This is the trailer for a movie called problem child, which I saw in the theatre when it first came out. In 1990. And the plot of this movie is that the older child that is adopted is the spawn of satan, and is dreadful to the nuns in the orphanage, and to his adoptive parents, and, gosh, everyone. As the mother superior says 'good little boys get good homes, bad little boys get something else.' The tendency is to want to adopt younger children, right from when they are neonates, but if you were to adopt an older child, you'd want to adopt one that was sugar and spice and everything nice. You most assuredly wouldn't adopt one like Junior from problem child, whom his adoptive parents had to be tricked into bringing home. And yes, once they discovered what kind of child he was, they tried to return him.
Who would choose Junior? Nobody would choose Junior. You could be tricked into taking him, deceived into it, but nobody would take him on purpose, knowing anything about him. And this is something that comes up a few times through the scriptures, the notion of adoption. Adoption and inheritance. We think about ourselves as being adopted into God's family as infants, as precious babies who are just lovely and sweet. But we weren't. We were rebellious, dangerous, and wicked. Incorrigible. We were rotten, rotten to the core, and disastrous, and our adoptive parents knew it, were well aware of it. Why would they take us in to begin with, what was the purpose?
What's great is that the Bible talks about families because we know about families. We all know about families because we all grew up in them. And the best family story that we know about from the Bible is the story of Hosea, Hosea who took a wife and had some children. Nice story, right? Well, not quite. Hosea's story was one about a man who was asked by God to take a wife, but a wife of adultery. He was asked to take a wife of prostitution, a wife who was going to be unfaithful to him, and whose children might not be his. And Hosea was asked to raise these children who may or may not be his, and to be faithful to his unfaithful wife, and to have that wear on him and grind him down over years and years.
Unfaithfulness is prettty much the universal exit hatch for relationships, the one thing that nobody's supposed to put up with. If you get advice from anyone about when it's time to get out of a relationship, unfaithfulness will pretty much always be the time to get out and run. And when you look at the story of Hosea, you want to grab him and scream at him 'Don't marry this woman! She's going to cheat on you and use you up!' Yes. Yes she is. And that's the point. Just like in Ephesians, where we have been predestined for adoption, knowin that we are rebellious problem children, people who are up to no good, who will wreck things and use things up. We're not going to be good and sweet, we never were. We're going to smash things, we're going to bust the place up, be rude and disrespectful, we're going to be rotten. And God is well aware of this. But he's going to adopt us anyway. He's going to adopt us and make us sharers in the inheritance that the natural born children get.
All in all, as usual, we expect things from God that we wouldn't do for each other. Funny, isn't it? We expect God to forgive, though we are stingy with forgiveness for each other. We expect God to love, but we are reserved with our love for each other. We expect God's care, but we won't care for one another. We most assuredly expect God to respond to our needs, but we won't change things to fit his commands. In other words, we're unwilling to do the things God wants us to do, while expecting him to meet our needs constantly.
If you will, the Gospel reading from Sunday is part of this whole thing. Think of Herod's promise to his daughter, promising her anything that she would want should she happen to dance for his party. She danced, and then was allowed to choose whatever she wanted. And so, on the prompting of her mother, Herod's daughter asked for the head of John the Baptist on the platter. And Herod gave it to her.
This ludicrous request was honored by Herod. Herod had John killed, and his head delivered to his daughter on a platter. Horrible. It's like the blessing given by Isaac to Jacob, like the inheritance given to the prodigal son, like Jephthah's vow in the book of Judges, like the marriage given to Gomer by Hosea, where we as readers ask 'why don't you stand up for yourself, and walk out? Why don't you just take your self respect, and go?' Good question, right? But the level of commitment that is shown by any of these people, it's something that we can't even understand. We think about all our relationships, including our one with Jesus, as what we can get out of it. What's in it for us? Not about the commitments we make, and our requirements to see it through no matter what. It's about wanting to quit when things get bad.
And so when you see this moment where John the Baptist is slain, where Herod's promises are met, think about what God has promised for you. Think about what God has promised for you, think about what he has offered to you as his child, a stubborn, rebellious child. All his promises are to his detriment. Whatever he offers to you, he follows through with not because you were good, but because of his love for you, and his comitment. The Holy Scriptures tell us about this constantly, the services of God's house reinforce this, that we bring nothing but our sins, and we end up receiving the grace merited by Christ.
Why would a parent choose a rebellious adoptive child? Why would a man choose to stay with a wife of infidelity? Why would Herod choose to offer a sacrifice on behalf of his daughter? Because of their commitment to their vows, not because of anything the other party offered. We are of inestimable value to Christ our Lord because of his love for us, because of his commitment to us as his rebellious adoptive children. And ultimately, it comes down to him saying to his disciples
'In my father's house, there are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?'
He prepares a place for us. If it wasn't so, he would not have told us that it was. This all falls on commitment, and it's God's commitment to us. The stories that we hear in the scriptures, where people promise things that they would rather not deliver, well, that's sort of the best image of the promise that God gives to us through Christ. Even though it costs him everything, everything that there is, family, friends, health, freedom, the clothes from his back and even his own life, he follows through on the promise that he made to us, that a savior would come, and free us from our sins.
So yeah, back to Problem Child. Problem child is the story of a kid that, if the parents knew how dreadful he was, then they never would have adopted him. True, true. But the deal with our adoption into Christ is that God knows exactly what he is getting, and decides to bring us to himself anyway. Or if that's too abstract for you, think about fruit. Which you were doing anyway.
When you go to superstore, you have your pick of fruit. Nice firm plums, and softer, mushier plums. And then the local Superstore special, where the plums are spoiled beyond repair, and in a bag with a pink triangle sticker on it. Almost like used fruit. Now, when you're picking plums up, you're probably going to pick the nice, firm, beautiful plums, yes? You're going to squeeze them, feel them, and prepare to pop them into your plastic bag. As you're scanning over the plums, you'll find plums with rough skin, a little on the older side, a bit too soft, a bit too juicy, and you do what the rest of us do, which is to leave them there, and to scan over for firmer plums.
And so does everyone else.
If you were to take one of those plums home, it wouldn't be because you wanted that particular plum, nor would it be because you cared to have that plum at that moment, but because those are the plums that need to be eaten. The other ones are good the firm plums are fine, and will be chosen and eaten by other people. The soft ones are the ones that need to be chosen because they need to be eaten. You were chosen not because you were good, but because you were the one who most needed to be chosen.
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