Rev. Jared Buss
Pittsburgh New Church; February 22, 2026
Readings: 1 Kings 12:3-15 (children’s talk); True Christian Religion §305; Married Love §391
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The fourth commandment is interesting because it’s the only one of the ten commandments that directs our attention to specific people (other than the Lord). The commandments don’t explicitly tell us how to treat our children, or our bosses at work, but they tell us to honor father and mother. The thing about talking about a specific relationship that everyone experiences is that that relationship is different for everyone. Honoring your parents is fairly easy—and what it means to honor them is self-evident—if you have an ideal relationship with your parents. The more complicated that relationship gets, the harder we have to work to understand this commandment.
What we need to do, as we work through this commandment, and as we reflect on our parents and what it means to honor them, is look for the things that are from the Lord. Because that’s what this commandment is really about: honoring what is from the Lord. In the highest sense our Father is the Lord, and our mother is the church, or the Lord’s kingdom. And even when we’re talking about our earthly parents, fatherhood and motherhood are roles that were given to those people by the Lord.
We’ll come back to these ideas, but now we’re going to turn to a reading from the Heavenly Doctrine of the New Church, from the book True Christian Religion, which you can find on the back of the worship handout. This reading is about the literal meaning of the fourth commandment [read §305].
So to keep the fourth commandment, in its literal sense, is to honor our parents, to obey them, to be devoted to them, and to show gratitude to them for the kindnesses they do. We could dig into what all of these words mean, and whether or not they’re good translations of the original, but you get the idea. One detail that is worth noting is that, at the end, the reading says that the fourth commandment also applies to guardians, in cases where the biological parents are dead. It doesn’t use the words step-parent or adopted parent, but it’s pretty clear that those types of parents are included too. A parent is a person who does a parent’s job.
It makes sense that little children should honor and obey their fathers and mothers: little children have no judgment, but their parents presumably have at least some. But the fourth commandment doesn’t say, “honor your parents while you’re a child, and then you can stop that when you get older.” It says, “honor them.” The implication is that we’re meant to respect and perhaps even defer to our parents as long as they live. There are a number of passages in the Word that suggest that we’re to have a basic, universal respect for our elders. The story that was read to the children is one of them (1 Kings 12:3-15); and in Leviticus we’re told, “You shall rise before the gray headed and honor the presence of an old man” (19:32). You could argue that this kind of deference to elders is mostly just a cultural thing, but the Lord does talk about it in a number of places in the Word.
However, it’s pretty obvious that even if we respect our parents our whole life long, our relationship with them changes as we grow, and what it means to honor them changes as we grow. In the book of Mark the Lord rebukes the scribes and Pharisees for failing to keep the fourth commandment, and the blameworthy thing that He specifically says they’ve done is teach people that it’s okay for them to give all their money to the temple, instead of setting some money aside to support their parents in their old age (7:9-13). In other words, the Lord says that caring for our parents, or supporting them (appropriately) in their old age is part of what it means to keep the fourth commandment. But when we’re little children that’s not what it means to keep this commandment. Little children should not be supporting their parents. The point is that the meaning of honoring father and mother evolves as we get older and our parents get older. And to a certain extent we’re called to use our own good judgment to figure out what it means to keep this commandment under our present circumstances.
As I said before, honoring father and mother isn’t that hard under ideal circumstances. But in practice it can be challenging—and that’s true whether we’re fifteen or fifty. The things that make it challenging to honor our parents can be divided into two main categories: stuff that’s our fault and stuff that’s not our fault.
The story about Rehoboam does a good job of illustrating the first category—the stuff that we’re responsible for that makes it hard for us to honor our parents (even though Rehoboam was disrespecting his elders and not specifically his father or mother). He got really good advice from the elders, who really did understand the situation better than he did, and he ignored it. He chose instead to kick the hornets’ nest, because his friends told him it was the awesome thing to do. And why did he ignore wisdom when he heard it? Well because he was a hothead, because he’d recently become king and he was drunk on the power, and because he thought he knew better. One of life’s big lessons that we all have to learn is that we don’t know better—not all the time. Probably not even most of the time. The Lord has put people who are older and more experienced than we are into our lives for a reason. In the Heavenly Doctrine we read that:
It is the mark of genuine wisdom for a person to see from the light of heaven that what he knows, understands and perceives is so little in comparison to what he does not know, understand, or perceive, as to be like a drop in the ocean, and so scarcely anything. (AR §875.4; v. EU §37; TCR §387; AE §739.10)
If what we know is a drop in the ocean, then we have no business refusing to learn—refusing to listen to people who might know things we don’t know. Especially if those people are older than we are and have had more time to figure things out (and of course listening to someone doesn’t mean you have to agree with them). No matter how old we are, our parents probably have something to teach us; and in any case, the Lord tells us to honor them. If we can’t do that because we’re hotheaded like Rehoboam, then that’s on us.
But nobody’s parents are always right. Nobody’s parents are perfect—and sometimes parents don’t do their jobs very well at all. So we come to the second category of things that can make it hard for us to honor our parents: the stuff that’s not our fault. Part of leaving childhood behind is recognizing that our parents never were perfect. We come to see their limitations more and more clearly. Some of those limitations are easy to forgive, but some are not. In the most extreme cases, parents do horrible things to their children. How do we honor father and mother when we’re confronted with our parents’ flaws?
In this context it’s important to note a detail from the opening reading from True Christian Religion: the readings says that parents do their duties as parents, “because of the love they have from the Lord, in whose place they act” (§305; cf. SH §3183). Parents act in the Lord’s place. Now it’s important to understand what this means. It doesn’t mean that anyone’s parents are godlike. We’re talking about what to make of bad parenting, and the last thing to believe when our parents are parenting us badly is that they’re being like God. Far from it—that’s when they’re the least like God. The point is that the Lord asks fathers and mothers to do His work—to act in His place. Fatherhood and motherhood are actually His jobs, but He lends those jobs to people on earth for a time.
This means that fatherhood and motherhood aren’t really, permanently attached to anyone on earth. And people can’t really make themselves fathers or mothers: they become fathers or mothers when the Lord calls them to act in His place. And they only really act as fathers or mothers when they do the job the Lord has given them the way He means it to be done. Fatherhood belongs to the Lord, and motherhood belongs to His church, or His kingdom. The fourth commandment isn’t about honoring human beings and their flaws: it’s about honoring roles that come from the Lord. We’re asked to honor our earthly father and mother to the degree that they faithfully carry out the roles that the Lord has given them. If they disdain or abuse those roles, we can’t honor them for that.
It’s important to understand that parenthood doesn’t truly belong to anyone on earth. The Lord is the one who makes people parents—and this is true in a very concrete way. A man and a woman can try to have a child, but conception itself is something that they don’t control. That new life that takes hold in a woman’s womb is a spark that only the Divine can ignite. Children are a gift from the Lord, and parenthood goes with that gift. The same is true of the love that characterizes parenthood—it’s from the Lord, we don’t “make” it. We turn now to our second reading from the Heavenly Doctrine, which is also on the back of the handout [read ML §391].
So the Lord wants to protect what He’s created, and He does this by implanting His love in fathers, mothers and nurses—everyone who has charge over children. The reading says that people aren’t generally aware of this, because they don’t generally feel the Lord’s love flowing in; but it says that if we think about it, we’ll realize that this has to be the explanation for the kind of love that parents feel. Where else does love like that come from? From nature? From sunshine or dirt or chemicals in our brain? How could fathers and mothers love so much if there weren’t something heavenly moving into them and shining through them? And to the degree that our earthly fathers and mothers have received that love, they should be honored. To the degree that they’ve faithfully acted in the Lord’s place, they should be honored. Every good thing that they’ve done for us is ultimately something that they’ve done on the Lord’s behalf; and in a deeper sense, it’s something that He has done through them. And the Lord, and His goodness, are worthy of all of our honor and our gratitude.
If we lift our minds to the deeper meanings of this commandment—the spiritual and celestial meanings—then the thought of our earthly parents fades away, and the Father whom we’re meant to honor becomes the Lord and the Lord alone. We’re told in True Christian Religion that in the spiritual sense, our Father and mother are God and the church (§306); and in the celestial sense, our Father and mother are the Lord and the communion of saints—the church that transcends time and space, the church that’s symbolized by the Lord’s bride (§307). So the spiritual and celestial meanings of this commandment are essentially the same; it’s just that the celestial meaning, which is deeper or higher, involves a clearer and more personal idea of who God is and what His church really is.
In the book of Matthew He says, “Do not call anyone on earth your father; for One is your Father, He who is in heaven” (23:9). We’re told in the Heavenly Doctrine that this wasn’t said for our benefit, but for the benefit of angels in heaven (TCR §306). While we live in this world, we’re allowed to call our earthly parents father and mother. But in heaven they know no father or mother besides God and His church (ibid.). The way it’s meant to go is that in the end—in the very long run—the authority of our earthly parents will fade, and they’ll become more and more like brothers and sisters to us, and together we’ll acknowledge the Lord as the one who gave us life; the one who’s raised us, taught us and provided for us all along. He is our Father in the heavens; every other parent simply acts in His place, for a time.
Amen.