10 Words- Part 4 - Honor

This morning's uh topic is a little bit complex.

That's because uh families are complex, uh, and maybe you could attest to that.

Uh some of us have had very loving and nurturing parents, and some of us in this room maybe it's a bit more complicated.

And so I know that having just a few, you know, a few minutes to speak on this topic does not cover all of the nuances of it.

Um but I'm gonna try.

I'm gonna try to speak about a few things.

And my message is gonna be a little bit shorter uh because uh the deacons are going to have us uh practice something right after our communion.

Um, and so I'm given a little time for that as well.

And so if you have thoughts about this or questions about this topic afterwards, I'd love to have that conversation with you.

So uh let's let's jump in.

Jesus he summarizes the entire uh law uh and and the commandments in two ways.

He says to love God, and then what does he say?

Love your neighbor as yourself.

Uh and so this is how how we are to look at the the uh the commandments.

And when we see these ten commandments, it should foster in us a love for God and a love, a love for our neighbors.

And so these first four, one through four, are about loving God, our relationship with the Father.

And that is our foundation to be able to have this relationship with our neighbor.

Uh the next six through ten uh are all about our relationship uh with our neighbor.

And these these last six that we'll cover over the next few weeks, they are instructions uh that are not a focus on our own personal rights, but on the rights of our neighbor.

As one scholar spoke, uh he said, this is a bill of other people's rights.

So when we read this, we are to consider our neighbor as we read it.

And how do we reflect our creator when we do?

And today we're gonna focus on number five, uh the closest of our neighbors, our family.

Which are sometimes the hardest ones to love, right?

Yep.

Okay, I got one.

I got one almost amen there.

Oh, yeah.

Oh man.

Old Testament theologian Patrick Millage said, Love of neighbor does not begin outside the home, but in the family circle.

It starts inside the family circle.

And in command number five, God tells the Hebrew people to honor their father and their mother.

So, what is it to honor a person?

And when when you think about an honorable person, who comes to mind?

Who rises up in your thoughts about an honorable person?

When you hear the word honor, you might think of respect, you might think of integrity, you might think of someone's reputation, like, what do I think of this person's reputation?

What does their name stand for?

There are people all around the world and throughout ages who are part of societies where the honor and shame are significant parts of their culture, and they they are beyond the individualistic kind of mindset that the Western world has.

It is the whole community is uh impacted by a single person's uh decision or their actions or the way they carry themselves.

It doesn't just impact them, it impacts everybody around them.

And so we would call that an honor-shame culture, which we have still a little bit of it uh infused in ours.

There's a Hebrew word that gets translated into a lot of English uh words in the scriptures.

Uh Kavade is the word.

And it can be mean both positive and negative.

It will be translated into each.

In a negative sense, it's burdensome, like something that really is heavy and it's carry, we carry it as a weight, but it also in a positive sense, it means it's weighty, or like we would say, uh uh it has gravity, it has this kind of weight to it or importance to it.

And so when we when we see this Hebrew word honor, it means weightiness.

That we would hold someone with great weight.

It does not mean your parents have great weight, um, meaning in the physical sense.

Um wow, that bond.

Okay.

Uh so but this means like, oh, I hold them with great importance.

I I think of them uh when I make decisions, their weight is greater than maybe some other people in my life.

The Apostle Paul would bring this up in the New Testament, this command uh to honor your parents.

He changes it a bit and he adds that the children should obey their parents, uh, which is which is good.

It certainly should be something.

Uh but in the command in Exodus 20, this is spoken to adults.

We often think of it in light of, well, go our minds will go right away to children.

But this but this command is spoken to a group of adults.

Children are present, but but the adults are to hold this command in their own hands and consider what it means.

Especially in an age or in a culture where three or four generations are living in the same house.

And how does that play out?

Honoring parents has this component of respect and obedience, but there's a very practical way to honor somebody else.

That's throughout scriptures.

And so a great place to kind of look at what does this word honor mean is in the wisdom literature in Proverbs.

We'll find the word honor a couple of times in Proverbs.

Uh so I'm gonna read a couple of um for you as we start to form out what does honor mean?

Proverbs 3.9 says, and if you'll read the words in yellow with me, how oh, you're on it, Josh.

You're on it.

Honor, honor the Lord with the first fruits of all your crops.

That there's some sort of association with our money and with honoring is being tied together.

Uh and what if what would that look like for us to honor the Lord with our wealth?

Well, in Proverbs chapter 14, it gives us a little bit more insight.

Proverbs 14 · chapter mention

It says, Whoever oppresses the poor shows contempt for their maker.

But whoever is kind to the needy honors God.

It's as if the scriptures are tying the way we treat each other is how we see God.

And what we think of God.

It's this tie, we find it in several James, we study James through the summer.

There's a little bit of a hint to that in the book of James, but we see that there is this relationship with how I treat others and how I see God.

And and the way I treat others is how the world should know how I see God.

And here he's saying to be kind to those who are needy, to help those who are needy is how we honor God.

So there is some sort of connection with finances and honor.

And Jesus embodies that uh in this conversation that Declan read earlier in Mark chapter 7.

Mark 7 · chapter mention

It seems like every time Jesus brings up the commandments of the Old Testament, he brings some more clarity to it.

He like he like begins to talk about it in a way that's like, oh, okay, now I'm understanding what that Old Testament command means.

And in this passage where he talks to these religious leaders and they're confronting him about something, and then he confronts them about something, and he brings up this command about honoring your father and your mother, and he brings it in the same context as Proverbs.

How you use your finances to help those who are in need honors or dishonors God, specifically with your aging parents, is in this context.

So let me read this just one more time, Mark 7, 11 through 12.

But you say that if anyone declares that what might have been used to help their father and mother is Corbin, that is devoted to God, then you no longer let them do anything for their father and their mother.

So this requires a lot more nuance than we have time to tell, but I there this is an example of a son.

There's a practice or tradition where a son can use his land, his investment in land, and say, I'm gonna devote this to God, but he still owns the property.

And so what that does in the temple is it relieves him of the right or the need to care for his parents.

He no longer has to use that money to care for his aging parents.

And he can still look good in the sight of his community.

If he's saying, Well, no, this is Corbin, I'm setting this aside for God.

But he still owns that property, but he doesn't have to, he no longer has to use it to help his needy family.

And so what Jesus is saying is, you're wiping out the whole uh uh um uh Old Testament, you're all wiping out the words of God to fulfill your religious tradition, is what he's saying.

And he says that that shouldn't happen.

I remember uh in youth group, whenever the honor your parents came up, everybody's hands shot shot up because we wanted to know the exceptions to the rule.

Like, do I have to obey in this case or in this case or in this case?

Do you remember did anybody else have that?

Maybe.

Uh and so we wanted to stump the youth leader.

I mean, that's always the most fun is stumping the youth leader with the hardest questions.

Uh and and this one was one of them.

Uh like, when do we have to, and when we when we don't have to.

But we teenagers also knew our friends, and we knew the houses that they were in, and we knew the parents.

I remember sitting in middle school with a friend uh the first time experiencing his dad being drunk as he treated his son.

So that kind of scenario in my mind when you think about honoring your parent.

As adults, we still hold those questions.

We hold, I mean, they're pretty similar, but a lot of times they're more complex.

What does it mean to honor a parent?

Especially in some of the more complicated scenarios.

Like, what if our parents were abusive when we were younger?

And they still don't treat us all that great in our adult life?

What if our parents are very self-absorbed and really don't even care about us?

What if our parent struggles with substance abuse?

And how am I supposed to honor them?

I'm really familiar with someone who whose parent struggled with both drug addiction and alcohol addiction.

But then in their aging life, they they also had medical problems.

And this the sons and daughters trying to figure out how do I navigate this.

I visited, I taught uh middle school uh a few years, and um I stayed in contact with a few of the students.

And I remember visiting one of the students, uh, he was an adult at this point, and his dad was in the hospital, and and uh I found out, so I went down to the hospital to meet with him, and we spent some time down uh in the in the cafeteria, and I asked, Can I come up and see your dad?

And he says, No, my dad is so mean, and I do not want you in the room.

He'll be super mean to you.

And to realize, oh man, he is trying to navigate how does he honor his dad, knowing his dad is a very angry man.

So, how do we deal with all of these different nuances of childhood and adulthood and being parents and having children and children having to deal with parents who are like children?

Um each of these and all of the other six that we're gonna cover, they require nuanced conversations.

They weren't meant to just be, you know, it's these four words and we're done.

What it did is it invited the community of people of God to consider what do we do in these particular situations with this rule or law.

It was meant for us to look at it together and say, okay, this comp this is a complicated situation.

Let's all speak into it as far as let's give some wisdom in a community that is trusted and that supports each other really well.

How do we navigate some of these topics?

Therefore, I can't even address, I mean, I couldn't even address it all in this room.

I think it requires a lot more uh individual conversations about some of these more difficult cases.

But I do want to make a couple of observations.

Let me do that for a moment.

Honoring is not living in full agreement with your parents.

Some of you could say, yes, amen, in this political climate.

But it doesn't mean to honor them doesn't mean that you have to fully agree with your parent in all the things that they say and do, and vice versa.

To honor never requires someone to stay in harm's way.

To honor definitely includes boundaries, trying to figure out boundaries.

How do I have this relationship where neither of us are imploding?

For people whose parents are estranged and the relationship is super complicated, honor might simply mean a season of just speaking well of your parent when you can.

In in examples of caregiving, which I'll talk about in just a few minutes too.

Honor doesn't mean that you have to do everything personally.

You may need to ask for help as you parent, you care, you offer care to a parent.

So to our parents in the room, and this is me too.

I man, I've been wrestling with this topic all week, just like considering what does it mean to parent adult children for me and Dawn?

Uh hold on, go back one on that.

Um, and and what does it mean to have aging parents?

And uh, and so to us parents in the room, it is much more easy to be honored when we love well, parents.

To set the stage for our kids to honor us requires us to figure out how do we love well.

And and there are times where our flesh, our our sinful things come out and our our human brokenness comes out.

And in those times, we need to be proactive in apologizing and reconciling and so on.

But I do want to say, I mean, there are passages of scripture that say fathers don't make kids angry, and those kids may be also adult children, which would require us to maybe not say all the things we want to say.

Uh and and not all the things are important, and so we may have to practice some self-control.

Parents, you know, I'm learning as I have 20-year-olds, 20-something year olds, I cannot offer unsolicited advice all the time.

I'm learning that, and it's so difficult.

Uh, can I hear an amen on those who are experiencing?

Yes, yeah.

All right, so you know, these are things I'm like, okay, this is what it means to start to foster an environment where my kids will honor me.

Um and it won't always go wonderfully.

Another way, Deuteronomy 6 says that in my daily life, I embody and model the love of God within my family.

I won't always do it perfectly, but I'm gonna try to do it intentionally.

In my daily life.

Let me tell you, uh, parents of young ones and all of us who have adult children, the best place for discipleship to happen is in the home.

And so we are responsible to love our children well and to show how much we love God well.

We won't do it perfectly, but let's do it intentionally.

Okay, let me keep moving because I gotta close this up.

Uh, this is the one promise that, our one command, uh, one of the commands that has a promise to it.

And tied to it, it says, honor your father and your mother.

Oh, uh I was supposed to give a resource.

Let's go back on that resource.

Just as a quick side note, because I think it's worth saying.

If you have a parent who is going into like uh an aging parent that's going into some of the last uh years of their life, this is a really important book to read.

It's written by a doctor who had to walk through the process with his own dad and making decisions around medical decisions and you know other things that are really tough at that season.

I just felt like it'd be important for you to consider this if you're anticipating that in the future.

All right, let's move on to the promise again.

Exodus 2012, honor your father and your mother so that you may live long in the land.

We were told as kids, if you want to live, you will obey us, right?

Like that, you know, what was that whole there was a statement, I brought you into the world.

Okay, so that could be one way, I can that could be one way that you are gonna live a long life by obedience.

Okay, so but that's not intention, that's not necessarily the intention of this passage.

This passage is a collective thing.

So basically saying if you foster an honoring society where you love God and love neighbors well, you will flourish in the land that God has given you, the place that God has given you.

And so part of this is parents passing on to the next generation, loving God and loving neighbor, and the next generation picking it up and running with it.

When uh when you go into the New Testament, we find that Jesus expands the idea of family into a faith community.

It's a beautiful way that Jesus invites us into living with one another as far as how we treat each other.

Is this the expanded family?

Peter N says the natural family and the family of God become blended into a whole without the believer losing any sense of belonging to both families.

So it's not that we drop one family for the other, it's that we we hold both, and this becomes part of my whole life when you enter the family of God.

And brothers and sisters are called to care for one another as if we are biological family members, and sometimes even better than.

The passage in 1 Timothy that uh Josh read so wonderfully is just one passage that describes this, what this looks like.

It says at the beginning, don't rebuke an older man harshly, but treat him as your if it were your father.

Treat younger men as brothers, older women as mothers, and younger women as sisters with absolute purity.

He goes on to say, uh, if there are widows, they and if they have children and grandchildren, those children and grandchildren should rightly care for their uh widowed parent.

And then if they don't have any family members, then there's this invitation for the church to play that role for the widow.

And Paul does a great job.

He he's he nuances this out and he says, hey, you know, the if if uh if they're older than 60 and if they've done this or this, this is how we should treat them.

So Paul kind of gives some practical ways of caring for those who are widows.

You know, uh I've been here almost two years, two years now, almost.

Uh I have I know that many of you in this room have cared well for your parents.

And some of you in this room are caring currently, are current currently caring well for your parents.

You're you're infusing into the DNA of this culture what it means to care well.

I've also heard a lot of examples, a number of examples of individuals in this room who have cared well for people just as if they are biological family.

And those stories are, I mean, over and over again, this care for each other.

You remember that that Hebrew word kavad or karvade?

It means To help carry, like this carrying a weight.

And the church family is how the weight gets shared.

If you are a caregiver, needing help from others isn't dishonoring to your parent.

The church family is meant to help.

And that weight may be lightened by offering a meal, giving some respite, a night off, or even just a visit.

I'll tell you, if you're if honoring your parent has cost you and it hasn't been easy, this church is meant to be a family to you, too.

To walk beside you in those moments.

I want you to consider a couple questions as I as I conclude.

If you're a son or daughter this week, consider what is one step that you could take towards honoring your parents?

Just another step that you could take towards honoring your parents.

If you do not have uh parents, if they've passed already, or uh you don't have children, um what's one way the family could this church family could care for you?

And if you notice there's someone without a parent or children, what's one way, one step you could take for caring for them?

This this church family loves so well.

Let's continue to infuse that into this culture of how to care for one another.

I'm gonna close uh because I want to show you, I want our eyes on Jesus this morning.

And uh and I want to just share this one passage of how Jesus honors his mother so well.

It's in John chapter 19.

John 19 · chapter mention

Verse 25, it says, Near the cross of Jesus stood his mother, his mother's sister, Mary, the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene.

And when Jesus saw his mother there and the disciple whom he loved standing nearby, he said to her, Woman, here is your son.

And to the disciple, here is your mother.

And from that time on, this disciple did what?

Took her into his home.

I mean, this is the beautiful picture of the church.

Jesus sacrificially loving us and then inviting us to do the same for one another.

Let's pray.

Help us to love one another.

Would you care for the stories that individuals hold in this room that are super complicated or difficult or even uh um there's hurt that's still felt?

Would you care for those moments right now?

Holy Spirit be our comforter.

For those who are missing their parents, would you care for them?

Would you continue to infuse hope in the midst of their grief?

Father, help us to honor you as we love one another.

Responding to needs.

We're about to, we're gonna celebrate communion here.

And uh before we do, I'm gonna give you some time to just have conversation with your creator, with your father.

Maybe that's a time of confession, maybe it's a time of um invitation where you hear from the Holy Spirit inviting you into something for this week.

Would you just posture your heart to listen as I prepare the elements?