Honor and Preservation
Pastor Mathew Magera – 3/19/17 – Sermon 218
St. Thomas Lutheran Church, Trufant, MI
To God be the Glory!
Grace and peace to you from
God our Father, from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit.
Amen.
One day in a Sunday school
class, the teacher was explaining to her students the fourth commandment that
says honor your father and mother. After getting it across to the students, the
teacher asks them if they know of a commandment that teaches how to treat our
brothers and sisters. One student answered, "you shall not kill." Just
as those two commandments seem to work together in that short little story,
they also go very well together anyway. Honor your father and mother. You shall
not kill.
We've completed going through
the first three commandments that teach us how to relate ourselves with God.
The remainder of the commandments take us into our relationships with other
people. We hear Jesus talk about the commandments sometimes in twos. He'll say,
"Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with
all your mind, and love your neighbor as yourself. This is what Jesus is
referring to, commandments 4 through 10. Love your neighbor as yourself.
What is Jesus getting at
when he says this? I think when Jesus tells us to love our neighbor as
ourselves he is both convicting us and giving us a new command at the very same
time, much like many of the things Jesus says. The new command is to love our neighbor;
the conviction is how we love ourselves. When it comes to sin attacking our
bodies and our minds, it causes us to have a natural love for ourselves. When
you lose your balance on a staircase or a ledge, your body naturally moves to
protect itself. When you trip while you are walking, your body naturally moves
to protect itself and regain its footing. When your body feels threatened, it
responds by protecting itself. But, this goes beyond our natural reactions. It
goes into our minds and our ability to make choices. Our minds will naturally
want to make decisions that benefit itself. To the mind, nothing else exists or
is as important itself. It's the command center, it's the only authority. This
is the love that we have for ourselves, the natural and chosen love that we
have grown into because of sin.
So, when Jesus says for us
to love our neighbor as ourselves, he is not saying that we should also love
our neighbor just as we love ourselves. He's not saying that we just need to
extend a little bit of our love for the neighbor. He's convicting us of the
love we have for ourselves as impure and unholy. He's saying, you're loving
yourself the wrong way and you need to stop. But, here's what you can do with
that love. You can take all of it, every last bit of it, and thrust it upon
your neighbor. Love your neighbor as you currently love yourself. Protect your
neighbor the way you currently protect yourself. Serve your neighbor the way
you currently serve yourself. Give that love to your neighbor, where this kind
of love belongs.
These six remaining commandments
then have to do with how we rightly place this love on our neighbor and we'll
talk about two of them today. Of these six, Martin Luther considers the fourth
commandment to be the greatest of them all, and we'll get to why that is later.
To start, however, I want to go out of order and consider the commandment, you
shall not kill.
* * *
When you first hear this
commandment, it sounds like it is making only one statement when in fact I
believe it is making five different statements. The first, is the obvious one,
you shall not kill. Even Jesus makes this clear in the Sermon on the Mount,
citing the 10 commandments themselves, so it's not just an Old Testament
command either. In addition to not killing our neighbor, we are not to hurt or
harm our neighbor in any way. This would include physical, emotional, mental,
and spiritual harm that is done to our neighbor. This sounds like pretty good
moral advice too, advice that we have likely heard growing up. Don't hit, don't
hurt, don't put down others, those are all contained within this commandment. I
believe it goes even further than murdering or harming our neighbor. Even
thinking about harming our neighbor breaches this commandment. Even having
slight intent within our own minds brings out the sinner within us that wishes
our neighbor death or harm. How many people have you killed in your lifetime?
My hope is that the answer to that question is close to or is zero. How many
people have you hurt in your lifetime? That number probably might rise pretty
quickly. Now, how many people have you ever thought of harming, even if just
being in the heat of an argument? That number is likely exponentially higher.
When it comes to sin, they all count. Though you may not have killed someone,
you have done so in thought.
Fourthly, there is still one
more don't here. This commandment instructs us not to avoid or refuse doing
good for our neighbor. In essence it means that just sitting by on the
sidelines and not acting on your anger isn't the point of the commandment. We
are guilty even if we have opportunity to do good for our neighbor and refuse.
If we, who are well taken care of, send away someone who needs clothes or food and
this lack causes them harm or even death, we are guilty. But, if we do give, if
we do share, if we do preserve and if we do love, we have done what is right in
the sight of the Lord. Lastly then, rather than do any of these four, this
commandment invites, encourages, and commands us to do good to our neighbor. We
are commanded to work to preserve and care for their life. If the opportunity
arises for us to be of service to our neighbor we are to take that opportunity
and use it to preserve our neighbor's life. Easy, right? Uh huh. And now we’ll
see how much more the fourth commandment means.
* * *
So, the fourth commandment, honor
your father and mother. One day a little girl was sitting and watching her
mother do the dishes at the kitchen sink. She suddenly noticed that her mother
had several strands of white hair sticking out in contrast on her brunette
head. She looked at her mother and inquisitively asked, "Mom, why are some
of your hairs white?" Her mother replied, "Well, every time that you
do something wrong and make me cry or unhappy, one of my hairs turns
white." The little girl thought about this revelation for a while and then
said, "Momma, how come ALL of grandma's hairs are white?"
For any of you parents or
parenting figures out there, being a parent is not easy. For any of you young
or still young at heart, being the child of a parent is also not easy. This is
why I think Luther believes this commandment is the first and greatest of the
final six. He says, in regards to this commandment, "it is a far higher
thing to honor than to love one, inasmuch as it comprehends not only love, but
also modesty, humility, and deference” (LC, 4th C, Vs. 106-107). In other
words, honor requires love. If we are to even think of honoring our fathers and
mothers, we must have the love thing down, which we get very well in the 5th
commandment.
Essentially, this fourth
commandment requires the fifth commandment before it. It encompasses all of the
do's and don’ts that we just covered for the fifth commandment along with the
honor that comes on top of it. Just as God is the source of love, our parents
should also be our source of love so that we are taught to be a source of love
for others. Thinking about this commandment in a more broader sense, we are
also called to honor all people that have authority over us, not just our
parents. However, if we do not honor our parents, how much better will we be
able to honor someone else? It is still the devil that causes us to forget and
dismiss what our parents give us. Just as we tend to forget and dismiss that
which God gives us, our parents receive no better. And so a generation of
children dishonoring parents also give birth to the next generation of children
dishonoring parents and so forth.
* * *
Now, these two commandments
together work at preserving life and honoring life, but doing so is tricky. How
do we follow the commands of our Lord in a situation in which a parent is
abusive or an employer is abusive or a teacher is abusive, what about those
situations in which you don't want to honor much less love another person? Let
me try to put it this way. God gives us people in authority like our parents,
teachers and employers to be good examples, to imitate Christ so that we also
because of their authority may imitate Christ. People in authority are not to
exploit this responsibility; they are not to treat their children, students or
employees in any way contrary to how God would treat us. So, if an abusive
person were not a good imitator of Christ, they are not fulfilling their role
as an authority position over you anyway. Now, it does not mean that we should
be abusive of them in return. But, the body of Christ has a responsibility to
play.
I had breakfast this past
week with the pastor of the Maple Valley Community Church that meets in the DBS
Hall. We had a wonderful conversation about how the church, meaning the greater
body of Christ, can meet the needs of the community but in order to do that, we
have to be able to admit to ourselves that we may not know what our community
needs. There is a dysfunctional side to our community. It resides in our community's
youth and it resides in our community's adults. I'm not saying this to say
anything bad about Trufant, but that there is plenty going on behind our backs
that we can't see, perhaps because we are blind to it or worse still because we
refuse to see it.
We have to remember we are
to love our neighbor, even those that do us or others harm. So, you can see how
this can get sticky. You can argue this in many different directions too and to
be perfectly honest, even I'm not sure which is right. It's not easy to discern
how to respond in the certain life situations that we are in. It's not easy to
know whether we are right or wrong. But, it should not stop us from being
Christ to others and teaching those who see us as authority figures to love
their neighbor. As the church, we are tasked to bring love by sharing love. So,
you see it is tricky and we find ourselves at a loss again and again. How do we
do it? Where do we start?
* * *
Here would be the normal
point in time where we would just give up from exhaustion, from being too
overwhelmed but see this is where Jesus comes in. In our confusion, we must be
reminded, what are these commandments here for? They are here to point us, to
lead us to Jesus, not because of how well we are able to follow them but rather
because of how inadequate we are. They show us the way he loves us and they
lead us to him when we fail to love others the same way. They teach us loving
the neighbor begins in a loving home. Loving the neighbor begins not with
obedient children but with obedient parents. The greatest responsibility of the
fourth commandment is not on the child to honor their father and mother, but
rather on the father and mother to be honorable imitators of Jesus. The Ten
Commandments are put in an order for a reason because they teach us what is
most important in how we direct our love. First, we love and honor the Lord our
God with all our heart, with all our soul and with all our mind. Second, we
love and honor our parents who have divine authority over us. Third, we love
and honor those others who have divine authority over us. Lastly, we love our
neighbor. This is why I strongly believe that if a parent does not commit to
worshiping with their children, the chances of the children doing the same are
not good. We love our neighbor because we honor our parents. We honor our
parents because they honor God and we honor God because our parents honor God.
And we would have no chance of loving our neighbors or honoring our parents if
it weren't for Jesus' example. We would have no chance of being redeemed from
failing to do these things if it weren't for Jesus' expansive love for us.
The world has turned itself
upside down by turning away from this and Jesus is calling us to see how he
intends to turn it right side up again. The gift that God is trying to give us
through these two commandments is the gift of relationship. As always there is
evidence of God's grace in each of the commands and that grace manifests itself
in the form of life, support, peace and eternal blessing. We should therefore
be focused on our individual duty, be reminded again of the forgiveness he
offers us today for failing to live up to the high standard this week, and to
let God take care of how he is to support us and provide for us as we are refreshed
to walk into this coming week renewed once again to love for the sake of him
who loved us. To God be the glory, now and always. Amen.