The largest hidden people group in Cincinnati

Cincinnati is full of old people. You just don't see them much. Because many have been ghettoized into nursing homes, removed from the rest of society.

Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the LORD your God is giving you. (Exodus 20:12)

Who are we supposed to honor?
The rule of Biblical interpretation is to begin with the most plain and simple reading of the text. At its base, this commandment is about how we treat our parents. We sometimes try to make it about other things, but at the most foundational level, this command is about how you as individuals treat your particular parents. People of my generation especially are tempted to interpret this command in other ways, simply to avoid taking any particular action.

We’re tempted to think the 5th commandment is mostly about an attitude toward old people.
“You like old people?”
“Yeah. Do you like old people?”
“Yeah.”
“Sweet, we kept the 5th commandment.” High five!

But it’s not quite that easy.
Listen to what Joy Davidman says:

Nowadays we sometimes like to get rid of the Commandments by broadening them into lofty moral sentiments too vague to apply in daily life. Thus “Honor your Father and mother” is often broadened into something like, “We have a collected responsibility for the aged,” which though perfectly true, can in practice be used to evade our individual responsibility for our own old folks – to justify treating our parents with the same cold benevolence we feel toward indigent strangers in a home for the aged. We plume ourselves on having eliminated selfishness and narrowness from the Decalogue by lifting it above the sphere of personal human contacts; but we have only eliminated reality, for all principles of conduct must come down in the end to the actual relations of flesh-and-blood people. And we have forgotten that the Commandments are not a set of divine ethical abstractions, but a set of quite practical rules for getting along in a very rough world. (Smoke on the Mountain, p. 61)

Your Own Parents
The simplest and most plain reading of the text is that you have an obligation to your parents. You have a divine mandate for honoring them. Part of the way you love and serve God, is by loving and serving your parents. “If you love me,” Jesus says, “then you’ll obey my commands” (John 14:21).

This is something I always tried to drive home with the teenagers when I was a youth pastor. You can have all the warm fuzzies in the world when the worship music is going, but that’s not the ultimate measure of your love for Jesus. Claiming to be on fire for God and having disrespect for your parents are mutually exclusive things. They don’t go together. They can’t go together. If you love God, you'll obey his commands.

The Elderly in our Society
But at the risk of getting too far a field from this primary meaning, I do think the 5th commandment has implications for our treatment of the elderly in general. We live in a culture that prizes youth and productivity to the point that the aged among us have been devalued and seen as burden, rather than as a treasure to society. We no longer revere our elderly and seek out their wisdom. The growth of nursing homes and assisted-living communities, while providing an important (and even necessary) health care service, has had a negative effect on our attitudes toward the aged by the very fact of drawing the elderly out of everyday society. It is now entirely possible as a young person to go months at a time without really encountering an elderly person. We are the first society in the history of the world where that is true. We go to jobs with people our age, hang out in our age-specific coffee-bars, and then on Sundays go to our increasingly more common age-specific worship services. It is myopic to think that this is not affecting the way we see and deal with the needs of elderly people.

This a great analysis of the situation from a friend of mine.

[Assisted-living communities] have the effect of drawing the elderly out of public life and into a separate world of their own, one which is often literally or figuratively at the periphery of society. Geographically and symbolically, many of the oldest citizens of this country live in isolation, left behind by a society that moves ever too fast for them to play any part in it. It is little wonder, then, that the elderly are often forgotten and lonely, as there is such a dearth of their presence in many communities. Especially in suburban communities where walking and public transportation are not common ways of getting around, seniors who lose the ability to drive are effectively barred from lifestyles that would allow them to mix with the general public. In some cases it would not be too extreme to say that the elderly are ghettoized in nursing facilities that are poorly run or where family members never visit. (Jessica Bratt, in a paper presented at Princeton Theological Seminary)

The aged have been moved to the edges of contemporary society. So much so, that I wonder how many of us are aware of the issues facing the elderly in our own midwestern cities. In a ten year period in the '90s, the number of officially reported domestic elder abuse cases rose by 150 percent, from 117,000 to 293,000 cases. Senator Christopher Bond estimates that (b/c many of these cases are unreported), there may be anywhere from 500,000 to 5 million victims of elder abuse (violence and mistreatment of elderly persons) annually. One man in Hamilton, OH was recently sentenced to life in prison for an attack on an elderly woman.

My point is that most of us are simply unaware of the loneliness and hardship and even danger that many aged people deal with daily in America. These people often cannot speak up for themselves. As you know, part of our role as the church is to serve and advocate for marginalized peoples . To borrow a term from missions, the elderly may be the largest “hidden people group” in greater Cincinnati.