Honouring Our Families17OCT10
(Clear on Big Idea and Make clear transition to honoring our parents)
Series: Loving God in the Ten Commandments October 17, 2010
Ten Commandments M4: Sermon Notes
Title: Honouring Our Families
Text: Deut. 5:16; Eph. 6:1-4
Speaker: Ken Shigematsu
Big Idea: When we honour our parents and our family, we express our love for God and we flourish.
The small town of Roseto, Pennsylvania, presented a major health mystery to researchers in the 1950s.
Author Malcolm Gladwell writes:
"In Roseto, virtually no one under fifty-five had died of a heart attack or showed any signs of heart disease [this at time before cholesterol lowering drugs were available and many men died young because of heart disease]. For men over sixty-five, the death rate from heart disease in Roseto was roughly half that of the United States as a whole. The death rate from all causes in Roseto, in fact, was 30 to 35 percent lower than expected by researchers… There was no suicide, no alcoholism, no drug addiction, and very little crime. They didn't even have anyone on welfare. Then we looked at peptic ulcers. They didn't have any of those either. These people were dying of old age. That's it…. "
After the medical researchers systematically studied -- and then eliminated--diet, exercise, genetics, and environmental conditions, the reason they wound up citing for Roseto's "outlier" status was the town itself. They looked at how the Rosetans visited one another, stopping to chat in Italian on the street, say, or cooked for one another in their backyards… "
In Roseto the love and care people had for one another had an astounding beneficial influence on people’s health.
When our primary relationships are healthy—our relationship with our parents, our families, our neighbours—then our communities will be healthy, and we are more likely to be healthy and to flourish.
As we continue our series on the Ten Commandments, we are going to be looking at God’s desire for our family relationships to flourish as we look at the Fifth Commandment.
Please turn in your Bibles to Deuteronomy 5:16:
16 "Honor your father and your mother, as the LORD your God has commanded you, so that you may live long and that it may go well with you in the land the LORD your God is giving you.
God says if you honour your father and mother you will live long and you will flourish.
In this series on the Ten Commandments, we have seen how, contrary to common myth, God did not give us the Ten Commandments as a way for us to earn favour with God--so that if we keep most of the Ten Commandments most of the time, God will be happy with us, accept us, and open the door to heaven for us when we die. We have also seen how again, contrary to popular myth, that God did not give us the Ten Commandments as an arbitrary set of rules which if we followed them would have the effect of spoiling our lives like hail on an otherwise pleasant walk through the park.
In this series we have seen how God gave his people the Ten Commandments after he had delivered his people out of Egypt, out of the land where they had been slaves for 400 years—where they felt in some ways like those thirty-three Chilean miners felt when trapped 700 meters below the earth. After saving them, he gives his people the Ten Commandments, not as a way for them to earn their favour with God--they already had God’s favour. He had already sprung them free from Egypt, this place where they had been slaves for 400 years—--but he gives them and us the Ten Commandments as a way to show them and us how we can flourish in our relationship with a God who has already accepted us, a God who has already forgiven us our sins.
So it is with the 5th Commandment--–to honour our father and our mother. But in the text God says, “I give you this commandment so that you may live long, and so that it may go well with you in the land the LORD your God has given you.”
God does not call us to honour our parents and our family as a way to wreck our life, but so that we would be healthy in the most holistic way: emotionally, spiritually, and physically, so that it might go well with us. The Hebrew word here is one that means “complete flourishing.”
Let me just make a little point of qualification here.
We in twenty-first century Vancouver tend to interpret the Bible and everything else through an individualistic lens. We live in a culture that focuses on the individual, but in the ancient Near East when this was written and in many places in the world today like Asia, Africa, Latin America, the focus is not on the individual but on the community. So when God says honour your father and mother so that you may live long and so that things may go well with you, he is not saying that every individual person who honours their parents will live to 80 or 90 or 100, but he is saying that when we honour our parents as a community, we create the kind of social climate where we will be healthy, where we will flourish, and where we are likely to live for a long time.
When our primary relationships are healthy—our relationship with our parents, our families, our neighbours, then our communities—like Roseta, Pennsylvania--will be healthy, and we are more likely to be healthy and to flourish.
The most fundamental of all our relationships is, of course, our relationship with God. When God is at the centre of our existence, then our other relationships tend to fall into place. And as our relationships fall into place, so does our life. I understand that in an orchestra sometimes the conductor will turn to the oboe player, ask the oboe player to play a note, and if that note is played correctly, then all the other members of the orchestra will adjust to the oboe’s tone, and together they are more likely to create beautiful music.) If our relationship with God is going well, then what tends to happen is that our other relationships will fall into place.
Now, our second most fundamental relationship after God, for most of us, is the relationship with our parents, and after that our relationship with our immediate family. If those relationships are going well, then our other relationships are more likely to flourish.
When my wife Sakiko was a young girl in Japan, she had the opportunity to meet with a number of her dad’s colleagues. Sakiko would meet her dad’s colleagues, and based on her interaction, she could predict with a high degree of accuracy whether those men had daughters, and, if so, whether their relationship with their daughters was healthy or not. There was just a certain very positive and healthy vibe that fathers in healthy relationships with their daughters exuded when they related with her. If they didn’t have daughters, or if they had bad relationships with their daughters, for some reason that also came through in different ways. How we relate to our parents or our families has a powerful impact on how we relate to others. We don’t need to have a PhD in psychology to understand that if you are dating someone who has an awful relationship with their parents, to trigger an alarm in your mind (make noise). Maybe there is good reason why they have an awful relationship with their parents. Maybe this person’s parents are terrible. But, we know intuitively that someone who has a very complex relationship with their parents, their relationships with other people will likely be more complex.
So when God calls us to honour our parents, and later through the apostle Paul in Ephesians 6 which is a kind of commentary on this passage, he calls us to honour our children and the members of our family and the members of our household which in ancient times, unlike our own, would often number 50-100 people, and would include blood relatives and non-blood relatives.
So what does it mean to honour our parents (or parent figures)? The word in Hebrew for honour is the word “kabod.” It literally means “to make heavy,” or “to give weight to.” In the context of honouring our parents, it means that we don’t take that relationship lightly, we give weight to that relationship, priority. We are to prize our parents.
In the Bible in places like Ephesians 6 and Colossians 3, Paul writes, “Children, obey your parents because this pleases the LORD.” These texts that speak of obeying your parents (which have a slightly different nuance than honouring your parents) are directed primarily at younger children. Paul would say to young children, without a lot of qualification, “obey your parents and it will go well with you.” But as we grow and mature, the commandment to obey our parents becomes relativized, as we understand more of what God’s will for our lives might be.
When Jesus was maturing as a boy (he obviously matured more quickly than us), he and his parents went Jerusalem to celebrate Passover there. Jesus ended up spending three extra days in Jerusalem unbeknownst to his parents. When his parents found him in the temple courts they scolded him, and he responded, “Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I had to be in my Father’s house?”
Jesus affirmed the Ten Commandments, and yet in Luke 14:26 he said:
26 "If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even life itself—such a person cannot be my disciple.
Jesus shed light on what that means when he said:
37 "Anyone who loves their father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves a son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.
Matthew 10:37
Jesus here is not suggesting that we are not to love our parents and honour them, but if our parents are at odds at what God is calling us to do, we are to choose God’s will over our parents’ will. Peter in the book of Acts declares that we must obey God, rather than human beings (Acts 5:29).
Particularly among those of us who are Asian, there can be a tendency to believe that honouring our parents means that we obey them, no matter what, even when we are adults. That is a conviction produced more by an Asian culture informed by the Confucian notion of filial piety than it is from the Bible itself. If your parents insist that you pursue a career path that makes you a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer or an accountant, those motives may not be entirely bad. They believe those careers will offer you the most financial security, and the fact that they provide an aura of prestige is a bonus. But, if you feel that God is calling you on a different path it’s OK to disappoint and even disobey your parents.
Honouring our parents if we are an adult does not mean absolute obedience.
Honouring our parents also does not mean that if we have been subject to all kinds of abuse, whether physical or sexual or verbal, we just sort of brush that under the carpet. If we have been hurt by our parents or those in authority over us, we are going to need to take time to process that pain, and to walk the long and challenging path of forgiveness, ideally with the help of a trusted Christian friend, pastor, or counselor. Honouring our parents isn’t turning a blind eye to the way they may have hurt us.
So honouring our parents doesn’t mean absolute obedience. It doesn’t mean that we offer a cheap, glib forgiveness.
So what does it mean to honour our parents?
So how do we honour our parents? If you are a young child here, you can honour your parents by obeying them. They do have your best interests in mind. Obey them.
Part of what it means to honour our parents, if we’ve had a bad relationship with them is to take a step in coming to terms with your parents (even if they are dead) which may begin by inviting Jesus to be a presence in that relationship… or beginning to process the relationship with a close friend, pastor or a counselor. As we do we honour our parents, we honour ourselves. If we don’t come to terms with the relationship we have with our parents—we’ll find ourselves stuck and unable to move forward freely in other areas of our lives.
How else can we honour our parents? As our parents age, we can honour them in some practical ways.
As our parents age and we become relatively more powerful, the roles of parent and child begin to shift, and even reverse, as we take more of a caretaker role in their lives. Sometimes people who have had an antagonistic relationship with their parents are able to honour them only as their parents grow older and weaker. Compassion wells up in them and they show mercy to their parents. If our parents in their senior years are experiencing financial difficulties, if we are able, we can support them financially. I have great admiration for my Filipino friends. Most of them are not making heaps of money, and yet many of them send money back to the Philippines to support parents and family members who are in financial need. This is honouring to God.
Another way that we can honour our parents, particularly as they age, is by spending time with them. And if we can’t much spend time with them physically because they are in another part of the world, we can phone them; send them photographs; make them feel close.
Those of us who are with parents who are aging are nodding their heads and saying, “I agree. Yes, I do that.” But do your parents feel it’s important to you?
When I first became a pastor here, the church was considerably smaller and we had a much higher percentage of senior citizens. From the time that I became a new pastor, visiting senior citizens, who were in a shut in and not well enough to come to service, has been a priority of mine.
As I sit with senior citizens, they regularly confide in me their disappointment that their children who often live relatively close by in places like Burnaby or Surrey hardly ever come to see them. They feel lonely. They felt neglected. It is interesting that when I hear their kids talk, they don’t feel that way at all. I sense this when the kids are giving eulogies for their parents at their funeral. When they talk--and I sense they are being utterly sincere—they talk about how much they admire and appreciate their parent, and how their own lives have been deeply enriched by continuing to spend time with the parent in their old age. But I know from the perspective of their parents, they felt neglected. So one of the things we might ask ourselves, from the perspective of our parents, are we loving them and spending time with them?
I know that in some cases parents have unrealistic expectations that we can’t meet, and, if we let their unrealistic expectation govern, our lives, we would be totally melded into their lives and we would not have a life of our own. But if that’s not our story, we might ask our self, “Are we connecting with our parents so that they feel loved and honoured and cared for?
(May cut: Are we encouraging our friends and spouses to do the same? There is a man that I know and that I have great respect for. He is a pastor. He has told this story publicly so I am not breaking a confidence. But when he moved from the mainland to Hawaii to pastor, one of the great joys that his wife had was the weekly phone conversation with her mother. The family was on a modest income and in those years long distance calls were more expensive than they are now. So the husband asked his wife, “In the interest of the family’s financial picture, cut back on those long distance calls to your mother.” She dutifully agreed to. But then just then a few months later her mother unexpectedly died. This pastor, who I have a lot of respect for and I don’t think has a lot of big regrets, said, “One of my biggest regrets is that I did not encourage and let my wife talk to her mother more often because I thought it was too expensive. As I look back we could have made it work financially.” One of the ways that we can honour parents, not just our own parents but other parents, is by encouraging those that are close to us to connect with them.)
Are we honouring our parents and those who have had some kind of parental role in our lives?
Commentators have pointed out that implicit in the commandment “honour our parents” is, if we are parents or parent figures or mentors, to live in such a way that honour is a natural response to the way that we live. If you are in power over someone, you can at times force obedience, but you can’t force honour. Honour is earned.
Parents, parent figures, aunts, uncles, mentors or potential parents one day, part of what God is calling us to be is parent figures who are worthy of honour.
That is why when Paul this passage in Ephesians 6:
4 Fathers, [b] do not exasperate your children; instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.
In the Greek, Paul is calling on the parents to not exasperate their children and to lovingly nourish them in the training and instruction of God.
For many parents today when we think of providing for our kids, we think in terms of getting them baby Einstein DVDs, getting them into the right pre-school, dance lessons, soccer lessons, and when they graduate from high school being able to help them if we can with their post-secondary education.
That’s not the most important gift that we can impart to our children. The most important gift by far is the integrity of our lives before our God, our honesty, our courage, our love.
I was recently in the home of Blaine and Jadine Cairns whom some of you would know. Blaine serves as an elder here at Tenth. Their boys, Ethan and Zach, are part of the kids’ ministry here. Jadine’s father died recently. A couple of weeks ago I was sitting in the Cairns’ living room with Jadine and Blaine. I asked Jadine to tell me about her dad. She talked about how he didn’t have a lot of money, but she so admired him because he was a good and solid person of integrity. I asked if she would share part of the eulogy because I wanted to read these excerpts that Jadine read at her dad’s memorial service. (show photo of her dad)
“I have always had a great deal of admiration for my Dad. From my perspective, of what I saw in his life, he was such a consistently good, solid, moral man. He had such integrity in all aspects of his life. His honesty and generosity defined him. “
Part of integrity is love.
(show photo of her dad)
Again if I can illustrate from Jadine’s father’s life.
When we were living in Hong Kong, we were not rich. Dad had a simple job working as a gardener at a hospital which was quite a ways from where we lived. I was about 2 ½ then, and loved the Japanese apple pears. They were very expensive then (as now). To save money to buy me an apple pear, he would walk an hour to work and an hour back after a long day of work.
It as we love our children and love others that they become stronger and healthier. Then they are more likely to enter into a relationship with a God who, whether they know it or not, longs to be part of their lives. Analog…
Gordon Neufeld is a psychologist that teaches at UBC. Some of you may have had him as a professor when you were a student there. Gordon Neufeld has written a great book with Vancouver, Downtown Eastside-based physician Gabor Mate called Hold On To Your Kids (show book jacket). If you are a parent, I would highly recommend this book.
Dr. Neufeld and Dr. Mate describe something that we have intuited and observed in our culture.
They argue that in North America, for kids and teenagers in particular, peers have replaced parents as the primary influence in their lives. They call this phenomenon “peer orientation” which refers to the tendency of children and youth to look to their peers for direction, for their sense of right and wrong, for their values, their identities, and codes of behaviour—rather their parents or other adults in their lives.
In this book Dr. Neufeld and Dr. Mate, who are as far as I know are not writing as Christians, but whose message very much reinforces the Christian message, call on parents to hold on to their kids by committing to being the primary influence in their kids’ lives.
And how to do it? According to Drs. Neufeld and Mate, it is not primarily by trying to control their behavior, but by deepening our relationship, and fostering their attachment to us by loving them.
When we love our children and they attach to us, we become their compass point. We help them develop a stronger identity. We also help to shield them from a world that can be very harsh.
For example, consider the story of Braden:
A father, a friend of Vancouver-based psychologist Gordon Neufeld, had a son who was about 5 years old. According to the father, his son wanted to play soccer in the local community league. On the first day of practice some of the older kids gave him a rough time. The dad said, “When I heard the voices ridiculing and taunting him, I quickly turned…I quickly wanted to become a protective father bear. I had every intention of giving these young bullies an external attitude adjustment, but then I observed Braden’s response, stretching himself to his full height, putting his hands on his hips and sticking out his chest as far out as it would go. I heard him say something like ‘I am not a stupid little jerk. My daddy says I am a soccer player’.”
Braden’s idea of what his father thought of him protected him more effectively that what the father would have by direct intervention. His father’s perceptions of him took precedence over his peers.
As we foster attachment to our kids—we are able to better protect them and guide them and to introduce them to the love of God.
God calls us to honour our parents, making them a priority and prizing them. If we are parents or parent figures, he calls us to be parents to lead lives worthy of honour. We exhibit integrity and love. If we do that there is obviously no guarantee how our kids will turn out, but it is more likely that they will be whole and know God.
God commands us to honour our parents and to live lives of honour as parents, again, not to wreck our life, but so that it may go well with us, so that we might flourish in our relationship with God and with one another.
How do we become people like this? Do we have the strength to honour our parents, to live lives worthy of honour? We become these kinds of people by honouring the First Commandment, which we talked about a couple of weeks ago.
We become these kinds of people as we honour God and place him first in our life, cultivating a deep and intimate, growing friendship with him and his son Jesus Christ. As that happens , like Braden, a 5-year-old starting to play soccer, as we grow to understand God’s love for us expressed to us most powerfully in sending his son Jesus Christ to act as sacrifice for our sins on the cross so that we might be forgiven and adopted as God’s sons and daughters, we will become more resilient in a world which at times can be hostile. And through God’s love for us and our attachment to him, we will find ourselves growing stronger, with more love to give to our parents and to our kids.
Pray:
Series: Loving God in the Ten Commandments October 17, 2010
Ten Commandments M4: Sermon Notes
Title: Honouring Our Families
Text: Deut. 5:16; Eph. 6:1-4
Speaker: Ken Shigematsu
Big Idea: When we honour our parents and our family, we express our love for God and we flourish.
The small town of Roseto, Pennsylvania, presented a major health mystery to researchers in the 1950s.
Author Malcolm Gladwell writes:
"In Roseto, virtually no one under fifty-five had died of a heart attack or showed any signs of heart disease [this at time before cholesterol lowering drugs were available and many men died young because of heart disease]. For men over sixty-five, the death rate from heart disease in Roseto was roughly half that of the United States as a whole. The death rate from all causes in Roseto, in fact, was 30 to 35 percent lower than expected by researchers… There was no suicide, no alcoholism, no drug addiction, and very little crime. They didn't even have anyone on welfare. Then we looked at peptic ulcers. They didn't have any of those either. These people were dying of old age. That's it…. "
After the medical researchers systematically studied -- and then eliminated--diet, exercise, genetics, and environmental conditions, the reason they wound up citing for Roseto's "outlier" status was the town itself. They looked at how the Rosetans visited one another, stopping to chat in Italian on the street, say, or cooked for one another in their backyards… "
In Roseto the love and care people had for one another had an astounding beneficial influence on people’s health.
When our primary relationships are healthy—our relationship with our parents, our families, our neighbours—then our communities will be healthy, and we are more likely to be healthy and to flourish.
As we continue our series on the Ten Commandments, we are going to be looking at God’s desire for our family relationships to flourish as we look at the Fifth Commandment.
Please turn in your Bibles to Deuteronomy 5:16:
16 "Honor your father and your mother, as the LORD your God has commanded you, so that you may live long and that it may go well with you in the land the LORD your God is giving you.
God says if you honour your father and mother you will live long and you will flourish.
In this series on the Ten Commandments, we have seen how, contrary to common myth, God did not give us the Ten Commandments as a way for us to earn favour with God--so that if we keep most of the Ten Commandments most of the time, God will be happy with us, accept us, and open the door to heaven for us when we die. We have also seen how again, contrary to popular myth, that God did not give us the Ten Commandments as an arbitrary set of rules which if we followed them would have the effect of spoiling our lives like hail on an otherwise pleasant walk through the park.
In this series we have seen how God gave his people the Ten Commandments after he had delivered his people out of Egypt, out of the land where they had been slaves for 400 years—where they felt in some ways like those thirty-three Chilean miners felt when trapped 700 meters below the earth. After saving them, he gives his people the Ten Commandments, not as a way for them to earn their favour with God--they already had God’s favour. He had already sprung them free from Egypt, this place where they had been slaves for 400 years—--but he gives them and us the Ten Commandments as a way to show them and us how we can flourish in our relationship with a God who has already accepted us, a God who has already forgiven us our sins.
So it is with the 5th Commandment--–to honour our father and our mother. But in the text God says, “I give you this commandment so that you may live long, and so that it may go well with you in the land the LORD your God has given you.”
God does not call us to honour our parents and our family as a way to wreck our life, but so that we would be healthy in the most holistic way: emotionally, spiritually, and physically, so that it might go well with us. The Hebrew word here is one that means “complete flourishing.”
Let me just make a little point of qualification here.
We in twenty-first century Vancouver tend to interpret the Bible and everything else through an individualistic lens. We live in a culture that focuses on the individual, but in the ancient Near East when this was written and in many places in the world today like Asia, Africa, Latin America, the focus is not on the individual but on the community. So when God says honour your father and mother so that you may live long and so that things may go well with you, he is not saying that every individual person who honours their parents will live to 80 or 90 or 100, but he is saying that when we honour our parents as a community, we create the kind of social climate where we will be healthy, where we will flourish, and where we are likely to live for a long time.
When our primary relationships are healthy—our relationship with our parents, our families, our neighbours, then our communities—like Roseta, Pennsylvania--will be healthy, and we are more likely to be healthy and to flourish.
The most fundamental of all our relationships is, of course, our relationship with God. When God is at the centre of our existence, then our other relationships tend to fall into place. And as our relationships fall into place, so does our life. I understand that in an orchestra sometimes the conductor will turn to the oboe player, ask the oboe player to play a note, and if that note is played correctly, then all the other members of the orchestra will adjust to the oboe’s tone, and together they are more likely to create beautiful music.) If our relationship with God is going well, then what tends to happen is that our other relationships will fall into place.
Now, our second most fundamental relationship after God, for most of us, is the relationship with our parents, and after that our relationship with our immediate family. If those relationships are going well, then our other relationships are more likely to flourish.
When my wife Sakiko was a young girl in Japan, she had the opportunity to meet with a number of her dad’s colleagues. Sakiko would meet her dad’s colleagues, and based on her interaction, she could predict with a high degree of accuracy whether those men had daughters, and, if so, whether their relationship with their daughters was healthy or not. There was just a certain very positive and healthy vibe that fathers in healthy relationships with their daughters exuded when they related with her. If they didn’t have daughters, or if they had bad relationships with their daughters, for some reason that also came through in different ways. How we relate to our parents or our families has a powerful impact on how we relate to others. We don’t need to have a PhD in psychology to understand that if you are dating someone who has an awful relationship with their parents, to trigger an alarm in your mind (make noise). Maybe there is good reason why they have an awful relationship with their parents. Maybe this person’s parents are terrible. But, we know intuitively that someone who has a very complex relationship with their parents, their relationships with other people will likely be more complex.
So when God calls us to honour our parents, and later through the apostle Paul in Ephesians 6 which is a kind of commentary on this passage, he calls us to honour our children and the members of our family and the members of our household which in ancient times, unlike our own, would often number 50-100 people, and would include blood relatives and non-blood relatives.
So what does it mean to honour our parents (or parent figures)? The word in Hebrew for honour is the word “kabod.” It literally means “to make heavy,” or “to give weight to.” In the context of honouring our parents, it means that we don’t take that relationship lightly, we give weight to that relationship, priority. We are to prize our parents.
In the Bible in places like Ephesians 6 and Colossians 3, Paul writes, “Children, obey your parents because this pleases the LORD.” These texts that speak of obeying your parents (which have a slightly different nuance than honouring your parents) are directed primarily at younger children. Paul would say to young children, without a lot of qualification, “obey your parents and it will go well with you.” But as we grow and mature, the commandment to obey our parents becomes relativized, as we understand more of what God’s will for our lives might be.
When Jesus was maturing as a boy (he obviously matured more quickly than us), he and his parents went Jerusalem to celebrate Passover there. Jesus ended up spending three extra days in Jerusalem unbeknownst to his parents. When his parents found him in the temple courts they scolded him, and he responded, “Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I had to be in my Father’s house?”
Jesus affirmed the Ten Commandments, and yet in Luke 14:26 he said:
26 "If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even life itself—such a person cannot be my disciple.
Jesus shed light on what that means when he said:
37 "Anyone who loves their father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves a son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.
Matthew 10:37
Jesus here is not suggesting that we are not to love our parents and honour them, but if our parents are at odds at what God is calling us to do, we are to choose God’s will over our parents’ will. Peter in the book of Acts declares that we must obey God, rather than human beings (Acts 5:29).
Particularly among those of us who are Asian, there can be a tendency to believe that honouring our parents means that we obey them, no matter what, even when we are adults. That is a conviction produced more by an Asian culture informed by the Confucian notion of filial piety than it is from the Bible itself. If your parents insist that you pursue a career path that makes you a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer or an accountant, those motives may not be entirely bad. They believe those careers will offer you the most financial security, and the fact that they provide an aura of prestige is a bonus. But, if you feel that God is calling you on a different path it’s OK to disappoint and even disobey your parents.
Honouring our parents if we are an adult does not mean absolute obedience.
Honouring our parents also does not mean that if we have been subject to all kinds of abuse, whether physical or sexual or verbal, we just sort of brush that under the carpet. If we have been hurt by our parents or those in authority over us, we are going to need to take time to process that pain, and to walk the long and challenging path of forgiveness, ideally with the help of a trusted Christian friend, pastor, or counselor. Honouring our parents isn’t turning a blind eye to the way they may have hurt us.
So honouring our parents doesn’t mean absolute obedience. It doesn’t mean that we offer a cheap, glib forgiveness.
So what does it mean to honour our parents?
So how do we honour our parents? If you are a young child here, you can honour your parents by obeying them. They do have your best interests in mind. Obey them.
Part of what it means to honour our parents, if we’ve had a bad relationship with them is to take a step in coming to terms with your parents (even if they are dead) which may begin by inviting Jesus to be a presence in that relationship… or beginning to process the relationship with a close friend, pastor or a counselor. As we do we honour our parents, we honour ourselves. If we don’t come to terms with the relationship we have with our parents—we’ll find ourselves stuck and unable to move forward freely in other areas of our lives.
How else can we honour our parents? As our parents age, we can honour them in some practical ways.
As our parents age and we become relatively more powerful, the roles of parent and child begin to shift, and even reverse, as we take more of a caretaker role in their lives. Sometimes people who have had an antagonistic relationship with their parents are able to honour them only as their parents grow older and weaker. Compassion wells up in them and they show mercy to their parents. If our parents in their senior years are experiencing financial difficulties, if we are able, we can support them financially. I have great admiration for my Filipino friends. Most of them are not making heaps of money, and yet many of them send money back to the Philippines to support parents and family members who are in financial need. This is honouring to God.
Another way that we can honour our parents, particularly as they age, is by spending time with them. And if we can’t much spend time with them physically because they are in another part of the world, we can phone them; send them photographs; make them feel close.
Those of us who are with parents who are aging are nodding their heads and saying, “I agree. Yes, I do that.” But do your parents feel it’s important to you?
When I first became a pastor here, the church was considerably smaller and we had a much higher percentage of senior citizens. From the time that I became a new pastor, visiting senior citizens, who were in a shut in and not well enough to come to service, has been a priority of mine.
As I sit with senior citizens, they regularly confide in me their disappointment that their children who often live relatively close by in places like Burnaby or Surrey hardly ever come to see them. They feel lonely. They felt neglected. It is interesting that when I hear their kids talk, they don’t feel that way at all. I sense this when the kids are giving eulogies for their parents at their funeral. When they talk--and I sense they are being utterly sincere—they talk about how much they admire and appreciate their parent, and how their own lives have been deeply enriched by continuing to spend time with the parent in their old age. But I know from the perspective of their parents, they felt neglected. So one of the things we might ask ourselves, from the perspective of our parents, are we loving them and spending time with them?
I know that in some cases parents have unrealistic expectations that we can’t meet, and, if we let their unrealistic expectation govern, our lives, we would be totally melded into their lives and we would not have a life of our own. But if that’s not our story, we might ask our self, “Are we connecting with our parents so that they feel loved and honoured and cared for?
(May cut: Are we encouraging our friends and spouses to do the same? There is a man that I know and that I have great respect for. He is a pastor. He has told this story publicly so I am not breaking a confidence. But when he moved from the mainland to Hawaii to pastor, one of the great joys that his wife had was the weekly phone conversation with her mother. The family was on a modest income and in those years long distance calls were more expensive than they are now. So the husband asked his wife, “In the interest of the family’s financial picture, cut back on those long distance calls to your mother.” She dutifully agreed to. But then just then a few months later her mother unexpectedly died. This pastor, who I have a lot of respect for and I don’t think has a lot of big regrets, said, “One of my biggest regrets is that I did not encourage and let my wife talk to her mother more often because I thought it was too expensive. As I look back we could have made it work financially.” One of the ways that we can honour parents, not just our own parents but other parents, is by encouraging those that are close to us to connect with them.)
Are we honouring our parents and those who have had some kind of parental role in our lives?
Commentators have pointed out that implicit in the commandment “honour our parents” is, if we are parents or parent figures or mentors, to live in such a way that honour is a natural response to the way that we live. If you are in power over someone, you can at times force obedience, but you can’t force honour. Honour is earned.
Parents, parent figures, aunts, uncles, mentors or potential parents one day, part of what God is calling us to be is parent figures who are worthy of honour.
That is why when Paul this passage in Ephesians 6:
4 Fathers, [b] do not exasperate your children; instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.
In the Greek, Paul is calling on the parents to not exasperate their children and to lovingly nourish them in the training and instruction of God.
For many parents today when we think of providing for our kids, we think in terms of getting them baby Einstein DVDs, getting them into the right pre-school, dance lessons, soccer lessons, and when they graduate from high school being able to help them if we can with their post-secondary education.
That’s not the most important gift that we can impart to our children. The most important gift by far is the integrity of our lives before our God, our honesty, our courage, our love.
I was recently in the home of Blaine and Jadine Cairns whom some of you would know. Blaine serves as an elder here at Tenth. Their boys, Ethan and Zach, are part of the kids’ ministry here. Jadine’s father died recently. A couple of weeks ago I was sitting in the Cairns’ living room with Jadine and Blaine. I asked Jadine to tell me about her dad. She talked about how he didn’t have a lot of money, but she so admired him because he was a good and solid person of integrity. I asked if she would share part of the eulogy because I wanted to read these excerpts that Jadine read at her dad’s memorial service. (show photo of her dad)
“I have always had a great deal of admiration for my Dad. From my perspective, of what I saw in his life, he was such a consistently good, solid, moral man. He had such integrity in all aspects of his life. His honesty and generosity defined him. “
Part of integrity is love.
(show photo of her dad)
Again if I can illustrate from Jadine’s father’s life.
When we were living in Hong Kong, we were not rich. Dad had a simple job working as a gardener at a hospital which was quite a ways from where we lived. I was about 2 ½ then, and loved the Japanese apple pears. They were very expensive then (as now). To save money to buy me an apple pear, he would walk an hour to work and an hour back after a long day of work.
It as we love our children and love others that they become stronger and healthier. Then they are more likely to enter into a relationship with a God who, whether they know it or not, longs to be part of their lives. Analog…
Gordon Neufeld is a psychologist that teaches at UBC. Some of you may have had him as a professor when you were a student there. Gordon Neufeld has written a great book with Vancouver, Downtown Eastside-based physician Gabor Mate called Hold On To Your Kids (show book jacket). If you are a parent, I would highly recommend this book.
Dr. Neufeld and Dr. Mate describe something that we have intuited and observed in our culture.
They argue that in North America, for kids and teenagers in particular, peers have replaced parents as the primary influence in their lives. They call this phenomenon “peer orientation” which refers to the tendency of children and youth to look to their peers for direction, for their sense of right and wrong, for their values, their identities, and codes of behaviour—rather their parents or other adults in their lives.
In this book Dr. Neufeld and Dr. Mate, who are as far as I know are not writing as Christians, but whose message very much reinforces the Christian message, call on parents to hold on to their kids by committing to being the primary influence in their kids’ lives.
And how to do it? According to Drs. Neufeld and Mate, it is not primarily by trying to control their behavior, but by deepening our relationship, and fostering their attachment to us by loving them.
When we love our children and they attach to us, we become their compass point. We help them develop a stronger identity. We also help to shield them from a world that can be very harsh.
For example, consider the story of Braden:
A father, a friend of Vancouver-based psychologist Gordon Neufeld, had a son who was about 5 years old. According to the father, his son wanted to play soccer in the local community league. On the first day of practice some of the older kids gave him a rough time. The dad said, “When I heard the voices ridiculing and taunting him, I quickly turned…I quickly wanted to become a protective father bear. I had every intention of giving these young bullies an external attitude adjustment, but then I observed Braden’s response, stretching himself to his full height, putting his hands on his hips and sticking out his chest as far out as it would go. I heard him say something like ‘I am not a stupid little jerk. My daddy says I am a soccer player’.”
Braden’s idea of what his father thought of him protected him more effectively that what the father would have by direct intervention. His father’s perceptions of him took precedence over his peers.
As we foster attachment to our kids—we are able to better protect them and guide them and to introduce them to the love of God.
God calls us to honour our parents, making them a priority and prizing them. If we are parents or parent figures, he calls us to be parents to lead lives worthy of honour. We exhibit integrity and love. If we do that there is obviously no guarantee how our kids will turn out, but it is more likely that they will be whole and know God.
God commands us to honour our parents and to live lives of honour as parents, again, not to wreck our life, but so that it may go well with us, so that we might flourish in our relationship with God and with one another.
How do we become people like this? Do we have the strength to honour our parents, to live lives worthy of honour? We become these kinds of people by honouring the First Commandment, which we talked about a couple of weeks ago.
We become these kinds of people as we honour God and place him first in our life, cultivating a deep and intimate, growing friendship with him and his son Jesus Christ. As that happens , like Braden, a 5-year-old starting to play soccer, as we grow to understand God’s love for us expressed to us most powerfully in sending his son Jesus Christ to act as sacrifice for our sins on the cross so that we might be forgiven and adopted as God’s sons and daughters, we will become more resilient in a world which at times can be hostile. And through God’s love for us and our attachment to him, we will find ourselves growing stronger, with more love to give to our parents and to our kids.
Pray:
posted by Shigematsu at 7:31 PM
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