Memorial United Methodist Church

Memorial United Methodist Church
White Plains, New York 10605

Honor your father and mother

A Sermon by Joe Agne, Pastor
Based on Exodus 20:1-17
March 15, 2009 (Not edited or proofread)

The Ten Commandments are about community: God with people, people with people and people with God. This morning I’m interested in a particular kind of community – our families. The focus commandment is “Honor your father and mother.” The major supplemental source used is Losing Moses on the Freeway, by Chris Hedges. He wrote the phrase that is the title of this sermon: “To honor our parents is to honor our essence.” Last night I had a parent-essence honoring experience. We met our newest grandchild, Harper Corbin. Her dad is my son, Aaron. My father is Francis Leroy Graham and his father is Edward. According to Hedges,

All parents, for better or worse, shape our lives. They condition our responses years after they are gone. Children who were loved, or not loved, who yearned for approval that was never sufficient, who fled the harsh oppression of the home, who rejected all their parents had pressed down on them until they became, as if in a cruel reversal, simply what their parents were not, live out these yearnings as adults….

We all honor our parents, even parents we reject, even parents whose cruelty did not make them fit to be called parents. For to honor our parents is to honor our essence, the roots from which we sprung, even the best parents have an oppressive power that must be broken. We must free ourselves from our parents to become fully formed individuals, in the process taking with us that which they gave us or did not give us and trying to fashion a distinct and separate life. It is a life that must, in the end, replace the parents.

My Story

In college I went to meet a date, Ruth. Her roommate met me instead with these word, “Ruth will not be going out with you tonight but she did want you to have this” -- a beautiful calligraphy, make by Ruth, of a definition of “sarcasm” “Sarcasm is a cutting remark with or without the intent to wound the feelings.” Sarcastic people, when confronted, often say, “I was only kidding” or “I didn’t mean anything, I was just goofing.” I was raised by a sarcastic father who loved me. I am sure he didn’t mean anything. He was just teasing, which is the word he would use. In this sermon I honor my father and pray that as little as possible of the Agne strains of sarcasm will get through to Harper.

My sisters, both older than me, tell of family life about which I have no experience. Before I was born my father was a warehouse manager for the Beech-Nut company in Jacksonville, Florida, where I was born. My dad was a lay elder in the Riverside Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). There was a fair amount of piety in the family, including prayer at meals. At this time my dad had one of his major episodes that left him not functioning at his usual level. He had been returned from basic training as not fit for the army in the midst of World War II. He lost his job. One of the signs of his dismay was that he could not pray at meals without crying. So he quit praying. I never heard my father pray. Also, I never saw him cry.

I knew my father to have a testy relationship with “church” after we moved to Oak Park, Illinois, when I was just short of three years old. He would make many sarcastic remarks about the pastor and many of the lay leaders. He would go to church for a while and then quit going to church. There was always something wrong at the church or at least something that caused his sarcasm – he was just joking, of course.

Both of his daughters married men who went to seminary and/or became pastors. In eighth grade I decided I wanted to be a pastor. I was asked to preach for the first time in high school on Youth Sunday. My father joked that he would come but that he might not be able to stay awake. Sleep was his usual posture during sermons. He did come and he did stay awake. I watched him as I preached to make sure. When it was time to go to college he joked that he could get me into his alma mater, Middlebury College, but he couldn’t keep me there – a reference to my academic achievements to date. When it was time for my ordination in 1973 he did not come, even though he was physically healthy and I offered to pay for my mom and dad’s plane tickets from Florida to Illinois.

My commitment to honor

I shared this story in my doctoral studies program at New York Theological Seminary in 2000. Another student, a Rabbi, suggested she knew one of the reasons I was a pastor – “to finish my father’s prayers, to give voice to my father’s prayers,” which had been cut off in 1944.

My father was an incredibly compassionate man giving much of his time through the Kiwanis Club in whatever city he lived. He also chose the youth committee and always served extensively and well. At his Memorial Service, when there was time for people to share stories of his life, a second grade teacher, stood up and shared about my dad’s mentoring her second-graders. He made his last visit to her class just months before his death, when he was 86 years old.

My father loved me a great deal and he had flaws that hurt me – a lot at times. I know many people have stories of far greater hurt from a parent. My situation gives me a peek at some of the balancing that some have to do be honest about their parents and to respond to the commandment to honor you mother and father. It isn’t a call to honor a perfect person or to honor only what is experienced as good in a parent. Rather it is call to be honest about our origins, our parents and the life they have given us. Our parents leave a major print on us. To honor them is to honor our essence.So today I make three commitments to my dad:

1. I will keep completing your prayers, my prayers and the prayers of the world.
2. I will keep crying your tears, my tears and the tears of the world.
3. I will keep expressing your compassion, my compassion and the compassion of the world.

In this way I honor you.