“Honoring Our Elders”

Exodus 20:12

Children, especially Christian children, should honor and obey their parents. Parents, especially Christian parents, should avoid provoking their children to anger. Our children shouldn’t respect us simply because they fear us. We children shouldn’t love and obey our parents just because we have to. We are called to live together in family settings in an atmosphere of mutual love and respect.

This love and respect doesn’t end just because children grow up. We don’t stop being parents when our children reach a certain age. We don’t stop honoring our parents just because we no longer live under their roof. This is a life long endeavor.

We are dealing again this morning with a Commandment that has been stripped of much of its meaning and power. Although it is incumbent on non-adult children to respect and obey their parents, such respect and obedience is but a fraction of what this Commandment is about. In its original setting it was understood primarily as a Commandment to adult children, its focus being on the care of their aging parents. It also focused on the wider covenant community’s responsibility for caring for all aging members of the community, not just the ones they were kin to.

This was a Commandment that would set the children of Israel apart from the pagan cultures surrounding them. In such cultures euthanasia of the elderly was not an uncommon practice. With the Fifth Commandment God made it clear that this practice was forbidden. He made it clear that all people had value, even the old and helpless. Elders were to be honored, respected, and cared for until the day they died.

In his book The Ten Commandments for Today Walter Harrelson wrote: “We never get so old or feeble that we no longer need companionship, loving care, the touch of another hand, words and songs and music… God never gives up on the wayward child, and God never deserts the aged who feel themselves speeding toward death. To honor one’s parents is to honor God – the [Father of us all].”

The true meaning of this Commandment was brought home to me during my final year of seminary. As part of my studies I took a course called Clinical Pastoral Education. That course required me to spend several hours each week as a volunteer chaplain at a nearby hospital.

One morning one of my charges, an older African-American lady, told me that she had something to confess. “Pastor,” she said, “I did an awful thing last night. I prayed for God to let me die.” Once I found out what was really going on, I assured her that she hadn’t done anything awful and that I in no way judged her. In her situation I might have been asking God to take me home.

She was a widow who had outlived all of her children, immediate family, and friends. She was suffering from severe back pain that limited her mobility and required that she have almost constant assistance. Her body was wearing out, and she knew it. She felt useless. In her mind her only hope was death.

And why not? In a culture that celebrates youth and physical attractiveness, she was old, and although beautiful in her own way, she no longer measured up to society’s conception of beauty. In a society where one’s identity is so often tied to one’s job, she was unemployed – she could no longer work and thus contribute to society. She was a consumer of social resources and not a contributor. In the eyes of some that made her a liability rather than an asset. In her own eyes she was a burden.

Where was her church in all of this? Where were her neighbors? Where was society as a whole? No church that takes the Gospel seriously can ever abandon someone like her. No nation that dares consider itself Christian is free to ignore the old, the sick, and the helpless. The Bible is very clear about the covenant community’s responsibility – the church’s responsibility - for widows and orphans. She definitely fit the criteria. Again, if a society deems itself Christian, then that society’s resources must be used to help someone like her.

Responding faithfully to people like her isn’t always easy. Sometimes it’s just flat out hard, often inconvenient, and sometimes expensive. Caring for the aged, be they our parents, grandparents, neighbors, fellow church members, or fellow citizens, means expending time, energy, and resources. It involves that wonderfully Christian notion of self-sacrifice and servanthood. It requires a willingness to give away a part of ourselves, if not in direct contributions to particular people, then in financial support of Christian ministries or secular charities that serve the elderly. And if ours truly is a Christian nation, a significant amount of the taxes we pay should be spent to support the various government agencies that can do corporately what we, as individuals are unable to do.

Honoring our parents – honoring the elderly – is, for disciples of Christ, an act of love and compassion as well as respect. It is something that must be seen as a ministry rather than an obligation or duty. A ministry that we carry out even when it’s inconvenient. And it can be inconvenient. Parents are people. People can be difficult. The elderly can be cantankerous.

Honoring, respecting, and caring for any elderly person is also a ministry of the wider church, the congregation, and individual Christians. It is a ministry that gives value and significance to people our culture would just as soon ignore or even throw away. It is a ministry through which we demonstrate in tangible ways that it is not a sin to grow old, feeble, and helpless.

Our wider culture does sometimes act as if growing old is a sin. Wrinkles, stooped shoulders, and sagging body parts do not fit into culture’s concept of beauty and worth. How dare anyone look their age? If we are to believe all the commercials, there must be something terribly wrong with men who have gray hair and bald heads. Likewise women who don’t look like super models must be horrible people. It is this kind of cultural nonsense that the church is to stand apart from and over against, living out a different way of looking at aging.

As Christian citizens we also have a ministry, one that is most often carried out in the realms of politics and economics. This goes beyond paying taxes in order to fund services for the elderly. We need to pray for and then vote for leaders who will make caring for those who cannot care for themselves a priority. It matters not whether these leaders are Democrats or Republicans, conservatives or liberals. Compassion is not confined to any one ideology. The Christian political agenda cannot be limited to

opposition to abortion and gay marriage. It is our calling to see to it that “the least of these” in our society are ministered to.

Preferably such ministry should be carried out by individuals, families, and congregations. We have a moral obligation as individual Christians to take care of our own parents and grandparents. Ideally every aging person would be cared for in this manner. Christian congregations as well as the wider church have a moral obligation to act as a safety net for those who have no family to care for them.

But what about those who, for whatever reason, fall through the cracks? What about those who have no family or church, or those whose families, friends, neighbors, and churches lack the resources to care for them? Do we ignore them or wish they would simply disappear. Not hardly. To do that is to break the Fifth Commandment. It is also to ignore Jesus’ parable of the final judgment contained in Matthew 25.

Just as it isn’t a sin to grow old, feeble, and helpless, it is also not a crime. I am aware of, and have been taken advantage of by, those who know how to work the system in order to obtain money under false pretenses. I was a social worker. I am well aware that there are welfare cheats. I am well aware that many people engage in behaviors that lead them into poverty, homelessness, and bad health.

I am also aware of those in our society who would have us believe that because some people receive assistance through dishonorable means, anyone who asks for assistance is obviously lazy, worthless, and up to no good. The rhetoric that such people broadcast falls under the heading of gross overgeneralization. Some people, especially the elderly, really do need and are deserving of public assistance.

As God’s people we are commanded to honor and respect our own fathers and mothers specifically and everybody’s father or mother generally. We are commanded to consider the elderly among us as significant and worthwhile and to treat them with dignity. We are commanded to see to their needs, if not directly then indirectly. Sometimes by way of our tithes and offerings. Sometimes by way of our taxes.

If we live long enough, we’re going to get old. The only option is dying. If we are fortunate in our old age we will have families to care for us and churches to minister to us. Until that time we must do the caring and the ministering. Why? Because God said so. Amen.