St. Paul’s United
Church
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Love Yer Ma & Pa – Rev. David Mundy
Exodus 20
Matthew 12:46-50
John 19:25b-27
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Just after Christmas I
conducted the funeral for our oldest male member at St. Paul’s who was
ninety-three -the men tend not to last as long as the women! He was a great old
guy who was refreshingly open about his Christian faith. He loved to chat and
we always got around to faith: his daily prayers, his belief in an afterlife,
and the values he felt were important to actually live from day to day.
Near the end of his life
his mind wandered to other eras, but the last time I saw him, a few weeks
before Christmas, he was quite lucid. He told me that he had always tried to be
a good person and I assured him that he was a good person. He went to sleep one
night and didn’t wake up – the way most of us would like to go.
His son arranged the
funeral and he let me know that he would offer a tribute to his father, and so
would his adult son, a firefighter. Both did a great
job, both shared humorous stories and both spoke about what they had learned
from dad and grandad. The son, who by the world’s
standards accomplished more than his father, said that he often asked himself
through the years “what would dad do in this situation.” The grandson also
spoke of his admiration for his grandfather’s values and how he stuck to them.
I had never met the son
before his father’s death, but every time I visited his nursing home room I was
struck by how well cared for he was by someone. There are times at funerals
when children offer glowing tributes to parents, and I sit there knowing that
they little to do with them in their final years. This son not only paid
his respects with words, he honoured his dad with his actions. That is an
interesting word, honour. It means to show respect, to listen with compassion,
to treat the other with deference and authority.
Today we continue our
series on the Ten Commandments and this Sunday
we will ponder the fifth commandment, which is honour your mother and
father. There are only two commandments that are not framed as prohibitions.
Last Sunday Cathy spoke on remembering the sabbath. This week it is Honour Yer Ma & Pa, to use the version on the wall of a
Tennessee Church. My “ma” emailed me this version a few weeks and while it is
meant to be amusing, it does get straight to the point.
Perhaps we should have
listened to a fuller treatment of this commandment in another version like The
Message which says
Honour your father
and mother so that you'll live a long time in the land that God, your God, is
giving you. It has been mentioned that
this is the first of the commandments to include a promise – good things will
happen if you honour your parents.
For those of you who don’t
know, a few Sundays ago everyone in worship had the opportunity to vote for
five of the commandments for us to address in this series. Not only did you
choose “honour your parents” as one of those five, a parent filled out a ballot
for his daughter who was in Sunday School and checked
off “honour your parents” five times. Since we realized this was a form
of ballot stuffing we didn’t count them!
I thank you for choosing
this commandment because I really wanted to speak on the subject of honouring
our parents. If you stop to think about it for a moment, this seems like a
rather unusual choice amongst the others. It’s not surprising that several of
the ten commandments are about God, since these are
supposedly God’s directives. It makes sense that “don’t steal” and “don’t
murder” are there. They are so important that they have made it into the
criminal code of every civilized nation. But don’t you wonder about honouring
your parents? Is this really essential to the health and well-being of a
society?
If your answer is “yes,”
and apparently it is, because you chose this commandment, then we better ask
why.
We know that our culture is
different than it was 3,000 years ago. For one thing we tend to have a very
different view of the value of children, in part because we expect that our
kids will survive those crucial early years. And we tend to live a lot longer –
in Canada our lifespan is at least twice as long as it was in Moses’ time, so
the relationship between children and parents extends over many more years.
There are stages of the child/parent relationship:
Younger children in
relationship to parents
Youth and young adult
children in relationship to parents
Mature adult children in
relationship with aging parents
Many of the passages in
scripture are about that first stage, directed toward younger children who are
still under their parents’ care. In the Old
Testament book of Proverbs we find:
Hear, my child, your
father’s instruction
and
do not reject your mother’s teaching;
for they are a fair garland for your head,
and pendants for your neck. Proverbs 1: 8, 9
If you curse your father or mother your lamp will
go out in utter darkness. Proverbs 20:20
That first one is poetic
and the second one is rather ominous – curse your folks and you’ll end of
swimming with the fishes! I know parents, you
will be posting these on the refrigerator door!
While they are very
different, they lead us toward the same truth. Without the imparting of
wisdom from one generation to the next, we are doomed to repeat our mistakes
and “wander in the wilderness.” Children learn from their parents, the good,
the bad, and the ugly, but we hope and pray that it will be mostly the good,
the ethical, the moral. Most of all, our desire is
that they come into a life-giving relationship with God.
With our younger children
we are engaged in helping them understand that they are not the centre of the
universe. We use the expression “the terrible twos” to describe children who
are at a development stage when they are totally convinced that they are little
gods. When they are under our constant care, we accept
responsibility as parents, both through our words and actions, to offer
an alternative to that outlook. Much of what our children learn is “caught” as
well as taught and this is certainly true of faith. If we want our children to
think and act as Christians, we will think and act as Christians.
I don’t know if there was
any such thing as a teen in the ancient world because there probably wasn’t
that period of grace where development could take place, but we definitely
recognize teens today. They are in a crucial stage during which they discover
(we pray!) that independence is not necessarily the same as all-out rebellion.
They push the boundaries of what we have already taught them, and it is
tremendously important that we continue to convey our faith and our values,
although it can test our patience.
When I was in Victoria last
week I stayed with good friends whom we don’t see often. Each morning I got up
to go to the conference and I had breakfast with the twenty-year-old daughter
who was up early for work. Today she is friendly and
funny and charming. When I saw her last, at age sixteen . . . well, not
so much. I commented to her parents that she is a lovely young woman and they
expressed relief. I observed that four years ago they may not have been the
stupidest people on earth, in her estimation, but they were finalists! Somehow
they have managed to keep the conversation going and she has discovered that
their values and wisdom might actually make sense.
The fifth commandment has
taken on a different and very important meaning in a time when people in many
cultures, such as ours, are living longer. What are our roles as children when
parents live to ripe old ages? No I didn’t say overripe!
What if we are the children in our fifties and sixties, or even seventies?
Often we find ourselves in a role reversal where we are deeply involved in
decision-making either with or for our parents and honestly we are unsure of
our boundaries.
Unfortunately there isn’t
much in scripture which speaks specifically of how we should treat our elderly
and perhaps infirm parents. You might be interested to know that the Quran, the
holy book of the Islamic religion does:
And your Lord has decreed
that you not worship except Him, and to parents, good treatment. Whether one or
both of them reach old age [while] with you, say not to them [so much as] 'uff' [i.e., an expression of irritation or disapproval] and
do not repel them but speak to them a noble word. And lower to them the wing
of humility out of mercy and say: 'My Lord! Have mercy upon them as they
brought me up [when I was] small.'" Quran
17:23-24
While the Quran is not our
holy book, these words seem to extend the notion of honouring our parents, even
when that doesn’t seem easy. Not long ago I did the funeral for another
of our elderly members, a wonderful person I described as independent, spelled
S T U B B O R N. Sometimes our role is to be humble and
gracious and to patiently provide support even when we don’t agree, the way our
parents did for us at certain stages of our lives.
As always we need to ask
what Jesus said that would support the commandments. In that first, brief
passage we might get the impression that Jesus didn’t have much time for
parents and family. He asks “who is my mother and who are my siblings?” I
would like to think that it isn’t as harsh as it sounds. Surely Jesus is
pointing out that he has a mission to a wider Christian family.
In the other gospel reading
we get a glimpse of Jesus’ respect for his mother, Mary. He is in the final stages of his torture and execution
on the cross. Yet his mother is there, with him in his agony, and Jesus uses
his last resources to ask the disciple John to care for her. I didn’t like the
film The Passion of the Christ, but perhaps the most moving moment was
as Jesus carried his own cross to Calvary, stumbling and even falling on the
way. Mary watches his humiliation as a mother, and in one poignant scene
she remembers him falling when he was a child in Nazareth and how she offered
comfort. Both this non-biblical image and the words of Christ from the cross
are incarnational, they speak of how we are in relationship from life’s
beginning to its end.
When we honour each other,
learn from each other, grow with each other through the stages of life we can
enter into the place God wants us to be.
This commandment to “honour
yer ma and pa” is a wonderful invitation to be
mindful of those relationships which gave us life and sustain life. Thanks be to God.