Let me tell you about a generation living during a pivotal time in history, a time of change and new ideas. A time of new technology making the world a smaller more connected planet. A time of questioning old belief systems, religions and the supernatural. Financial turmoil. A rise in socialist ideas about the economy. New forms of art. The passing away of old racial divisions. The blurring of the line between black music and white music. Rethinking long-held concepts about sexuality, about what constituted a family and parental authority. A generation living through one of the most important times in human history.
What generation am I describing? Some of you, especially the teens, may assume I am talking about our children, the Millennial Generation, Gen Y, or whatever term demographic studies call them now. Some of you, perhaps some Baby Boomers, assume I am describing the 1960’s and all the social upheaval of that era. Those of you from the WWII era probably thought I was talking about you, what Tom Brokaw termed “The Greatest Generation”. In fact, I was describing the generation that lived through the 1920’s, the generation of my grandparents and great-grandparents. The time of jazz music, Harry Houdini, Sigmund Freud, Red Scares, and the stock market crash.
Unless you know history well, or lived through that time, you probably didn’t make those associations. Instead, you associated the cultural phenomena I described with the experience of your own generation. That is to be expected since we are all guilty of what Old Testament scholar Walter Bruggemann calls “one generation narcissism” and think nothing important happened in history until we showed up on its stage. Every generation believes they are living in a time of cultural, technological, artistic and political revolution the likes of which the world has never seen. In a sense, they are correct. Each generation does face challenges that are unique and in some way unprecedented. Each generation’s character is shaped by new influences. Yet when we wrongly imagine that those who came before us have nothing to teach us, we risk repeating the mistakes of the past.
Last weekend, Pam and I attended the Christianity 21 conference in Minneapolis during which twenty-one women speakers explored faith in the 21st century. One of them, Diana Butler Bass, a church historian, said, “People who really know history … are people who are not afraid of change…because we’ve seen it all before.” A connection to those who came before us provides us with the wisdom to deal with the challenges of the present.
How do we have that connection with the past? Is it soley through watching the History Channel or academic study? As we have seen these past few weeks, the God of the Ten Commandments is not some abstract concept but a God who acts in history, not in vague generalities but with great specificity. The God of Mt Sinai comes to people in very personal ways. So it should come as no surprise that in order connect us with our past, God comes to us through one of the most personal of relationships, that of parent and child.
As we continue our study of the Ten Commandments, we come to this the fifth commandment, “Honor your father and your mother that you may long endure on the land your God gives you.” Now some of you may have difficulty with this commandment. Perhaps you have a parent or parents that were neglectful, even abusive. Some of you have parents who did not and not honor you. This commandment does not endorse such behavior. Nevertheless, we can’t be afraid to lift up the values of parenting and family just because so many people have been hurt by their family. In fact we need to speak up even louder to say that’s not the way a family is supposed to be. This commandment invites us to rethink parenting, to be the kind of parents God calls us to be and not shrink back from being so. How can we do that?
A few things we must note about how this commandment is phrased. First, we are told to honor our parents. Not blindly obey, or excuse abusive behavior. The Hebrew word for honor is a softer gentler word. Bruggemann describes honor as a more “delicate transactive maneuver whereby both parties grow in dignity through the process.” Think of God’s family, the Trinity, where the members honor one another without dominating one another. Honoring our parents is not an excuse for parents to beat down their children either physically or verbally. Since history teaches us that we have seen it all before, we can surmise ha there were inadequate and abusive parents in ancient Israel. God was certainly not endorsing that sort of parenting in that time and surely is not endorsing it in our on time. It is not the divinely-ordained endorsement of the old parental rationalization “because I said so.” Instead it is yielding our wills and sometimes even narcissism to those who came before us. It is realizing that our parents, whether they were good or bad parents, may have something to teach us.
At first, that may not sound so revolutionary, but in fact it is. Let’s face it, we are more inclined to find fault in our parents’ beliefs and practices than we are to find wisdom in them. It is as if we are in a permanent state of adolescent rebellion. As a great theologian of my generation, Mike of Mike and the Mechanics, once said, “Every generation blames the one before.” Although the Ten Commandments do warn us that the legacy of our bad choices will be passed on to future generations, that warning is balanced with this command to honor our parents and the generations that came before us.
The second thing is that God conveys this gentler reciprocal sense of honor by not limiting the commandment to just fathers. As we will see in the coming weeks, some of the commandments reflect the patriarchal society of the time. The commandments regarding adultery and coveting betray how many men at he time thought of women as their property. However, in this commandment the maternal role is elevated to the same level of importance as that of the paternal role. Thereby, we can avoid falling into the trap that this commandment is all about blind obedience to the stereotypical authoritative image some of us may have about fatherhood.
The third thing about this commandment is to whom it is directed. Usually churches tend to emphasize this commandment as pertaining to young children obeying their parents’ commands to go to bed on time. Certainly, this commandment applies to young children and teens. But here is the bad news (I know you though “Do not commit adultery” was the bad news). It also applies to adult children. The audience which first heard these instructions were primarily adults. These adults were being told to honor their parents. This was about something much bigger than telling kids to eat their vegetables. For most of the children of Israel, their parents had spent their whole lives as slaves in Egypt. Many had died by this time. How was this new generation to honor the experience of their ancestors? How were they to honor their struggle for freedom and liberation?
Once we become parents, it is all too easy to think we are off the hook with this commandment - that now our kids are the ones who have to do the honoring. Yet as our parents tell us, we never stop being their kid. Sometimes that’s difficult. Many of you know what I’m talking about. The phone rings and the caller ID tells us it’s our mother calling and we hesitate to answer. We may even let the machine pick up. Then we feel guilty.
Some of us are caught in the struggle between raising our own kids while caring for aging parents at the same time. We may even be forced to make decisions about their health care, help them move into assisted living or a nursing home. It can lead to arguments and resistance. That can be draining. It may even make us feel guilty. Yet when we approach these challenges from a posture of honoring our parents, we find that God provides us with the wisdom and peace we need to make those decisions. God can alleviate our guilt in making tough decisions.
This brings us to the fourth element of this fifth commandment, the promise. By honoring their parents, God promises this new generation that they will long endure in the promised land to which they were headed. The success of their generation was tied to honoring and remembering the story of the generation that came before. In order to receive God’s promises, this new generation would have to follow in the spiritual footsteps of their parents, as would their children. They would have to be in relationship with this same God in the future.
That’s a challenge. Children are known to rebel against their parents’ religion. Consequently, many parents are reluctant to pass any religion on to their children. They fear that if they do, their kids will resent them and reject it. So they teach them nothing. As parents, we can’t complain about our children turning their backs on God if we aren’t willing to pass our faith on to them. Many times I hear parents say, “Oh I don’t want to force my kid to go to church or youth group because that’s what my parents did to me and I resented it.” Yet the parents who say that to me are in fact, in church. So it must not have been all that bad. Funny how I don’t hear parents say, “I don’t want to force my kid to bathe because I don’t want them to resent it.” If we love our kids and want them to be equipped to face the challenges of the future, we must pass our faith along to them. They, in turn, honor us when they continue on that path.
Whenever God showed up to people in the Old Testament, God always identified Godself as the God of their ancestors. Who God was for people in the present, was always linked to who God came to in the past. Our parents, with all their faults and good qualities, are a part of who we all are. Whether they were people of faith or not, whether they were good parents or not, they are part of our story. When we ignore that, we do so at our own peril. We can learn from their success and their mistakes. When we do so, we truly honor them.
Every generation imagines they are the first that matters. However, instead of thinking of ourselves as the Greatest Generation, perhaps we should take a cue from Jesus. Jesus said in order to be the greatest, one had to become the least. This commandment is a helpful corrective for our generational narcissism. It confronts us with the idea that we may not be the Greatest Generation, but the Least Generation.
Thought-provoking observations.
GK Chesteron said tradition is the truest form of democracy; it allows dead people to have a vote about what happens today.
Posted by: John Meunier | October 21, 2009 at 11:39 PM
That's a great quote John. I think we in Protestantism can have too low a view of tradition. For many historical reasons, we equate it as being the opposite of scriptural, when in fact, the Bible is a collection of traditions.
Posted by: Don Heatley | October 22, 2009 at 09:02 AM