I have often said
that our son David is really the theologian of the family. What follows is the
script of the sermon he preached to Milwaukee Mennonite Church, whose members
share the preaching. I am posting it with my sermon scripts, not just out of
parental pride, but believing it is worth sharing. David is Dean of Students at
Frank Lloyd Wright Intermediate School in West Allis, Wisconsin. You will meet
David’s wife, Rachel, and their children in the sermon. The pictures are from
the day Elizabeth joined their family and currently.
Romans 8
October 21, 2012
© 2012 David Stolpe
Good evening.
Tonight we continued our journey
into Paul’s letter to the Romans. Honestly I have been amazed and challenged by
the different perspectives brought by each of you who have preached in this
series. Quite frankly I feel a bit daunted by my task tonight.
First off, I am left with the
responsibility to offer something of value to you all, and fear my offering may
pale in comparison. I am further daunted by the fact that for some reason I was
left to preach on Romans Chapter 8.
The eighth chapter of Romans is
probably the most familiar portion of the letter. Some of the most memorable
and referenced passages of the entire Bible are contained in this chapter.
…there is now no condemnation for those who
are in Christ Jesus…
For those who are led by the Spirit of God
are the children of God.
I consider that our present sufferings are
not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.
If God is for us, who can be against us?
... in all these things we are more than
conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor
life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any
powers, neither height nor
depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the
love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
This is just a small sampling of
the rich text of Romans 8. It is the triumphant highpoint of the letter. So I
find the responsibility I have tonight downright intimidating. I started this
week by asking myself, “What do I, David Stolpe, have to bring to the
understanding of this passage?”
What I haven’t told you though
is that Romans 8 has been pivotal for me throughout my life. In fact, it is
possibly the passage in the Bible that I have read and chewed on more than any
other. But in no way do I feel this makes me the Romans 8 authority, instead it
just raises my anxiety about the words I bring to you tonight. After 20 plus
years of frequent visitation to and meditation on Romans 8, do I have anything
of value to say? I hope so.
Romans 8 is a major building
block in at least three aspects of my faith. The first was formed when I was
young and had the passion, angst, and fire of my youth. I was dogmatic, at
times even belligerent. As my understanding of more complex theological
doctrines formed and I found John Calvin’s Institutes
to be shaping my understanding of our relationship with God, Romans 8 was a
bastion of support for my beliefs of our complete and utter dependency on God
for all salvific hope. At this time, I loved to engage in debate and argument
to advance my Calvinism on others. Romans 8 was an arsenal of evidence to
support my at times aggressive dogma.
Since this time, the fire and
angst of my youth have waned a bit, and Rachel deserves a lot credit for
tempering this uglier side of me. Today my desire for coercive arguments to prove
Calvinism has all but dried up.
That being said, I still hold to
many Calvinist tenets, and find Reformed doctrine something to rejoice and
celebrate. I must admit I still get frustrated when I hear people characterize
Calvinism as a belief in a harsh, vindictive God choosing to flick some people,
but not others, into hell. This is an argument against a perceived
understanding of what Calvinism is, held by people who object to, but I believe,
fail to understand Calvinism. This is not in anyway how most Calvinists
understand what Calvinism is. To Calvinists,
like myself, the immensity of God’s love and grace through Christ’s death on
the cross, is so great, that the idea of God being harsh and vindictive is
entirely irreconcilable. Romans 8 is a defining passage in this understanding. But
Calvinism is not the aspect of my faith I will be focusing on tonight, although,
this reasoning may well be evident in my words anyway, as the themes of Reformed,
Calvinist theology are intertwined with who I am and how I understand God’s
love.
The
second aspect of my faith that Romans 8 was foundational in is my understanding
of our responsibility in caring for God’s creation. Before I wound up in the
world of education, I did my undergrad in Environmental Studies in Humanities.
I was concerned about the degradation of the creation, and am convinced that a
great deal of this was the result of a false doctrine that believed God created
the world for mankind’s use and resource, instead of for God’s own glory. The
dominion statement of Genesis has been used as a privilege rather than a
responsibility. The religious right has co-opted dominion as a justification
for free market capitalism that has advanced the western economy, fueled
through environmental degradation that has afflicted the poor, powerless, and
already marginalized. My goal was to challenge the church from within, by being
part of defining a green theology that recognized that the earth is here for
God’s glory, and our sin has compromised that. Romans 8 was a cornerstone of my
studies and writing at this time. Verses 19 though 22 state
19 For
the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. 20 For
the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the
will of the one who subjected it, in hope 21 that
the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought
into the freedom and glory of the children of God .22 We know that the whole creation has been
groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.
It
is we, the children of God, and our sin, our brokenness, that have subjected
the creation to frustration. And it is not only us, God’s people, who long for
Christ’s redemption. All of creation yearns with labor pains to be liberated
from the bondage to which we have subjected it.
But this again is not the aspect of my faith that I come to offer
tonight.
The
theme of this portion of Paul’s work that has come to most significantly impact
my faith is his description of the nature of our relationship to God. Paul
compares God to a parent and us to his children. This describes an intimate and
deep love between God and God’s people. But Paul goes beyond that, and
describes this parental relationship more specifically as an adoption. This
additional description is by no means without significance. Why does Paul go beyond
the parent relationship metaphor, and extend it to a relationship of adoption?
In
the last 7 or 8 years, this theme of adoption has hit home for me in a much
more tangible way because of Elizabeth. And as I dig into Romans 8, I now
digest each section in the light of Elizabeth’s life story, our adoption
experience, and our relationship with Elizabeth. Our adoption is the single
most powerful event that I have experienced in my lifetime. The entire story is
packed with sorrow, struggle, triumph and joy. While the beginnings of that
story remain obscured from me, these real life elements bring new clarity and
understanding to me when I try to grasp the immensity of God’s love. I hope
that tonight as I share parts of our adoption story it will help each of you
have a new appreciation and understanding for the power and immensity of God’s
love for you.
Adoption
is a metaphor used by Paul to help us understand something greater than our
capacity to fully understand. Paul again uses the metaphor of adoption in Galatians
and Ephesians. All metaphors have limitations, and this metaphor is limited by
scale. The love we have experienced in our adoption is the grandest thing I can
imagine, and yet it remains minute, or
bitsy, in comparison to God’s love for us. That being said, I still
struggle to comprehend the immensity of the love we have for Elizabeth. To put a finer point on it, Paul has taken
the most powerful experience of love in my life, to help me understand the
nature of God’s love which is even greater. As a parent of Sam, our biological
child, I would find this amazing by itself, but there are specific events and
dynamics of our adoptive relationship with Elizabeth that bring increased
understanding to Romans 8 that our relationship with Sam does not. So I will
spend the remainder of my time walking through Romans 8 to tell you the story
of Elizabeth Stolpe, so that you may share in this joy in the further clarity
of the immensity of how much God loves you.
As
I imagine it, on December 27, 2006, a poor Chinese couple, who lived in a
cramped room, had a baby in the privacy of that room. She was tiny, itsty
bitsy, probably barely over 4 pounds, and she had a noticeably disfigured foot.
She was weak and frail, and if the parents tried to have someone with some
medical training do a health check on their daughter, they would find that this
delicate baby had a hole in her heart. Her parents had to wrestle with what to
do. With no means to provide care adequate care for a fragile child like this
tiny girl, it is likely that she would not have survived the year. To cling to
her may have been to cling to death.
Paul
tells us in verse 6 that “To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the
mind on the spirit is life and peace.” We have a choice to make. If the
priority we choose is to cling to, preserve, and indulge our flesh, we also
choose death, but if we choose to sacrifice our flesh, and cling to the spirit
we are choosing life.
In
desperation this mother and father recognized that if they clung to their
daughter, it would likely mean death for her, but if they sacrificed their
relationship with her, they might also be saving her life.
Despite
their love for their daughter this poor couple made a decision that is
incomprehensible to me. They chose to give her up in order that she might live.
The
Wuxi newspaper reports that on December 31st 2006 a 36 year old
woman found a little girl in a box in the alley. It says the girl was dressed
in cute clothes and a hat, and was left with a bag with some more clothes, a
bottle, formula powder, and a paper that stated that she was born on December
27th.
This
decision to give up their daughter is a decision that Rachel and I can barely
stand to even think about. It is so incomprehensible and painful for us to
think about. Would we have enough love to make that decision? Would we cling to
our kids to preserve our relationships and bring death, or would we be strong
enough to make this sacrifice of faith in order to allow our children to have
life? Fortunately, we don’t live a life that forces us to make that decision,
but this is what Elizabeth’s birth parents did for her, knowing that they would
lose their daughter forever.
This
scandalous act of love was likely a gift of life for Elizabeth, and a certainly
a gift of a daughter and sister for our family. In verse 32 Paul states that
likewise God did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, will
God not with him give us everything else? God displayed this same act of scandalous
love, giving up the Son as a gift of life for each of us.
Half
a world a way, and about year before this helpless little girl was found in
that alley, I sat at our kitchen table in tears, terrified that Rachel was
going to have a break down that was going to leave her hospitalized or self
destructing. I was scared that I was going to lose the woman I fell in love
with. We had been trying to have a second child for almost 2 years. The pain of
infertility had been building up, and Rachel was in the middle of her second
month of using Clomid, a fertility drug that threw her into deep depression and
limited her grasp on reality. I told her I wanted her to stop taking it because
I was scared about what it was going to do to her. She stood at the counter and
desperately cried out that she wanted a second child. We held each other for a
while, sobbing, and decided that having a second child did not justify the
damage being done to Rachel’s well being by this chemical. We had to find
another way.
One
morning after having a particularly rough night, we went to our old church
pretty tired and emotionally exhausted. Sam went up for the children’s message
and in the back and forth of Pastor Mark’s conversation with the kids, Sam
announced that he was going to be a big brother. Immediately everyone in the
congregation looked at us and smiled congratulatory smiles assuming that Sam
knew something we didn’t let the rest of the church know yet. I quickly shook
my head no and indicated that it was not the case, as Rachel crumpled into my
shoulder in tears. For the next few weeks people would come up to us trying to
congratulate us for being pregnant, and time and again we had to face them and
tell them that Rachel wasn’t. We wallowed in these unwanted and to frequent
reminders that we were not going to have a second child.
Within
a few weeks Rachel’s Dad convinced us to pursue adoption as an alternative. It
would be another two years before we would take Elizabeth into our arms. During
our four years of trying to have a second child, Rachel and I would go through
many more ups and downs. As I said before our adoption of Elizabeth is the most
powerful experience of love and joy I have had in my life, but I also said that
the story was packed with sorrow and struggle. The adoption process took over 2
years and cost about what I was making each year when we started. There are so
many hoops to jump through. This four year period of our lives was the darkest
we have walked. It is my primary basis for understanding suffering. It was a
time of severe longing and yearning. A time of pain and grieving for the loss
of someone we never even had. Romans 8 became a place of refuge and hope for
me.
I
consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory
that will be revealed in us. For the creation waits in
eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. For
the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the
will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself
will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and
glory of the children of God.
We know that the whole
creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the
present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the
firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption
to sonship, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were
saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already
have? But
if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.
This
passage provided the promise of assurance, but the adoption process seemed insurmountable,
and Rachel and I often lost hope and belief that it ever was going to ever
really happen. But Sam of 3 to 5 years
during this period of life would walk every visitor to our house into his
bedroom, show them the giant map on his wall and point to China and confidently
say that that is where his sister was going to come from. Sam never lost hope.
The 2 plus years of adoption seemed endless to Rachel and me, but to this small
loving boy, it was not a deterrent. Sam never stopped believing. He had
unshakeable faith in a hope in something unseen, his sister, and he waited
patiently, setting an example for Rachel and me.
We
struggled to display Sam’s hope and faith in what was unseen. Rachel will tell
you that she would go through the pains of the birth of our 11 pound 9 ounce
Sam ten times again before going through the pains and the inward groans of the
adoption process. Simply put there was no comparison. This was a period of
great inward groaning and suffering for us. But as Paul pointed out, our
present sufferings were nothing in comparison to the glory in our revelation.
I
will never forget the night that Rachel and I walked into the Nanjing Grand
hotel, the night before we finally got Elizabeth. We had been in China for a
week, and yet Elizabeth still seemed like a concept that was never truly going
to happen to our family. As we stepped into the hotel there was a crib set up
at the foot of the first bed. When Rachel and I saw the crib we both burst into
tears. Sam asked why we crying. We told him that for the first time Elizabeth
seemed like a real person and not just a story that we kept telling ourselves.
I don’t thing Sam understood, but then he always had faith, hope, and
confidence that he was going to be a big brother, lacking the doubt that we
had.
Now
I know I said I wasn’t going to spend the night talking about Calvinist theology,
but in the last half of chapter 8 Paul starts throwing around these words,
predestination, called, foreknew, and elect. And this raises the question of
predestination. While many Non-Calvinist believers view this concept as
portraying God as someone who damns some people to hell and not others, this is
by no means how most Calvinists view the concept, certainly not me.
Here
again our adoption experience colors my understanding of this text and the
concept of predestination. During the children’s sermon I spoke of the Red
Thread. This again is a traditional story shared within the community of
adopting families, in particular families with children adopted from China. The
concept states that the people who are meant to be together are connected to
each other with an invisible and unbreakable red thread. This red thread ties
us to each other and assures that we will find the people in life that we are
supposed to be with no matter what. And when we do, this red thread will bind
us together.
It
is easy to dismiss this as a nice quaint story with no grounding in reality,
and think that families will love their adopted children no matter what, but I
think there is more truth to it than that. When we went to China we were part
of a group of nine families who were all adopting with the same program. On the
day we were united with our children, we quickly connected with our children.
As we all rejoiced and cried with this hope fulfilled, we spent the next two
weeks together with this group. Within the first day there were dynamics that
we all noticed in the children and their new families that made many of comment
on how well fit each family seemed to be for each child, and visa versa. When
Elizabeth was handed to us she immediately popped the same two fingers in her
mouth just as Sam always did. This is just a minor example, but in reality, there
seemed to be instant bonds with each adoption, and it became difficult to
imagine the children paired with any other family, even in that first day. The
chemistry of the bonds that were forming seemed to be natural and logical, and
arbitrarily changing them seemed illogical. The personality combinations just
would seem to be mismatches if any child was paired with any other family other
than the one they were matched with. This is the concept of the red thread.
This
concept was further strengthened when our friend Maureen let us know privately
that she and Stu were originally paired with Ji Ju. When they opened their
envelope, they looked at Ji Ju’s picture and Maureen felt blank. She told Stu,
that’s not my baby. They made the tough decision and declined the match. They
were then paired with May. Ji Ju was paired with Mike’s family. We grew very
close to these two families in our next two weeks. Even within the first day,
we thought about what would have happened if the two matches hadn’t been flip-flopped.
That just seemed wrong in our imagination.
I
believe our adoptive children were tied and bound to us. Maybe not with a red
thread, but by God’s will and divine plan. They were predestined to be in our
families. This is how I have grown to understand the concept of predestination.
It is not God fickly damning people to hell; it is God binding himself to each
of us with a red thread, that connects us no matter what. Nothing is going to
stop our adoption from happening, nothing is going to keep us from God’s love,
not even our own sinfulness and fallenness. God is going to fight relentlessly
to welcome us into his arms.
For I am convinced
that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor
the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation,
will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our
Lord.
Paul
also writes in Galatians 4:3-7
…when we were underage,
we were in slavery under the elemental spiritual forces of the world. But when the set
time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law,
to redeem those under the law, that we might receive
adoption to sonship. Because you are his sons,
God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, the Spirit who calls out, “Abba, Father.” So you are no longer a slave, but God’s
child; and since you are his child, God has made you also an heir.
God
has adopted us, let us rejoice!
God
has transformed our lives!
Not just from a slave to a freed
person, but from a slave to a child of the family, from slavery to sonship, from
a slave to an Heir. On April first, 2008 when we finalized our adoption, we
were asked to swear an oath to the government of China and to Elizabeth. The
oath stated that Elizabeth was to be considered and treated as if she was our
own biological child. An heir to our family’s wealth, no different than a child
born to us. We sealed this oath and our promise with a thumb print left in red
ink. God has tied and bound himself to us with a red thread. God has not only
freed us from slavery, he has taken us into his own family, adopted us, called
us his own children. God has made us heirs to the kingdom, considering us no
different than God’s own son Christ. God has sealed this oath and promise not
with red ink, but with the Red Blood of God’s own son.
Ephesians
1:3-6 says,
Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord
Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual
blessing in Christ. 4 For he chose us in him before the creation
of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us for adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his
pleasure and will— to the
praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves.
