A Sermon based upon Exodus 20:17; Mark 7:9-13; Luke 12:51-53; 14: 26-27
By Rev. Charles J. Tomlin, D.Min.
Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership
14th Sunday After Pentecost, August, 21th
2016
If you don't care for your parents, you probably won't care
about anybody. But if you do care for
your parents, you’ll have the potential to care about anybody. Let me explain.
When I went off to college, I went to a different college than
where my Father wanted. But Being a good
father, he supported me anyway. But as
my Father had feared, I brought home some of those new ideas.
Dad had warned me about those new ideas, and that if I learned
too much too fast, I might not be a good a preacher. But I honestly felt like some of the things I
was learning were good and valuable lessons for life. I wanted my Dad to know the good stuff I was learning. He had enabled me to go off to school and now
I wanted to share with him so he could learn them to. Needless to say, it didn’t work out so well.
My Dad never understood how some of those ideas could be good.
My Dad was a very good, intelligent man who had little chances
for higher education. He taught a Sunday
School class as large as the attendance in my first church. Dad knew every phone number of every members
and kept them all in his head. In his
grocery business he figured small orders without a calculator and then he was
able to add the tax in his head as well. Dad had practically memorized the
important parts of the Bible as well.
All I had to do was ask him where a parable or story was and he knew it
chapter and verse. His Bible knowledge
passed on to me gave me an edge when I studied the Bible at college level.
Yet, when my interpretations began to clash with his, I soon
realized that I was not going to change his views. If we were going to remain father and son,
with positive relationship, I had to give up trying to change him.
That was the day I became a true adult. I understood that I could be my own person,
but I also could allow Dad to remain who
he was as well. So, I choose to discuss
the things that united us and did not dwell on the things that divided us. This was the moment I understood more fully
what it means to honor your Father and Mother.
I was become my own person, and no longer had to obey my parents, but I
was also learning to how to honor, respect and care for them as an adult child,
in spite of our differences.
HONORING
IS NOT EASY
Some Jewish Rabbis say this sixth commandment is one of the
most challenging commandments of all. We
live in culture that has been dominated with the thought of Sigmund Freud, who through his psychological
concepts has encouraged the mental killing of the oedipal Father which
ultimately resulted in announcing the death of God into modern society. Freud taught us to hate the ones who produced
us so that through therapy we can become gods unto ourselves[1] To put this in plain language, the world’s
voice says live to
toot your own horn over everyone else’s, including your
parents. Since you know more than they do, go out there and knock’em dead and
make a name for yourself.
To HONOR and respect YOUR PARENTS SUGGESTS THAT YOUR LIFE IS
NOT YOUR OWN and that you have been ‘bought with a price’. I realize this is ‘slave language’ but it’s
also a graphic reminder that we are finite, limited human beings who will never
absolutely be ‘our own person’ because we are always in debt to those to whom
we owe our life and being. If you can
understand what I'm saying now, you owe them, even if they weren't perfect, and
even if they had serious failures. If you
are alive today, you at least owe your parents honor and respect.
But Honoring parents can be A BIG CHALLENGE FOR SOME. All Parents have flaws. They all will
sometime fail. You, nor I, came with a
set of instructions. There is no book
that tells us how to be perfect at parenting.
Someone has said that the only way that Jesus could have been our
perfect Savior is not to become a parent.
Since parenting is an inexact science, all parents make mistakes. We make mistakes in how we instruct and
discipline our children. Parents make
blunders. Others fail in their
marriages. All of them have some kinds
of flaws, like we all do. I’ll never
forget the day they let our RA’s out early and I caught my mother smoking. That may not sound like a big deal to you,
but it was a big deal to me. I got
angry. I stormed out of the house. I told her how wrong it was. My honor and respect for her was lost in
that moment. Of course, later I learned
that things were different that I first perceived. My mother tried not to smoke around me and
she was hiding her addictive habit for my own good. She was trying to help me, not hurt me. But in those days that was hard for me to
understand.
While we can understand the mistakes parents make, because we
are all human, some parents more difficult to understand or honor because they
stop trying to parent. Either because they
want their children to like them or because they are too busy, it has been asserted
that parenting is on the decline in our culture. According to a recent survey in the Wall Street
Journal, the average American parent spends less than 15 minutes in serious discussion
with their children. For Father’s, the average
is 17 seconds per day. Years ago parents
needed no family time because the culture was agricultural, everyone lived at
home, all worked together and the children learned most everything at
home. Today, we live in an urban culture,
even in rural areas. In it’s extreme
form, children can go through a day without having any face-to-face time with
parents.
Worse, some parents have abdicated moral teaching and value
learning to television, schools, or to churches. Even in the best of situations
a school and a church can only help to reinforce what the parent is already
teaching at home. Nothing replaces the parents influence. If parents have no
time to fulfill their role as parents, how will they be honored?
JESUS
HAD PARENTS TOO
Because PARENTS CAN sometimes BE LESS THAN HONORABLE, this
command may GET COMPLICATED. It’s
certainly hard to honor a parent when, the child has so much left-over
emotional pain, they have to leave out the first two words of the Lord’s prayer. They can’t say ‘Father’ or because it hurts
too much. It’s also hard for an adult child who told me that the worse job she
has in her life, is looking for a mother’s day card that will be respectful
without telling a lie. Attendants in
nursing homes can take you to room after room of aged, forgotten, parents who
are rarely, if ever visited by their adult children, even though they only live
minutes away. Honoring and caring for
our parents can get very hard, because of their sin or our own.
I think it’s interesting that JESUS understood the human
STRUGGLE to honor parents. In Luke, 12:51-53 Jesus asks: Do you think
that I've come to bring peace to the earth?
No, I come to bring a strife and division! From now on families will be split apart,
three in favor of me, and two against, or the other way around. There will be division between father and
son, mother and daughter, mother-in-law and daughter-in-law. In another text a little further on, Jesus
says in stronger language, If anyone comes to me and does not hate his
father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters, yes, even
his own life, he cannot be my disciple (Luke 14:26). Perhaps the most revealing moment of Jesus’
struggle to honor his parent came as his mother and siblings came to take him
home because people were claiming Jesus to be insane., Jesus responded quite
sharply: Who is my mother and brothers? My mothers and brothers are those
who do the will of the Father.” (Matthew 12:48-50).
When it came to a decision between choosing what is clearly the
will of God and what are the wishes of our parents, God’s will took precedence.
While Jesus was talking about
discipleship, and in no way was giving anyone an excuse not to honor their
parents, the CLASH JESUS faced, children still face, when they are trying
following and do the work and will of God.
WE
ALL HAVE BELLY BUTTONS
But to completely or to disrespectfully disregard our parents or
to cut oneself off at the root is something that Jesus did not do, even as he
became his own person. Do you know why
we must not dishonor or disrespect parents, even if we disagree with them? Here’s the issue: We all have belly
buttons. There is nothing so revealing
about how vulnerable, dependent and needy we humans are, than our own belly
buttons. When the Ten Commandments tell
us to honor Father and Mother it recognizes one great truth. We all come from somewhere. Someone gave birth to us. Someone changed our diapers, fed us, nursed
us back to health, and earned a living to put food into our mouths. No human can raise themselves. We all have to
be cared for by someone to get to where we are, and we all have to be cared for
by someone to humanely get to where we’re going.
This sixth commandment reaffirms that LIFE IS INDEED A GIFT and
that we need family to survive. We need
to be cared for by our families and we need to care for them as well. Our
family gave us the first images of God’s grace.
Science tells us that at least half of everything you’ll ever know you
learn before age 5. The first 4 months
determine most of your personality. You
depended on your parents for most everything that made you who you are and you
will loose part of your soul when you forget that you are someone's child.
What you can't do, Jesus taught, is have a good EXCUSE to stop HONORING,
RESPECTING and caring for YOUR PARENTS?
In Mark 7: 9-13, we read how during Jesus’s day there were religious
leaders who taught that everyone else should care for their needy parents
except them. They excused themselves for
religious reasons, as they had taken a special vow to God. The time and energy
they were supposed to give to their parents they were now giving to God. But Jesus says that by neglecting the care
and honor of their parents, even for the best reasons, they are ignoring God’s
moral law. NOTHING EXCUSES US from honoring and respecting our parents. Because they are our parents, they deserve our
care and respect.
One thing unique about this commandment
is that it is the only commandment with a promise. This promise could be understood both
positively and negatively; in other words, it promises good consequences if we
obey, but implies negatives when we don’t. The Brothers Grimm included an old
moral tale about a little old man, with trembling hands and feeble eyes, whose
uncertain table habits became increasingly offensive to the daughter-in-law
with whom he lived. One day she
unsympathetically objected to her husband, the old man’s son. So, they took the fumbling old man to a
corner of the kitchen, set him on a stool, and gave him his food in a n
earthenware bowl. Now he was no longer troubling them by his dribbled food; now
the tablecloth was no longer soiled by his trembling behavior.
One day, in his trembling, he dropped the bowl and broke
it. Now the daughter-in-law lost all
patience and compassion and blurted out,
“If you are a pig,” she said, “you must eat from a trough like one.” And they made a little wooden trough, and he
ate from it. At that time, the pride of
their lives was their four-year-old son. One evening they noticed the little boy
playing with blocks of wood with deep concentration. When the father asked what
he was doing, the boy said with an engaging smile, “I’m making a trough to feed
you and Mamma when you get old.”
The tale continues that after hearing this from their own
child, the man and woman just looked at each other, not saying anything. Then they cried and then went to the corner
and led the little old man back to his place at the table. They gave him a comfortable chair, and put
his food on a plate. Never again were they angered by the food he spilt or by
the dishes he occasionally broke. They realized that by honoring a parent, they
possessed their own future.[2]
“Honor your Father and your mother, so that your days may be
long in the land which the LORD your God is giving you.” When you treat your parents with respect and
honor you give give them back the care
that has made your life possible. A
great reminder of this is a powerful, unforgettable sculptor in Oslo, sculpted by
Norway's premier sculptor, Gustav Vigeland.
It is a walk-through, Sculptor entitled, “The Cycle of Life”, made of
121 larger-than-life pieces, which depict the full range of human life and
family, from infancy to old age. The
scluptors stretch across the river bridge from one side to the other on both
sides of a four-lane highway that connects one part of the park to the other. The artistic work traces the coming together
of a young couple, the coming of their children, then the changing relationship
of parent and child. Finally, the artist
shows the connection between the generations: a grandfather and a grandson, a
grandmother and a little girl.
You can't help stare in awe at some of the huge pieces, find
tears in your eyes at the sight of others. A walk across the bridge is a walk through
your own life. If you watch the people watching the statues, as well as the
statues themselves, you get glimpses of the pain and the beauty that underlie
each of their separate lives at separate stages. But one of the statues on the garden bridge
stops every sightseer in their tracks. To
this one, the response is almost always universal delight. This one is the Sinnetagen, the figure of a
foot-stomping, raging two-year-old who is claiming his right to be human, to be
listened to, to be respected for who he is and what he wants.
This particular statue, I think opens us to the full potential of
this fourth commandment. This fourth
commandment is not about being powerless children, controlled by the will and
wishes of authoritarian parents. No, it
is about having the kind of freeing, caring, guiding parents, who allow us to be
ourselves and to test ourselves over against the world, while under the watchful
eye and wisdom of those who love us and have gone this way before. Without the constant care, love, and shaping
by our parents, this two year old doesn’t stand a chance. But with them, this youthful ‘foot stomper’
gains the power to live, and its youthful wanderings can be guided, molded,
until this child reaches its fullest potential as a human being. It is all because parents care, that we have
roots that give us the wings we will need to soar to the highest heights of
human life.
This is really what this fifth commandment is about. It’s all about having the kind of honor and
respect that is filled with care. This
commandment has been called the ‘bridge’ commandment because bridges our
responsibility to care for our community with our responsibility to care about
and respect God. If we don’t develop a
caring heart—that keep that heart of respect and honor for the very parents who
cared for us and made life possible for us, then a truly honorable life becomes
impossible for us. Most interestingly,
this word ‘honor’ is from the Hebrew word which means, ‘to make heavy’. The weight
of love that has carried us must now be carried by us as we bear the weight of
having respect, honor and care for our parents. Amen.
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