamental. But it is not foundational. And it is not final. Because it turns out that the universe has another characteristic as well: it is under the watchful eye of the One who made it. And so, praise the Lord, are you.

Amen.

Graceland

Scripture: Colossians 2:13-14

I do not believe in ghosts. But, if I did, I would also believe that Memphis, Tennessee has more than its share of them.

That thought crossed my mind recently as I stood in a hallway of the Lorraine Motel, which now houses the city’s Civil Rights Museum, and looked through a large plate glass window into room 306.

As you may recall, room 306 is where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. rested briefly, took some coffee, met with fellow civil rights leaders, and joked with friends before stepping out onto the balcony where he was assassinated. That balcony marks the place where one of God’s beloved prophets and poets was martyred. In my view, that balcony is holy ground.

But it was room 306 itself that really captured my attention—indeed, almost hypnotized me. It is a dingy, tired, cramped little space that has been preserved just as Dr. King left it when he stepped onto the balcony. The sheets on the bed are rumpled. Cups are scattered around in disarray. It looks indescribably ordinary.

An exhibit I had passed earlier in the museum left me with the same impression. That exhibit described the story behind Dr. King’s famous letter from Birmingham jail—one of the most significant documents in the history of the civil rights movement. You know some of the lines from the letter: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” “Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever.” “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” It is a document of signal importance.

Part of the exhibit features a glass case that contains the satchel that one of Dr. King’s lawyers used to carry the letter out of the jail. It is a humble, beaten up old briefcase—another indescribably ordinary thing. One can hardly imagine that this scarred leather bag served as a vehicle to carry words of inspiration to millions of people and multiple generations.

We know that God often chooses to speak to us through indescribably ordinary things. Indeed, at certain times of the year we make it a point to remember that He does so. At Christmas we talk about a stable that was even more dingy, tired, and cramped than room 306. On Palm Sunday we talk about a donkey that was even more humble and beaten up than that scarred leather briefcase.

We might think of the cross in these terms as well. It is a sparse geometric figure, the joining of single horizontal and vertical lines. It can be drawn with two strokes of a pen. It can be signaled with the simple gesture of a hand. It can be made out of two sticks and a tack. In a sense, there is nothing more ordinary than a cross.

Of course, we know that on a dark afternoon two thousand years ago this ordinary thing became the vehicle for an extraordinary message. And we know that this ordinary place became the focal point of extraordinary events. So, understandably and rightly, we glorify the cross.

But when we do so we risk losing sight of just how ordinary, basic, and simple a thing it is. And, more importantly, we risk forgetting that, in the time of Jesus, the cross was a political weapon, a method of state-endorsed terrorism, a means of inflicting unspeakable torture. We risk missing the fact that in its time the cross was a feared and cursed and wretched thing.

And yet—and yet—through His use, God transformed it. God transformed the cross—even the cross. God took this symbol of misery and despair and contempt, this “emblem of suffering and shame,” and turned it into a symbol of eternal life and enduring love, an emblem of audacious hope and amazing grace. How could we believe—how could we believe—that God can so fundamentally transform even the cross itself and yet cannot fundamentally transform us?

Indeed, in this passage in his letter to the Colossians, Paul assures us that God has already begun the work of that transformation. We come to God weak and uncertain and confused and hesitant and jealous and angry—in short, we come to God as human beings, and therefore come to God as human beings have always come, as those undeserving of the love of the one who made us. But God casts all of that aside.

God takes the ledger sheet—the list of foibles and failures and frustrations that we accumulate as we stumble through this mystery called life—and nails it to the cross …. nails it to the cross. God nails it to the cross, and in doing so makes our burdens His. Is there any greater act of love and grace imaginable? Is there any better Good News than this?

Now, there is a subtle difference here between what Paul is saying and what we often hear said. Perhaps you’ve been at a worship service where someone urged you to write your burdens on a piece of paper and throw it at the foot of a cross. Or perhaps you’ve had a well-intentioned friend encourage you to take a burden and “give it to God.”

These sorts of expressions of faith are all well and good, but they may not help us much. We may feel as though we no longer have the strength to carry our burdens, even to the foot of the cross. Or we may hear the kind advice to “give it to God” and think to ourselves “well, I’ve been trying to give this thing away for some time now, but without much luck!”

Paul is saying something different. He is saying that you do not need to carry these burdens to God or give them to God. God has already taken them. God has taken them, and has “nailed them to the cross.”

* * *

Well, I mentioned that I was recently in Memphis, Tennessee, but I didn’t tell you why. Lisa and I were there because Lisa’s mother is a passionate fan of the late Elvis Presley. So, for Christmas, Lisa invited her mother and father to join us for a trip to Elvis’s famous mansion, Graceland.

Now, I have a confession: I’m not all that big an Elvis fan—my father held the view that music went downhill after Bach. But I love my mother-in-law and this is the sort of pilgrimage you make out of love. So off we went.

But, before I talk about the trip, I have one more confession. A few weeks before I was going to preach this sermon I told our senior pastor that my sermon would be called "Graceland." I also told her I had no idea what the sermon would actually be about. I just felt certain that if I was going to a place called Graceland I would have an experience that, as the saying goes, “would preach.” And I think I did.

We drove just south of downtown Memphis and met the tour bus at the building near the parking lot, which houses fourteen different gift shops to meet all your Elvis needs. The bus took us across the street to the mansion, where we fell into a group that got into line with all the other groups. And there we were: the four of us, and every other flavor of humanity that God ever put on this earth. I thought of the Paul Simon song called “Graceland,” where he summarized the diversity of the visitors with the succinct phrase “poor boys and Pilgrims with families.”

Well, there were poor boys and Pilgrims with families. And there were also the young and the old, the fancy and the slovenly, the educated and the unschooled, the gay and the straight, the tattooed and the clean-cut, the hares and the tortoises, the uninitiated and the veterans, the Southerners and the Northerners and the Easterners and the Westerners, the deeply devoted and the mildly curious, the English speakers and the Spanish speakers and the Japanese speakers, the ones who would pause in the Jungle Room to laugh over the shag carpeting on the ceiling, and the ones who would pause at the gravesite to cry over the death of someone who had meant something special to them.

I watched all these people—every one unique, every one with their own hopes and dreams and burdens and problems—work their way through the twists and turns of the various buildings until they found themselves on a winding outdoor path. And I watched as they followed that path until they arrived in the meditation garden, literally at the foot of a tall stone cross. And I thought of the Paul Simon song again. And I remembered these lyrics: “I have reason to believe we all will be received at Graceland.”

I do not know what is on your list. I do not know whether it is a list of things done or undone, words said or unsaid, pain that you have suffered or pain that you have caused, dreams that have been denied or dreams that have been deferred or dreams that have died.

But I know that each of us has such a list, a list of our burdens, a list that is uniquely our own.

And I know this: that no one’s list is greater than God’s power to transform the person who writes it; that God has already taken that list from you; that God has nailed it to the cross; and that God waits to meet you there.

Amen.

Children of the Promise

Scripture: Galatians 4-5

If you want to learn how to think like a theologian then you must study the sayings of the greatest abstract thinker of our time. I refer, of course, to Hall of Fame baseball catcher Yogi Berra.

Yogi’s thought is not limited by the laws of time and space. So he observed that “The future ain’t what it used to be” and advised “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” Nor is his thought constrained by the principles of mathematics. So he noted that “90% of [baseball] is half mental” and once instructed his teammates to “Pair up in threes.”

Occasionally, the concept of human mortality appears to place some parameters around his thinking. This explains his statement: “Steve McQueen looks good in this movie. He must have made it before he died.” But, in general, even death itself poses no serious challenge to Yogi’s reasoning. Hence, this suggestion: “Always go to other people’s funerals; otherwise, they won’t go to yours.”

Yogi understands a great deal about journeys of faith. Perhaps your own is described by Yogi’s trenchant comment “We’re lost, but we’re making good time.” In any event, it is absolutely clear that Yogi has the soul of a theologian. After all, it was Yogi Berra who once answered a reporter’s inquiry by saying “I wish I had an answer to that, because I’m tired of answering that question.” I’m confident that every theologian has, at one time or other, entertained just that thought.

In reading Paul’s letters, I have been struck by how often he had to answer one particular question. He had to answer it over and over again, and I wonder if he ever wearied of doing so. The question comes in different forms. But, at bottom, it always asks the same thing: “Who’s in and who’s out?”

Paul takes on this question again in the fourth chapter of his letter to the Galatians. Paul had personally founded the Galatian church, which was overwhelmingly made up of converts from Celtic paganism. It appears that, after Paul’s departure, some missionaries suggested to the Galatians that their conversion was incomplete and inauthentic because they had not accepted circumcision and other requirements of Jewish law.

This worried the Galatians, who apparently wondered whether their conversion had somehow missed the mark. From our perspective, this might seem rather amusing. We may grant that faith is not a matter of credentials while also acknowledging that conversion under the direction of the apostle Paul is a pretty good credential indeed. In any event, Paul wrote to address their concerns.

Now, there are many striking things about Paul’s answer. For example, in the course of responding Paul alludes to the parallel Hebrew Bible stories of Isaac and Ishmael and says “Now, this is an allegory.” It is a remarkable statement, really. Think about it: here we have Paul interpreting a Bible story and arguing for an allegorical and poetic—rather than a literal—understanding of what it means.

But, in my view the most arresting aspect of Paul’s answer lies in his description of our relationship with God. Paul points to two qualities of that relationship: he talks about its continuity; and he characterizes the relationship as an adoption. There is a lot going on here, so I want to look at these two themes separately. And then I want to talk about how those two themes, particularly when joined together, can comfort, inspire, and challenge us.

Let’s start here: the continuity Paul describes follows necessarily from God’s unchanging nature. Our God, Paul suggests, is a God of Promises—and has shown himself to be so since at least the time of Abraham. In the fourth chapter, Paul describes a foundational promise of freedom that God bestowed upon Abraham and Sarah and their son, Isaac. Paul declares that we, too, are promised and called to a life of freedom. He says: “You, my friends, are children of the promise, like Isaac.”

Of course, this has implications in both directions. Granted, ours is a God of Promises. But ours is a God who expects us to be a People of Promises as well.

So Paul warns that we must not take the freedom God promises us as an opportunity for self-indulgence. Rather, he urges, we must use that freedom to pledge ourselves to God, to the love of our fellow human beings, and to a life of service. If we accept God’s promises, without making any promises in return, we fall into the trap that Dietrich Bonhoeffer brilliantly describes as “cheap grace”—the grace we bestow upon ourselves and that costs us nothing.

It matters greatly to Paul that God has consistently exhibited this quality—that our God is and always has been a God of Promises. It should matter to us, too. It should matter because believing in a God who fundamentally changes—or, more specifically, believing that one kind of God ruled the Hebrew people and another kind of God rules Christians—can lead us into all sorts of problems.

Still, we can and do fall into this sort of thinking. So, perhaps you’ve heard someone say something like this: “The God of the Old Testament is a God of justice, judgment, and anger; but the God of the New Testament is a God of forgiveness, mercy, and love.” Maybe you’ve even said it yourself. Now, reasonable people can disagree about many matters of faith and biblical interpretation. But I’d like to suggest to you that such statements are much more wrong than right—and may even be dangerously wrong.

First, such statements deny a continuity of faith that Jesus himself acknowledged and embraced. Jesus was an observant Jew who taught in the Temple while still a youth, honored Passover, and quoted from the Hebrew Bible. He declared that he had come not to abolish the law, but to fulfill it.

Jesus teaches us many things about new ways to understand what God wants from us and to think about our relationship with God. And for us Jesus's death and resurrection are defining moments in our relationship with God. But Jesus certainly never declares that God fundamentally changed, that the Hebrew Bible became irrelevant, and that the God who loves justice and who passes judgment became defunct and disappeared and so now we can all breathe a little easier.

Second, such statements deny the reality of the texts. Granted, if you go looking for justice, judgment, and anger in the Old Testament and for forgiveness, grace, and love in the New Testament you’ll certainly find them. But it isn’t that simple.

In fact, the Hebrew Bible includes numerous passages in which God exhibits forgiveness, mercy, and love. Consider how God loved David, despite his conspicuous foibles. Consider how God forgave and embraced Jacob, the troublemaker who misled his father and tricked his brother out of his birthright. Consider how the Psalmist described the God he worshipped just as we describe the God we worship: “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.”

By the same token, the New Testament includes numerous passages in which divine justice, judgment, and anger are put on full display. Jesus turns over the tables of the moneychangers in the Temple, and we cannot believe he does so in a warm and fuzzy way. He shows anger toward the Pharisees who refuse to answer his questions. He repeatedly refers to a time of judgment. Indeed, some theologians, like Albert Schweitzer, have maintained that this idea of divine and final judgment had a central place in Jesus’ preaching.

Now, why does all this matter? Well, it matters because harboring illusions about the Hebrew Bible encourages us to harbor illusions about the Jewish faith and our Jewish brothers and sisters. Throughout history, such illusions have fed one of the greatest evils to bedevil our planet, the evil of anti-Semitism.

And this also matters because harboring illusions about our own scriptures can leave us with a God who does not qualify for the name. To use Richard Niebuhr’s sardonic, and sometimes misused, description, it can leave us with “a God without wrath [who] brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.” We may, even if unconsciously, cling to such an image because we find it comforting. But let me ask you this: is there anything less comforting—and more frightening—than the idea of a God who is one thing one day and something fundamentally different the next? How could we place our love and trust in such a God?

Still, Paul recognizes that, while God does not change, our relationship with God can. And he describes those who come into a new relationship with God as God’s “adoptive” children. This idea of “adoption” has prompted a great deal of debate and deserves some exploring.

It turns out that we actually know very little about “adoption” in the ancient Near East. We know that the Mosaic Law did not address it. But we also know that it was fairly common. We know that the Hebrew Bible includes some instances of adoption—Moses was adopted by Pharoah’s daughter and Esther was adopted by her cousin Mordecai. But we also know that such scriptural references are rare and fleeting. Neither the text nor the history of the scriptures gives us much help in understanding why Paul would have used this word.

So we are left to speculate—and we have, for dozens of centuries. Indeed, this question has occupied some of the greatest theologians in history. Thus, St. Augustine argued that “Paul says ‘adoption’ so that we may clearly understand that the Son of God is unique. For we are [children] of God through [God’s] generosity and the condescension of [God’s] mercy, whereas [Jesus] is Son by nature, sharing the same divinity with his father.”

Augustine expresses his point with characteristic clarity and power. But maybe Paul uses the word “adoption” for other reasons as well. Maybe he uses it because it is dense with meaning and suggestion. Maybe he uses it because, in that single word, he could capture a multitude of ideas. Maybe he uses it because this is Paul at his poetic, allegorical best.

So consider these possibilities. We are “adopted” because God has a defining, active role in the relationship. God takes us in. Indeed, God takes us in even if no one else will. Thus, Psalm 27 says “If my father and mother forsake me, the Lord will take me up.”

We are “adopted” because we can come into a new relationship with God from anywhere, from any place, and from any past. As the first chapter of the Gospel of John suggests, we all have the opportunity to become the children of God.

And we are “adopted” because we are invited into a fundamentally different kind of relationship with God. It is not simply a relationship of obedience. It is a relationship of trust and love.
It is, as Paul perfectly expresses it, a relationship in which we can call the most awesome power in the universe “Abba,” “papa,” “beloved parent.”

Of course, like all allegories and metaphors this one is imperfect. For example, it does not account for the fact that God made all of us and so we are all the created children of God. But we know that allegories and metaphors work in this rough sort of way. When Bob Dylan sings that someone is "like a rolling stone" we appreciate that there are actually more ways in which they're not like a tumbing rock than ways in which they are. Still, the image of "adoption" is a powerful and useful one.

Jesus calls us to make, and honor, these same promises to all our brothers and sisters. This can challenge us and frustrate us and exhaust us. But it can also motivate us and inspire us. And, finally, it can save us.

So we keep at it. We try to make the promises and to keep them. We try to do what we say we will do. We labor long and hard to tend to the family. And in this work we do not, we must not, we cannot rest. For, to paraphrase the words of Robert Frost, we have promises to keep, and miles to go before we sleep, and miles to go before we sleep.

Amen.