Sermon: Becoming Children

 John 1:1-18
Becoming Children
James Sledge                                                                            January 2, 2022

Birth of Jesus, Benedictine monks, late 1800s
Basilica of the Immaculate Conception,
Conception, Mo.

The Presbyterian Book of Order is the butt of a lot of jokes, and not without some cause. It the rather cumbersome and unwieldy book of rules that governs our denomination, and there is almost nothing that happens in churches or the larger denomination that isn’t addressed somewhere in this book.

But along with a plethora of rules and regulations, there are some beautiful theological statements about our faith and our understanding of what it means to follow Jesus. In its opening chapter, the Book of Order has a section entitled, “The Great Ends of the Church.”  It lists six primary purposes for which the Church exists. The first speaks of proclaiming the gospel for the salvation of humanity, and the second is this: “the shelter, nurture, and spiritual fellowship of the children of God.”

I always discuss the Great Ends of the Church whenever I do training for newly elected elders and deacons. And I don’t think there has ever been a time when at least one person didn’t look surprised to hear that “children of God” does not refer to all humanity. It is speaking of those who are part of the Church, not the Presbyterian Church or any other particular church, but members of the Christian faith.

People are startled to hear this more exclusive meaning because we are used to thinking of children of God as a synonym for humans. Somewhere along the way we have developed the idea that we are children of God naturally by birth.

But doesn’t it seem a bit presumptuous to claim divine nature for ourselves? To claim God as my heavenly parent seems to insist that something of the divine exists within me, that all on my own I am somehow related to God. That sounds a little arrogant to me.

It’s nice to think so highly of ourselves, but I’m not sure where we got this idea. According to the Bible, we are part of creation, one of God’s creatures. We may be the pinnacle of God’s creation, but we are creatures nonetheless. We are made of dust and to dust we shall return. 

Now if this is starting to sound like a downer, hang on just a bit. The notion that we are not children of God by nature may seem like a come down at first, but I think the good news that God adopts us as children more than makes up for it. The promise that we just heard in John’s gospel is that we can become something more than what we are by nature. As God’s creatures we are wonderfully made, crowned with glory and honor, it says in the Psalms. But we can become something even more wonderful through a kind of second birth, not a natural, human birth, but a birth that is “of God.”

There is a whole lot of “becoming” in our gospel reading, though much of it gets lost in translation. We hear that the Word became flesh, and that we can become children of God.  But because it sounds awkward in English we don’t hear a literal translation that says of the Word, All things became through him, and without him not one thing became. What has become in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.

The Word of God that was with God in the beginning, that is the creative power of God, that is God, that causes all things to become what they are, has become flesh, has become one of us. And through this a whole new “becoming” has been made possible. We can now become children of God.

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Many of you likely know someone who was raised by adoptive parents. Perhaps you were adopted. And so many of you know that there can be identity issues related to adoption. Sometimes adoptive parents are hesitant to tell their children about the adoption, worried that it might make their child somehow feel less a family member. Sometimes adoptive children decide they want to find their birth mother, to find out who their biological parents are. 

These identity issues can play out very differently in different adoptive families. But in the vast majority, after all is said and done, family is about relationship, about the bond developed and the love shared living together as a family. For most adoptive parents, their child is always their child, no matter if a birth mother has or hasn’t been found. And for most adoptive children, the parents who raised them remain their parents, even if they find and develop a relationship with a birth mother or father.

Child, mother, father, sibling; these are just as much relational terms as they are biological ones. In fact, they are probably more about relationship than about biology. That’s certainly true in the Bible. Psalm 2 is a coronation song, likely used when kings took the throne. It says, You are my son; today I have begotten you. This is the same sort of language used in God’s promise to provide offspring for King David. “I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever. I will be a father to him, and he shall be a son to me.” (2 Samuel 7:13-14)

This idea that Israel’s kings were adopted spoke of a special relationship with God, an intimacy with God not normally available. John’s gospel uses the term Son of God this way, to speak of Jesus’ intimacy with God. And this is an intimacy that Jesus comes to share with us. As John’s gospel tells us this morning, No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known. The idea is that through a relationship with Jesus we find ourselves in relationship with God. We share in Jesus’ intimacy with God.

Growing up in the South, I had lots of friends who were Southern Baptist. But I’ve always been a bit uncomfortable with their language about a personal relationship with Jesus, and especially the insistence on being “born again.” This insistence on a particular religious experience, a vivid, earth-shattering faith moment, always struck me as limiting, a little like saying that if you’ve never experienced love at first sight you’ve never really been in love.

Nonetheless, there is something to this idea that through Jesus we become something we weren’t before. Perhaps it happened so gradually that we weren’t aware of it, but I do think there needs to come a time where we realize that we have become something more than our human nature allows. It happens via a rather strange adoption. Jesus claims us siblings, and it is because of this claim that we dare claim God as parent, that we dare pray to God as Father or Mother.

You aren’t a child of God simply because you are human, but the good news, the wonderful news, is that God desires you, has chosen you, has adopted you through the Word made flesh who takes on our humanity because God so loves the world. In Jesus, in the Incarnation, human flesh bears within it divinity, and joined to Christ Jesus, we are God’s children. By the Spirit, we are joined to one another as the living body of Christ, and so we become bearers of the divine. As siblings of Jesus, we become bearers of God’s love that gives itself for the world.

You are a child of God. We are God’s children, and so we are called to carry God, to carry Jesus into the world, to share God’s love with the world so that all may know the love of God that says, “You are my beloved child.”