A Chorus of Voices
“Honor your father and your mother, as the Lord your God commanded you, so that your days may be long and that it may go well with you in the land that the Lord your God is giving you” (Deuteronomy 5:16).Footnote 1 So reads what is customarily named as the fifthFootnote 2 of the biblical Ten Commandments. But how is this commandment understood, not merely as a verse somewhere in the Bible, but as an active divine command, or at least as a moral value, among the rank and file of the faithful, and beyond that in the larger culture? To whom is the commandment addressed? What obligations and practices are envisioned by the idea of honoring father and mother? What sort of well-being is imagined as a consequence of obeying the command?
As one way of probing these questions, in this essay I explore this commandment not only as understood by theological specialists and by scripture scholars, but also as preached in American pulpits. In particular, I will take core readings of recent American sermons based upon this commandment from two periods, a generation apart, the 1960–1970s and the 2000s.Footnote 3 I will examine how this commandment functions when performed rhetorically in the context of Christian worship.
In the mid-1990s, the distinguished theological journal Interpretation observed its fiftieth year of publication. At the anniversary celebration, Richard Lischer, a prominent professor of homiletics at the Duke Divinity School, delivered one of the keynote addresses, on the state of American preaching. In preparing for this address, Lischer studied several dozen American sermons that were preached in 1947, the year the journal was founded and a scant two years after the end of World War II. After immersing himself in the pulpit world of the late 1940s, Lischer came away impressed by how much the cultural situation of preaching had changed in five decades:
If you need convincing that we have a new situation in preaching, read some sermons from 1947 … to see the difference fifty years makes. I looked at a few dozen … and I can testify that reading them was like finding a message in a bottle from another shore. All the familiar characters and themes are there, but the idiom has changed. The sermons breathe a sense of confidence in the clarity and rationality of the Christian faith. … [T]he preachers sound terribly sure of themselves—even pompous—perhaps because they are under no necessity to qualify their assertions. There is an ease of communication here that is disconcerting to our ears. The sermons of 1947 reflect a new world that has been restored by the forces of good. They rejoice in the unlimited capacity of humanity to master its future. But most of all, they assume a universe of shared values and a common language for expressing them.Footnote 4
One could argue that what Lischer found by reading those 1940s sermons is simply the obvious truth that preaching is a form of public rhetoric that mirrors its cultural context. Small wonder, then, in a self-assured, postwar American society, a society confident in its own righteousness and secure in the knowledge that, in the fight against the Axis powers, the forces of evil had been vanquished by the forces of good, a society enjoying (at least in some sectors) common values and a shared moral language, that preachers should speak in the same assertive voice of that culture. Small wonder as well that those preachers would sound remote, even pompous, to a less assured, more fragmented and morally ambiguous age at the end of the twentieth century.
But to view Lischer's observations only this way would be to miss at least half of the picture. Preachers are children of their own era, to be sure, and their preaching voices understandably resonate with the cadences and values of their time. So, yes, Lischer read a 1940s postwar sermon and heard the untroubled confidence of that time. But preaching is more than self-expression. Preaching is by design a form of intentional double-speech in that it attempts to broker a two-voiced encounter between an ancient text of scripture and the contemporary listening context. At the very basic level, the preacher, much like a constitutional lawyer constructing a brief, wishes to allow a classic and authoritative text, which obviously comes from another time and place, to speak its wisdom to a new time and place. So when a New York Swing Era preacher talks about the Beatitudes in a voice and with a vocabulary that sound like the ballrooms of Times Square and Broadway, that is a sermonic virtue, not a defect.
On a more ambitious level, the preacher, again like a constitutional lawyer, hopes to treat the scriptural text as a “living” document and, therefore, crafts a sermon designed to facilitate a conversation, a dialogue between the current world of the hearers and the originating world of the text. The picture of a sermon as a dialogue underscores the fact that in sermons, even though they may seem like monologues, two voices are in fact speaking back and forth, calling and responding, interrogating and being interrogated: the voice of the text and the voice of the current context.
It should be noted that, when a theological description of preaching is included, the two-voiced conversation between text and context adds a third voice. In a bold theological move, preachers add one more level, one more hope, one more voice, to the event of preaching. Particularly in Christian theology, the claim is made that God in fact “speaks” in and through scripture and, thus, in and through preaching. This divine action in preaching is not a matter of obligation and binding—that is, God is not somehow conjured up by the formula of preaching—but of divine freedom and promise. It is believed that God has promised to speak not only in nature, in events of history, and in the “still, small voice” of the conscience, but also in and through the words of the preacher. The divine Spirit, like the wind, blows where it will, which means that sometimes those who hear a sermon are aware that they are being addressed by God and other times they hear nothing at all that rises above the preacher's often tedious drone.
The point here is that sermons will and should always sound like a mixture of voices: the voice of the present age (for example, the 1947 American postwar voice that Lischer heard), the voice of the ancient text brought to contemporary expression, and the silent spaces preserved in the hope that the divine voice will come and fill them. Preachers are, thus, poised on the balance bar between what they can control and what is beyond their control in preaching. They do what they can do to craft and deliver scriptural sermons, sermons that give voice to the language of the street and give voice to the language of the ancient text. But they perform the act of preaching in the yearning that yet another voice will be heard, that what is utterly outside their control will occur, namely that God will keep the promise and will freely speak a divine Word through the human words of the preachers. This promise and this hope is perhaps nowhere more strikingly expressed than in the ecumenical sixteenth century creed known as the Second Helvetic Confession, which makes the connection between the sermon and divine speech in the most direct way possible: The preaching of the Word of God is the Word of God.Footnote 5
Interpreting Scripture in Preaching: Text and Performance
The divine voice in preaching may be a part of the preacher's conviction, but it is, as we have noted, beyond the reach of the preacher's technique. While the preacher may be a well-respected official or member of the community, theologically the preacher's authority is derived not from his or her wisdom, experience, aptitude as an orator, or moral rectitude, but rather upon the words of the sermon being taken up by God and used as the earthly vessel of divine speech. In some ways this is analogous to poetry. A good poet will master the techniques of meter, word choice, metaphor, and so on, but an inspired poem is more than the sum of these technical parts. The poet must work to employ good craft but must also hope that the Muse will dwell in his or her words to take them beyond mere craft.
In terms of method, the homiletical craft involves two large, moving pieces: the interpretation of the claims of the ancient biblical text on present-day hearers and the voicing of those claims in the speech forms accessible to those hearers. Therefore, a preacher seeking to craft a sermon on the commandment “honor your father and your mother” must first discern what this commandment means for today and then create a rhetorically fashioned sermon to communicate that meaning.
In the last century, most educated pastors have been trained to interpret scripture employing linguistic, historical, sociological, and theological methods of interpretation. They are aware that biblical texts were not somehow “dropped from heaven,” but that they sprung up in specific historical contexts and in response to certain conditions. An interpreter of a biblical text must determine something about the original setting of that text before attempting to articulate the potential meanings for today.
Sometimes the relationship between the ancient text and the contemporary context is pictured as a kind of translation from one language, one culture, one medium to another. The idea is that, just as a translator of, say, Caesar's Gallic Wars from Latin to English has to do more than simply look up the words in a Latin-English dictionary but must instead find dynamic linguistic equivalents between the two languages, so the biblical interpreter has to find dynamic cultural equivalents between the ancient text and the social setting of the hearers.
Recently, however, this translation model of biblical interpretation has come under attack as naïve and inadequate, a distortion of what actually happens when people look to the scripture for authoritative meaning and guidance. David Kelsey, for example, has argued that one of the marks of a “good” translation is not that it moves the original conceptuality to another but that it actually preserves “the same concepts” as the original. Thus, “it is logically impossible to translate from one conceptuality to another.”Footnote 6 Instead of translation, when one finds contemporary meaning in a biblical text, this “move from one conceptuality to another is not a ‘translation’ but a ‘redescription.’”Footnote 7 This is especially true given the great distance between biblical texts and our own time. Kelsey goes on to say,
Writing of Christ's death, Paul may say that “Christ died for us.” Bultmann may say that the story of Christ's death brings us the possibility for “authentic existence,” and Tillich may say that the story of his death mediates to us the “power of being.” But the latter two are not translating what Paul said. They are redescribing it in different concepts, and perhaps for very good reasons and to good effect.Footnote 8
Another way to picture the act of biblical interpretation is to imagine that the text to be interpreted is a stone thrown into a lake. This stone created a concussive impact when it was first thrown, and the ripples of that impact spread gradually out across the surface of the lake. As they spread, they are altered by various features of the lake, such as contours of the shoreline. The interpreter stands in another time and place, that is, in another place in the lake, and eventually the waves of the first impact reach the interpreter's place. To interpret the text is not somehow to imagine that one could be transported to the place of first impact, but instead to say what happens when the ripples from the text reach this new location.
To understand the task of interpretation in this way, as redescription rather than translation, is to preserve the proper sense of continuity between the ancient text and the new context. The text must be taken seriously; it is, after all, what is to be redescribed; it is what generated the original “splash” in the lake. But the continuity between text and interpretation, and thus between text and sermon, is not one of replication or return but of a new generation of meaning. There is a balance, then, between continuity and discontinuity. Paul Ricoeur describes something of this same balance when he distinguishes between a text's “situation,” that is, the tightly construed details out of which the text arose, and its “world,” that is, the possibilities toward which the text points that are not attached to its specific situation. He says,
The sense of a text is not behind the text, but in front of it. It is not something hidden, but something disclosed. What has to be understood is not the initial situation of discourse, but what points toward a possible world. … [Interpretation] seeks to understand the world propositions opened up by the reference of the text. To understand a text is to follow its movement from sense to reference: from what it says to what it talks about.Footnote 9
So the preacher takes the biblical text and employs all the exegetical tools at hand, the goal of which is to move from the text itself—what it says—to the world projected in front of the text—what it talks about—and, standing in the world to discern how that textual world conforms, corrects, or collides with the world of the hearers. This is the moment of interpretation that gives rise to the two-voiced sermon.
Honor Your Father and Your Mother
The fifth commandment as a part of the Decalogue, that is, as one commandment among the ensemble of ten, appears twice in the Old Testament, in slightly different phrasing, in Exodus 20:12 and Deuteronomy 5:16. It is cited or alluded to in several other places in scripture, both in the Old and New Testaments. Patrick D. Miller, in his superb monograph on the Decalogue, The Ten Commandments,Footnote 10 describes several key aspects of this commandment in its own textual and historical contexts, which I summarize below.
Special Importance among the Commandments
At one level, the fifth commandment is just that: the fifth in a series of ten religious and moral injunctions. However, there are indications that this commandment, along with the fourth commandment, concerning the Sabbath, was given special emphasis and stature among the others.
First, there is the matter of placement. The Decalogue has traditionally been seen as composed of two tables: the commandments in the first table describe one's responsibilities toward God (for example, refrain from making of idols, hallow God's name), and the commandments in the second table set forth one's responsibilities toward the neighbor (for example, you shall not kill, you shall not steal). But do the fourth and fifth commandments belong in the first or the second table? Arguments have been made both ways. One the one hand, the fifth commandment, “Honor your father and your mother” clearly defines an obligation toward other human beings, that is, toward “neighbors,” but the additional clause, “that your days be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you,” redirects the commandment toward the human-divine relationship. This commandment, as well as the Sabbath commandment, which has a similar bidirectionality, serves, as Miller states, “a bridge function” between the first and second tables.Footnote 11 This bridge function is important because we are able to glimpse, in the fourth and fifth commandments, the coming together of the two basic moral worlds of the Decalogue: the love of (and reverence for) God and the love of (and ethical responsibility toward) neighbor. It is in these two commandments alone that we find explicit expression of the reciprocity of these two words, that is, the love of God finds grounding in the love of neighbor and loving actions toward the neighbor are a form of the love of God. If the first table directs one's moral compass toward God, and the second table directs the moral gaze toward the neighbor, the Sabbath commandment and the commandment to honor father and mother evoke the messy world of practical reality in which the two must be negotiated. It is interesting to note that the fourth and fifth commandments are further distinguished by being the only two of the ten that are expressed as positive admonitions; the rest are in “you shall not” form.
A second indication of the special status of the fifth commandment can be found in references to it elsewhere in the Old Testament, in which the commandment takes on emblematic character. In the summary of Israel's moral obligations found in Leviticus 19, what is commonly called “the holiness code,” the text begins by citing the fifth and then the fourth commandments as the signal signs of holiness and obedience to God:
The Lord spoke to Moses, saying: Speak to all the congregation of the people of Israel and say to them: You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy. You shall each revere your mother and father, and you shall keep my sabbaths: I am the Lord your God. (Leviticus 19:1–3)
On the negative side, when the prophet Ezekiel makes charges of moral decay against “the bloody city” (Jerusalem), the first indictment has to do with the fifth commandment: “Father and mother are treated with contempt in you; the alien residing within you suffers extortion; the orphan and the widow are wronged in you. You have despised my holy things, and profaned my Sabbaths” (Ezekiel 22:7–8).
Addressees
To whom is this commandment addressed? Obviously it is directed to the children of mothers and fathers, but children of what age? The import of the commandment differs depending upon whether it is addressed to the young children of healthy and strong parents or the adult children of parents who are aging and lessening in strength. There are clues that the commandments were first addressed to adult males (such as the phrasing of the tenth commandment: “you shall not covet your neighbor's wife”), but the narrative setting and the prologue of the Decalogue implies that that literary audience embraces all of the people, all of the Israelites. Miller finds among biblical scholars a “general consensus,” with which he agrees, that the focus of the fifth commandment in its current setting in the Torah is “on the mature child's dealing with older and frailer parents.”Footnote 12 The fifth commandment is about giving honor to parents in the season when their neediness is perhaps at its height and their productive capacities are waning.
However, Miller points out that the effect of this commandment radiates beyond its immediate focus on the adult–aging parent relationship. Young children observe their parents' actions toward their grandparents, learn the patterns of care expressed in honoring mother and father, and grow up into these responsibilities themselves. “[T]here is not some point at which the commandment is not applicable,” says Miller, “and some point where it suddenly takes effect.”Footnote 13
It is significant that the New Testament Letter to the Ephesians swivels the focus of the fifth commandment away from adult children and toward younger children: “Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. ‘Honor your father and mother’—this is the first commandment with a promise: ‘so that it may be well with you and you may live long on the earth’” (Ephesians 6:1–3). As we will see, this ambiguity about the addressee of the text will play a part in the focus of sermons based on the fifth commandment.
The Meaning of “Honor”
The Hebrew term translated “honor” in the commandment is kabbed, which literally means “to be heavy, weighty.” Miller says, “So to ‘honor’ parents is to regard them as persons of great weight, to treat them with high regard.”Footnote 14 But what does this mean in a practical sense? Obviously, the command to honor one's parents prohibits physical or verbal abuse, as the Book of Exodus makes clear: “Whoever strikes father or mother shall be put to death. … Whoever curses father or mother shall be put to death” (Exodus 21:15, 17). Beyond this, however, the ancient rabbis wrestled with the implied obligations of “to honor,” and eventually came to the understanding that the command “to honor” included two implications: emotional and behavioral. Children were to develop such a relationship with their parents that their feelings were a matter of honor or reverence for them, in the form of love, deference to their authority even in old age, and respect, and they were to perform concrete actions of devotion toward them in the form of caring for their bodily needs in a time when parents could not fully take care of their needs themselves. As the Mishnah, an ancient rabbinical commentary on the Torah puts it,
Our rabbis taught: What is reverence and what is honor? Reverence means that he (the son) must neither stand nor sit in his [father's] place, nor contradict his words, nor tip the scale against him.
Honor means that he must give him food and drink, clothe and cover him, and lead him in and out.Footnote 15
Consequences of the Commandment
For most of the Ten Commandments, obedience is an outgrowth of a relationship with the God “who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery” (Exodus 20:2, Deuteronomy 5:6). That is, Israel is expected to keep the commandments as a response to God's liberating action toward them. The fifth commandment, however, is the one exception to this rule. In this one commandment an additional motivation is provided for keeping it: “so that your days may be long and that it may go well with you in the land that the Lord your God is giving you” (Deuteronomy 5:16).Footnote 16 As Ephesians says, “[T]his is the first commandment with a promise.” Indeed, it is the only commandment with a promise.
Implied in this motivation, or promise, connected to the fifth commandment are three elements: authority, wisdom, and longevity of good life.
Authority
The commandment reflects the idea that one's respect for and deference to the authority of the parent is in reciprocal relationship to one's respect for and deference to the authority of God.Footnote 17 Through the Deuteronomistic literature in particular is the idea that relationships of authority, whether familial, communal, or national, are mirror images of one's obedience to God.Footnote 18
Wisdom
By attending reverently to one's aging mother and father, and by performing deeds of care toward them, one continues and deepens the acquisition of wisdom that has always been a part of the healthy child-parent relationship. This is picked up by the author of Proverbs:
Longevity of Good Life
The fifth commandment promises that obedience will lead to both duration and depth, both a longevity of life (“that your days may be long”) and a quality of life (“that it may go well with you in the land”). Martin Buber has observed that only this commandment and the Sabbath commandment have any reference to time. He writes,
The two of them, and only these two among all of the Ten Commandments, deal with time, articulated time; the first with the closed succession of weeks in the year, the second with the open succession of generations in national duration. Time itself is introduced into the constitutional foundation of national life by being partly articulated in the lesser rhythm of the weeks, and partly realized; in its given articulation through the greater rhythm of the generations. … Both of them together ensure the continuity of national time; the never-to-be-interrupted consecution of consecration, the never-to-be-broken consecution of tradition.Footnote 19
Honoring aged parents leads to longevity both in the obvious sense that caring for the elderly extends their life span but also in the more textured sense that society becomes a culture of care, care that begins in the closest familial relationships but extends to the whole of human life. This pervasive care creates a society for which “it goes well in the land.”Footnote 20
Contemporary Sermons on the Fifth Commandment
I now turn to contemporary sermons on the Fifth Commandment, looking, as I observed earlier, not to the ways in which the ancient meanings of this commandment have been translated and applied to a new cultural context, but instead to the ways that the commandment has been “redescribed” in a new setting, that is, to the ways in which the splash in the lake has rippled out to a new place and time. What is more, in a sermon the commandment is not simply taught, but performed. In the acoustics of a spoken sermon, much like an orality play or an attorney's closing argument, the commandment is brought to life as it interacts with particular issues and concrete circumstances that were never a part of its original conception.
Sermons from the 1960s and 1970s
I examined seven published sermons from this period,Footnote 21 all of them by male Protestant clergy. Even though these preachers were of different denominations and from different geographical regions, their approach to the fifth commandment was similar enough that we can use as a baseline a single example: the sermon on the fifth commandmentFootnote 22 by the Reverend Arthur E. Graf. He preached this sermon in 1969, as a part of a series on the Ten Commandments, to his Missouri Synod Lutheran congregation, Faith Lutheran Church in Jefferson City, Missouri. As a minister in the Missouri Synod denomination, Graf is representative of a more conservative theological approach, but his views in this particular sermon mirror most of the perspectives found in the other sermons that I surveyed, regardless of the theological position of the preachers.
Graf opens the sermon with a witty quotation from the newspaper advice column of Ann Landers:
Dear Ann Landers:
I have accepted an engagement ring from a wonderful young man. We decided to marry before he goes into the service.
I get a little sick inside when I think of Hugh meeting some of my relatives. I have a couple of aunts and uncles who don't know how to dress. Also, their table manners are appalling and their grammar is atrocious. They say such things as “Hain't you seen it before?” They talk too loud and laugh like hyenas. I hate for Hugh and his family to meet these slobs but I must invite them. Is there something I can say to prepare Hugh and his people for these offensive boors?—Dreading It
Dear Dread:
Offensiveness must run in your family. You sound like a social-climbing little creep to me.Footnote 23
Graf presents the plea of the writer, “Dreading It,” as a sign of a general social condition, namely as an attitude “typical of some young people who despise the hand that feeds them.”Footnote 24 Children are often contemptuous of and embarrassed by their parents, says Graf, but “this is not the way of Christian children, who honor their parents.”Footnote 25
Graf goes on to invoke, as a remedy against this attitude, the fifth commandment:
The Lord says, “Honor thy father and thy mother.” Usually they deserve your honor. Even when they don't, the Lord still expects you to give them honor for the simple reason that they are your parents and His representatives.Footnote 26
What Graf is doing is hearing the fifth commandment as the writer of the Letter to the Ephesians sees it, namely as a charge to children to respect and obey their parents. He goes on to make this explicit:
Obedience is one way in which we show love. St. Paul writes: ‘‘Children, obey your parents in all things; for this is well pleasing unto the Lord” (Col. 3:20). Even when it is difficult to obey, even when you as children and youth seem to know better than your parents, as Christian children you will obey nonetheless. You obey parents in all things, except when they ask you to sin against God (Acts 5:29). Blessed are you parents who have children who work at obeying you. Blessed are you children who have been taught to obey your parents, because obedience to parents is obedience to God who gave the fourth commandment. When God speaks to Christian parents they obey; when parents speak to their Christian children, they obey. Obedience by both parents and children is the basis of the happy home.Footnote 27
Graf's theological tone is that of a conservative Christian, but his basic performance of the commandment is consistent with the other six sermons examined: (1) the commandment is addressed to young children; (2) the commandment evokes obedience to parents; (3) the reason for the obedience is hierarchical, namely a child should obey parents in the same way that all humans should obey a “parental” God; and (4) the reason for obedience is that it creates a “happy home” and, beyond this, a stable and healthy society.
We can hear, then, these sermons about obedience to parental and Godly authority and the desire for domestic and social harmony against the backdrop of American society in the 1960s and early 1970s. These decades were characterized by sharp social change involving not only the civil rights movement and protests over the Vietnam War but also tension between the younger generation and the values of conventional society. In these preachers and their typical sermons, the fifth commandment is performed as a stabilizing (or perhaps reactionary) force, calling for the proper obedience of authorities, human and divine.
Graf makes explicit the connection to the political climate of his time:
Christian young people will not participate in sit-ins which violate state laws; neither will they flaunt the established rules of a university. Christians give obedience to those in authority because they know that obedience to those in authority is obedience to God.
We can also see in Graf's sermon the glimmer of an issue that will become a major motif within a generation. Graf calls for children to obey parents “except when they ask you to sin against God.” Several of the preachers maintain that the fifth commandment implies reciprocal ethical obligations, that is, children should obey their parents and parents should be toward their children the kind of authorities who merit obedience, but Graf allows the shadow of sin to fall for a moment on the parental side of this equation. What Graf puts theologically will soon enough become in later sermons also a social and psychological issue: the mistreatment and abuse of children.
Only one of the preachers of this period, John Shelby Spong, names this theme outright. Spong eventually became a controversial bishop in the Episcopal Church and a well-known liberal theologian, but when his sermon on the fifth commandment, “The Meaning of Parenthood,” was preached, Spong was rector of a parish church in Virginia. In his sermon, Spong agrees with the other preachers of his period that obedience to parents is at the heart of the commandment. But he acknowledges the physical and psychological danger of this commandment leading to damaging and blind obedience in the face of child abuse:
I recall some twenty-three years ago when, as a young seminarian serving a congregation of tenant farm families in rural Virginia, one of my duties was to teach a class for high school students each Sunday morning. These children and teenagers were not well-educated or sophisticated. They were simple, earthy people. My subject was the Ten Commandments. When we got to this Commandment, “Honor your father and your mother,” I became aware of the agitation of one lovely blond girl, about fourteen, who was in the first blush of adult feminine beauty. That beauty, however, was marred by an ugly scar across her forehead. I knew the source of that scar. Some years earlier her father had come home drunk and abusive one Saturday night and had kicked this child down the stairs, splitting her head open. The family did not seek medical attention. Perhaps they were too ignorant or too poor or too afraid of questions being asked. So the forehead was left to heal as best it could, with home remedies probably exaggerating the disfigurement.Footnote 28
Spong goes on to defend that call of the fifth commandment for children to be in respectful obedience to parents, but in a way that transcends the complications and dangers of parent-child relationships, real and potential, that are abusive:
Thus the fifth Commandment enjoins us to live as recipients of both the love of a mother and the love of a father. To preserve that pattern, this Commandment calls us to rise above our internal conflicts and emotions and to honor the meaning of fatherhood and the meaning of motherhood, that life may continue and that our days may be long in the land which the Lord our God has given us.Footnote 29
One other preacher from the 1960s and 1970s raised an additional theme that would develop more fully a generation later. T. Cecil Myers, preaching in the early 1960s to Grace Methodist Church in Atlanta, noted, “We honor [our parents] by being attentive to them. Especially is this true where there are older parents.”Footnote 30 In what was essentially an aside, Myers turns from the relationship of younger children to their parents to that of adults to their aging parents. As we will see, what was a minor motif in Myers' sermon will become a major stream four decades later.
Sermons from the 2000s
So, in the 1960s and 1970s, a period of anxiety about generational conflict and authority, the preachers of that era, both liberal and conservative, tended to “perform” the fifth commandment as a word about restoring proper and harmonious relations between young (or adolescent) children and their parents. A very different picture emerges from the sermons of the twenty-first century. Now the focus of the sermons is less upon the question of obedience of the young and a respect for the structure of authority and much more upon adults caring for aging parents.
I examined ten sermons,Footnote 31 again from a wide variety of Protestant denominations and theological perspectives. Changes to be observed are that in the half century between the sermons of the 1960s and the twenty-first century, not only are sermons now more readily available because of the Internet, but also many women have entered the ministry, and their voices are represented in my sample.
Again, so unified are these preachers in redescribing this commandment, one sermon can serve as a representative of the group: William G. Enright's “Memory: The Fifth Commandment.” Enright, the senior pastor at Second Presbyterian Church in Indianapolis, Indiana, begins his sermon by claiming that the focus of the commandment is on the adult children of older parents:
This fifth commandment is for children, especially for adult children. The focus of this commandment is on aging parents. We may not all be married. We all don't have children. Never, however, do we cease to be children of parents. And we never stop talking about our parents regardless of how old we are or how long our parents may have been dead. As Shirley Abbot describes it, “Our ancestors live in our mind's attic.”Footnote 32
For Enright, the notion of “honoring” one's parents has become deep remembering of one's parents and heritage, because this is the way God has created us and made possible a life of flourishing:
What is life without connections? Without roots we have no sense of history, no genealogy to claim, no cultural heritage to embrace. Roots connect, roots nourish, roots give us a center out of which to locate our lives in time and space.Footnote 33
In Enright's sermon, he goes on to describe something of his own roots, making it clear that he does not mean family roots only in the idealized sense. He tells about his experience as a sophomore in high school when he earned his first varsity letter in sports. He proudly went to the local sporting goods store to order a letter sweater. When he gave the store owner his name, the man said, “Oh you must be Jerry's boy.” Embarrassed, Enright tried to change the subject. His father had been a local politician who created something of a scandal by divorcing Enright's mother and leaving town with another woman. “I tried to ignore those roots,” Enright said, but “[o]ne morning I awakened to the realization that, indeed, I was Jerry's boy. I bore his name, William Gerald Enright Jr. I had been blessed with some of his gifts. You can't disconnect from your past.”Footnote 34
He goes to connect this experience with the honesty of the Bible about the family:
What makes the Bible so believable is that it speaks with candor. … The family as portrayed in the Bible is very fragile if not downright dysfunctional. The family revealed is a family frayed by infidelities and feisty feuds and untimely deaths. Yet the family survives, not by its own doing but because of God's faithfulness fleshed out in grace and forgiveness, tolerance, and a pesky sense of promise keeping.Footnote 35
Mike Hamby, pastor of a Southern Baptist Church in Indiana, also underscores the power of the fifth commandment to speak to the children of older adults and to the familial and relational texture of the commandment:
But, this extends not merely to children who are young but to children who are now old. We were all once children and we are all bound by this commandment forever!
You see without obedience to the 5th commandment, the screaming young toddler quickly becomes the rebellious teenager, who slowly becomes the empty young adult, who finally becomes the bitter and lonely senior citizen. In contrast to such an enslaved, hopeless life, believers can choose to love the 5th commandment and find grace in it.Footnote 36
The shift from young children to adult children in the sermons of the 2000s quickly and inevitably raises the question of broken familial relationships and estrangement between adults and their aging parents. In his sermon on the commandment, “Adults Honoring Their Parents,” James Ellis, III says,
We don't like to talk about conflict. It scares the bejeebers out of us. But the truth is some parents are a “hot mess,” with unaddressed shortcomings and sins that leave them bound to immaturity and ineptitude of various kinds. They refuse to seek their own healing, which can, if we are honest, severely limit the ability of adult children to have as close of a relationship with their parents that might otherwise be possible. But in the real-world, this is life. So what do adult children do when their parents try to force their values on them, when they encourage them to stunt their own growth and thus violate God's principles?Footnote 37
Timothy Peck, a priest in the Anglican Church in North America, further complicates the picture of family by raising the issue of what the commandment means in the midst of divorce and adoption. He says,
Now a parent isn't necessarily the person who gives you your DNA. A father is whoever “fathers” you as you grow up, and a mother is whoever “mothers” you. So even though my biological dad contributed my DNA, he choose to forfeit his right to be my dad when he abandoned my mom and I when I was four. So this command really applies to my relationship to my mom and adoptive dad—who adopted me when I was 7 years old.Footnote 38
Once the sermons of the 2000s swung the focus of the Fifth Commandment from parents to the adult children of aging parents, a world of familial and social complications never envisioned in the ancient text became major issues for conversation in the pulpit. The moral voice of these more recent sermons becomes more nuanced, less directive perhaps, more layered with the complexities of life.
Conclusion: The Biblical Command and the Anxieties of Every Age
I began this essay by describing the two-voiced nature of a sermon, how a sermon brings to meeting the influence of a biblical text and the circumstances of the contemporary context. What we have observed is the remarkable shift, over 40–50 years of American preaching, in the way the fifth commandment has been performed from the pulpit. In an age of anxiety about authority, the preachers of the 1960s and 1970s heard the fifth commandment calling a culture back to obedience, beginning with the parent-child relationship and extending to other authorities in society. But in the 2000s, with baby boomers aging and increasingly assuming the care for their aging parents, with families assuming new and sometimes troubled configurations, the preachers on the fifth commandment swiveled away from the younger child-parent relationship and toward adults and their aging parents. The theological and ethical theme of obedience gave way to matters of memory and forgiveness.
While biblical scholars may debate matters of accuracy and correctness in biblical interpretation, biblical texts are more like force fields capable of exerting influence and creating meaning in many directions and in ever new contexts. Neither the preachers of the 2000s, nor their forebears a half century earlier, are guilty of misinterpreting the ancient commandment. Instead, they felt the ripple of that biblical injunction as it passed over their place in the pond. The preachers in the twenty-second century, and in each subsequent generation, will do the same.
Acknowledgments
I am deeply indebted to my research assistant, Kimberly Wagner, for help in researching this essay and for her insights on this topic.
