A Church Where All are Honoured

Ten days ago I went to St Pauls Cathedral, to hear Kofi Anan, Sec Gen of the UN, speak. I was queuing patiently like any self respecting British person would, with the other two thousand or so other people who were waiting to get in and these big black cars with full on police escort pulled up and drove right up to the side entrance. The people inside had their doors opened for them, members of the St Pauls staff came out to greet them and they were ushered to the best seats in the house…er..cathedral…These were the obviously the VIPs or the guests of honour.
Of course, the Queen awards honours twice a year, in June for her birthday and in the New Year. They are awarded to people for all types of service, including teachers, nurses, actors, scientists, diplomats, sports men and women and broadcasters. The largest number of awards goes to those providing services to their local communities, mainly volunteers. Y’know the drill adding a few letters after your name OBE, MBE or becoming Sir this or Dame that.
To honour means to ‘give value’ to someone.
The root of the Greek word that Paul uses in this bit of the letter means valuable, beloved, precious.

Our society is saturated by celebrity culture and anyone who walks into my office will take one look at my computer desktop and see I’m not entirely immune! We value & honour those who are successful, beautiful, intelligent, famous, brave. Those who we look up to, who seem to be all we want to be and have all we want to have.

In today’s passage, Paul writes about honour and giving value to people. But it’s not who we would expect:
Children and parents, slaves and masters and in the bit we didn’t read but is included in this section of the letter, husbands and wives.
Family, work and marriage. Common, all very ordinary, the people we see everyday; day in, day out.
In the first century AD, when Paul was writing this letter, each of these relationships signified a huge imbalance of power and value. Remember, this is a time when:
Jewish men thanked God in their prayers that they were not born women,
children were regarded by many in the Roman Empire as a nuisance because they inhibited their parents sexual behaviour and complicated easy divorce. Paul’s writing in a culture where unwanted babies were abandoned and the weak and deformed were taken out and left to die
it’s a culture where slaves had been regarded as subhuman, little more than living tools.

Paul takes these familiar examples of relationships where the power and influence is culturally uneven and blows his listeners expectations out of the water.

That he addresses teaching to the wives, children and slaves at all is hugely counter cultural but Paul goes beyond that. He honours and gives value to the under-dogs if you like, by addressing them first in each case. As so often with Paul, he models what he is teaching as he writes!

He tells us that there is to be honour and respect on both sides of these relationships:
‘Wives submit to your husbands’, ‘husbands love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her’,
‘children obey your parents’, ‘honour your father and mother’, ‘Fathers do not exasperate your children instead bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.’
‘Slaves obey your earthly masters, Masters treat your slaves in he same way,… do not threaten them.’

In two thousand years, how much have we moved on in our society in terms of honouring those ordinary people in our families, our workplaces and our marriages?

We prob are all familiar with the saying
‘familiarity breeds contempt’
When I asked an old boyfriend why he had been having an affair with another woman, what I had done wrong, he told me ‘It’s nothing you did, it’s just that you were always there and well, she wasn’t you.’

What is it about the fallen human nature to take for granted these everyday relationships?

In the remake of the film Alfie, Alfie talks about a visit to the a museum and saw a beautiful statue of Aphrodite,…actually I think we’ll let Jude take it from here….(DVD CLIP)

‘When I was a boy at St Albans secondary school, the school took us on this cultural trip to observe art at one of those big famous London museums. When I was there, I came across this statue of a Greek goddess in marble; Aphro…Aphrodiddy, something or other. Beautiful she was…perfect female form. Chiselled features. Exquisite. I stood in awe of her. Finally the teacher calls us all over and I’m walking past it and on the way I notice in the side of this Greek goddess all these cracks, chips, imperfections. Ruined her for me. Well that’s Nikki, a beautiful sculpture – damaged. In a way you don’t notice till you get too close.’

He got up close and he saw the cracks in the marble and that was it, she lost her beauty in her imperfection.

Maybe, we expect each other to be perfect and when we get close, when we spend so much time with someone, we see their imperfections and it shatters our illusions, we no longer see them as someone special.

Why can we afford honour and praise and value to stars we’ve never met and probably never will, yet can’t do the same for the people we see all the time?

In 1797, someone called William Godwin wrote,
“Excessive familiarity is the bane of social happiness,”
Yet Paul in this passage seems to be arguing the opposite.

Is it too much to say that the high divorce rate, the number of single parent families, the levels of stress and depression, the promiscuity, the brokenness and mess of lives we see on shows like Jerry Springer and Trisha stems not from excessive familiarity as Godwin would have us believe but from the lack of honour, respect and value in these basic day to day relationships?

Back in the 1st century AD, Paul knew the world about him was fractured, fallen and as we look around, we know it still is. But Paul also knows what it is meant to be like.

Paul has a passion for something different, he has a passion for the Kingdom of God to break through. All through this letter he has been painting a picture. A picture of UNITY and WHOLENESS under the headship of Jesus. Guys, this is not how it was meant to be. God has something very different in mind.

Earlier, in Ch 5 v2 Paul has urged them to
’live a life of love’ and then in Ch 5 v8 ‘live as children of light’

Where are our lives most visible? It’s not in here, Sunday by Sunday, or at conferences like New Wine, where Christians all get together, fabulous as those times are. No, we are seen to live a life of love and light when we are living out these ordinary day-to-day relationships. This is where people see the Kingdom.

The potential is there. The human heart does long for right relationship with those around us.
In Steven Spielberg’s latest blockbuster, War of the Worlds, Tom Cruise plays a father who has not been there for his children and has certainly exasperated them through his lack of interest in their lives and his lack of responsibility towards them.
He barely knows them as they visit him for the weekend. His teenage son Robbie particularly has a lot of anger and shows his lack of honour in that he refuses even to call him Dad anymore and refers to him as Ray.
But then, as is prone to happen in a summer blockbuster movie, aliens invade the earth and through the trauma of their experience, they do find reconciliation, respect and value in each other.

In real life, after the bombings last week, I heard from every member of my family in the ensuing 24 hours. We are not a close family. Why is it that we wait for something awful to happen before we honour one another? Do we really have to wait until our funerals until we really pay tribute to how much we value each other?

In Ch 5 v15 Paul writes:
‘be very careful then, how you live – not as unwise but as wise, making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil’

‘Making the most of every opportunity.’
God gives us so many opportunities to value each other and I bet it’s more than just our birthdays and Fathers Day. Let’s make the most of them. A phone call, a letter, a present for no reason, little acts and words of kindness that don’t cost us anything but time.

Yeah, that’s great Ruth, but what if my parents are not exactly honourable? As I said before, it’s easy to value something when you don’t see the cracks. But God calls us to honour our parents even if they don’t deserve it.

A great example of someone who honours their father when he certainly doesn’t deserve it is Luke Skywalker from George Lucas’ Star Wars films. I would apologise for the spoiler coming next, except that the films have been out for 30 years so, tough!! In a classic scene from The Empire Strikes Back our hero Luke discovers that the bad guy Darth Vader, who he has been fighting, is actually his father. Amazingly Luke refuses to give in to resentment and bitterness and in Return of the Jedi, Luke repeatedly states that ‘There is still good in him.’

If that’s true of Darth Vader, surely that is true of our parents, our bosses or anyone we are close to who have acted dishonourably.
Is it possible that when we are tempted to just give up we can look for the good in them instead of focussing on the negatives?

My branch group looked at the ten commandments last year and when we got to the one on honouring your father and mother, I felt really convicted that I wasn’t honouring my father much. As I said before, we haven’t been that close for the past few years, since my parents spilt up and I hadn’t been spending much time with him and his new family. I decided to spend a weekend with them, that doesn’t sound like much but that was twice as long in one go as I’d spent with them at any one time in the previous 6 years. And it was lovely. I still don’t feel completely ‘at home’ around him, but he knows now that how he feels is important to me and that I want to move on in my relationship with him. I also recognised that it’s too easy for me to focus on his negative attributes, the things he doesn’t do for me rather than thank him for the good stuff.

Now I realise some hurts from our parents go very deep, there are whole conferences run on healing for these issues and I have a couple of leaflets for some coming up in the autumn which I’ll put over by the display boards, so please don’t think I’m making light of it, I’m just saying that a starting point is to want to honour our parents and to look for the good in them.

From the other side – Paul writes in Ch 6 v4:
‘Fathers, do not exasperate your children; instead bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.’
I’m not a parent, but I would like to say to those of you who are – please don’t ever underestimate the power your words and actions can have to build your kids up or to make them die a little inside. And that includes when they become teenagers and start being a little less easy to love!
At Friday club, we are constantly amazed at the effect that good rules & boundaries and lots of positive encouragement has on the kids who come along. They are so much more open and friendly, their defences drop right down. They no longer feel like they have anything to prove. They are accepted for who they are.

What about slaves? Firstly a quick aside to those of you thinking ‘hang on, why didn’t Paul tell the masters to let their slaves go?’ There are a few ideas on why that I don’t have time to go into now, feel free to ask me after the service, but suffice to say that although not condemned here, slavery is not condoned either. Marriage and family are both affirmed in the Bible as God-given institutions and slavery is not. However, it was a way of life for an estimated third of the population of the Roman Empire and Paul is already lessening the gap between slave and master and undermining the institution by including teaching specifically for them.

The modern equivalent is of course employee and employer!

This is not quite so romantic an idea as family and marriage. You don’t get many action films where an extreme situation of jeopardy finally brings together a boss and an employee who have not been getting along!! Perhaps that is because it’s easy just to leave and get another job, but it is almost accepted in society to moan about our bosses, a bit like Mother in Laws!

But here we see that Paul wants us to respect those in authority over us obey them, as we would obey Christ and serve wholeheartedly as if serving the Lord not men. Yikes!

We may not feel like it on a Monday morning, but if slaves were urged to work ‘as if…serving the Lord’ how much more should we?
In practice that might mean not joining in when people are moaning about their boss without going to him or her to sort it out. That might mean, not getting distracted with long emails to friends in work time or cheerfully accepting that piece of work you know is going to be boring but has to be done. Each of us will know the things we do when no-one else is looking that we wouldn’t do if Jesus was our boss!

Masters too are to treat their slaves well and not threaten them. In Roman times Masters had the power of life and death over their slaves, we may not have quite so much in our workplaces if we have people working under us, but it is tempting to use the power we do have in a selfish way. We need to remember that we too are under the authority of Jesus and even if we are the MD or owner of our business, we still have a boss in Him!
John Stott points out in his commentary that Paul urges each side to ‘concentrate on their responsibilities and not on their rights. ‘
Honour and value comes back to putting others first and serving one another like Mark was talking about last week.

Finally, Paul writes that if we do this stuff and honour one another, there are benefits!
V3 ‘that it may go well with you and that you may enjoy long life on earth’ and in v8 ‘you know that the Lord will reward everyone for whatever good he does.’

These types of verses always make me squirm a bit inside when I’m preaching, as it’s perfectly obvious that not everyone who honours those around them has a long life and has everything ’go well with them’ . BUT I do believe that in a general sense, society does go better when these principles are followed, how can they not?

Mike Lloyd said in some talks on this letter to the Ephesians, ‘the church is called to be both the agent and the sneak preview of the ultimate creation of harmony under the headship of Jesus.’

As the church, we are the ones to model the benefits to others.
It’s through us that God is able to make a difference in the world.

The potential is that God could transform society through the church if these basic building blocks of society, marriage, family and work contained effective, harmonious relationships where all are honoured.

Let’s look for those opportunities to honour one another and make the most of them. Don’t wait for the aliens!