The Honoring of Parents John M, Buchanan
Ephesians 6:1-4 Broad Street Presbyterian Churcn
May 8, 1977 Columbus, Ohio

My text this morning is Exodus 20:11, the Fifth Commandment, "Hcnor your father
and your mother, that your days may be long in the land which the Lord your God gives
you," I would like to lay beside this text two others: One, a doublet from that
charming wit, Ogden Nash, "Children aren't happy with nothing to ignore,

So that's what parents were created for.", -
the other, not nearly so charming; a statement by a 75 year old: "When I was young
T used to think that more than anything else old people must be scared of dying. But
now I'm old and I'm more scared of living, What will I do if I get hurt or really
sick? All I can do is hope I die quickly," (Trends, April 1972).

Those are the boundaries, if you will, for a Mother's Day Sermon on the Honor-
ing of Parents: the initial Biblical injunction, the traditional relationship between
parents and children which requires grace and a sense of humor more than anything
else, and a major concern which is currently presenting itself to our society in
gigantic proportions - and which is most significant for the institution of the. ot
family - the whole matter of aging in America. — C. cle ue ewe - "oe

First, the Bible - the Fifth Commandment, "Honor your father and your mother,
that your days may be long in the land which the Lord your God gives you," The Ten
Commandments were received by the tribes of Israel in the midst of their wandering
through the Sinai wilderness. Prior to the Sinai episode it is not accurate to refer
to them as a nation, For generations they had been a loose federation of tribes
dwelling in Egypt. After the Exodus, during the wanderingg, the idea of nationhood
was born among them, The importance of the Ten Commandments is as the initial,
founding, legal framework for a new nation, They are the ten building blocks for an
entirely new society in which God would reign as King, and in which His will would be
done. They are more important, that is to say, than rules for everyday conduct, They
are the principals upon which God's people would live their corporate life, and upon
which the rest of their new society, its customs, traditions and institutions, would
be built,

The principal to which the Fifth Commandment points might be expressed like
this: the family unit is the basic element of our society: it must be preserved, pro-
tected, nurtured and appreciated, The institution of marriage, for instance, was sO
highly valued in Israelite culture that somewhere in the law it is forbidden for a
newly married soldier to be sent away to war for a period of time after the wedding:
a wise custom if there ever was one! In any event, the family is the foundation of
Judaic culture and religion. The posture of children within that system was based
on obedience to one's father primarily, loyalty to the family business or trade and
respect for both parents, There are many Old Testament references which document the
seriousness with which that was taken, In Exodus 21, for instance, the death penalty
is prescribed for anyone who strikes a parent, And in Leviticus 20888 the same
punishment is mandated for cursing a parent.

Old Testament scholarship suggests that the respectful and obedient model of
childhood was so prevalent in early Judaic culture that it would not have been
necessary to build it into the Ten Commandments, The scholars suggest that the real
target of the Fifth Commandment was not children at all, but adults burdened with an
elderly parent, It is, in this context, a thinly disguised warning against the
heathen practice of abandoning the elderly when they were incapable of caring for
themselves. (The Interpreters Bible, Vol, 1 p. 985).

The real intent of the Fifth Commandment, therefore, is not simply that children
treat their parents politely, but a whole, stable societal system in which age is
honored and in which all the elderly are regarded as parents who must be valued and
cared for - for the health of the entire culture, The promise which is attached to
the commandment, “that your days may be long in the land the Lord your God has given
you", was self-actualizing. If the system is structured in this manner, it will
respect, honor and care for you when you reach old age,

—"y Many centuries later, the life of Jesus of Nazareth is illustrative, He was a
part of the system which resulted from the Fifth Commandment. No record exists of
His first thirty years, but the sest historical deductions are that Joseph died long
before Jesus arrived at the age of thirty, According to the accepted practice of the
day Jesus would have learned His father's trade, and upon his death assumed the
business and the role of head of the house, It is likely that those thirty years,
therefore, were spent in the carpenter shop and caring for His mother and brothers
and sisters. The Gospel narrative indicates clearly that Jesus continued to care for
His mother during His public ministry, No better, nor touching illustration of Jew-
ish family solidarity exists than our Lord, near death, remembering to ask His dear
friend John to care for His mother. be Mace aevlars

ceouce
Jesus expressed the best of His culture, but in His teaching and His life He \
added a rather new dimension, Jesus focused on children, not merely as appendages to |
their parents whose existence was to obey and honor and respect, but as persons in |
their own right, In His teaching children became an occasional example of how moral —
life should be lived: childlikeness, in His words, became the model for the faithful
adult, One time, when He was very tired His disciples did what adults are always

doing - they kept the children away. He caught them at it and reversed their decision

and welcomed the company of the little ones,

What we see emerging in the teaching of Jesus then is something rather unique. |
William Barclay calls it the principal of reciprocity: parents have obligations to |
their children: society has certain duties vis-a-vis its Little ones, Thus in St.
Paul's letter to the Ephesians, in the text we read this morning, he said: "Children,
obey your parents:.,,fathers, do not provoke your children."" Parenting, suddenly, in
the context of the Gospel, became a two-way street, And, according to Barclay, no-
where has the Christian faith had a more dramatic influence in history than in the
treatment of children.

The Roman world, in which Jesus lived did not esteem children very highly. As
a matter of fact the culture did not place moral demands on parents at all, Babies
that were not vanted were simply discarded, The Roman historian Tacitus muses about
the fact that the Jews don't "expose" children, What he meant was that the Jews
didn't practice the Roman custom of abandoning unwanted children to the elements. In
that world the idea that parents had duties toward their children was revolutionary /
indeed, tt

In our world that thesis is commonly accepted. There are laws against child
abuse, for instance: restrictions on society as a whole in the labor market, and upon
parenting in the tragic matter of physical neglect and abuse,

(A The primary motif about the contemporary American family, hovever, is that
things aren't what they used to be, Change has occurred rapidly and dramatically and
we aren't at all sure when or where the situation will stabilize. If you read at all
you know the common anxiety about the institution of the family. Part of it is not

\

4

\
“

« & =

new at all, For instance, listen to this broadside. "The world is passing through
troublous times. The young people of today think of nothing but themselves, They
have no reverence for parents or old age. They talk as if they know everything and
what passes for wisdom with us is foolishness with them, As for the girls, they are
forward, immodest and unwomanly in speech, behavior and dress," Sounds as contempor-
ary as my own dinner table, It was written 703 years ago, in 1274, by a preacher
with the curious name, Peter the Hermit. (The Ten Commandments for Today, William
Barclay, p.59). E

¥ I'm unconvinced that there is anything new about the generation gap except

the vocabulary in which it is expressed. Nor am I convinced that there is much new
knowledge on what is to be done about it apart from the time honored virtues of love,
forgiveness, acceptance, humor and above all, patience, "This, too, will pass."

St, Theresa promised, and it wiil.

What I am certain about is that there are major sociological changes in process
and that being a family today is different from what it has ever been before, The
traditional functions of the home have been taken away, one by onc, and assumed by
other institutions in our culture, School alone demands a total time commitment for
young people, from carly morning till late in the evening. The home seems, at times,
to have been reduced to a twenty-four hour laundramat, quick food service, youth
hostel, And even if all that were not true television alone will consume a total
17,000 hours out of the life of the average American high school student. That's
17,000 hours, regardless of the quality of the television that is watched, taken
away from other activities which normally would have been the domain of the family.
We shall overcome, however, I am concerned but not distressed about the family. I
see thoughtful, loving, sensitive people getting the job of parenting done rather
well,

My deeper concern is in another direction: the direction suggested by the
Fifth Commandment: “Honor your father and mother," The high mobility of American
culture has produced dislocation, uprooting and isolation on a scale unprecedented
since our ancestors stopped following the wild game and settled down to plant corn,

pwr The victims of the now legendary American mobility, I would submit, are primarily

yaa

the elderly. They are the ones deprived of extended families. If the institution
of the family is in trouble in our culture, it is at the older rather than the

pf yh younger perimeter,

gu Pl

Ten per cent of our population is over 65, That's 22.5 million people. A full
one-third of them live beneath the poverty level, About a decade ago our society
suddenly acknowledged that it had a problem, Senior Citizen began appearing on the
covers of Time and Newsweek, Sociologists, psychologists, politicians told us
clearly: - growinz old in America is a problem, The real problem, I submit, is the
culture itsel£: the culture which has forgotten its own precious roots and has de-
clined to estecm and care for its own elderly. Remember, that is the intent of the
Fifth Commandment,

Robert Borwning held up the classic, romantic ideal in a pocm you have heard:

"Grow old along with me:

The best is yet to be,

The last of Life for which the first was made;
Our times are in His hand ;

Who saith, 'A whole I planned: Youth shows

but half: trust God; see all; nor be afraid, "

- 4 =

The Best is yet to be? Hardly - at least for many elderly people. More to ‘eo
ee the point is a line out of Macbeth: fh

"That which should accompany old age, co

love, obedience, troops of friends,
I must not look to have,"

A

“Ailes
One of the reasons why the Best has been for many elderly people is that this —

culture is obsessed with youth and really doesn't know what to do with people over
sixty-five, Listen to how one writer expressed it: "Dropping out of the productive
cycle at sixty-five can be traumatic. You work and work at a job for forty years,
feeling needed, important, indispensable, Then suddenly it's over, Vacation begins
and it never ends. No alarm pumps up the adrenalin that begins the process of mak-
ing you face the world and yourself that day, or next week, or next month, or ever
again. Nor does anything end the day. No bell or whistle or even "happy hour" after
work sends you back to home and hearth and family," (Trends, op. cite.)

What a waste of human productivity simply to assume that retirement from work
must occur at 65, involuntarily, What a waste if this Church and Paul Spierling had
not experienced ten sood years of ministry together after he was 65, How much
poorer the parish would be without Art Romig, It isn't necessary, the physicians
tell us, The iast time I saw Harry Cotton we shared a plane seat and he was on his
way to a trout fishing expedition by horseback, after he had delivered one of the
most cogent, energetic sermons I've ever heard,

"Honor your father and your mother": esteem the elderly: they are the mothers
and fathers of your culture, Part of our problem is the image our culture assigns
to the elderly. In simpler times, when families lived close together, grandparents,
aunts and uncles played a vital role in the life of the whole family. Urbanization,
and mobility have ended that, and in the absence of the traditional role the image
of the elderly in America has become condescending.

Not long ago I walked in on a rerun of a television show I had never seen
before and have no intent of secing again. The episode took place on a cruise; the
passengers were all retired people. The humor, which essentially consisted of poking .
fun at old age, vas atrocious, full of cruel stereotypes. Mindless parodies of old
age occur with some frequency on television, and when I see them I get angry.

The image, I believe, needs to be changed. Those of us under 65 need to help

change it, but those of you who are over 65 are the ones who can make it happen,
hk RIM Ee tus ,
(mK his culture needs you, You have a sense of history which the rest of us
can't have yet. You have seen more and lived through more great events than any
generation before you. You witnessed events people my age have only read about, And
don't bother tc*ling us that your memory is slipping. The only thing for which you
will be excused is the fact that vou have so much more to remember. In fact, be-
cause your education relied much more heavily on memorization than mine, you can
remember more and better than I can, That thesis, by the way, was tried by a
Michigan neurolosist recently, He asked a group of fifty people in their 80's and
90's to memorize a section of the Congressional Record. Then he asked 50 college
students to memorize the same material, Without exception the people in their
80's and 90's memorized more swiftly and with greater ease than their younger counter-
parts, And their recall was more accurate over a longer period of time, Don't tell
us that your memory is going bad, Because it isn’ at

- 5- :

Age gives you a wisdom and grace that is deserving of honor, James Hilton
in Goodbye, Mr. Chips, wrote, "One of the joys of growing older is that you bother
less about a lot of little things and care more about a few vig things," I was
delighted to discover a charming vignette about Arthur Rubenstein in a recent
edition of New York Magazine - (1-17-77). Someone had told the master that at 80
he was playing better than ever, He said, "I think so, Now I take chances I never
took before, You see, the stakes are not so high. I can afford it, I used to be
so much more careful, No wrong notes. Not too bold ideas, Now I let go and enjoy
myself and to hell with everything except the music," ks
mR PoP hen. cr
/ . F : ; P

And finally, in terms of perspective and faith, age - I have concluded, has
it all over youth. One of the special bonuses of the ministry is that a week never
goes by without the opportunity of learning that, I was at the bedside of an 35
year old woman recently who is nearly blind. The light conversation turned to
hospital food - to the breakfast she had eaten, And suddenly she asked me, "Did
you ever think how wonderful an egg is? How it turns into a chicken with feathers
and bones and beak?" Well, in a way, I suppose I hadn't thought about that - for
a long time anyvay, I'm too busy cating and reading and worrying about the day
ahead, But she who, by my rough calculations probably cracked 20,000 eggs in her
life, could still stand in awe before the magnificent and mysterious processes of
God's creation. And so I prayed with her - and I thanked God later for her wisdom
which I need so badly.

It is time to say out loud what all of us know in our hearts: that when needs
are added up, older people need younger people but perhaps not nearly as much as
younger people need older people: that there is deep truth and importance in the
ancient injunction, "Honor your father anc your mother that your days may be long
in the land the Lord your God has given you,"

We need one another, The Best - can be - yet to come,
Amen,

Eternal God, we are grateful for Your good gift of life: for people to
love and care for; for parents and aunts and uncles and all those whose wisdom
and stature is increased by age. Make us one family, in the name of Jesus

Christ our Lord,
Amen,