To Make an Offering

There is a beautiful custom in Malawian culture. The custom is to send your child to live with their aunt or uncle when they reach the point of adolescence and things get bumpy. The time when dependence and independence is blurry, who is in charge of whom gets fuzzy at this moment in Malawi you send your son or daughter to a brother or a sister and they are obliged to not only take them in, but to raise them and treat them as better than their own child.

              It doesn't always happen, and I am sure there are problems and cracks in the culture, but as a custom it is brilliant, a beautiful surrender to how little we are in control. By in large, especially with children, we want to believe we are in charge, have some level of control, at least in our own house.  But there is nothing like a teenager to remove this layer of delusion.

              You may have heard a parent say or may have said these words yourself, "this is my house and as long as you are here you will follow my rules."  When such declarations are made there will be trouble ahead.  It is all too painfully clear such declarations are false and delusional.   

              Dispelling this delusion is part of the beauty of the Malawian custom.  For the parent they acknowledge their inability to control; and the teen has their world turned upside down and thus afforded the opportunity to see how life is not in their control either, not as obvious as they thought. It is a moment where the order of things is recast.

              This moment, the delusion of control, is a theme in the gospels. There are many stories about this.  Mainly the stories are people trying to define or direct Jesus.  People try to control Jesus, try to impose an order, and it is as if he says, "not likely."  The Pharisees invite Jesus to dine, essentially to bring him into line.  A woman of common fame crashes the party to bathe his feet with her tears.  This disrupts the party a bit.  Judas believes Jesus is out of control and he makes a deal with the religious leaders; he came to regret that decision.  Peter is told of Jesus suffering, how things will be, and in his bravado, Peter tries to exert some control.  God forbid.  For this attempt to rise above he is brought low.  There are many instances where Peter tries to control or impose an order for Jesus, and every time it just didn't work.

              The most tragic attempt to define or control Jesus was the question of John the Baptist from prison, are you the Messiah or should we expect another.  Tragic because John would die soon after while still struggling.  There is also the moment where the family of Jesus comes to fetch him, thinking he had lost his mind.  Jesus asks, who is my mother?  In all these stories, there is a common theme: you cannot control Jesus.  He seems to defy being put in a box or made to dance or sing. 

              Of all the stories of Jesus being beyond our control, our reading today, known as the boy Jesus in the temple, or Jesus and the doctors, is the most poignant.  Where the others are awkward or embarrassing, tragic even, this one is a terrifying moment.  It's one thing to fail to exert control over someone; it is another to have your child go missing.  That dreadful moment where you say, "he was just right there." You are helpless and desperate.     

              We could take the story of Jesus staying behind in Jerusalem as one of many, part of a theme in the gospels: follow Jesus, don't try to guide him.  We could also take it as Mary's signing off.  The temptation of the temple was just as true for the son as it was for the mother.  The apple hadn't fallen far from the tree.  "Where else would expect to find me?" This can be read as, "I'll take it from here."

              I believe there is something more here, something about life that goes beyond trusting Jesus and following him, or Mary's religious devotion. This treasured story of Mary has a simple truth of life: to live in freedom, we must surrender; to live in faith, in trust, we must lose the desire to control. 

              I was in the home of a family when they were struggling, fighting for control.  A teenage daughter wanted to go out and by out she wanted to be free of control; her parents were having none of this.  She wasn't going anywhere.  I sat on the couch as they argued and shouted, threatened and demanded.  It was bumpy.

              Thankfully I wasn't there as a pastor and thus was not solicited for advice, of which I was in no place to offer.  Watching it play out made an impression on me.  It wasn't just the shouting and the tears and the bluster: the impression was that they were heading fast toward heartache. What made this much worse, made the stakes very high, was religion.  These folks were evangelical charismatics.  So not only was the potential for danger real, the usual markers of teenage risk (sex, drugs, reckless behavior), but God was in the middle of it.  The parents had high expectations, an ideal of purity; they were demanding not only ethical behavior but a hyper-intense moral code of unrealistic restrictions.

              Flash forwards a few decades and the young woman is a wonderful human being, a loving mother and married to a great guy and they are both professionals and college graduates and own their home and contribute to their church and community. But on that night as I sat on the couch and the stakes kept getting higher and higher, the fight more and more intense, it was as if this trust of the future, trusting a great life to be found, this was all in jeopardy.  It was a matter of control.  "My way or the highway."

              Letting go of control, the delusion, is hard.  And bad theology makes it worse.  Bad theology like God is in control of all things, pulling strings and making rainbows and providing success for the true believers; God has a plan and purpose for you, and you can trust that all things will work out if you are good enough, faithful enough.

              Maybe the worst theology is God's will can be clearly known and asserted for all to see and hear.  Anything where God is an assurance or a guarantee, there is danger.  Whenever there are a set of absolute principles for you to demand and determine, you can trust the kingdom of God has been lost. 

              Not only do the stories of Jesus being beyond our control contradict this, but Jesus’ teachings also flatly dismiss the false certainty of control.  Jesus always spoke in parables.  A parable is told to challenge a basic assumption.  In one way or another every parable of Jesus challenges the basic assumption that we can have certainty, control, that we can determine the course of life. The parables say, no, not really.

              When I taught college courses at a local prison, I was not well received by the guards.  Some resented that people in prison would be given free college credit.  More than one said to me, I had to pay for my kids to go to college and they get it for free? 

              Two instances of frustration stick with me. 

              One was the guard who had to sift through my brief case and check my shoes and jacket.  As I was doing the TSA dance, the guard looked at the books in my briefcase, philosophy texts, Kierkegaard and Plato.  He studied one of them and said, "You know these people are smart.  Really smart.  All they do all day is sit around trying to figure out ways to make us miserable, try to outsmart us.  And here you come, and you are making them smarter.  Thanks.  Thanks for that.

              The other was a guard who was obviously struggling to keep himself together.  As we walked to the building where I taught, he pulled me aside and started to describe recent moments of violence and frustration.  He was upset and angry and bitter.  His words were a bit confessional.  Finally, his faced hardened and he looked me dead in the eyes and said, "this place makes you evil.  It is destroying me."  And then he opened the door to let me through.

              Trying to control others, control life, control God destroys us.  In our day-to-day life this might not be obvious.  In a prison this is all too clear.

              In our reading today Mary recounts how they went each year to the temple.  They went as a community.  It's sixty-four miles by foot.  Not close, but not the other side of the world. This was an act of religious devotion, and the temple was the place of great religious devotion.  When they were in the city, just outside the temple, they would have purchased animals or grain as a gift, a temple sacrifice, an offering.

              The tradition of the sacrifice, while it is no longer a lamb or a flask of wine, continues.  We bring money and pledges; we pass a plate instead of bringing livestock.  The currency has changed a bit, but the act itself hasn't.  We too make an annual gift to support the church, we give thanks to God, to express our gratitude. We may not walk 64 miles, but we do come out, gather to the temple. 

              In the time of Mary, just as today, the tradition of sacrifice could be corrupted with bad theology.  The very popular preacher Joel Olsten is an example of this corruption.  You give to God and God blesses you for the gift.  The greater the gift, the greater the blessing.  This is the prosperity gospel.  If you want to be rich, give richly; if you want good things, give good things to the church. 

              This is bad theology not only because it is untrue, but it is also bad theology because it seeks to control, to determine what God is and does.  Mary and Joseph losing Jesus in Jerusalem, leaving him behind, is one of many gospel accounts contradicting the idea that Jesus is someone who can be directed, controlled, or determined.  What is more, his teachings are quite clear that life, let alone God, is not to be controlled. Where the prosperity gospel is a profound error is this: generosity, the spirit of sacrificial giving, should be a path leading us to lay aside control, not gain it. 

              We see this in the beautiful Malawian custom of adolescence and parenting.  To lay aside the delusion of control, to give away, to take in as an act of compassion, of family, of humility and courage, to resist the pride of control or the falsity of dominance or rebellion, giving this up makes us more, frees us. And the opposite was so clear in the prison and the bitterness of the guard.  The demand to control, to coerce, to force obedience was making him evil, ruining him. I believed what he said. This place makes you evil. 

              As we grow in the spirit of generosity, we will rise more and more beyond greed and the fear of money; we will find freedom from the fear of scarcity.  Yet this is but a first step.  In generosity we can lose the fear of scarcity, and then, so freed, we can offer a gift much more valuable than money: we can give up, sacrifice, lay down our desire to control, we can rise above the bad theology of a life we determine, a God we define.  This is the great end of generosity, to be so free in faith we seek trust not control.  Amen.