Re:Verse passage –Exodus 20:12 (day three)
“Honor your father and your mother.”
After establishing the necessity of a rightly-calibrated life with God, the Ten Commandments locates a society’s robustness in the family system. One could imagine a law code that teaches societal order by starting with something other than family: “Honor the state” or “Honor the king” or “Honor the traditions” or even “Honor the religious precepts.” None of these other things, though important and influential, brings to human life what “father and mother” brings. Contained within that construct is nurture, biological attachment, shared history, and mutual formation of the inner life (adoption’s highly-cherished status arises precisely from the willingness to extend love despite the absence of biological attachment). Principles or codes or offices establish ideology, not character. Only the parent-child nexus will produce societies with the empathy that makes peace and progress possible.
Bryan, I am always amazed at how intellectual you sound either during preaching a sermon or these blogs on Everyday Prayer..not because I can’t imagine how you ‘got so smart’! but because, once I fully listen & pay attention to the meaning of your message, I am totally drawn into the meaning.
I come from a fairly large family of grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins as well as my own family of 5: dad, mom, me as the oldest & only sister (as well as oldest of all the 11 grandchildren on one side of our family) and two younger brothers. And every Sunday without fail, after church, this one side of our family from my dad’s side, gathered at our grandparent’s home, close to church, and shared delicious snacks to tide us over until we all went to our individual homes for lunch much later. But it wasn’t the homemade snacks of either homemade banana pudding or hot cheese dip/chips or cinnamon rolls prepared by our grandmother (an elementary school cook & just a great cook anyway), it was the TIMES we shared catching up on the past week with our family. Cousins were close, aunts & uncles shared happinesses as well as disappointments, & we all gathered in a VERY small addition to the house, with much talking and even MORE laughing that I have ever shared at any other location. And over the years that big family of ours has moved all over the country & we only get together for family funerals. It’s a sad state of a family when it separates & moves on but even then, when we get together, no matter how many of us are there, it’s as if we had just seen each other the Sunday prior.
The best gift I take away from all those years of Sunday afternoons with my family is our shared Gift of Laughter! And if you can laugh at yourself as well as a family member all in good fun & taste well that is the MOST FUN I take away from my family memories. Praise God my grandparents expected all their children & grandchildren to show up every Sunday after church. It’s a good thing!