Last Sunday's Sermon - Onward: Honoring Our Fathers and Mothers
/"Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense."
When I say that out loud you can’t see the breaks between the words; it sounds as if they make up a pretty straightforward sentence. Maybe a little old fashioned, towards the end — “to whom I was like to give offense” — but otherwise unremarkable. Some of y’all probably think I’m about to start preaching about a particular wall that keeps coming up in the news, but honestly that’s just been the curse of the last several months — our politics have become so all-consuming that it's almost impossible to preach or even have a conversation with a friend that doesn’t accidentally end up as a commentary on some political party or some new scandal.
But the reason I’m beginning today with three lines from Robert Frost’s famous poem “The Mending Wall” is precisely because, in any moment except this one, the only thing remarkable about them would be how unremarkable they sound. What made Robert Frost one of this country’s most beloved poets was his ability to write with a beautiful rhythm that never sounded too much much like a poem. He didn’t sound as old and dusty as the Victorians, but he also didn’t sound as confusing and experimental as the moderns.
"Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense."
It’s plain to read, plain to understand. But even though it doesn’t rhyme, it finds a way to linger in your mind. That single, simple sentence is in fact three exacting lines of 10 syllables each, each line arranged into 5 beats. Someone once asked Frost why he never joined his friends in writing the kind of “cutting-edge” poetry that had no structure to it whatsoever. Frost responded “I’d sooner play tennis with the net down."
Robert understood that wrote according to the rhythm of restrictions. Yesterday, when we were watching college football the moments that most lingered in our mind were defined by the restrictions - the kick that is made just before the clock runs out, the catch that comes down just inside the sideline. In music, in poetry, in sports, the right limits will create much more beauty than they exclude.
Not that this comes naturally. It’s much more fun to set limits for someone else than for ourselves.
When we talk about other people it’s often like “Can you believe that he is complaining about money when he paid American dollars for an exhaust system on his car. Maybe he'd have more money if he hadn't payed make his truck sound like it has sleep apnea.”
But when I talk about myself, the limits are a lot less appealing. If you drop me in Lowe’s you’ll find me saying… “I really shouldn’t buy that but…”
We love to talk about limits for other people, but not so much for ourselves. Just compare how we started a country, as compared to how God started a country. When we were getting started, we started with a bill of rights. We started off with 10 things that the government can’t do to me. It can’t tell me to shut up, it can’t tell me who to worship, it can’t make me put soldiers in my guest bedroom. We started our country by talking about what you and all of them can’t do to me. But when God made the Hebrew nation, God began with 10 commandments. God didn’t begin by saying “here are the 10 things that can’t happen to you,” God began by saying “here are 10 things you can’t do.” God said, "Here’s the net, and here are the lines, and if you can’t play within these, then what’s the point?" God’s own spirit gives us the life and breath and strength to play, but God also takes all that passion and gives it shape.
Last week, as we started looking at the 10 Commandments, we said that they draw three dimensions to our life. Last week we said the commandments draw us upward to God, and next week we will see how they draw us outward to our neighbors. But today, I want to show how they draw us onward. And here’s what I mean by that: God doesn’t just want to change our relationship to the Holy Trinity and to each other, God wants to shape our relationship to time. Put another way, if your life is shaped by God, we have to accept that we all come from somewhere, and without God, we’ll never get anywhere.
Without God, we'll never get anywhere, and so we Honor the Sabbath day, and keep it holy. From our very beginning, Christians have had an on again, off again relationship with the Sabbath. My hometown kept a law on the books until recently that no business could serve alcohol on Sunday, unless it was a private club. One infamous consequence was that a handful of bars and restaurants all demanded a one-time cover charge on Sundays. For $1, anyone could become a lifetime member of their club and thus no one had to go 24 hours deprived of their liquor. We like the idea of limits - we like the idea of a law on the books. But we also don't especially like it when those limits get in our way. And when it comes time for us to truly rest, it seems like there is always one more opportunity of a lifetime, or one more job that won't do itself. So we blow right by the Sabbath. Though we don't always get what we hoped out of all our effort.
We have records from a wagon train for the days of the Oregon trail. The train had to stop in Colorado for the winter, during which time they split into two groups, and when they restarted their journey, one of the groups kept sabbath, the other did not. The one that kept sabbath got to Oregon first.
The theologian Marva Dawn puts it this way, keeping a Sabbath is not a day off. It’s a day for. To keep Sabbath and to keep it holy is not to separate yourself from the world, but it is instead to dedicate yourself entirely to God while remaining in the world. It might be the day that you eat microwavable foods on disposable plates so you have more time to pray and listen. It might be the day in which you eat every meal out for the same reason. Although, if you eat out on the Sabbath, here’s one additional commandment. Tip well. In fact, tip extravagantly. You’ll notice that in the original recording, God said we can’t take your own sabbath at someone else’s expense: "Do not do any work on it—not you, your sons or daughters, your male or female servants, your animals, or the immigrant who is living with you.” As I was reading that with my small group this last Wednesday, it occurred to me that if I’m going to observe a sabbath in a restaurant, I need to find a way to multiply the blessing. Maybe I eat at a cheaper restaurant, if that allows to me can give more. Eat at McDonald’s, and then make the day of the person who buses your table. For one person, sabbath might look like signing off social media and news media so that you have one day in which the all-consuming anxieties of the present age aren’t given shelter in your head. For another, a sabbath might be giving yourself the time you can’t afford the rest of the week to be patient and attentive and to be a witness in how you bless and respond to someone online. Perhaps the simplest way to keep sabbath is to set aside 24 hours in which you will not make any plans except those that involve worshipping God. The best measure of whether you are keeping Sabbath is not whether you got to sleep in, or even whether you engaged in self-care. The best measure of Sabbath is this question: “Have I given myself 1 day out of 7 in which my mind and my time were wholly dedicated to responding to the leading of God?” 6 days a week, we work and play with all our heart - we make stuff and make memories, we make it through the day. But if we can’t stop to rest and discover what we are made for, we will soon find we’ve been going in the wrong direction. Then it won’t really matter if we went there with all our might. If we’re going without God, we aren’t really going anywhere.
And of course, whenever we stop to set our course, it’s hopeless if we don’t know also understand where we’re coming from. Those are the two questions my GPS always asks - where are you going, and where are you coming from? We all come from somewhere.
"Honor your father and mother, so that it may go well with you in the land." For some of you, this sermon is the entire reason you started coming to church. You didn’t need church when you were single. You didn’t need church when you found “the one.” You were doing just fine on your own, but then you had a kid and pretty soon you realized, “I need somebody to make this kid listen to me.” So you came to church.
There are others of you who have heard this sermon all too often. Maybe you sometimes want to run from God because you knew your earthly father all too well, and the thought of a heavenly father with limitless power is too terrifying to contemplate. Maybe you are here because you are trying to measure up to a mother’s goodness, and this week, you’re pretty sure you failed again. We all come from somewhere.
When you read the Old Testament, you quickly realize that the most astonishing part of how Israel honored their fathers and mothers is that they made sure to remember everything. They told about the glories and the grumbling; they told about the faithfulness and the frailty. The told about devotion and disaster. They told about Moses’ courage, and about his murderous temper. They told about David’s passion for God and his passion for Bathsheba. One third of the Old Testament books are just the collections of the words of the prophets - that means one third of the books of the Hebrew Bible are the people who say “Israel, you’re doing it wrong.”
So what does it mean to honor our father and mother, if it doesn’t mean we simply imitate their example, or even their words? Generally, in the Old Testament and the New, we see two ways that we honor them. The first is by caring for them. Family relationships are like our laboratory for loving our neighbor. Sometimes, our family relationships are where we learn what it means to love our enemies. By caring for one another, I don’t mean simply having warm feelings. I mean attending to their needs. This is clearly what Jesus intended when he chastised the Pharisees for taking the money that temple goers should have set aside for the care of their parents. And this kind of active provision is clearly what Jesus intended on the cross when he looked at his mother Mary and then said to his apostle John - here is your mother.
But there is another aspect of honoring father and mother; honor is not only about acts of care, it’s also about listening to their story, and passing those stories on, as in Claudia’s beautiful testimony that we heard this morning. What an amazing gift her mother gave her in telling a story that had all the details, the moment when she felt God’s correction, and the moment that she felt God’s comfort. Those stories give us pause when we are tempted to say the folks who came before us were the heroes of some golden age, and when we are tempted to treat them as backward and obsolete. We aren’t the first to struggle, we aren’t the first to glimpse glory.
Last week, I said that if nothing else, the first three commandments reveal our need for Jesus. We need Jesus because we need forgiveness and grace just to live up to the basics. Jesus’ relationship to the fourth and fifth commandments is a little more complex. After all, Jesus was once quoted saying “My mother and brothers and sisters are all those who do the will of God.” And throughout his itinerant ministry, Jesus scandalized the religious experts by healing people on the Sabbath. When they challenged him he said “The sabbath was made for people, people were not made for the Sabbath.”
Jesus came not only to forgive us on the basics, but also to show that the basics are only the beginning. Just like the lines of a poem or a football field, God’s commands are not meant merely to contain us - they make space for creativity and new creation. The sabbath connects us to eternity, it reminds us we can afford to take the time to bless the world well.
This week, my challenge to you is to take a sabbath and bless a spiritual ancestor. Specifically, take 24 hours this week to rest in one of the ways I mentioned earlier. And in that 24 hours, take the time to write a letter to someone who has made you who you are. Maybe you have a story of how you try to be like them. Maybe you see them when you look in the mirror. Maybe this person is a spiritual hero, maybe its someone with whom you need reconciliation. Maybe the healing begins with you saying, “whatever has happened between us, I see this of you in me. And I am glad.”
And maybe the person you would write to is no longer around to hear it. In that case, I encourage you to send it to someone who needs to hear it. Send it to someone who would be blessed to know a little more of where you come from, and how you carry the image of God onward from those who came before. If you don’t have anyone else, you have me. I’d love to hear your story. It would be an honor.