Ten Words That Matter: Someday It Will Be Me
Dr. Tom Pace
July 9, 2017
Exodus 20:12; Mark 7:8-13; Matthew 7:12

We’re continuing our series of sermons on the Ten Commandments and two weeks ago we were talking about the most misunderstood commandment, which is not taking the name of the Lord thy God in vain. Last week we talked about the most openly disobeyed commandment, remember the sabbath day and keep it holy.
This week I want to talk about maybe the most emotional of the commandments. One that really strikes at the heart of issues in our lives. And we’re going to hear the fifth commandment that Jesus in two places talks about really what the meaning of the commandment is all about.
Honor your father and your mother, so that your days may be long in the land that theLordyour God is giving you. Exodus 20:12
You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.Then he said to them, “You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition!For Moses said, ‘Honor your father and your mother; and, ‘Whoever speaks evil of father or mother must surely die.’ But you say that if anyone tells father or mother, ‘Whatever support you might have had from me is Corban’ (that is, an offering to God—then you no longer permit doing anything for a father or mother, thus making void the word of God through your tradition that you have handed on. And you do many things like this.” Mark 7:8-13
“In everything do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the law and the prophets.” Matthew 7:12
Pray with me, O God open us up. Open our eyes that we might see and our ears that we might hear. Open our hearts that we might feel. And then, O God, open our hands that we might serve. Amen.
I listen to a lot of sermons, and this week I was listening to a series of sermons preached by Adam Hamilton, the pastor of the United Methodist Church of the Resurrection in Kansas City. He’s working his way through the Exodus journey, and he got to the Ten Commandments. He said that he had proposed to his staff a sermon series - ten weeks on the Ten Commandments, and they all said, “Don’t do that, nobody wants to hear ten weeks about what you’re not supposed to do.”
I thought, “Well, nay, nay, we have lots of people who are listening, and they love it.” They look forward to it, they’re thrilled to come every Sunday and find out what they’re not supposed to do.
The reason we’re talking about the Ten Commandments is not so much that they tell us what we’re not supposed to do. But if you think about the 613 laws given to us in the Old Testament, ten are set apart as given directly by God, right from the mouth of the Lord. So if of the 613, ten of them are set apart, don’t you think maybe they show us something about what really matters to God, like what’s really important?
So what we’re trying to do during these weeks is look below the surface of those Ten Commandments to see what the driver behind them is. Why are they so important to God? What do they really mean?
So I want to help you remember the Ten Commandments. I want you to think – 4-3-2-1. That’s the easiest way to remember it. 4-3-2-1. There are four commandments about how we love God. The first, put God first. We have a special relationship with God. We are a covenant people. So God’s saying, “You belong to me. I belong to you. We’ve got a special covenant together. Don’t cheat on me. Don’t be unfaithful to me. You hold to that covenant. We have a special thing.” The second is, “Don’t put me into anything that’s man-made. Made by humans. You can’t put me in a box.”
Now at that time those were graven images or idols. But for us there are other things that are made by humans that we begin to just believe are the same as God, like systems of theology, ideologies, governments, all sorts of things that are created by humans, things that we begin to worship. And we think that this is what God is! And I’ll tell you that you we can’t contain God into any single system of theology, thought or government or anything else.
The third commandment is “Don’t take the name of the Lord in vain.” He’s saying, “Look, don’t treat me lightly. Don’t make me superficial or put me on the outside. Don’t just go through the motions. Don’t use me for your own agendas. Take me really seriously.”
Then last week we talked about, “Remember the Sabbath Day,” to put first things first. God’s saying, “Remember that I created you, and I’ll keep working after you’re long gone. I’m God and you’re not.” So we’re to get everything in its right place, creator in the right place, and creature – you – in the right place.
So those first four have to deal directly with our relationship with God. Then we have three that deal with very specific categories of relationships. Our parents, our enemies, and our spouse. Parents, enemies, and spouse. We’re going to talk about enemies when we talk about murder next week and then our spouse when we talk about adultery.
Then there are two that have to deal with possessions. Don’t covet, don’t steal. And then there’s one that speaks about telling the truth. Don’t bear false witness. So that helps you remember – 4-3-2-1.
So of these six that have to do with how we love our neighbor, I find it so interesting that it begins with mother and father. If you think about it, that makes sense. Our relationship with our parents is the foundational formative relationship of our lives. It’s the very first one, and by the time we are two years old we have already begun to know based on that relationship whether the world cares about our needs, whether we’re protected, whether we’re nurtured, whether we matter. And what’s interesting is that there’s no more important relationship in terms of what evolves into our relationship with God than that relationship with our parents.
We know – every pastor will tell you – that so much of how we understand God is based on how our early life was. That’s not to say it can’t be different, all I’m saying is that this is so foundational. You walk into any therapist and you sit down and say, “My life’s a mess! Help me put it together!” Then they begin, “Tell me about your relationship with your mother.” Aw – come on! Seriously? Why? Because somehow I want to get down to the core of things. We want to begin to deal with the issue.
So it’s really important I think, that we begin with this particular relationship. Now let me just say that this is also the relationship that evokes the most emotion. In this room here there are certain people who have wonderful relationship with parents. Their parents could do no wrong, and in fact, they almost kind of worship their parents. Looking back, they’ve somehow managed to just push aside and forget all the bad stuff, and everything is just wonderful.
And sort of on the other end there are those whose relationship with their parents is difficult, broken, painful, gone. So across the spectrum, and across the middle of all that what you have is that all the rest of the folks who say, “You know, my relationship with my parents was kind of a mixed bag. It’s complicated.” You might ask, “How’s your relationship with your parents?” And the answer might be, “Well, it’s complicated.” I’d say that’s most of us.
So I want to be real careful here today and right at the beginning give you this disclaimer. I don’t know your life. I don’t know your situation. I’m in no way aiming something right at you. This is about your prayer to God. What does it mean when you open the Scripture and it says, “Honor your mother and father?”
I want to talk about three things then. The substance of honor, what does it mean to honor. Second, the object of our honor just exactly what it is we’re honoring. And third, the purpose of our honor.
First, the substance of our honor. What does it mean? The word honor in Hebrew is kabed which means heavy. It means to give something weight. If you were going to literally translate this commandment it would say, “Give weight to your parents – your mother and your father. Give them weight.”
So it’s saying, “Recognize your parents as heavyweights.” If I’m being sued I want to bring in the heavyweight lawyers. I don’t want any of those rookies. I want the heavyweights. I want the ones with significance. I want to treat them like they matter, like they’re somebody. That’s what it means – technically.
Let me tell you what it doesn’t mean. It doesn’t mean to obey them. It doesn’t mean to agree with them for sure. It doesn’t mean approve of what they do or how they live or how they treat you. It doesn’t mean don’t set appropriate boundaries with your parents. All of those things are, sometimes we think if we’re going to honor our parents, then we aren’t going to do those things.
For us to understand honor – the word honor – we have to understand and begin to think about the culture of the Old Testament at that time. It was what we call an “honor-shame” culture. You’ve heard about honor cultures now. You read about them in the paper – about honor killings. Honor was viewed as how you are viewed, how you are esteemed by the community. So if you were looked up to by the community you were honored, and if you were looked down on by the community you were shamed.
And what mattered in an honor culture is how other people see you. What’s more – this is where we have the biggest trouble. In honor shame cultures you are so connected to your immediate family, or tribe or group that what happens to them also impacts your honor. So if your child does something that’s against the norms of the community, then you are dishonored. Not just them, but you are dishonored by the community. And if they do something wonderful, then you are honored by the community.
Now you and I say “That’s not fair.” But, friends, I have to tell you something. If you really pay attention to how we talk about Christianity, about our Christian faith, it’s based on a supposition of a certain kind of honor culture. We talk about the “sin of Adam is visited upon us.” We are sinful because Adam was sinful. It’s the doctrine of original sin. And what’s more significant we are saved not based on something we’ve done, but based on what Jesus did.
That’s why people come up to me all the time and at some point they say, “It doesn’t make any sense to me that Jesus dying on the cross saved me. How does that work?” Well, it’s because we don’t have any conception of this notion of community guilt and community salvation. So what I want you to understand is what the Bible does is it turns this notion of honor on its head. It says that what matters is not what the community thinks of you, but what matters is what God thinks of you.
So when it says to “Honor your father and mother” it says you are to be an instrument and agent of God’s honor in their lives. You are to be a conduit of God’s grace, because God sees them in a particular way as his children. And we are to be conduits of that grace.
Let me give you some examples. To honor your parents means to bless them, to be a blessing to them. It’s that simple. I get a Father’s Day card from my children, and they’ve all written nice little notes on it. And I start to cry, because at my age I cry all the time, at almost anything. I just start to cry. But I start to cry because they’ve written these things that are full of affirmation but I know are lies. There are all sorts of great things that they’re trying to say, and they’re not true. I know that. They know that. We all know that. Everybody in the room knows I’m sort of a mixed bag when it comes to parenting. But they recognize that part of their job in honoring me is to lift me up, to encourage, to know the struggle and to say, “Dad, we’re with you. We’re lifting you up.”
To honor means some very specific substantive things like to make sure that parents have food and shelter and clothing and medical care. If you read what the rabbis have written – it’s always interesting when you’re studying the Old Testament - it’s always important to not just read Christian authors but Jewish authors as well. Because the traditions really reflect differently sometimes.
And the rabbis – the tradition says that to honor your father and your mother it means two things, and it means them very specifically. It means, “Don’t say anything bad about your parents in public” and second, “Make sure they’re fed, clothed, housed, cared for.” That’s what it means.
You know, the passage we read from the New Testament where Jesus is talking about this notion of corban. You and I don’t understand, that because it doesn’t make sense to us. Here’s what would happen. At the time of Jesus the Pharisees or some wealthy people would say, “I’m going to take all of my possessions, all of my wealth, and I’m going to designate it as corban – as an offering to God. And when I die, all of it will go to the Temple. All of it. So in a sense it belongs to the Temple now, but I get to use it.” And that’s called designating something as corban. And if you were really religious you would designate something as corban.
So what happens if my parents need food, clothing or shelter? Sorry – can’t use any of that money, because it belongs to God. That just offended Jesus. He said, “That’s not honoring your parents to say you’re going to give it to the temple.” Jesus is on the cross, and the last seven words on the cross, and he sees his mother, and he tells John, “Take care of my mom.” It means very specifically that we have a responsibility for the physical needs. To honor someone means to give them dignity. In fact, the word is translated about a third of the time – the Hebrew kavod – is translated in the Old Testament as dignity. Remember, we are God’s agents, so just as God gives us our dignity, our free will, we are to do that to our parents as well.
Sometimes I think we step in and say, “You can’t make your own decisions anymore.” And there may be a time for that. I know that. But part of our job is to recognize that they need their dignity and that they are grown men and women.
So we have honor. But what then is the object of our honor? That’s what it means, the substance, the object of our honor. Well, the object of our honor is not necessarily the person themselves. The object of our honor is first the office of a parent.
I’m going to use a parallel here as an example, a teaching example. We talk about honoring the office of the president. So I have to be honest with you it makes crazy, and I’ve quit doing it, to read the comments online after an article in the newspaper. Before when it was President Obama the things they said about him, and then a whole different group of people, I’m sure, now are saying things about Trump. And they’re writing these things that are hateful and personal, and they do not honor the office of the president.
You don’t have to agree. You might think the president is the worst president in the world, but I’m going to tell you something. When the president walks into a room, you stand up. That’s just what you do. It’s because there’s a sense in recognizing the significance - not based on performance – but the significance of the office.
I would say it’s the same thing about your parents. You don’t have to agree with them or do what they say. But what you do is recognize the office of parent as having significance – having weight – in your life.
We honor not just the office but we honor the journey of our parents. We do a thing every once in a while at Men’s Life, about every five years or so. We do the curriculum called Men’s Life One, which is a series of issues that men deal with, and it includes things like your relationship with your father and with your mother. And one of the things we do is to ask men to write a letter to their fathers. And many, if not most, of the fathers have passed away. But you write the letter anyway. If your father’s alive you can choose to give it to him or choose not to.
One man came to see me and brought his letter, and we had a great visit. His father had died when he was a young man, but he said, “My relationship with my father changed when I went to see the movie ‘Saving Private Ryan.’” The first fifteen minutes of the movie are bloody since it takes place at Normandy. If you haven’t seen it you have to really hang in there for the first fifteen minutes of the movie. He said, “I saw that and I realized… My dad was at Normandy at Point du Hoc which is where the Army Rangers had to scale the cliffs. I looked at that and realized why maybe my dad was so distant and closed for all those years.” To sort of look at how our parents got to where they got to, what they went through, the good things, the bad things.
Dee’s mom passed away a while ago, last year, and when she was alive, she wrote a little book. It’s memories of her journey, of her childhood and what that was like. It’s called Love, Mom. Here’s what’s interesting. We have a little satchel in our closet, and in there we put the things that when the floods are coming or the fire is burning we go in there and snatch them away so we don’t lose them. We put the book in that satchel because we want to honor the journey of our parents.
And one more thing, and maybe I don’t want you to leave without this key thing. We honor not just our biological parents but the spiritual mothers and fathers all around us. Both Old Testament and New Testament see the community of faith as family. We are family for one another, and all around you are spiritual mothers and fathers. And our responsibility is to give them weight, to see them as somebody, to honor their journeys, to care for them, to be God’s agent to bless them in whatever way we can. Because we’re family together. You may say, “Gosh, my parents have passed away. How can I possibly honor them?” Well, look around you.
It leads me to the third component which is the purpose of our honor. You notice that this is the only commandment with a promise. “Honor your father and mother…” And then it explains the purpose. “…that you might live long in the land that God has given you,” that we might live long. It’s not talking so much about us individually, but it’s talking about the nation of Israel. Because if this covenant is to be continued, it will be passed down, one generation to the next, to the next, to the next. And that puts a certain responsibility on parents, but it also puts a responsibility on children. You have to hear the covenant, you have to listen, you have to honor the covenant that God gave your parents and your grandparents, and your great–grandparents, and your great-great-grandparents and so on. You honor that covenant that gets passed down, so that the community of the faithful will continue. What is it we say? That we are just one generation away from extinction as Christians. So we pass it down, and those after us listen to us.
But there’s another component that I think is maybe the most significant and I sort of saved it for last. The point here is to recognize that we are an inter-dependent community of people. Our parents – spiritual parents and biological parents – need to count on us.
It’s funny, in the United States particularly in the West this is hard because … here’s my goal financially. My financial goal is not to leave my children any money. My financial goal is to make sure they don’t have to take care of me. That I have enough money. I want it to run out the day I die. That’s it. There’s nothing left for them, but it’s all gone that day. I have spent it gallivanting around the world.
But we have in our mind this sense of independence. I don’t want to have to count on anybody. That’s not Biblical. The Biblical model we’re given is one of community. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” is not an explanation of independence. It’s an explanation of inter-dependence. We care for one another. That’s what this commandment is about. We care for one another. We care for our parents; we care for the spiritual parents among us.
Here’s the way it works. My grandparents cared for my mother and father. They made sure they had an education, enough to eat, raised them in the faith, loved them and nurtured them. My parents cared for me. They loved me, and nurtured me and made sure I had an education. They shaped me in the faith. I care for my children. We make sure they had an education. We make sure they have a place to grow up safe and are loved and nurtured and all of those things.
I’m watching, now joyfully, them choose to care for my grandchildren. They do the same thing. It’s funny to hear them say, “How are we going to pay for college?” Now here’s the other half, though. My parents cared for my grandparents. I remember every Sunday afternoon phone calls to my grandparents. We lived far away from them, but we were making sure they were okay, staying connected, blessing them however they could, cramming us all in the car to drive to Texas to see my grandparents from Illinois.
We care for my parents. We want to love them and bless them in whatever way we can. Now let me stop there. One of the reasons that I want to bless my mother and my father is because I want my children to see me do that. I want them to know that that’s how one behaves. So that when that day comes, when I can’t make my own decisions about certain things, when I need to be cared for in a different way, they get it. They understand. And I hope that my seven – soon to be nine – grandchildren see my children caring for us. So when I’m long gone and can no longer do anything to help out my kids, my grandkids are there for them.
You see we weave ourselves together. We don’t try and say, “Hey, I’m on my own! I don’t need anybody.” But the Christian faith teaches us that we are inter-dependent. We are woven together in life.
So, friends, look around you. These people are God’s gift to you. And the spiritual mothers and fathers in this room are here for us to honor, to bless, and to give dignity to, to care for. And someday, it will be us and there will be somebody to care for us, too.
Gracious and loving God, we thank you for mothers and fathers, biological, spiritual, emotional, those people who are in our lives who have helped to shape us. We pray that we might work through all the complications, all the stuff that’s in our hearts and know just what it means to honor them that we might all learn to care for one another. In the name of Christ we pray.