PEOPLE'S CHURCH OF DOVER

Matthew 15:1-9                                          Honor Your Father and Mother
Lent I Sermon Feb. 21, 2010:  People’s UCC, Dover, DE:  The Rev. Dan Griggs

          It is traditional in Christianity to pay attention to the Ten Command- ments sometime in the Season of Lent:  the Ten Commandments give us some basic instruction about the things we are trying during Lent to correct in our lives.  This Lent my sermons will be about each of the commandments, one at a time, beginning with number five.  The first four Commandments are about our relationship to God—“You shall have no other God,” “you shall not make an idol,” “you shall not swear ‘by God’ to a lie,” and “keep the Sabbath day holy.”  The last six Commandments are about our relationship to our fellow human beings, and that’s what I want to focus on during Lent this year, beginning with number five:  “honor your father and your mother.”  Not only does this commandment appear in the list of ten in the Hebrew Bible, but Jesus repeats it in our Gospel Lesson, and it gets repeated again in the Letter to the Ephesians.  The point I want to make today is this:  Each stage of life has its proper way to honor your father and mother. 

The story begins with a completely different subject.  The scholars of Judaism (remember, Jesus was a Jew)—the scholars in the Law of Moses, their religious standard, confronted Jesus about the behavior of his disciples:  they were “eating with unwashed hands.”  Now this has nothing at all to do with hygiene:  they were talking about a ritual of spiritual cleansing they went through before taking kosher foods into their bodies.  Over the centuries the scholars had developed traditions about how to do this, and if a Jew followed the tradition he or she would automatically be keeping the Law of God—the tradition was intended to “build a fence around the Law.”  The Jews had received a special covenant with God, and their responsibility in the covenant was to keep God’s command-ments:  in this way they would demonstrate to each other, to their children and to all the world that they had been set apart and are different from pagans.  So we see that the Pharisees had good, spiritual reasons for their traditional practices; and anybody who ignored those practices was dancing on the edge of ritual “uncleanness,” or spiritual “pollution.”  It was a matter of moral contamination. 

          I grew up about twenty-five miles from Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where they purified uranium to make the first atom bomb.  Oak Ridge is still a major center of American nuclear production, and everybody around us was very aware of radioactive contamination.  One Sunday afternoon in the autumn when I was about seven years old my parents took me on a trip out into the countryside, into the woods, to gather walnuts.  While they were gathering nuts I did some exploring, and I found an old marble quarry—my home county is one of the biggest marble producers in the country.  As I walked to the entrance of the quarry a spooky feeling came over me:  was it radioactive?  I had already taken several steps into the place, but I stopped dead in my tracks.  Fear welled up in me, and I turned and ran out.  I was afraid I would die of radioactive poisoning, and for three or four weeks after that incident I kept watch to see if I were getting sick.  I was afraid I would die.  As I got older I looked back on that incident as something silly—marble quarries are not radioactive.  And then came Three Mile Island, and Chernobyl, and Love Canal, where people’s lives really were threatened. 

Spiritual contamination was, to the Pharisees, a horrible threat of being cut off from the living God.  That’s what the purity laws of the Hebrew Bible are about, and that’s what a lot of the traditions were meant to safeguard.  So to put it bluntly, Jesus’ disciples were conducting themselves as if they were disciples of a rabbi, but their spiritual health was very much in question.  It was worth confronting Jesus about it. 

We see from Jesus’ answer that he was also concerned about dying of contamination, but not nuclear contamination, and not ritual contamination:  Jesus was focused on the contamination of the human heart, and how your heart’s behavior affects your community.  He answered the scholars out of their own concern—avoiding contamination among God’s people.  How can you make the world you live in more holy?  By your moral choices, because your moral choices flow from what is in your soul.  Later in this debate Jesus said it clearly:[1] 

For Jesus, your behavior is not a private issue:  it affects the life of the family, the course of the nation, the purity and holiness of God’s world. 

          And it’s in this context that Jesus brings up the fifth Commandment:  ”Honor you father and your mother.”  The writer of Ephesians[2] makes a point of the fact that this is “the first commandment with a promise,” which is long life in the land God gives.  So the issue here is a matter of life and death, both for the individual and for the community.  It isn’t too much to say that where parents go without proper honor, the society is dying.  So when the individual’s heart is defiled, she or he acts in ways that defile self and also those they love.  There is moral contamination in inappropriate behavior:  it isn’t “dirty” (like not using soap in the shower), it’s the contamination of the heart that contaminates the life. 

          The fifth Commandment is about what’s in your heart toward your parents at any age.  Each stage of life has its proper way to honor your father and mother. 

          The commandment does not, however, say “obey”:  it says “honor your parents.”  For some people it just isn’t right to say, “Daddy’s always right,” when daddy is abusive.  When mother orders her children around with unreasonable demands, allowing themselves to be beat down is not  “honoring” at all—it’s just painful.  Especially as a child grows more mature they must distinguish the bully; give the appropriate honor to the appropriate person.

          For the young it really is “obey” except in unusual circumstances.  The parents say to take out the garbage, clean their ears, be in by curfew, and they “obey.”  But children are born with an inner drive to grow up and become individuals in their own right.  There is a time for learning, understanding, paying attention, and that is “honoring” their parents; and then there is a time to think things through for themselves, and they can also do that in ways that “honor” their parents. 

          This Commandment is still in effect for adult children.  “Honor” means something different now, however.  Maybe it means that now you go back and make peace with a parent you hurt when you were younger.  It means establishing a mature relationship with your parents, like “friends” in a lot of ways.  It means that you build your life on what they taught you.  Yes, you’re your own person now, you establish new ways of thinking, talking, working and leaving each other alone; but it all finds its roots in “honor.” 

          And then there comes a time when the roles of parent and child reverse:  the child becomes the care-giver.  This can be a hard thing to do, especially if it involves decisions about nursing home care, management of finances, balancing care for a parent with care for a job or a family.  But you still “honor” your father and mother—even in your own old age. 

          Now the child needs to find balance in caring for the parent.  One Mother’s Day I turned on the television and saw a man I knew very well:  he was co-hosting a local program.  A couple of years before, I had performed his mother’s funeral, and now, two years later, he was still visiting her grave every day—he was out of balance, he couldn’t say “Goodbye.”  So on this broadcast he had a tear in his eye as he looked into the camera and said, “Go see your mother.”  But not being able to say “Goodbye” is not “honoring” her:  “honoring” her would be to find his mature balance in life, and cherish the memory of her love.  That’s how we whose parents are gone may now continue to “honor” them. 

          So, as I said:  Each stage of life has its proper way to honor your father and mother. 

          One of the stories in the Book of Genesis is about the burial of Isaac.  His two sons, Jacob and Esau, didn’t get along.  They hadn’t spoken in years.  But when their father Isaac died, they came together to bury him with honor.  When the Hebrews came out of Egypt with Moses leading them, they carried with them the bones of Joseph—a great ancestor and protector of the clan; and they buried his bones with honor in the new land.  Jesus told a parable about a father who told two sons to go work in the field:  one said “Yes” but didn’t go; the other said “No” but did go; and Jesus says that it was the second son who honored his father—not words but deeds.  We remember the parable of the Prodigal Son who spent his inheritance in self-indulgence; but when he came to his right mind he returned home and honored his father.

Each stage of life has its proper way to honor your father and mother.  Honor is required of us:  it is action flowing from the heart, and it gives real life to a family, to a church, to a community, to the nation.  This is Jesus’ “family values”:  not pornography laws, or legislation about abortion, or economic rules—these are not in the Book.  But what is in the Book is this:  “Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land which the Lord your God is giving to you.”  Honor.

AMEN