The Fourth Commandment - July 8, 2018

Our Fourth Commandment this morning: Honour your father and mother. 

What does this mean? We are to fear and love God so that we neither despise nor anger our parents and others in authority, but instead, honour, serve, obey, love, and respect them.

Now, if I were to ask who amongst us has broken this commandment, I would expect every single person to raise their hand. I would bet with 100% certainty that every single one of us here has, at some point in our life, angered our parents. Even Luther angered his parents, particularly his father, when his family spent considerable expense to send him to law school and Luther partied too hard and then decided to drop out and become a priest, which in no way was going to support his parents when they got old. Luther was a deep disappointment to his parents, he failed to honour, serve, obey, love, or respect them.

And Luther knew it, and came to deeply regret his behaviour towards his father, which is the context behind his explanation to this Commandment. You see, Luther is very harsh about what this commandment means. He believed, as many in his time did, that parents and masters (or employers) and civil authorities––including mayors and princes, and religious authorities––including pastors and bishops, were all part of a God-given hierarchy. In that world-view, God set up a hierarchy of power that allowed the world to be stable. Each person had a boss or master over them, who had one over them, all the way up to the princes and kings, whose boss was God. Upsetting that hierarchy would lead to an upset of God’s order, and chaos and cosmic disruption would take place and evil would reign. So, high stakes for Luther.

Now, to be fair to Luther, he actually believed that the top of the pyramid was not the Pope, or the princes, but parents. He believed that God gave divine authority to parents, much as Christ gave authority to his disciples, and that all other authority developed out of the authority of parents. Parents then subsequently gave authority to others on their behalf ––to teachers, to teach their children what parents couldn’t, to government––to rule their children when they couldn’t, and to pastors––to preach the Gospel to their children when parents couldn’t. And it’s important to remember that putting the authority of God with the parents, rather than with the princes, or with the pope, was a huge deal. In this respect, Luther was pretty radical.

In other respects, though, Luther was not. I know that we all have this image of Luther rebelling against authority, and defying the Pope and the Roman Catholic Church, but he could actually be quite conformist. He was clear that obeying parents, and teachers, and pastors, and government, was a Commandment. He said that we are obligated to obey these authorities, “even if they go too far,” because God had put them there. He said that even terrible parents are still given to us by God, and that we need to honour and obey and even love them. He said that pastors, our “spiritual parents” should be given double honour. He wrote that servants should obey their masters at all times, that the peasants should stop resisting unfair working conditions, and that the princes had divine authority to suppress any uprising.

And this is a struggle for me. Because there have been too many times in the history of the world, in the history of the church, and in the history of families when this commandment, Honour your father and mother, has been weaponized, and used to justify abuse and violence. In WWII, Hitler used Luther’s explanation to this Commandment to argue that the churches must obey the Führer, and to merge faith and patriotism in order to wipe out certain peoples, much as Jeff Sessions did recently. In congregations, pastors have used this Commandment to argue that their decisions are ultimate and their actions never to be questioned, and that those who do so are to be cast out of the church. And, of course, there are families where parents have used these words to abuse their children, who subsequently go on to abuse their own children when they get older. Of all the Commandments, this one is the most dangerous, because it can lead those of us with any authority at all, whether as bosses or teachers or parents or leaders of any kind, to believe that we are entitled to power, entitled to obedience, and entitled to the fear and love that belongs to God alone.

So what are we to do with this? While there are certain laws from the Hebrew Scriptures that we feel comfortable ignoring, like not eating pork or not wearing clothes made from mixed fibres, we hold a special place for the Ten Commandments. We do follow these laws––they make up the fabric of our western legal code, they undergird our social morality. Can we reconcile the constant and still ongoing abuse of this Commandment with the Commandment itself?

Well, standing next to Luther’s belief that God gives God’s own authority to rulers on earth, we have Psalm 146, that we read today: “Do not put your trust in princes, in mortals, in whom there is no help.” The Psalm tells us that God is the only one who truly cares for the needy, who “executes justice for the oppressed, who gives food to the hungry.” God is the only one who truly cares for those in need and punishes those who do ill. God is the only one we should fear, love, and trust––in essence, the only one we should turn to and honour, serve, obey, love, and respect.

Which, it turns out, is not so far from Luther as we might expect. Have you noticed yet that Luther begins every explanation to the Commandments with, “We are to fear and love God?” He does this on purpose. Luther believed that the Commandments were actually given to us in order of importance. The First Commandment is the most important––You are to have no other gods, which means we are to fear, love, and trust God above all things. And this is the foundation for all the rest. When we fear, love, or trust something or someone else above God, then the remaining Commandments will trip us up. When we fear, love, and trust God above all things––or all people––we will automatically obey the rest of the Commandments. 

And the same is true for the Fourth Commandment. And this is where Luther offers some comfort in our struggle. Luther commands obedience to those in authority over us, “provided that [their will and word] are subordinated to God and not set in opposition to the preceding commandments.” In other words, if those given power over us, whether parents or teachers or pastors or governments, are themselves clearly breaking the First Commandment, or even the Second Commandment, or if they direct us to do something that breaks those Commandments, then we need not obey them. We may even disobey them, or actively work against them, so long as we are doing so from a place of fear, love, and trust of God above all things.

Now isn’t that interesting... embedded within the Commandment to Honour your father and mother, and by extension all authority, is the commandment to disobey them if their actions or words are leading us away from loving and trusting God.

We are in dangerous territory now, I think. God commands us to obey those God has placed in power, and God commands us to disobey those who use that power wrongly. But how are we to know?

Well, our Scripture readings for this morning offer us guidance for what God’s power looks like, and how we can tell if someone is wielding their own power, or God’s, and whether we should willingly obey or dissent. 

You see, God’s power is the power to create, to give life, to change the world for the better. God’s power, as Paul says in our reading from 2 Corinthians, is the power to be humble, to not think of ourselves more highly than others. It’s the power to see that the success of those we lead, or parents, or teach, or employ, is more important than our own. God’s power is the power to be weak. It’s the power to give away one’s strength to others, in order to build them up, and not ourselves. Imagine a world in which parents and teachers and governments and police and all those with authority were so strong in their power that they were humble and weak. Okay, I know it’s hard to imagine––Make America Humble Again is not a slogan that wins votes. But just imagine what that would look like! It’s the same in our Gospel reading for today. The disciples are given the authority of Christ, but not to rule. They are given the authority to serve, and to heal. To put themselves in service to others for the well-being of their people, not to demand praise and accolades wherever they went. This is what God’s power looks like. This is the kind of power God gives us. 

God gives power and authority to parents and others so that the world might experience God’s power first-hand as it comes to us in humbleness and weakness and service and healing. And, because we might otherwise think that those who are weak and humble and put others first are not the ones we should be following or imitating, God commands us to obey them. And so in this Commandment, too, is grace and love for us: that God desires that we be cared for, and care for others, by those who use their power to grant grace, to be merciful, to forgive, to give life, just as God in Christ does for us. Thanks be to God. Amen.