As Martin Luther says: “Parents should consider that they owe obedience to God, and that, above all, they should earnestly and faithfully discharge the duties of their office, not only to provide for the material support of their children…, but especially to bring them up to the praise and honour of God. As a parent or grandparent, are you carrying out your mission to lead your children into the knowledge and love of God?”

1.They mess you up, your mum and dad…

The English poet Philip Larkin once wrote a poem about parents.

They #&@# you up, your mum and dad.

They may not mean to, but they do.

They fill you with the faults they had

And add some extra, just for you.

I’ve found that this poem – and I’ve read it out many times – makes people sigh.

Because the relationship we have with our parents is one of the most complex and fraught of all human relationships. And ever since Sigmund Freud, we’ve blamed our parents for our faults, flaws, and limitations. Many an hour on the therapist’s couch has been spent detailing how our mother and father have hurt us by their absence or emotional distance, or their demands that you succeed, their helicopter or tiger parenting, their indulgence, or their neglect. Perhaps even by their abuse.

Knowing how we can mess up our kids has produced a deep anxiety in us about parenting. At least in the middle-class West, we are so hyper-sensitive about the mental health of our kids that we’ve come to believe that the point of parenting is to produce happy children, rather than mature and robust adults.

And yet at the same time as we know they’ve messed us up, we do tend to love our parents! We’d hate to be parentless. So many of the great stories of children’s literature, from Oliver Twist to Harry Potter, start with lost or orphaned children – because to be without parents is to be without love, safety, or identity.

If we do find ourselves shaped by our parents’ vices, then we’re also embossed with their virtues, too. I can’t tell you how many tearful and heartfelt eulogies I’ve heard honouring parents in this very place – recounting with gratitude the blessings that have been handed on down the generations.

2.The command to honour your parents

Which takes us to the fifth commandment:

Honour 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.

a) Human beings in their finitude

Now, there is no human being that is excluded from this command. Not all of us are parents; but all of us are children. There’s no such thing as a self-made man or woman. We did not create ourselves. We all emerged from the physical bodies of our parents – mostly from that semi-voluntary act that combines the flesh of male and female, and from the bloody struggle of our mothers to give us birth. We came from sex, blood, muscle, placenta, and birth canal. We’re not clones of others – simply derivative of them. We have a uniqueness that comes from the combination of male and female that produces us.

And we share this condition with vast majority of animals, and even some of the plants. Like them, we’re biological creatures, emerging from the soup of genes and DNA that has been bubbling away in the bodies of our ancestors for millions of years.

As children of parents, we take our place in the endless roll call of the generations. We may feel as if history has led inexorably to this point and to our existence, but our nature smashes this egotism. For the generations pass on. Now is our time; but our time will pass.

And so: the command to honour our parents is in part a humble recognition of our biological reality. You are a finite creature. As a human being, though you’re made in the image of God, you’re also formed from the dust of the ground.

b) The natural authority of parents

And this command reminds us that there is a natural authority given to human parents over their children. We see this at work in the natural world, too, for parenting is not just a human thing.

This week we had a baby magpie in our garden just leaving the nest. It looked a little wet. Its parents were watching carefully from the trees and occasionally swooping down to feed it by regurgitating into its beak – and to show it how to feed itself. It’s not yet learnt how to fly and needs to learn from those who’ve gone before it. They are protecting it, feeding it, and teaching it.

It’s natural that the older will teach the younger. We need to know how to live in our bodies from those who’ve lived in bodies like ours before us. God has given us human parents of both sexes to teach us, by word, discipline, and example. They name us; and in a sense we belong them, for we are their responsibility. They will give account to God for their parenting of us.

This command then tells us what our mission as parents is. We’re not just the providers and the nurturers of our children. We’re their teachers.

And what are parents to teach them? Parents teach them how to live as human beings. They humanise us. Now this is a big task, and God has arranged it so that, in the ordinary scheme of things, we have two physically and psychologically different adults to help us with this. We call them ‘mum’ and ‘dad’.

Lots of this has to do with the material business of keeping alive: with food, work, and relationships.

But father and mother are also specifically called to teach us to walk in the ways of God – which is an essential part of flourishing as a human. Like their parents, children are made in the image of God. So it’s vital that children learn who made them and their parents.

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