When you get pregnant, as those of you who have ever been involved in a pregnancy may remember, you enter a situation that is in many ways out of your control.  Your body begins to behave in ways you weren’t expecting, it needs more attention or a different kind of attention, and of course, it’s all building up to something you have even less control over:  the birth.  When, where, and how the baby is going to make its way into the world is also out of your control.  Which then leads to the entrance into your life of the child, and by now you’d better be willing to have almost no control whatsoever.

But parents, it seems, don’t want to be out of control--next time you go to a bookstore, look at the parenting section.  There are books about every conceivable aspect of parenting, books that tell you how to handle your child in this situation or that condition.  Parents buy these books in the hope that they will bring back some semblance of control over their lives.  They don’t.

Life with children is simply not under your control.  

But here’s the secret--you may have figured this out already--life, even without children, or even when your children are grown up and on their own, is also not under your control.  Sometimes we are reminded of this by an unexpected medical situation.  Many of us were reminded of this when we saw much of our retirement savings vanish in the economic crunch a year ago.  But we still try to control what we can, whether medically, financially, or whatever it may be.

The wealthy man in this morning’s gospel, for instance, was trying to gain assurances that he had controlled his life carefully enough to inherit eternal life.  He suddenly appeared and knelt in front of Jesus and began his question with a compliment:  “Good Teacher,” he said, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”  Now, this was a smart guy.  He begins his question by buttering up the other fellow, and then asks a question that he is pretty sure he knows the answer to, and pretty sure that the answer will be favorable to him.  

But Jesus isn’t going for it.  He first questions the premise:  “Why do you call me good?  No one is good but God alone.”  Then Jesus tells the young man what he expects to hear:  he reiterates the commandments.  The young man at this point figures that things are going just as he wants, and says:  “Teacher, I have kept all these since my youth.”  He sits back to wait for the approval, and the assurance that then he is all set, not to worry, eternal life is his.  But instead, Jesus looks at him and loves him.  

At this moment, Jesus is seeing what there is to be seen in this man.  He knows him inside and out.  He sees him, loves him, and tells him something he doesn’t want to hear:  “sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.”

The young man is dumbfounded.  He had no idea that this was coming, that Jesus would ask anything more of him than he had already done in keeping the commandments.  He came for reassurance, and is left with a seemingly impossible mandate:  sell everything you have and give the money to the poor, then come, follow me.  He goes away grieving.  We don’t know what happens to him afterward--whether he does what Jesus asks or not.

Jesus then reflects to his disciples:  “How hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!”  Now, I don’t know about you, but that sounds pretty clear to me--but for some reason the disciples were perplexed.  Maybe this thought hadn’t occurred to them before.  So Jesus says it again, and then adds that famous line:  “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”  

Here, I need to take a brief tangent.  I hope you will forgive me.  Have any of you ever heard the interpretation of that line that says that what Jesus was really talking about was a gate into Jerusalem called the “eye of the needle”?  The story goes that it was a particularly small gate, and that, depending on which version of the story you heard, either the camel would have to be unloaded a little bit, or entirely, or even have to go through the gate on its knees.  But the camel COULD go through, you see.  So this interpretation kind of takes a lot of the teeth out of what it seems that Jesus was saying.  

Well, I’m not going to ask you if you believed that story when you heard it.  I’m just going to tell you that it is baloney.  Malarky.  There is no evidence whatsoever, historical, archaeological, nothing, to lead anyone to believe that there ever was such a gate.  When Jesus says that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God, then that is exactly what he means.  That’s why the disciples were astounded.  They weren’t expecting this.  The obvious question was:  “then who can be saved?”  And Jesus’ reply goes right to the heart of the matter.  He says:  “for mortals, it is impossible, but not for God; for God all things are possible.”

For mortals, it is impossible.  That rich man, who had kept all the commandments for his whole life, thought that he could earn his way into eternal life by his own works.  When he comes to Jesus to test that assumption, Jesus does not simply confirm his ideas of what the rules are, of how to control his life.  Instead, Jesus tells him that he has to put himself in a position where he has no control whatsoever.  No money, no possessions, and following where Jesus goes.  Jesus essentially says:  turn yourself over to me completely--not your money, but your self.  

The thing about being rich--and when you look at the way people live around the world, we in this country are all pretty much rich--the thing about being rich is that it leads to the illusion that you can control things.  If a problem crops up, throw money at it, and eventually a solution will present itself.  We even have our own version of what the rich man was trying to do--a way to try to control our way into eternal life.  You might know it as the tithe.

Now, you’ve heard of the tithe before, that is the idea that ten percent of everything we earn should go to God’s work--generally that means, to the church.  And you may have heard of something called the “modern tithe,” where five percent goes to the church and the other five percent goes to other organizations also doing God’s work.  And it may seem appropriate, now that we’ve just talked about how hard it is for rich folks to enter the kingdom of God, to begin to think that maybe if we tithe, that will do the trick.  That’s what God wants, right, ten percent off the top?  And then we start to wonder:  is that a pre-tax percentage, or after tax?  Is there a standard deduction?  What about a year when my expenses were particularly high?  

And there we go, merrily on down the road of trying to control things, in this case, trying to assure our place in the kingdom of God through meeting the financial expectation that we believe we are supposed to meet.   And guess what.  We have missed the point, yet again.  

Now, let me be clear.  It is good to obey the commandments.  It is good to tithe, whether traditional or modern.  But these things are not the means to the end of getting a pass into the kingdom of God.  What they are is the means to the end of giving up control to God.  In allowing God to control many of our actions, when we follow the commandments, then we give up some control to God.  In allowing God to control some of our income--particularly when the amount that we give is an amount that we notice, that we really wouldn’t mind keeping, that we are in fact a little nervous about giving away--then we give up some control to God.

Learning to give up control is a lifelong adventure.  Or, perhaps I should say, learning to recognize just how little control we really have is the adventure.  

Whether you are a parent, or have medical or financial circumstances that you are not in control of, or any other situation that makes you realize more sharply how little control you have, consider looking at it as an invitation.  Look at it as an invitation from Jesus, like the one he gave the wealthy man.  Although it was hard for the wealthy man to see, the invitation to give up his possessions and his money was intended to help him to learn to truly follow Jesus.  

Jesus invites us to give up control, turn it over to him, and follow.  How will you respond?