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A few years ago a woman in the eastern part of the United States wrote a letter to Jim Ludwig, the manager of Sak's Fifth Avenue in San Francisco. The letter arrived the first week in December. It went like this: "I'm Mrs. Anna Barber. I'm 75 years old and I'm a widow. I live alone and I do not expect any gifts this Christmas from anyone. So I am enclosing 10 dollars in this letter. Would you please select for me 10 dollars worth of gifts,any gifts, put them in a package and send them to me because I think I would like to get a surprise package for Christmas."

Jim Ludwig was so moved that he sent a copy of the letter to all the Sak's stores, and on that Christmas, Mrs. Anna Barber got 19 surprise Christmas packages.

Can you imagine the incredible joy that the woman experienced when she received so much out of expecting so little? Christmas ought to be like that for everyone, shouldn't it? In a strange way, Christmas isn't Christmas unless you get something. We can have a tree decked with soft colored lights and candy canes; stockings hanging on the mantle, or, if the gifts have gotten too plentiful, laying on the hearth; a bonus in our pay envelope; or someone coming home who hasn't been home in awhile; but Christmas still isn't Christmas unless you get something from God.

As we members of Western culture walk toward death, searching for home, the experience is not a Christian one, I should think, unless we get something from God to help us with that walk.

The central question is this: "Are you getting what you want out of life?" The prophet Isaiah was one of the first to ask the question: "Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread and your labor for that which does not satisfy (Isaiah 55:2)?"

We are fortunate, I guess, that Isaiah is deceased, because were he living he would probably stand among us and say to the consumers of America who have the nicest homes, the most comfortable furniture, the most abundant food, the most clever gadgets, and the most luxurious automobiles of any generation: "Are we getting what we want?"

The long walk toward home is not a Christian walk without an ultimate identity. Yet the birth of a little baby so long ago seems to have no real connection to present-day happiness for us.

Such could not be farther from the truth. The Scriptures say it, "For unto you is born this day, in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord." You got something for Christmas - an identity and a purpose which transcend this life.

I think the most important thing to receive in life is an identity and a purpose which are greater than the things of this earth. Without that, one cannot experience self-acceptance. The acceptance of God's free gift of your identity as a child of God seems critical to me. We either accept that gift from God, or we will try to earn our identity through the efforts of earthly existence. A person can live a fairly satisfying and successful life and never come to know an identity which transcends this life and points him or her toward an eternal home.

The emphasis in Jesus' teaching is on receiving your identity from God as a child of God ... "But as many as received him, to them he gave the power to become sons and daughters of God (John 1:12)." In his life on earth he saw prodigals, women taken in adultery, and mixed-up human beings of every description, not as they were but as God saw them, and he gave everyone of them a new identity so they wouldn't feel shackled by their old destiny or feel they had to work hard to find acceptance on earth.

Basing one's identity and worth as a human being on anything less than one's ultimate destination leads to disappointment.

Consider the options - you can't protect yourself on every front when you are trying to build an earthly identity for yourself. You might stave off society at large and find identity in the market place at the expense of being rejected at home through your neglect of those closest to you and wind up a lonely divorced man, sitting on a pile of money. Others build an identity on achievement and the good life brings fulfillment for a period of time. But what happens when you make your goals or it dawns on you that your earthly goals will never be realized? When business or career goals are attained or unattainable and as the children have left the nest or retirement approaches, what gives you your identity? The mother can find some meaning and identity in her husband and her children. But what happens when your reasons for living walk out of the house, die, or go to college? An identity based on interpersonal relationships is always subject to change. What do you do for an identity when retirement comes? Those who developed an identity based on achievement can no longer be an achiever. Those who have never achieved become remorseful about the past, dissatisfied with the present.

As we march toward our death, the only identity that will suffice is one which is greater than the temporal identity we acquire from our lives on this earth.

This matter of identity was pressed upon me in a vivid manner. I returned to my hometown for the 20th reunion of my high school graduating class. Frankly, I did not exactly look forward to it. It's hard for a 230-pound preacher to go back and socialize with a group of people who knew him as a 150-pound kid down the block. But the experience was an enjoyable one. At least I have all my hair and a few other things. Amazingly enough, after all those 20 years of changes and experiences, everyone's basic identity and sense of identity seemed to me to be pretty much the same as it had been all his life.

For example, the contented, nice Christian friend who lived down the street is still a nice, generous, contented man who now happens to have three children and works for $17,000 a year in a rather menial job. The nervous, insecure, unaffirmed skinny kid without much security in high school is now a nervous, unaffirmed surgeon making $300,000 a year. The gracious, generous Christian girl named Kaye is now a generous, gracious Christian woman, even though she has a mentally retarded son. The insecure, nervous, self-deprecating boy with the low self-image is now the insecure, nervous adult male with a low self-image, even though he now has 57 rental houses, four apartment complexes, a bank and a Cadillac he owns to usher around that flagging self-identity. And the self-assured Christian kid who seemed to value morals, God, and other people above everything else is now a self-assured Christian physician who values other people and can sit down and be admired by everyone as if his wealth is no barrier to his deeper identity.

What I'm saying, of course, is what many of you know to be true: The interpersonal relationships and the material things of this world can never form a person's identity. They are only add-ons or take-aways from that basic feeling of self-worth or self-rejection. Jesus said, "The things outside a person are not the things that matter; it's on the inside that counts. If the inside be clean it doesn't matter much what happens on the outside."

The effort to find an ultimate identity in a world of temporal success is the key to our search for home. It is hard to march toward a home you do not wish to live in. If our Christian tradition points to anything, it points toward an impartial God. Our life on this earth is essentially a kindergarten experience to help us prepare for living in an eternal home with different cultures, races, religions, and intellects. Without an ultimate perspective as we live our daily lives, our vision of a home where God does not play favorites can be quite frightening. We march toward an eternal home where we share living quarters with all types of people we had better start learning to love.


16. ETERNAL HOME IS AN ORPHANAGE

One August, Diane and I journeyed to Augusta, Georgia, to attend the 20th anniversary reunion of her high school class. The evening of the registration was a hot, humid one, as only August summer nights can be. And the line at the registration booth, on the grounds of the Holiday Inn, was a long one. We waited and waited to get up to the little booth. I soon learned why. Each member of the class was given a yellow name tag with his or her high school picture affixed to it. We spouses were given a white name tag. There we were - the yellow badges and the white badges. While the yellow badges all ran up to each other and hugged and screamed with delight, we white badges slowly drifted to the lobby.

I could understand their purpose in being partial to the yellow badges. After all, they, the yellow badges, were the real ancestors of the school. We, the spouses, the white badges, were the Johnny-come-latelys to the experience. It's still a funny feeling, though, to be an outsider to an experience.

One of the first things a person learns in adulthood is that our world plays "favorites." The world is a place that exhibits a great deal of partiality. Those who pay the most money get the best seats! Those who occupy the highest positions get the best parking places. Ours is a world of preferential treatment for preferred persons. Some play by one set of rules while others have to play by a different set. It's part of our existence and the greater the responsibility a person has, the better the "perks" that person has. It's a fact of life, and a justifiable one, I think. After all, our world revolves around big donations, preferred customers, and partial treatment.

Shortly after our family moved to High Point from Boston, I received a beautiful packet from my alma mater, Furman University. My name was embossed in gold on an invitation to attend a football game. The packet contained all manner of beautiful brochures, bumper stickers, and notebooks, with the college logo on them. Choice seats were being reserved for me for the game. All we had to do was notify the development office when we were going to attend. Frankly, I was shocked. Usually I have to scramble to get a ticket past the five-yard line.

A few nights later Diane received a telephone call from Furman. I heard her laughing in the kitchen, so I went in to eavesdrop on the conversation. The last words I heard her say were, "No, he isn't that kind of doctor." You see, in Massachusetts, Diane had worked as a secretary for Pediatric Associates in Walpole. Somehow the Furman computer had scrambled together her job, our church's address on Country Club Drive and my name. I retrieved the packet from the shelf in the utility room and only then noticed the address: Dr. Harold Warlick, Pediatric Associates, 1300 Country Club Dive, High Point, North Carolina. The poor computer. It thought it had targeted a preferred alumnus. Needless to say, we haven't received any more special invitations.

What the heck, I understand it. We live in that kind of world. I benefit from it as well as sometimes become the victim of it. It's nice to occasionally be given partiality. Our world invented the wall long before it invented the wheel.

Consequently, we are sometimes knocked between the eyes when we read the stories in the Bible. I'm always amazed by the haunting words that came from Peter's mouth in Acts 10: "And Peter opened his mouth and said, 'Truly I believe that God shows no partiality, but in every nation any one who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.' "

God does not have favorites. God does not play favorites. God is an impartial God. If we are brutally honest with ourselves we must admit that that's hard to take. The idea that God doesn't play favorites has always been a bitter pill for religious people to swallow. I guess that's one reason why we preachers preach so many lightweight sermons on self-help, personal happiness, individual depression, and the Book of Revelation with its emphasis on our Christian revenge. Maybe that's why we have so many bumper stickers and lapel pins with slogans like, "God is my copilot," or "In case of rapture this car will be unoccupied," while we dodge the tough issues like maybe all those sinners who didn't behave as well as we did will also make it to our eternal home. Frankly, I think most of us would prefer to ignore the entire question of God's impartiality and refuse even to think about it. Psychiatrists describe this condition as "psychic numbing." When a situation is too horrible or frightening to contemplate, some people pretend it doesn't exist. For example, most people who were veterans of World War II refuse to talk about it and generally adopt a psychic "closing off" of the whole subject. In like manner, my parents refused to talk about the Great Depression. Few older people talk about it. Our whole society has a "psychic numbing" about the subject of nuclear war. Finally, consider our psychic avoidance of death. There are few, if any, seminars on death. We'd prefer to pretend it doesn't exist. We eat yogurt, buy cosmetics, jog, and think positively.

The idea that God does not have favorites is such a shocking idea that we don't talk or think about it often in our world of preferred treatment, partiality, and individual success. In a world of yellow badges and white badges, partitions, apartheid, Protestant, Catholic, and Jew, men and women, most of us would just as soon forget all those biblical references to a God who doesn't play favorites. If the Bible is correct, some of us executives will live forever, side-by-side with our custodians and $4.00 per hour third shift employees. And they will have the same "perks" in this home we march toward as we will.

Yet, on the matter of God not playing favorites, Jesus was consistent and persistent. He told of the owner of a vineyard who hired some laborers to work all day long. Then the owner hired some laborers to work but an hour. At the end of the day, the owner paid all employees, regardless of work, the same amount of money. How would you feel if you'd worked hard all your life trying to be a Christian and God put beside you for eternity, in your special home, some sleazy person who'd been a Christian for one hour? It isn't fair!

Jesus told of a child who seized his inheritance and blew it on a raunchy lifestyle. But this prodigal child still received the same treatment from his father as the dutiful child who stayed home, behaved, and remained loyal. It isn't fair!

Jesus likewise spoke of a banquet. Everyone loves a banquet. Everyone loves to go out to eat in a fancy restaurant and be given a choice seat. That's the way our world operates. One summer I had to drive up to Canada by myself to preach. My trip coincided with some work one of our members, Bill Guy, was doing in western Massachusetts. Since we were both "bacherloring" it, we arranged to meet in Connecticut for dinner. I suggested that we meet at the Silvermine Inn and Tavern in Norwalk, Connecticut, since the owners, Frank and Marsha Whitman, are friends of mine. I called Frank and he graciously made the reservations. Frank lamented that he couldn't eat with us because he had to attend his sister-in-law's wedding rehearsal. When we arrived, Bill and I went over to the maitre'd in that beautiful restaurant overlooking the lake and the country estate. All we wanted was a place to eat. The restaurant was crowded and a group of 50 or more people were laughing and toasting an elderly couple in the fireplace room as photographers snapped pictures. The flustered hostess came running over and said, "They're having a 50th anniversary party for a couple in the fireplace room. They're not finished yet but I can move them if you wish."

Bill and I looked at each other in puzzlement. "We just want to eat supper and talk. Anywhere will do. Anywhere." The color returned to her face and she politely led us to a nice table. After the salad, I went by the hostess' desk on my way to the restroom. I looked down at her clipboard and there were all these names with reservations. Beside Hal Warlick and Bill Guy was written, "V.I.P. - Frank Whitman."

Just because her boss had written three letters, this gal was going to move 50 people who had planned an event for at least a year to honor a deserving couple.

That's the world we live in. It's not what you know but who you know. Now, Jesus handled banquets differently. He told his disciples, "When you go to a banquet, you don't dare take the choicest seats. You take the least desirable seats in the back of the house. That's how heaven works. The first shall be last and the last shall be first." Sobering thought, isn't it?

Our little world of partiality has reached an incredible level of distortion of the Christian message. The home we march toward as we travel toward death could be a huge surprise. It is a world house. Men are not superior to women in that home; gentile is not favored over Jew nor Jew over gentile; the politically powerful live side-by-side with the politically powerless; rich and poor, educated and uneducated, occupy the same quarters. Certainly an impartial God does not have segregated living arrangements!

Perhaps you and I can identify with the hostility heaped on Peter's head when he opened his mouth and said, "God does not have favorites. He is an impartial God."

You see, we gentiles were the Johnny-come-latelys to the House of Israel. We were the white badges. Peter's words and actions hurt those Jewish Christians deeply. Peter dared to baptize a Roman, a gentile. Peter had been "religious" only three years. Yet he presumed to set aside two thousand years of time-honored tradition and eat with this gentile, this scum, this outcast, this sleaze-bag. How could he do that? The angry crowd demanded an answer. "How could you do that?"

J. B. Phillips once said that the most personal issue you can engage in is what you think God's like. He contends that quite a number of us have much too small an idea of God. Most people develop a great deal physically, mentally, and psychologically as they grow up. They learn their job and become proficient in it. They learn to be a parent and even a grandparent. "But," says Phillips, "as far as religion is concerned, a lot of them haven't grown up at all."35

All of us need to acquire a few grown-up ideas about God as we march toward death. Whatever home we are headed toward cannot be described solely in Protestant or Catholic terms. All the evidence we have from Scripture and human experience tells us that Peter's assessment is correct: Whatever God is and whatever God isn't, one thing we can count on for certain - God is an impartial God.

The God of Christianity displays a tenderness and an impartiality toward this world that has often gone unacknowledged in our Western world. The Western religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, believing that truth comes through particular persons, tend to be exclusive. They also tend to focus only on the male images for God - Lord, Master, Father, Son, and Judge. The Divine Warrior motif, for example, which was found in early Hebrew literature, became the search for a Messiah. We should not forget that a suffering servant motif combined with that messianic expectation to provide the backdrop for the child of Bethlehem who points our way home. God's home is a home of tenderness and impartiality because that home is created by God who has a mothering side. It's right there in our own patriarchal tradition.


17. THE MOTHERING SIDE OF GOD

His name is Harold and he lives near Atlanta. Harold is a child who very much wanted to be in his church's Christmas pageant. Harold wasn't selected for one of the larger parts. He was selected to be just a shepherd. Harold's sister, however, landed a big part. She was chosen to play an angel. During rehearsal, the director of the pageant marked an "X" on the stage floor to show each character just where to stand. Harold knew exactly which "X" was his.

On the afternoon of the pageant, Harold dressed in his robe and slippers in just 10 minutes, while it took his sister most of the day to get on her white dress with hoops and wire-up her halo and wings. Obviously, Harold was disgusted with his lesser role.

As the pageant began, the angels took their places in great splendor. Now, the director's only oversight was a failure to realize that the hoops in the angels' dresses caused the spread-out dresses to completely cover some of the Xs. When Harold entered, he could not find his X. It was under an angel's dress. He walked all around the stage but could not find his spot. Finally, he walked to the center of the stage, lifted his arms as though to lead in prayer and shouted, "The dumb angels have covered up all the crosses!"36

Sometimes it is like that in our religious perspective. The angels can indeed cover the crosses. When that happens we tend to miss one of God's greatest signposts on the road toward home: God's mothering side.

There already existed in that story of the birth of Christ in Bethlehem a foretaste of the sufferings and crosses that he would have to bear in his lifetime. In fact, the story of the birth of Jesus has all the ingredients to be a horror story, even if we do tend to cover them with angels' dresses. We can't let the angels cover up those crosses or we miss God's gift to us.

Imagine what the Christmas story would be like if you filmed it or made a video of it. A young teenage girl named Mary received word that she was pregnant. In those days you could be stoned to death for being pregnant before marriage. There was little romance about the events which happened to this woman named Mary. Foreign soldiers occupied the land and everyone was required to return to his home city to reregister for taxation. Mary was well into her pregnancy and had to ride on a donkey's back many weary miles. Then all the places to stay were booked, so she had to set up residence in an animal shelter and have her baby there. It was a dangerous time. Birthing was a crude process. And once the child was born, the dangers were everywhere. One of the "signs" given to the shepherds was that they would find the child "wrapped in swaddling clothes." The mother had to wrap the child in swaddling clothes lest he freeze to death in that little cave in the hillside. Then, the mother heard that King Herod had ordered all male babies slaughtered. So she and her husband had to take the small infant and flee many, many weary miles to Egypt.

No, we must not let the angels' dresses cover the many crosses that were in the Christmas story for that brave mother. And we Protestants, in our valid attempt to revolt against the excesses of Mariolatry and Catholicism, must not lose the mothering side of God.

The late George Buttrick used to say that there is no such thing as a "self-made" person. For every great self-made person some brave mother went down in pain and discomfort to get him or her here.

If there is something which keeps the Christmas story from being a horror story it is not the presence of angels. It is the mothering nature of God. God is not only powerful and almighty; God is so tender and caring that no person is so forsaken and homeless in this world that God cannot see him and come to him and take care of him with real tenderness.

The mother and the child hold the story together, don't they? We never escape the need for a mother, do we? The mother cannot be written out of the picture. All else can be removed from the Christmas story and it is still the Christmas story. The mother who sang praises to God for giving her such a son; the mother who wrapped him in warm clothes and loved him; the mother who remained close by him during his ministry; the mother who stood by the horrible cross when her son was executed. The mother cannot be written out of the picture. The angels' dresses cannot cover up all the crosses that the mother stood on.

What a powerful message it is! In the Old Testament we see a God who is a powerful and tremendous force. He is accompanied by loud and awesome trumpet blasts. His messages were so terrible that people begged him to stop speaking. Moses became so frightened at the sight of God on the mountain that he shook with a terrible fear. In addition, the Israelites believed that anyone who touched the Ark of God, other than the most holy would surely die.

We need a powerful God. And we have one. But we need a caring God, too. That is one of the clues toward finding the pathway home. God has a mothering side, too. When Jesus grew to be a man he told us that in his father's house are many mansions and that he will not leave us as orphans, struggling alone in the world. There is a mothering, caretaking side to God's nature that the trumpet blasts and the angels' dresses cannot obscure.

One of the greatest pastors in this century was the German, Martin Niemoller. In 1938, Niemoller was arrested and placed in solitary confinement as Adolph Hitler's personal prisoner. Three years later he was sent by the Nazis to the Dachau concentration camp where he preached to his fellow prisoners for four years. On Christmas Eve in Dachau in 1944, he spoke of the great joy that came precisely in these unromantic aspects of the first Christmas: "God, the eternally wealthy and almighty God, enters into the most extreme human poverty imaginable. No person is so weak and helpless that God does not come to him in Jesus Christ, right in the midst of our human need; and no person is so forsaken and homeless in this world that God does not seek him, in the midst of our human distress."37

That is powerful. There is a tender side of God that does not leave us as orphans. In spite of the most brutal of conditions, God has a mothering side that comes into our midst.

God can come. There is no situation so bleak that God cannot come and wrap tender arms around us and love us. There is no place that can shut him out; no cold that can freeze him away; no tyrant that can murder his comfort; no journey that can conquer his resolve; no disease that can blot his mercy.

The Marys of our world can still feel his blessedness. I know a woman named Mary. She is 97 years old. Her crippled body is folded awkwardly into a wheelchair. She will spend Christmas in a nursing home. She has no family. She resides in a room at the end of the hall where the smell of urine is stronger and the people look like zombies. The Salvation Army will probably bring her a package containing a toothbrush, a comb, some candy, and Kleenex. A church group or some Girl Scouts will probably come caroling perfunctorily down the hall, stealing glances into Mary's room. It will seem so lonely as their voices rise above the moaning and crying. Don't worry. Unto her a Savior will come and the dumb angels' dresses can't obscure the smiling face of God standing on Mary's crosses.

Somewhere in Ethiopia, a mother will pull a rag over the face of her starving child. The baby's body will shake one last time and then it will give up its spirit to death by famine as we sit down to our VCRs, home computers, and compact disc players. Don't worry. That child has had a Savior born unto it who will pick it up in his arms, and wrap it in swaddling clothes and hold it to his heart. Our dumb angels' dresses can't obscure the smiling face of God standing on the crosses, pointing the way toward home for those who suffer poverty and death in ways we cannot begin to imagine.

Somewhere a body racked with pain, processing chemotherapy treatments will laboriously make its way to a Christmas tree for one last Christmas with the family before the cancer drains its life from it. Don't worry. Unto it a Savior has been born and the dumb angels' dresses can't obscure the smiling face of God standing on its cross.

Isn't that wonderful news! God has a tender side. It says so right there in the Christmas story.

That's a great gift for you and for me. There is no weakness, no pain, no amount of tragedy and horror that can come into our lives that is so extreme that God cannot seek us and find us right in the middle of our human distress. Look for it. Expect it. Count on it. There is so much more to God than the gift of power and angelic visions.

There is the adoption of the human race by a God with a mothering side. In our system of patriarchy, we often tend to focus on the experience of being born into a home. It strikes us as somewhat foreign to conceive of a God who prefers to adopt children into an eternal home. Yet the mothering side of God comes from a tradition in which adoption by a tolerant and impartial parent into an eternal home stands at the core of its assertion.

Children are marvelous creatures. They can love and hate one another and their parents at the drop of a hat. My sister and I experienced the usual sibling rivalry when we were growing up. Our parents had to exercise care to give us Christmas presents that were exactly alike when we were small. Then, as we grew older they could get away with purchasing different items, as long as they both cost the same.

On several occasions in our childhood my sister and I voiced questions to each other relative to our natural or adopted relationship to our parents. These occasions were when we overstepped our boundaries and were punished by our parents. More than once, after my mother and father had yelled at me over a "C" in conduct on a report card or over one of my displays of bad temper, I would go into my room crying. I would whisper to my sister, in utter sincerity and complete confidence, "Mary Jo, I think I'm adopted. Really. Nobody that mean could be my real parents. I think I'm adopted."

Obviously, I did not know much about adoption then. It takes as much love to care for something or someone you've adopted as it does to care for something you've made.

The writer of Ephesians made a powerful statement to the effect that none of us are natural-born children. We are all adopted - that is, if we want to be adopted. He stated that God, as an act of love, decided before time began to adopt everyone on earth through Jesus Christ and freely give those people the inheritance of his kingdom. Most of us probably do not understand the seriousness of those adoption papers. Our lack of appreciation perhaps comes because we confuse our privileges with rights. That wasn't the case with the first Christians.

Under Roman law, adoption was a serious step. It was not uncommon to adopt a child to ensure that your family would not become extinct. The ritual of adoption was very impressive. Copper and scales were used. Twice the real father sold his son and twice he symbolically bought him back. Then the sale was held a third time, and at the third sale the son was not bought back. After this, the adopting father had to go to the magistrate and plead his case for adoption. When the adoption was complete, the adopted son had all the rights of inheritance in the new family. All his debts and obligations connected with his previous family were abolished as if they had never existed.38 You, obviously, were quite lucky if someone adopted you. In fact, you were doubly rich. It was a powerful image of a privileged state.

For the early church, God, through Jesus, adopted us from a worldly family of sin and death and gave us full rights of inheritance in his heavenly kingdom. It is a great privilege to be delivered from a situation from which you could have never delivered yourself. Ezekiel depicted Israel as an illegitimate child who, on the day of her birth, was cast into an open field, and left to die of exposure. But God came by and adopted that foundling into his family and left her a great inheritance. That, said the writer of Ephesians, is what God did for the whole world, not just one nation, in Jesus. We were lying exposed in an open world of sin, with all kinds of human obligations. We were not going to make it. Death was the lot to which we were born. But Bethlehem's God adopted us, bought us with his only son and gave us a rich inheritance. That is tremendous news, isn't it? We're all illegitimate children, but God loves us anyway!

Sometimes we have a difficult time accepting our state as adopted children because we confuse rights with privileges. For example, most of us attend church because we, or a member of our family, can drive a car. No one has the right to drive an automobile. Driving is a privilege that is granted by the state in which you drive. If you do not obey the laws, that state can take that privilege away from you. If you do not possess certain information and driving skills, the state will not even grant you the privilege in the first place. One can't simply go down to city hall and pound his fist on the desk and scream, "I demand the right to drive." A privilege is given. It is not owed to you.

In like manner, we did not have a right to be adopted by God. We did not have a right to the birth of Christ. No one has the right to be adopted by anyone else. It is a privilege. That's the good news of our inheritance. We march toward an eternal home at death, not out of a right but a privilege.

It is amazing to me that the Apostle Paul could grasp that idea in his situation. Paul was in prison in Rome, awaiting trial before Nero. He was allowed to stay in a house which he himself had rented, and his friends had access to him; but day and night he was chained to the wrist of a Roman soldier whose duty it was to see that he never escaped. Amazingly, Paul considered it a privilege to be a prisoner for Christ. Just because he believed in God and had perhaps a closer relationship with God than any of us ever will, he did not demand that he had a right to be set free and live an easy life. He knew that God had adopted him and given him everlasting status as a son. God had bought him through the blood of Jesus and he had full rights of inheritance of all that his adopted parent possessed. He concluded that that was a privilege that far outweighed the sufferings of his present time.

One of the great success stories in our country is that of Booker T. Washington. He was born a slave. But with his courage and his bare hands he founded Tuskegee Institute and lived to see it evolve from a hen-house and an abandoned stable to a world-renowned educational center. He raised most of the money needed to build and staff this first teachers' college for his race. His autobiography tells us that he never had to resort to begging. The genuinely generous people felt privileged in being in a position to support a worthwhile enterprise. It is a privilege to be able to help a good cause, to have a share in something worthwhile. Not many people have that privilege.

Someone once asked me, "How do you get a person to be generous? How can you make an ungenerous person into a generous person?" I only know of one way - that person must recover a sense of privilege in being an adopted child of a tender, mothering-fathering God.39 The key word is learning to appreciate the privilege of your state as an adopted child of God. Frankly, I'm tired of preaching on people's duty to come to church; their responsibilities as a Christian; their obligation to do certain things; their need to sacrifice for something. You rarely hear the word privilege used around a church. But we are a very privileged people.

Parents complain about all they sacrifice for their children. No one has a right to have a child. I know a young woman, 36 years old, who has had five miscarriages trying to have a child. Twenty percent of the funerals I have done as a minister have been for children less than one year old. I have visited with people who have been waiting seven years to adopt a child. It is a privilege, not a duty, to be entrusted with the upbringing of a child for a few years. You will never be generous with your time to your children until you understand that.

We hear about sacrifices people make to go to school. Few people in this country sacrifice anything to go to school. It is a privilege not everyone in the world has. There are 600
students in a school in Kenya that have four textbooks among them. When they go home and it becomes dark, they can't do homework even if they wanted to because there is no electricity in their homes. Our children don't have an obligation to do their homework in order to get a good grade. Every time they go in that room, open a book, and turn on a lightbulb, they are participating in a privilege, a privilege not everyone has. I once served as director of ministerial studies at Harvard University. I saw a young man walk to that university from Minnesota. He lived on a small farm, which had just been repossessed. His family lost everything. So he packed what he could into a backpack and odd-jobbed his way to school, literally walking 1,000 miles when he couldn't catch a ride or hop a slow train. No, most of us did not go to college because we were sacrificial and responsible. We went as the acceptance of a privilege.

And I hear people speaking of their duty to their parents or their having to sacrifice because of the mistakes of their parents. Listen, last year there were 236 babies born to little girls 12 to 16 in Guilford County, North Carolina, where I live. To put that in perspective, there were 265 graduates of Andrews High School and 268 of Central High School, the two schools in our city. If you lined up the graduating class of either school and placed alongside it the 12- to 16-year-old girls with babies, the two groups would be the same size. Every year it would be about the same size. To say, "I will bear with my parents' weaknesses because I have a duty or an obligation to them" is to miss the target. To even have a parent that has been in some way responsible is a privilege that not everyone in even our own county has.

The writer of Ephesians hammered home a great awareness of a general privilege that Christians possess. He said that it is a privilege to know something that other people don't know. He said that the Christians know a secret that not everyone knows: "God has adopted the world. We are his children and through the ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus, we have become heirs of God's estate." Therefore, life is worth living. That is a secret that has been unveiled to Christians that not everyone knows yet.

As we march toward our death, we do so as adopted children of a tender, if not mothering, God. We participate in a common kinship with the entire human race. Our journey, therefore, is not just one which takes place in our lifetime. We are being watched by kin and friends as we struggle to find the lights of home. Because of our adopted state, we humans experience kinships and friendships which in themselves help provide experiential and historical landmarks identifying the road toward home.