Easter 5 year B 09 Sermon Mother's Day
On Mother’s Day…I thought what better…
than to explore the divine decree…
which opens the second half of the Ten Commandments.
‘Honour your father and your mother’
Of course, the first five commandments… instruct us… how to live in relationship with God…
and the last five teach us…
how to live with one another on this earth.
And the very first rule we’re given…
for our relationships with other human beings……
ahead of the rules against murder… adultery…stealing, lying and desiring what isn’t ours…
the very first rule we’re given is to honour…
our father and our mother.
In February…my brother and I made…
a very brief pilgrimage… to honour our parents…
we thought this might be the last time…
our little nuclear family…could be together on its own… without husbands and wives and grandchildren.
At the end of which… we said good-by…
hoping to come back in November…
to celebrate my father’s 90th with the whole family.
Today we’re so glad to have honoured him in life… because only two months later…
we’d have to honour him in death.
On the 23rd of April…supported by your prayers…
I flew back… this time with my daughter Jessica…
to honour my father by taking his funeral… and organising the tributes… from his colleagues at NASA and his friends in the community.
As well…I honoured him with tears…
as I sat in his favourite chair…and later…as I said my final farewell to his earthly body. [pause]
I left New Zealand thinking my poor 87 year old mother wouldn’t cope… physically or emotionally…
and that we have to quickly sell the house…
bundle her up… and whisk her out to Colorado…
to live near my brother……
But I was so wrong.
I discovered my mother… was as strong and stubbornly independent… as she’s always been…even in her grief… She told everyone who wanted to flap around her with concern…that it’s best to wait a year or so…before making any big changes…and besides… she’d been at home there for 42 years. [pause]
And so I stuffed my anxiety…
and the internal pressure to do something… and…
I chose to honour my mother… by respecting her competence and strength…and her right to make her own decisions… in her own time.
…because for the first time I truly saw my own daughter … as a strong… competent… woman…as an adult…who at twenty eight… honours me as her mother. [pause]
Now all this sounds very lovely doesn’t it…
especially to me… but if it were always this easy…to honour our parents…we wouldn’t need a commandment… would we?
And I suspect God knew we’d need a rule about it…
because at some stages of our lives…
we simply don’t want to honour our parents…do we?
As teenagers especially…when Mum and Dad are restricting our freedom…or refusing to give us what we want.
As young adults… when we don’t need them anymore for our survival…Or around the age of forty…
as we finally get in touch with our anger…at how we think our parents have failed us…in some way or other.
And even later in life…sometimes our parent’s frailty and dependency in old age…make us shrink from honouring them…because we… just don’t know…
how to handle it….
And of course for some people…at whatever stage of life…it’s hard to honour someone who’s hurt us…or abandoned…neglected or abused us.
In the powerful Christian novel The Shack … Mackenzie Philips finds the honouring too hard…
the narrator tells us…[Read from book]
It’s not until the age of fifty six…in this story…that Mack encounters the overwhelming love and grace of God’s triune presence…in the shack…
When he tells God he can’t love or forgive his father… or the man who killed his daughter…God says…but Mack ‘I do love them…not for what they became but for the broken children they were…who were twisted by their pain…
And God tells Mack ‘I want to help you take on that nature that finds more power in love and forgiveness than in hate.’
until this encounter with God…Mack never even considers his father…to be someone God loves too …in spite of his anger and his brokenness
Only when Mack views his father in this light…can his relationship with him be healed…
only then… with God’s help… is Mack free…
not to excuse his father’s behavior…but to forgive…
as he’s been forgiven…
only then… does Mack really begin to live…
It’s interesting the commandment to honour our father and mother…is the only one with a promise attached… a promise the apostle Paul repeats…in his letter to the church in Ephesus.
"Honour your father and your mother, as the LORD your God commanded you, so your days may be long and it may go well with you…in the land the LORD…your God… is giving you." [pause]
I don’t need a commandment to honour my mother and father now, but my oath… there have been times in my life… when I failed to honour them…
One thing I’ve learned through the hard way…is that in life or in death…when we learn to see our parents… as children of a loving God…when we learn to accept our parents…for who they are or were…not who we’d like them to be.
When we can forgive our parents for their sins against us…just as we have been forgiven…
Well maybe then…we won’t need a commandment from God… to honour them. [pause]
Ultimately our faith teaches us… our real parent…is God after all…father, son and Holy Spirit the one who creates us…reconciles and perfects us in love
may you realise in the last analysis…that you are a child of the living God…and may you honour your true parent…as you come to see all others… as God’s children too.
