In order to answer that question, I don't look to the military, however important that may be to keep our borders safe. I don't ask who's in office, which party is active. I don't even look to the economy or to the health benefits that are offered to our various people. I look where I think there is a significant and pragmatic answer. I look to the elderly, and I ask how are they doing? How are their children serving them? When they are very old and lying down, do their children come and sing them songs as once they heard those songs in their childhood? If the elderly are honored I say the signs are good. This nation may last, or any community you may be a part of including your congregation or your church or your neighborhood. It will last in so far as the generations don't split as one generation learns how to serve the other, as long as the elderly are honored.

I'm drawing upon that one commandment both in the Hebrew scriptures and then renewed for us in Jesus which says, "Honor your father and your mother"C and here will be the result: this is pragmatic, you can measure it, it'll be real"Honor your father and your mother, that it may be well with you and then you will live long in the land." This is the one commandment that has overt and realistic consequences. Generation to generation will last in the land and so will the community.

Now I'd like to talk about that commandment a little bit. If you will allow me, I'd like to teach you something about it. In fact, I'd like to teach you three different words in it, so that we completely understand it, and then after that I'd like to tell you a story which becomes an example of this honoring.

Honor your father and your mother that it may be well with you and you may live long in the land. Please understand this is not a commandment to little children. And the first word in the commandment is not obey. It was always presumed even by God that parents should have the run of their children, that they should teach them how not to disobey. No, this is a commandment to the elderly children, to those who have grown up. And it regards their parents when they may be less than honorable in their own lives. "Honor them" means that when they seem dishonorable, without honor, that we ourselves bring honor unto them. It should be recognized that this honor doesn't always come from within the particular person. It comes from without, and how the people on the outside bring glory and blessing and honor and praise to this person.

Honor. In Hebrew the word honor has the feeling of weight to it. Its almost the same word as glory, when we talk about the glory of God, the weight of God. The commandment says deal with your parents as if they had the same weight as God. Carry them as if this weight were authoritative and important because they are the wisdom of the place even when they have forgotten wisdom. Honor them when they are dishonorable and they will be honored again, that it may be well with us. That word "well" is the same word that we get in Genesis at the creation. Do you remember after God created something and God said, "It is good." The same word: It'll be well with us, it'll be good with us, which touches the same feeling that God had at creation. And you should understand that Hebrew word for good isn't just an assessment, a mental balance of whether this fits or not to the specs that God had in mind, no. It's an emotional word. "Good!" you'd say. If you could imagine God saying, GOOD, it's a little bit as if God looked at what had been made and said, "Yes! That fit what I wanted," and delights in it.

Honor your parents that everyone may delight in the relationship and in the land, that the parents themselves may delight and know that goodness. That you will delight and the community will. Honor them, that you may live long in the land.

That word "land" means three things. It means that a people will continue in the territory where God has placed them, in so far as this honor continues between the generations. Land also means the soil. And it touches our work. In those days it was farmers. In these days you have a lot of work. Honor your parents that you may delight in your work, that it may be well with you in the work that you do.

And finally land means earth, existence. Honor your parents that you, the plural, you, the community, you, the church, you, the nation, may exist long, may continue to be. Honor, honor.

I have a friend named Melvin who lives in Wisconsin who taught me the meaning of this word Honor even when he didn't know he was doing it. Honor. Melvin and I went to the same school in Milwaukee. It was a boarding school, so we lived there. I used to go with him to the farm upon which his parents lived at breaks, on weekends, and I learned to love his family. His mother was a short, round woman with a beautiful, strong, flushed, red face. I worked for her in Milwaukee. She would bring potatoes and groceries and produce into the farmers' market, and I helped her sell it. Strong woman. People would come up to me and in German try to get the potatoes for cheaper than Mrs. Reimer wanted to sell them. But she would come and with her absolute German voice, stand firm and joyful, and sell the potatoes where she wanted, same price exactly. And the people didn't go away mad. I loved her. When I graduated Melvin did not. He had to go home and take over the farm and then finally watch his mother. It's in a rich territory so they have sold it off, five acre lots at a time, and they don't farm anymore.

In the fall I went to visit my friend Melvin, just when the air smelled wine-y and was bright and chipper. I knocked on the door and he answered the door, and I smelled cinnamon, apples. Apple pie I knew it was. I said, "Melvin, your mother has made an apple pie for us." He said, "No." He said, "I see to the necessary things now." I didn't completely understand what he meant, but he invited me into his house and he walked me to the room which they call the parlor, even yet and still. In the parlor his mother was lying on a bed. There was a chair where Melvin told me that he sits of a night with a small lamp over his right hand shoulder and half glasses so that he can read making almost no light where his mother lay back against the wall on the bed. He said he does this because she might need him and he doesn't want to be far away from her. Melvin. The man is wise. He is lean. He is well-kempt and very careful in all of his doings.

He introduced me to his mother as if we had never met before. "Mother," he said, "be pleased to meet Walter Martin Wangerin, my friend," which was odd to me because I had known her so well, until I walked to the foot of her bed and saw her face. She was smiling, beautiful teeth, smiling, but her face was as blank as a plate, and she wouldn't look me in the eyes. Her watery blue eyes looked down here in this region for me as if she were looking for something. When I put my hand forward to shake hands, she did raise her hand to me, and I took it, but it was as soft as putty and white as flour and I began to realize what Melvin was talking about. He sees to the necessary things. She said nothing. She didn't look at me. She didn't recognize me. She kept peering in this region until Melvin himself came over with a bowl of prunes and gave her prunes. She was happily chewing prunes with her very strong teeth as we left the room.

Well we went outside and walked the afternoon away. They have a little bit of old orchard left on their last five acres. And he talked how hard it was to keep things together on this farm, just the two of them, himself and his mother. He talked generally about nations and communities and I do believe that if presidents would, or if preachers would, they could gain wisdom from my friend Melvin.

We went in. He made supper for me. He shared some of his apple pie with me. And we said goodnight, and I went up to bed. About two o'clock in the morning I was awoken by a loud sound. It sounded to me like someone was in pain, like "Yaah, na na na nah!" I heard. And I shot out of bed without even thinking, put on a robe and went downstairs fast. Through the kitchen, into the parlor where the sound was coming, "Yaah, na na nah!" as if someone was being hurt horribly. I came into the doorway itself, and Melvin's low light was on, and as I stepped into the room I immediately thought I should not be there at all. Melvin was kneeling by his mother's bed. He saw me and invited me in and motioned me to his chair, and by a nod told me to sit, and I went and I sat in the chair. By the smell in the room I knew what Melvin was doing. He was cleaning the waste away of his mother. He was washing her and changing her diapers. My friend Melvin was keeping the commandment of God, honoring his mother. While he was doing it, he was singing, singing in the tongue of her childhood, in German softly. [Singing in German ] And then I understood something else, too. His mother was not in pain. His mother was in joy. She was also singing at the top of her lungs "Yaah, na na na nah!" and I have no doubt that the woman felt as beautiful as she did when she was a child running free in the fields with a yellow dress and with a ribbon in her hair.

When I am asked: How is the nation? What about the community? Will it last, Walt? Is it healthy? Then I think of Melvin, and I say the signs are good. When anyone of us with elders grant unto that elderly the honor of God so that God becomes the nexus between us and the older generation, then generation by generation we drop deep roots. The honor itself becomes the very stuff of our society. And yes, yes, we shall live long in the land that God has given us.

Lydia Talbot: Walter, a compelling, sobering reminder about honoring the elderly, to honor thy mother and thy father. But you must tell me about your own parents. How is that working with you and God is the nexus, as you point out, between you yourself and your parents?

Walter Wangerin: There are seven of us children. I'm the oldest. Presently my parents live in Canyon City, Colorado. My father is doing a long and slow recovery from some significant surgery that he had in the spring, but his mind is sharp. My mother's mind is also very sharp. At this point Dad is depending on Mom for a good deal of service and watchfulness himself.

Talbot: You say he's in a wheel chair?

Wangerin: Yes, he's learning how to get his legs back and to walk again, walk with a walker and all of us hope that off the walker then he'll finally have strength in his legs to walk on his own.

Talbot: The gift that our parents give to us, the connectiveness, the story, the living history in our lives, thank you for that wonderful reminder of what our task is as older children, as you put it. Not the commandment to the children, but to older children. Now Walter, I must ask you about this extraordinary book, The Book of God, your latest book just published in the spring. The book of the Bible as a novel, formidable assignment. How did you come to approach the Bible as a narrative?

Wangerin: Several answers. I think it has a lot to do with my father as a matter of fact, who used to tell us stories. He told us stories that he made up in his own mind on a Saturday afternoon. But when we were on the North Dakota plains, especially during Lent, my father would preach on Wednesday nights and speak as if he were Peter or as if he were Mary Magdalene, so that from the very beginning I saw the Bible as a continuous story, a relationship between God and the people, and a story which could very well invite me in so that I would experience it as well. That first, and then second I think that's how my father, and then my own training, saw what we call the holy history. It really is a narrative. The Bible is many things. It has wisdom literature in it. It has the Psalms in it. It has pure teaching in it, but all the way through is this thread of God's relationship with humanity and God's effort, some how or other, to draw humanity out of its own sin and back into heaven again. That's God's action. Action is experience. They are the story.

Talbot: Now, what's the creative process involved here? I mean, you're a master story teller, as we've seen, but the Bible is drama. Give us a sampling.

Wangerin: Well, I should tell that the process involved for me about ten years of genuine research, so I had some sense of how the people lived and how they dressed and what the building looked like and how the weather was, so that I could set a setting that the Bible does not tell us about. The second thing was, I would take cues from Hebrew words, and allow my imagination expansion. For example, David is called a ruddy boy first, and then a ruddy man, which has the implication of reddishness. And so when I described him, which the Bible doesn't do often is to describe the people. It says Saul is a tall man. I described him as having reddish hair and freckles and a light, a surprisingly light complexion for middle eastern peoples. So I took that cue. To add to that, in order, indirectly, to indicate that Jesus is a son of David, I carried over some of the characteristics of David, quietly, like the color of his eyes, and merely described Jesus that way, too, so that I could indicate the relationship.

Talbot: Biblical literature coming to life! Walter Wangerin, thank you for this, yet another gift from your creative genius. Thanks so much.