Download LifeDate Summer 2023
by Pastor Leon and Terri Rosenthal
In our home we commissioned a sculpture of adoption. Terri and I adopted Nathan in 1986 and Anna in 1988. Both were born in South Korea. Our family story is about how the merciful and gracious Triune God is the God of hope (Romans 15:13). He has blessed us with hope, peace, and joy in the gift of our children.
Pastor Adrian Hanft, talented sculptor and good friend, met with us several times to discuss the shape and form of God’s grace in our lives. We shared with him what we believe to be true of the history of all God’s people in Scripture and the practice of adoption. It is a joy to know, to see, and to touch how Adrian sculpted our experience into stone.
First, on one side of the sculpture (which can be rotated), we wanted a witness to the birth mother and father. The umbilical cord attests to the universal biological fact of child, birth mother, and birth father. We are thankful for their decision to sustain life from conception to birth. We do not know whether both made that decision together. We choose to believe nonetheless. This was a painful, difficult choice, and done in suffering love for their son and daughter. They made the decision to affirm hope in God’s creative, preserving love. They affirmed, whether tacitly or explicitly, the image of God in themselves and the truth of God’s creation and preservation of all things. Whether intentionally or not, God’s good and gracious will was done!
We believe—and nothing reveals this more than the adoption process—we are broken sinners all. Loss, suffering, and sacrifice are facts of life. To resort to the language of heroes is a fictitious and a false stretch, because adoption finds its truth in the grammar of redemption.
On both sides, the baby is complete in the image of God bestowed in creation. This baby is the person described in Psalm 139:13ff and Jeremiah 1:5, and is evident in the other side of the sculpture.
Both sides attest that God we confess in Holy Baptism and in the historic creeds. From womb to tomb, we are preserved by the nourishment God gives. This God, and no other, calls each person into being through the Word (John 1) and redeems through the incarnate love (John 3:16) of Jesus who was “conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died and was buried. He descended into Hell. The third day He rose again ….” This God is the living Lord of Life!
We are not just adopted into our individual Rosenthal family, but God’s “family,” the Body of Christ, the universal household of faith. Pentecost brings us into the power of God’s love to care for the orphan, the widow, the poor, the imprisoned, and those who are the weakest of the weak. We are called in Holy Baptism to share the Feast of the Lord’s Table. In effect, we always need an umbilical cord: Man does not live by Bread alone, but by every word from our mother the Church.
Early Christians were noted as refusing the culture of abortion because they believed they were a holy priesthood, God’s own people. St. Cyprian said, “You cannot have God for your father unless you have the Church for your mother.” Throughout Christian history, adoption has been a “go-to choice.” Luther said: “I embrace the church, the communion of saints, as my holy mother, and in a conscious act of faith I make my own all the spiritual blessings that the church represents.”
We did encourage Nate and Anna, if they desire, to locate their birth mothers and fathers. Of course, this is one of the ongoing realities of adoption, reminding us that God sees us from conception all the way through to the end! We are partners by God’s grace and mercy with their birth parents and also with our children in this broken world of sin which Christ Jesus redeemed.
God’s grace is costly (the Cross is the best symbol of all) and God is “for us, not against us,” because God is the God of creation and nature, history and eternal destiny (Romans 8). Here St. Paul reminds us that we are all adopted into Christ. Just as we are all transformed by renewing of our minds (Romans 12), so the Gospel has shaped our earthly adoptions and our families—now including three beautiful granddaughters! In our Triune God we are born to a new and living hope, a pro-life and pro-adoption one!
We have a poem entitled “Adoption” under the sculpture, because we believe in miracles. It is secular in nature but reflects our experience nonetheless! When we think about our adoption, we believe we are focusing on whatever is good, true, just, pure, lovely, commendable, and worthy of praise (Philippians 4).
Adoption …
Not flesh of my flesh,
Nor bone of my bone,
but still miraculously my own.
Never forget for a single minute.
You didn’t grow under my heart,
but in it.