“A Day to Rejoice”

At this mid-point in the season of Lent, what do you have to rejoice in? Today, on this fourth Sunday of Lent, we are called by ancient church tradition to take a bit of a break - to pause for just a moment from our Lenten disciplines of abstinence and self-mortification in order to take stock of and to reflect upon all the good gifts we have received from our Heavenly Father which give us cause to rejoice.

In the ancient church this Sunday was called Laetare or “Rejoice” Sunday. It developed out of the ancient catechumenate – that three year process of preparation for baptism and being made a member of the body of Christ. Today was the first day the candidates for baptism were admitted in to the hearing of the Gospel, read and explained in the service. And so the Psalm for the day reflects the joy of being invited into our Father’s house: “I was glad when they said to me, ‘Let us go into the house of the Lord.’”

On this day, the Church rejoiced, for soon -in just a few weeks - on Easter morning new children would be born to her through the grace of regeneration and adoption in the waters of baptism. And the catechumens rejoiced because they’d finally found their forever-family. They had a new Mother – Jerusalem above, the Church Universal and Triumphant – through whom they would soon be born again in the Son as free children of their new Heavenly Father. And they were about to get a bunch of new brothers and sisters as well, together with whom they would be made heirs of eternal life. And so the epistle lesson for today reflects the joy of our adoption into the family of God as His free sons and daughters - the joy of our new birth in Christ through our Mother, the Church.

But also today, as the catechumens, and the Church with them, rejoiced that they would soon begin their new life in Christ – their pilgrimage with Him through the wilderness of this world – they could also rejoice that Christ would continue to come to them to feed and refresh them along the way with the spiritual food their souls longed for. In other words, they could also joyfully anticipate that, once they were adopted into the family of God and given access into His house, they would be free to come to the Lord’s table and receive the refreshing of their souls by the body of blood of Christ. And so the Gospel lesson today – Jesus’ feeding of the five-thousand in the wilderness - reminds us that we have cause to rejoice in the fact that Christ continues to come to us, here in our wilderness, to feed and refresh us with Himself, with the spiritual food of his own body and blood. It’s the reason why this Sunday is also called “Refreshment Sunday.”

And so you can see how all three of the lessons for today hang together. They present us with three great joys that, on this Rejoice Sunday, we ought to take a short time-out from the austerities of Lent to be renewed in: Joy in our adoption as God’s children. Joy in our free access into God’s house. And Joy in our refreshment at God’s table. But I want to focus this morning on the first of these: the joy we ought to have because we have been, or soon will be, adopted into the family of God.

This week I came across a true story about a little girl named Stephanie. For the first few years of her life Stephanie didn’t have a name, but people called her “Toogee” – that’s Korean for “foreign devil.” It was her curly hair and big, bright eyes that gave her away, and made people hate her for the bastard child of an American G.I. that she was. She was a reminder of everything they wanted to forget.

When she was just four years old her mother abandoned her. Stephanie thinks she remembers her mother sending her away alone on a train. And since then she’d been surviving by sleeping in caves or under bridges, and eating locusts or scraps of food people tossed out, or things she was able to steal from the marketplace. She moved from village to village hoping that her mommy and daddy would be waiting for her somewhere.

But many of the Korean villagers wanted to get rid of her. At one point a group of men tied her to a waterwheel hoping to drown her. Round and round she went, in and out of the water, her mouth and nose filling with water and mud, when suddenly the wheel stopped, and a kind man untied her and said to her, “Run, little girl, run. These people will hurt you.” By the age of six, she says, she was dead emotionally.

At seven years of age, she recalls, “I wanted to die. I knew what my future was, I hated myself and everything around me, especially the people, [and] I didn’t want to be abused anymore.” And so, stripped of dignity and hope, beaten and malnourished, and now suffering from cholera, she lay down on a garbage heap and waited to die.

But that’s when her whole world entirely changed. She was found lying there on the garbage heap by Swedish nurse by the name of Iris Erickson, who took her off the streets and brought her to live in the orphanage that she operated in the city.

Two years went by, during which her hope faded of ever being adopted, until the day came when an American missionary couple, David and Judy Merwin, arrived at the orphanage. They’d already been to six other orphanages, looking for a little boy to call their own. They’d already chosen a name for him, too: Stephen. “They were the tallest, roundest and strangest looking people I had ever seen,” Stephanie recalls. But they were instantly drawn to her. And so the very next day the couple adopted her into their family. And suddenly, the little girl who for almost nine years of her life had, even in her own mind, no other identity than “Toogee” – an outcast, foreign devil – became Stephanie Ann Merwin. And she was an American, with all the rights and privileges that we so freely enjoy.

She was loved by her new parents, and she learned about the love of God in the Bible, and was baptized. And yet she didn’t know how to accept the love of either her parents or of God, because still, inside, she didn’t feel like anything but a dirty, ugly toogee. Until her new mother sat down with her one day and explained that when Jesus came down from heaven to be born of a virgin, he too was ridiculed and mocked as an illegitimate child. Some even said he was the base-born son of a Roman soldier. Her mother also asked her if she’d ever thought about where Jesus was born. “To me,” she says, “the manger was just like the Christmas play every year.” She never realized that it was a dark, dirty cave that never got cleaned out and that the only thing he had for a bed was a feeding trough.” Stephanie’s mother went on to explain how King Herod had tried to kill Jesus when he was a child because he felt him to be a threat, and how later on in life even his closest friends rejected him.

That’s when Stephanie began to realize that Jesus, the Son of God, went through all of that abuse, and was eventually killed, to become one with us, so that we could become the children of God, and be loved by Him. And so from that day on, Stephanie began to grow in her joy, not only in her adoption as the free daughter of the Merwins, but in her adoption as the free child of God through her union with Jesus Christ.

Do you have joy in your adoption? St. Paul’s parable of the two mothers, the two wives of Abraham in our epistle lesson, illustrates our good fortune in being made children of promise by the free woman. Sarah represents the Jerusalem above, the Church, who has birthed us into union with the one true Son, that birth which is, says Paul, “according to the Spirit” – the Spirit of adoption, by whom we cry out to God, “Abba, Father.”

And St. Paul contrasts this blessing with the bondage and curse that we were adopted out of – the bondage and curse of the Law. Hagar, the slave women, represents, the Jerusalem which then was, the Old Covenant Church under the Law, whose children were in bondage with her. All of us when we were born merely “according to the flesh” had this woman for our mother. And she was brutal. All she could ever do was call us down for coming up short of her expectations. All she could ever do is batter and bruise our consciences because of our sins. All she could ever see in us was an evil toogee – a foreign devil.

But thanks be to God, “when the fullness of time had come God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, that we might receive the adoption as sons” (Gal. 4:5). Thanks be to Christ that, though we were foreigners to God’s people and strangers from the covenants of promise, now in Jesus Christ we are no longer strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God (Eph. 2:12, 19). And that means we’re free. Free of the bondage and curse of the Law. Free of fear of God’s rejection of us. Free to love God with joy and gratitude in our adoption. “For you did not receive the spirit of bondage again to fear, but you received the Spirit of adoption by whom we cry out, “Abba, Father.” (Rom. 8:5).

On this Rejoice Sunday, are you joyful in your adoption? The only way we can truly have joy in our adoption into the family of God is to appreciate the severity of the situation out of which we were adopted. That’s what Lent teaches us. That’s what Lent is supposed to teach us. But on this Rejoice Sunday we get a preview – fore-glance, if you will – of the joy of Easter: the joy of being adopted into God’s family; the joy of having free access into God’s house, and the joy of being refreshed at God’s table. May God make us truly joyful today as we reflect upon these three great privileges we’ve been given through the One who continues to walk with us on our journey to the Heavenly City. +