¹⁴ For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. ¹⁵ For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, "Abba! Father!" ¹⁶ it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, ¹⁷ and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ--if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him. (Rom. 8:14-17)

¹¹ He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. ¹² But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, ¹³ who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God. (Jn. 1:11-13)

As the above quotes from scripture indicate, however, God is the most prodigal of adoptive parents there is. God doesn't just adopt a child here and another child there to make up for the inability to have children or just to be charitable to orphaned children from other countries. God adopts everybody. We are, all of us, adopted children of God. Here, adoption seems to carry none of the ambivalence that it carries in experience among human beings. We all just think that is wonderful that God adopts all of us. But is that how we would feel if we really thought about it? If we are all adopted by God as God's children, then the childhood fantasy of adoption that we ridicule is actually rooted in a very deep reality. Is this why parents feel a little bit threatened when their child expresses this fantasy? Given the anxiety and ambivalence that adoption entails, and given the fact that we are adopted children of God, a brief examination of this subject should help us understand a fundamental challenge of being a Christian.

One likely source of anxiety over adoption is that fact that it is often a response to rejection experienced by the adopted child. There are many good reasons that children are put up for adoption when the neither natural mother nor her family is in a position to care responsibly for the newborn child. In such a case, the parent hasn't rejected the child so much as taken a responsible action. Nonetheless, there is the real possibility that an adopted child who knows this truth might feel rejected by the natural mother. If the child does not feel this way, others still might. An adopted child is automatically suspected of being born illegitimately and then rejected by those parents. It may be a great good to be adopted, but it is not such a great good to be a societal reject from birth. Not every adopted child has suffered this sort of rejection. Perhaps the child is an orphan adopted by relatives or friends of the family after the tragic death of the parents. Even here, however, children, and not children only, experience the death of a nurturing parent as a rejection and a betrayal, no matter how irrational that feeling may be. Morever, some adopted children have indeed experienced severe rejection. If a child is adopted only after having been shunted from one foster home to another with bad experiences at each one, building trust with that child is very difficult. Biracial children seem especially vulnerable to this sort of horror.

It may be stretching the truth to say that God calls only rejects, but readers of scripture can be pardoned for suspecting this might be so. At birth, the life of Moses, born of an outcast people, was deemed forfeit by Pharaoh, but he was saved when pharaoh's daughter adopted him. Later, when God called to Moses out of the burning bush, God was adopting Moses along with his people, a ragged bunch of slaves caught in a foreign country. After his call from God, Moses was rejected by Pharaoh and then, after their escape from Egypt, rejected by his own people to the extend of encountering several instances of life-threatening mob violence. The Suffering Servant will "share a portion with the great" although he was "numbered with the transgressors." (Is. 53: 12). At his baptism, Jesus was proclaimed God's "beloved son" although he came from a city from where nothing good could come, according to Nathaniel, in a region from which no prophets come, according to the high priesthood. Jesus himself became notorious for calling the riff-raff of society to the detriment of his reputation. Jesus' sonship was reaffirmed at the Transfiguration on Mount Tabor, the very time when Jesus was also coming to the realization that he would be handed over to the authorities and put to death. St. Paul reveled in the irony that the Gentiles who rejected the Jews had themselves became the ones rejected by God only to become chosen once again when the Jews rejected Jesus. 

In speaking of adoption by God, one might be inclined to a theoretical stance that the adoption does not entail rejection of some kind. When the famous psalm verse says that "my father and my mother have forsaken me, but the Lord will take me up." (Psalm 27:10), it does not mean that it is necessary to be rejected by our own parents in order to be adopted by God. However, it should be noted that in human experience, adoption is always a response to rejection or loss. Loving parents who should be there, are not, and therefore adoption is required as a remedy. This may be where the analogy falls short when it comes to our relationship to God. In Jesus' case, adoption of the heavenly father is not primarily concerned with making up for a family Jesus never had. Indeed, although little is really known about them, Jesus' parents are held up by the church as the best human models for parenting available to us. Even here, there are hints in the Gospels that not even the Mother of God understood her son as deeply as Jesus needed to be understood. At one point, Jesus' family wanted to haul him away because they thought he was out of his mind. God's adoption may not, then, become a reality only in the case of catastrophic loss of good parenting, but, for human beings, it never fails to relate to at least some brokenness and loss in our human relationships. God's offer to adopt us does not sound like the best of news if we do not feel like orphans and have no desire to do so. If, in any way, we do feel like orphans, than God's adoption of us offers us hope that we might otherwise not have at all. God's adoption of human beings radically reorients us in our awareness of rejection and victimization. The one who is rejected may be the cornerstone of God's kingdom. This goes for us if we have, ourselves, suffered rejection, and it goes for all those whom we have seen fit to reject.

Adoption also causes uneasiness because it involves a shifting of boundaries. A person who was outside a family has been moved inside it. Somebody who was part of the "out group" is now in the "in group." While a family cannot conceive a child of a genetic makeup alien to them, a family can adopt a child of any race whatever. As with any crossing of boundaries, there is a chance the move will be met with hostility. The adopting family may itself have difficulty absorbing and retaining the foreign element which they had embraced. Abraham, the patriarch of the Israelites, was not himself an Israelite. This foreshadows the scope of God's tendency towards adopting children. Ishmael was adopted by Abraham only to be rejected later at the insistence of his wife Sarah. The rejected Ishmael, however, was still, like the Jews themselves, adopted in the wilderness by God who raised him up to be the patriarch of another great people. When the Gibeonites worm their way into being adopted into Israel through means of a ruse, the people are relegated to a lowly status of enslavement. (Josh. 9:3-27) The big shifting of boundaries entailed by God's adoption is, of course, the boundary between Israel and the Gentiles. Isaiah prophesied this outcome and the Acts of the Apostles and the epistles of Paul attest to its reality. It was quite a shock to Peter to learn that the Gentile Cornelius the Centurion had already been adopted by God and he was called upon to preach to the household and baptize the members. The Council of Jerusalem, of course, shows the early church struggling with this radical shift of boundaries and searching for a new identity beyond these boundaries. The epistle to the Galatians shows Paul struggling with powerful resistance to the inclusion of Gentiles, as Gentiles, who were not even required to accept circumcision as Jews. The shifting of boundaries that result from God's prodigal adoptions threatens any and all exclusionary mechanisms in which God's people are separated from those who are not God's people. 

The baptism of Jesus suggests an even more radical shifting of boundaries: that between human beings and God! When the heavens open, Jesus is announced as the beloved son of God. Just as a human child adopted into a human family partakes of that family's substance, so Jesus partakes of the substance of God. In the case of Jesus, a human being has been shifted over to the divine side of the divide between God and humanity. Now, we must be careful here because we do not want to end up with a Christology that has historically been called adoptionism. As I shall indicate below, God the Father eternally begets the Logos, the Son. But, when the eternally begotten son entered humanity, he entered time. Even the Logos needs to be adopted by Joseph upon entering human existence in order that he will be taken care of while a vulnerable child. This same human person, in turn, needs to be adopted by the heavenly father before embarking on his mission of proclaiming the Kingdom of God. Every act of adoption that shifts boundaries reminds us that the boundaries can shift for everybody. If one family adopts a child of a different race, than any child of any race can be adopted by any family of any race. Likewise, if the man Jesus can be adopted by God, then any human being can be adopted by God. The author of 2 Peter says as much by affirming God's promises to call us to God's "own glory and excellence to the extent that we "become partakers of the divine nature." (2 Pet. 1:3-4) The crossing of boundaries that occurs in adoption does not, however, entail a blurring of distinctions. An adopted child of a different race from the adopting family remains as distinct racially as the child would have been if never adopted. Likewise, our adoption by God brings makes us partakers of the divine nature, which is a very different thing than possessing divine nature. The natures of God and of humanity remain distinct for all the closeness that adoption brings to them.

Giving birth occurs in the natural order of things, while adoption occurs outside of it. That is to say, adoption is unnatural. The uneasiness this phrase gives us in many contexts, not least in ethical norms for "natural" sexual behavior, points to another source of uneasiness over adoption. We seem to have a "natural" tendency to prefer that which is natural over that which is unnatural. Food prepared out of natural ingredients is considered "real" food compared to that which uses chemicals added to or manipulated by human hands. There is much folk wisdom that suggests that everything would be fine if we just "acted naturally." Animals have no problem following their instincts and they do just fine? Why should humans have a problem with that? A family with adopted children looks unnatural, especially if the children posses genetic makeups that could not possibly have been natural. Likewise, our adoption by God is unnatural. St. Paul stresses the unnaturalness of God's adoption of the Gentiles by using the image of a tree's branches. The Gentiles are "cut from what is by nature a wild olive tree, and grafted, contrary to nature, into a cultivated olive three." (Rom. 12: 24) This unnaturalness is connected with the crossing of boundaries: a branch that by nature does not belong to the tree is connected to the tree. The analogy, as presented here, breaks down in that the imagery suggests that Israel's connection to God was "natural." That was not the case either. As noted above, God's adoption of Israel is equally as unnatural. By nature, Israel, too, was an orphan abandoned in the wilderness until God came along and adopted her. (cf. Ezek. 16) Going back to Abraham, we note that Isaac was born to Abraham and Sarah only after they had long since passed the age when it was natural to give birth. All branches of the tree, then, are grafted on to it, contrary to nature.

In all this, what emerges as most fundamental to adoption is intentionality. Adoption doesn't just happen by following the course of nature; it requires a decision. One chooses to adopt. This goes for humans as much as it does for God. Indeed, one effective way of removing a sense of stigma for adopted children is to call them "chosen children." I once heard of an adopted child who picked up on that fact by reminding her siblings, who were "natural" children, that their parents had to take them but they chose her. This sort of taunt, of course, underrates the intentionality of the parents to have natural children and, more important, to care for them, but it still makes an important point. We have to make choices of which people to adopt in life. On a more negative note, I once had an unpopular biology teacher who, in one of her many exasperated moments, reminded us that not only had we not chosen her for a teacher, but she had not chosen us as her students, either. Even so, the decision was ours to adopt her as our teacher and vice versa, although that did not happen in this case. Caring relationships do not happen by going on automatic pilot. What is at stake here is the realization that human relationships do not simply happen naturally, by instinct. We may have an instinct that causes us to need these relationships, but they only happen when we make sustained choices to have specific relationships with specific people. We can reverse the wording of the sign most of us have seen in dentist offices: "Friends are like teeth. If you ignore them, they go away."

What the image of adoption tells us about God is that God chooses us. God chooses that we should be and then God chooses us to inherit the kingdom prepared for us. God adopts us and makes us heirs of God's full inheritance. The emphasis, again, is on intentionality. God's love for us is not some vague instinct that happens automatically the way the human heart beats automatically. Rather, God invites each and every one of us individually to become God's chosen child. God's intentional love for us is most clearly stated in that oft-quoted verse in John's Gospel: "God so loved the world that he gave his only Son that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life." (Jn. 3:16) By revealing this intentional love through entering humanity, God reveals the nature of the love that exists between the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit in the holy Trinity. The love of the three divine Persons for each other, again, is not a natural instinct that just happens without anybody willing it. On the contrary, each of the divine Persons choose to love the other divine Persons. These relationships of love must be renewed at each instant or the Trinity would fall apart. That seems unthinkable, and it is. It is unthinkable, however, not because the Trinity is a motor composed of indestructible parts that just keeps on running once the switch is turned on. It is unthinkable because the intentional love is so intense that one cannot imagine God having a change of heart over the intention to love everybody.