Kahlil wrote his most famous book The Prophet in 1923, but it only became really popular after his death when Elvis Presley, The Beetles, and Johnny Cash all utilized The Prophet at certain points when writing their songs. The poem that we are focusing on today is called On Children, which I thought was kind of perfect because on this particular Sunday in Advent, we tend to emphasize Mary, Jesus’ mother, who is currently pregnant with Jesus. Let’s take a listen.

We’re going to come back to this poem a little later on, but for now I want to turn to our scriptures for today. Our first scripture reading comes from the book of Deuteronomy. In this particular text, God is speaking to the people of Israel and presents them with an interesting choice. If you obey God and follow all of God’s commandments, then you will be rewarded with a good life. God will bless you and give you many offspring and you will be successful throughout your life.

On the other hand, if you do not follow God’s commandments, if you reject God and turn your heart towards other idols, then God will make you suffer. God will not support you. Indeed, God will curse you and cause your family to perish. Whew, kind of rough, right? So the choice is fairly simple. Do what God says, things will go well for you. Turn against God and life will be full of pain and suffering.

Another way of putting it is like this: if you strive to be a good person, good things will happen to you. However, if you make bad choices, bad things will happen to you. I would say that, generally speaking, a lot of people believe this to be true. And there is certainly some wisdom in this philosophy. If you’re constantly making decisions that hurt other people, if you’re constantly making decisions that break the law, then it is likely that there will eventually be consequences for your actions.

Likewise, if you treat people with kindness and respect, if you live your life ethically, then it is likely people will do the same for you. But this is not a guarantee. There are many people who do bad things who never end up going to prison and there are many people who live good ethical lives, who deal with a lot of hardship. Indeed, this is what the book of Job is all about.

Job is a good man who loves God and does everything that is expected of him. As a result, his life is a reflection of the book of Deuteronomy. He’s got wonderful children. He’s got lots of land, lots of animals, servants, a beautiful home. For his day and time, Job was living the best possible life a person could live. But then, all of a sudden, those things are taken from him. His servants and animals are killed by fire from heaven (probably a volcanic eruption). His house is destroyed along with his children who happened to be inside (probably an earthquake that came along with the eruption).

The point of the story is to convey the idea that you can be a good person; you can do all the right things; you can have all the best material possessions this life has to offer and that will still not prevent you from having to deal with difficulty and tragedy in your life. The New Testament takes this idea one step further. Jesus was the best of men and his life was filled with unimaginable hardship, literally from the moment of his birth. In fact, Jesus’ life becomes an example of how being a good person actually leads to hardship.

Because Jesus was willing to stand up and speak out for the rights of the oppressed, this got him in trouble. People wanted to hurt and kill him because he called out unjust behavior and said, “This isn’t right and this has to stop.” This is why Jesus tells his followers that if they live out his teachings and do the things he’s telling you to do, your life will become harder, not easier as a result. So what this tells us is that this connection between being good and not suffering is simply an illusion.

But we will do everything in our power to keep this illusion alive. How many of us believe we are living our lives the way God would want us to? How many of us order and structure our lives in such a way that we diligently plan for the future? How many of us try to anticipate everything that could go wrong so that we prevent bad things from happening to us? But as much as we may try to direct our paths, life still happens to us. We cannot prevent chaos from entering into our lives.

Of course, we are all painfully aware of this fact because of how COVID-19 has upended everything in our lives. The problem with chaos is that it leaves us feeling as though we lack control over our own lives. Chaos strips us of our freedom. For example, due to the pandemic, you can’t just get up and go anywhere you want to go. Everything you do has a risk to it.

Want to visit your family? Do they live in a hotspot? Will you have to ride on a plane? Are they in the high risk category? You know what, I’ll just stay home and visit my favorite restaurant. Wait, I can’t eat at the restaurant? They only do take out? Oh no, they don’t serve my favorite dish anymore because they’re not getting enough business. You know what, we’ll just make something at home. Oh no, there’s nothing in the fridge? We need to go to the grocery store? You know what, I’ll just starve. Honestly, it’s not worth all the hassle.

I would argue that one of the hardest things about being human is that we all yearn to be the director of our own lives. We all want the freedom to do what we want to do, when we want to do it. My children are a great examples of this. My boys are 7 and 10 years old. Right now, everything they do in their life has to be cleared with us. They do not have the autonomy to make their own decisions. They can’t just walk out of the door whenever they want without telling us where they are going.

For my eldest son, he’s starting to become conscious of the constraints placed on him by us. Whereas he was previously happy to comply with our rules, he now wants the freedom to leave the house at will. He wants the freedom to play on his devices as long as he wants. He wants the freedom to eat junk food for every meal and not eat anything healthy. So he’s constantly pushing the limits of our boundaries.

It’s like Courtney and I have become professional negotiators, because that is how we spend most of our day—negotiating the terms of engagement. Yes, you can go off on your own for one hour, but not two. No, you cannot afford that. No, I will not split the cost with you, but yes, you can work for it. Yes, you can stay up late, but no, you can’t have ice cream. Why, because you already had ice cream. No, you cannot skip brushing your teeth. Yes, I know I’m the worst parent ever.

One day, they will have the autonomy they crave to make their own decisions without needing approval from us. What is currently standing in the way of their freedom is age and the trust that they can make the right decisions on their own. The age simply comes with time. It is the issue of trust that is more subjective and this is where I want to return to the poem we read earlier from Khalil Gibran because I think there’s some amazing wisdom in this poem about chaos and control.

The poem begins: “Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.” The idea here is that parents often see their children as their property. They see their children as something they own. But what Gibran is trying to tell us is that, even though parents have a responsibility to care for their children, that does not mean that their children belong to them.

This is because your children belong to life itself. If we were to translate that idea into Christian terms, we would say that your children do not belong to you, they belong to God, which is why we say that we are all children of God. In this way, we are almost like surrogate parents. God is entrusting us with the responsibility of raising God’s children and releasing them into the world.

Now why does this way of thinking about children matter? It matters because it totally changes the way you think about your purpose as a parent. So often, parents want their children to be reflections of themselves. We want our children to think like us, act like us, believe what we believe. We want them to embody our morals and values. But as Gibran warns, “You may give them your love but not your thoughts, For they have their own thoughts.”

Your children are not meant to be smaller versions of you. You are supposed to raise them to be independent, free thinking individuals, which frankly, is very scary to many parents. It’s certainly scary to me. We have a lot of addiction issues in our family. I watched a lot of people in my life destroy themselves with drugs and alcohol.

It’s a big reason why I made a decision from a young age never to drink alcohol or use any drugs. When I saw how many people in my family struggled with substance abuse issues, I decided, “You know what, I’m not even going to risk it.” And that decision has served me well in my life. I have an addictive personality, but I’ve made strategic decisions to get addicted to things that are good for me, like exercise.

Now, I worry that my boys have inherited those same addictive genes. If I’m being honest with you, I want them to choose my path because it’s a lot safer. But my boys are not me. They are their own people and they will make their own decisions and they will make their own mistakes. I will, of course, one day explain to them why I made my decision, but as Gibran says, I cannot force them to think the way that I think.

The fact is that your children are going to become their own person no matter what you do. The idea that you can make them a carbon copy of yourself is very illusory. As the poem indicates, the only thing you can do is show them love and attempt to nurture the best parts of who they are. The true irony of life is that if you try to control your children, they will quickly spin out of your control. Whereas if you simply love them, they will often respond by emulating the best parts of you.

Herein lies the paradox of life, the less you control the world, the more control you have. Whereas the more you attempt to control the world and the people around you, the more you will find yourself mired in chaos and discontent. Indeed, when you love your children rather than trying to control them, there’s an interesting role reversal that occurs. I always assumed that my job as a parent would be to teach my children everything I know. And it is true that I do teach them things, but that learning occurs mostly through osmosis rather than by intention.

The reality is that my children are teaching me more than I will ever teach them. I have learned so much more about life from them than I would have ever known on my own. They speak truths about life I would have never considered. For example, a couple of years ago we were driving around town and somehow we got on the topic of when they were born. Courtney asked Elijah, “Where do you think you were before you were born?” And Elijah said, “We are wind before we are born.”

I really loved that answer. In all my time contemplating questions about life/death/the soul, I had never thought of life in that way. In fact, I will admit his answer made more sense to me than all of the books I had read around the subject. This is what Gibran means when he says, “You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.” If I had tried to make Elijah a carbon of me, that answer would have never come out of his mouth.

And Jesus’ life is a testament to this reality. Imagine if Mary, a poor peasant girl of no education, had demanded that Jesus be a carbon copy of her? Imagine if she was jealous of his success? Imagine if she had demanded that he stay with her and remain a carpenter? What if she said, “It’s too dangerous out there; too chaotic! If you leave, you’ll be hurt and possibly killed.”

Instead, Mary allowed Jesus to enter into the chaotic world. She allowed him to walk around Galilee and preach the gospel. She allowed him to speak all of this wisdom contained with him into the world. It’s like these little moments I have with Elijah every so often is what Jesus did all the time. And the more chaotic the world became, the more his words became the calm in the storm.

And here we come to the point of this sermon. The truth is we have very little control over our lives. The closing lines of Khalil Gibran’s poem says, “The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far. Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness; For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.” If we translate this into Christian language, God is the archer that sends you out like an arrow into a chaotic world. How you deal with that chaos is what makes all the difference.

Like being in the ocean and fighting against a strong current, you can wear yourself out if you try to go your own way. If you fight the current, it is likely you will not make it very far. Or you can turn and go with the current. You may not be fully in control, but by allowing the waters to take you forward, you can make small adjustments that make the experience so much more meaningful.

This is why we celebrate Jesus’ birth. His words, his wisdom, his teachings in the gospel are those small adjustments that make the flow of life so much more worthwhile. It doesn’t mean that life will be easy. Indeed, if you follow Jesus’ way, life will often be a lot harder, but my goodness, it will be so much more fulfilling as a result. So as we end, I want you to listen to the whole poem, one last time and contemplate how letting go is sometimes the best way to gain control. Amen.