Children...

          Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. "Honor your father and your mother" -- which is the first commandment with a promise -- " so that it may go well with you and that you may enjoy long life on the earth. (Ephesians 6"1-3)

          The moment you say something about how someone is supposed to behave in a relationship, you get the “But you don’t know my ________.” No, I don’t, and many of you didn’t know mine. The problem is that we are tempted to create a false dilemma: either we obey one hundred percent, or we obey zero percent. Either our parents are perfect and deserve our cooperation, or our parents are imperfect and therefore monsters deserving nothing.

          When Martin Luther King, Jr. and other leaders of the Civil Rights Movement first started their movement, Dr. King provided guidelines to his followers. They were to obey the law except when that law was racially biased. Civil disobedience wasn’t anarchy. In fact, he told them that they weren’t to resist arrest. Penalties given them for their civil disobedience were to be accepted. In other words, they were to obey the law when they could, and when they couldn’t was to be the exception to the rule, rather than the rule. It was based on matters of principle, not ego.

          There are times when one needs to disobey a parent. The sad part is that most kids don’t have the wisdom to know when those times are. That’s why families need to be connected in a community, so that parents can learn, but also so parents can be monitored. Even this doesn’t guarantee that bad parents will be discovered and dealt with, but this commandment is dealing with the majority, not the exceptional cases.

          This passage is also difficult for adult children. The command to obey one’s parents doesn’t get revoked when a person reaches legal age. Even marriage doesn’t erase it. Keep in mind that a few verses back, we were told to submit to one another. That means adult children to parents, and parents to adult children. The goal doesn’t seem to be to have the right to dictate, but to submit, except, again, if that submission violates another principle God has taught us.

         One last idea here. This passage is about the behavior of children. “You don’t know my ________” ignores the opposite possibility, that it is the children who are being abusive, disobedient, destructive, hateful, etc. That’s what this passage is talking about, and that idea brings us back to the promise included with the commandment. A kid who grows up “good” and learns to cooperate with others is far more likely than the bully to have a life that goes well.