Thomas J Parlette
“Written Into the Will”
Ephesians 1: 3-14
1/5/25
They didn’t legally adopt him – but they surely did raise him. And he was forever grateful.
The young African American boy had been born into a poor family in New Orleans in 1900. He grew up in a neighborhood so rough it was known as The Battlefield. His grandmother raised him until he was 5, after which he went to be with his mother – but she barely had the means to care for herself, much less a 5 year old boy.
What saved him was a Lithuanian Jewish family known as the Karnofskys. They took him into their home. They cared for him as if he were their known. He helped around the house and helped the Karnofskys’ sons, Morris and Alex, gather “rags and bone” and deliver coal. Years later, he recalled how the Karnofskys taught him a song known as the “Russian Lullaby.” They didn’t just teach him the words and the melody – they encouraged him to sing it “from the heart.”
His first musical performance may have been at the side of the Karnofsky’ junk wagon. He played a tin horn to attract customers and distinguish their cart from those of the other people hawking the same sort of second-hand goods. Sensing his young friend’s interest in music, Morris Karnofsky gave the boy a salary advance so he could buy a cornet from a pawn shop.
The boy would play the cornet – and its close musical cousin, the trumpet – for the rest of his life. He would also sing – always “from the heart,” as his adoptive family the Karnofskys had taught him.
There were difficult days ahead. At the age of 12, he was arrested for shooting a gun into the air. Because, at that tender age, he was already what the newspaper called “an old offender,” he was sentenced to live at a Spartan reform school known as the Negro Waifs’ Home. Eventually he was released to the custody of family members and he bounced from one relative’s house to another.
Eventually, his raw and prodigious musical talent led to jobs playing in dance halls and later in jazz bands on Mississippi riverboats. He ended up settling in Chicago and became one of the most famous musicians in America.
His name was Louis Armstrong. He never forgot where he came from, nor the Karnofsky family who had taken him in and shown him such kindness. For the rest of his life, Armstrong wore a Star of David as a tribute to his adopted family and – to the astonishment of the Jewish musicians he played with – he spoke Yiddish fluently. (1)
Our reading from Ephesians addresses this topic of adoption as it relates to our relationship with God. Adoption is really the beginning of a new type of relationship. The adoptee was once in a family relationship with this person, but now they are in a family relationship with someone else. From the moment of adoption, a child is placed into the arms or into the care of an adoptive parent, there is a new relationship – complete with fresh prospects, for good or for ill sometimes – for a different future, a different family, a different nurturing style, an alternative opportunity for education and enrichment, among other reasons.
Here is what the Bible says: “God destined us for adoption as God’s children through Jesus Christ.” So Paul says OUR adoption into the family of God was a part of the Divine plan. “God destined us…” Paul says. Now, we may not understand what that means, but at the very least, we can be assured that the fact that we’re occupying space on this planet is not some cosmic accident. We’re here for a reason. Our adoption into God’s family is not an afterthought or even a back-up plan B – it was God’s intention and desire all along. Before the foundation of the world, we were always to be included as one of God’s children. That’s been God’s plan from the get-go.
So, how is this possible? It’s possible “through Jesus Christ,” says Paul. This phrase is crucial because it highlights how our adoption is realized. Again, we may not understand the “how”, but we can still claim the “truth” of it.” Jesus’ sacrificial love on the cross paved the way for our reconciliation with God, breaking down the barriers of sin and separation. Our faith in Christ is one way of claiming the blessing of our adopted status as a child of God.
But why would God do this? Why would God want to bring us into the family? Why would God want to write us into the will and leave us an inheritance?
Paul says that our adoption is “according to the good pleasure of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace that he freely bestowed on us in the Beloved.” This underscores the fact that God’s decision to adopt us was not made out of obligation or necessity, but out of God’s sheer delight and sovereign choice. God takes pleasure in calling us God’s children, just like we take pleasure in introducing our children to friends.
For instance, think about that friend who has just become a father, mother or grandparent for the first time. When you see them – what’s the first thing they do? Nowadays, they pull out their phones and start scrolling through a couple hundred baby pictures!
Yes, we bring joy to God. We are a child upon whom, like an earthly parent, love can be bestowed. How great it is to know that we cherished and valued by God, who is often described as a heavenly parent. Think about it – God is showing your pictures right now to everyone up there in heaven, a proud parent or grandparent!
Paul assures us today that we are adopted as God’s children through Jesus Christ. And since we are God’s children, we are written into the will – we receive a Divine inheritance. Our inheritance includes redemption, forgiveness and the riches of God’s grace. In return, we are called to live grateful lives, transformed by God’s grace, living in a way that brings glory and honor to God, who delights in us as adopted children.
In July of 1939, a train filled with hundreds of Jewish children pulled into a London train station. It had traveled all the way from Czechoslovakia. The children had been rescued by Nicholas Winton, a British stockbroker who had cut short a ski vacation in Switzerland, journeyed to Prague and subsequently convinced the Nazi authorities to release 669 children onto eight separate evacuation trains, through a program known as Kindertransport, later earning him the nickname of the “British Schindler.”
Those children were the lucky ones. Of about 15,000 Jewish children later interned in camps in Czechoslovakia, only about 100 survived the war.
One of the Kindertransport children was Vera Diamantova, age 11. Years later she recalled how difficult it was for her parents to decide to release her and her two sisters to the Kindertransport program.
Only one of her two sisters was able to make it out of the country with her. The other was scheduled to travel on a later train that the Nazis canceled at the last minute.
The scene at the Prague station will be with me forever,” she told a Daily Telegraph reporter. “The forced cheerfulness of my parents – their last words of love, encouragement and advice. Until that moment, I felt more excited than afraid, but when the whistle blew and the train pulled slowly out of the station, my mother and father could no longer mask their anguish.”
Her mother would die from typhoid a few days after being liberated from Bergen-Belsen. Vera credited her parents with the “moral courage” to give up their children so their lives could be saved.
Young Vera would be taken in by the Rainfords, a Methodist family from the Liverpool area. The Rainfords had children of their own and couldn’t easily afford another – but they made do. She would later credit them with a different sort of moral courage.
Years later, a grown-up Vera would ask her adoptive father why they had decided to make room in their family for her. He explained – “I knew I couldn’t save the world. I knew I couldn’t stop the war from coming, but I knew I could save one human life. And as Hitler broke – as Chamberlain broke his pledge to Czechoslovakia and Jews were in the direst danger, I decided it must be a Czech Jewish child.”
Vera also recalled what happened after the train arrived in London, as she was the last in her group to be adopted. She was greeted by the British woman she would come to know as Mummy Rainford – “And as she saw me, she started laughing and smiling and crying at the same time and she ran toward me, flung her arms around me and spoke some words I didn’t understand then, but they were – ‘You shall be loved.” And loved I was.”
“And you know,” Vera added, “those are the most important words any child in danger, and child in need, can hear.” (2)
“You shall be loved” is what God whispers to us all as we are adopted as God’s children, and written into the will.
So I invite you to begin this new year by taking your seat at the Table as we look forward to the feast of God’s coming Kingdom.
May God be praised. Amen.
1. . Homileticsonline, retrieved 12/10/24
2. Sam Roberts, “Vera Gissing, Who Was Rescued by Britain’s Schindler.” Dies at 93,” The New York Times, 3/25/22
