A friend of mine asked if, now that I'm a pastor full time, I just sit around getting revelation all day and then get up and give announcements and the occasional preach. That sounds like a pretty sweet deal actually, I wish it were the case!
The thing about serving and leading people is that...it involves people.
People are complicated
Their struggles are complicated
Their cultures and backgrounds are complicated
Their understanding of God and their experiences is complicated
And when they ask another complicated person if it all makes sense ...
The result is not going to be a surprise to many!
There is a couple in our church who are
living together but are desperate to get married. They believe whole-heartedly
that the state of marriage is to be desired and is blessed and commanded by
God, and that living together outside of marriage is not and is disobedient.
Simple solution right? Just get married.
Unfortunately not.
Her family wants
them to go through a lengthy negotiation process and then receive a huge Lobolla payment before they will agree to the match. And here we sit smack bang in the center
of a collision of two cultures.
A western, capitalist, Christian, individualistic,
self-determining, Frank Sinatra singing culture where everyone wants to do it
‘their way’,
meets an African, rural, ancestral, tribal, family authority
respecting, Ubuntu singing culture where the way it has always been done is the
only way it shall be done.
This is when being a pastor gets even more exciting
than my old job, even if, as part of that job, I found myself on mountain tops
during hail storms or looking after hundreds of young boys with wet shoes in a
snow storm and trying to teach things like integrity to the lady Gaga
generation!
So a few of us were privileged to go along
to the traditional negotiation and it was amazing. I felt as out of place as an
ultimate Frisbee player in a cage fight.
I was once again reminded of how ridiculous it is to try to preach or give advice into contexts without humbling yourself enough to get involved and understand things from within that culture.
We really thought we were going along to explain the church’s position on the
sanctity of marriage and why these two people wanted to do it and honour God
not dishonour their family.
Quick chat,
all agree,
pray for the sick,
see a
healing or two,
have some good chisa nyama and hopefully some Zulu beer
and be
out of there in time for some 4x4ing on the way home…
Man but
was I missing the point completely!
We get annoyed when Americans and
Englishers arrive in our country on their white horses to save us from
ourselves, receive our thanks and assuage their first world guilt before
hopping on the plane home and yet here I was doing the same!
I’d love to say that four hours later,
after loads of wonderful food, some beautiful ceremonial traditions and
incredible hospitality, I left with a new-found love and understanding of the
Lobolla tradition, and partly that would be true, but unfortunately that we be
leaving out the massive social, economic, spiritual and traditional problems
that Lobolla, in its current form, carries with it. With humility and deep
respect for the original intentions of Lobolla, let me outline the problems as
I see them;
- What was originally intended to make marriage seem more valuable is now making marriage seem almost unattainable and, therefore, irrelevant. We know this leads to less family stability as children are born into situations where no real commitment has been made.
- What was originally intended to make the woman seem like a treasure of incredible value, who is worth sacrificing for, now makes her seem like an object which can be valued, bargained over and owned once the price has been met. While this is not always the case, I would argue that the wife’s position is often undermined when the husband feels she isn’t giving him what he ‘paid for’.
- What originally brought families together now pits them against each-other in a battle of greed. An offering of money as a way to say,
‘though I could never repay you for the incredible sacrifices you made in raising your daughter and preparing her to join my family, here is a token of my eternal gratitude’
is an amazing thing and, I believe, was how Lobolla started. However, I watched a mother who had had nothing to do with her daughter for the majority of her life, leaving her to be raised by granny, suddenly change her mind during negotiations and become hostile arguing for more and more money and refusing the suggestion that it be paid off after the wedding, instead demanding it all up front or the deal was off. Her greed was an obstruction to the wedding her own daughter desired and felt, before God, that she needed to have with the man she loves. Other members of the family were spurred on just as an agreement had seemed possible and this convinced me that the best interests of their daughter and sister had long since stopped being the deciding factor. The suspicion and mistrust as both parties were signing for how much money had changed hands after counting and re-counting, and the arguments over whether this money counted as part of the eventual dowry or as simply a price for introduction couldn’t have been more at odds with the picture of two families coming together with rejoicing.
- Finally, the massive financial hit that young couples must take, in order to line their parent’s pockets, at a time when they should be getting up and running, trying to save or even getting into the property market, seems incredibly unfair. I think how Burn and I have struggled to get going even without a massive outlay like that and I can understand why many would laugh marriage off altogether, what a pity!
I am very much aware that I have only
witnessed one couple’s journey and that many instances of Lobolla are far less
fraught with tension than this one.
I can also hear, already, the cry that it
makes no sense to judge one culture simply by comparing it to another.
There is
certainly much that the Zulu culture can teach us about respect for elders and
valuing the investment our community puts in to us instead of blazing off on
our selfish ‘my way or the high way’ endeavours,
but there is also a command of
God which supersedes culture;
'For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh'
the two becoming one flesh bit happens best within marriage which is God’s design for happy, fruitful, lasting
relations between men and women and which serves as an incredible picture of
the intimacy he longs for with his bride, the church.
Anything that gets in the way of this happening needs a lot of defending and I’m not sure Lobolla , as currently practiced in Zulu culture, has many legs to stand on.
Paul
