Sunday, May 13, 2012

I Have Called You Friends

 John 15: 7-19



         “From now on, I’m calling you friends,” Jesus said in his farewell address.  “You are no longer my pupils or apprentices or servants.  No,  you are the friends I love and am willing to die for. You are likewise that same kind of friend to one another because we are energized and connected by the same Divine Love. So love one another just as I have loved you.  You are my friends.”

         I have 297 friends—on Facebook.  A paltry sum, really, in comparison to the more than 2,000 Facebook friends my nephew Patrick can claim.  Not that anyone’s counting.  Except that apparently someone is.  The grand total of our Facebook friends gets automatically tallied on our Facebook pages for all to see.

         Out of perverse curiosity, I checked yesterday to see if Jesus has a Facebook page.  Well, of course he does!  He has more than 20 pages under the names Jesus, Jesus!, Jesus!!, Jesus Christ, Jesus the Christ, Jesus Cristo, Jesus the Savior of the World, Jesus Christ the Son of God, etc.  There are thousands of FB pages ABOUT Jesus, but these are apparently the ones he personally maintains.  Which is proof enough for me of his omnipotence. I can barely keep up with two Facebook pages: mine and Open Table’s.  But now I’m wondering why Jesus hasn’t friended me on Facebook yet, given his explicit offer of friendship in John’s Gospel. I mean, is he just going to let it go at that?

         A recent  article in the Atlantic  titled “Is Facebook Making us Lonely?” begins with the horrifying story of Yvette Vickers, an 83-year-old former Playboy playmate and minor movie star whose neighbor recently discovered her body at least a year after the former actress had drawn her last breath. The belatedly inquisitive neighbor found Vickers’ mummified body near her computer, which was still on and glowing greenly in the dark room. The story of Yvette Vickers’ lonesome death went viral on FB. “She had long been a horror-movie icon, a symbol of Hollywood’s capacity to exploit our most basic fears. . . ; now she [has become] an icon of a new and different kind of horror: our growing fear of loneliness. Certainly she received much more attention in death than she did in the final years of her life. With no children, no religious group, and no immediate social circle of any kind, she had begun, as an elderly woman, to look elsewhere for companionship.”  Research later revealed that in months prior to her death, Vickers reached out virtually, not to friends but to distant fans who had found her on the Internet.  The author highlights the story’s irony this way: “Vickers’s web of connections had grown broader but shallower, as has happened for many of us. We are living in an isolation that would have been unimaginable to our ancestors, and yet we have never been more accessible.”[i]

         Maybe we have forgotten what people in Jesus’s day knew well, that friendship can determine our very survival. Earlier in the Gospel of John there’s a story of a paralyzed man who had no family or friends to help him reach the healing pool of Bethesda.  So Jesus spoke to him, related to him as a person--became his friend, if you will--and as a result became his healer.  Our own Rosemarie attributes at least some of her ongoing healing to your friendship that has included visiting, encouraging, loving, and praying for her. A New York Times article summarizes recent research on the health benefits of friendship—which statistically increases longevity, improves psychological well-being, boosts cancer survival rates, reduces coronary disease, and promotes brain health as we age. “Friendship,” says the author of one study, “has a bigger impact on our psychological well-being than family relationships.”[ii]

         One Bible scholar asserts that “making friends was the most important [task for the inhabitants of the communal biblical world]” (p. 190).[iii]  In contrast, Westerners in the 21st century are increasingly focused less on befriending others and more on networking for success. And when we use the word “friend,” we might mean it more casually and less committedly than did Jesus and his peers.  For us, friending on Facebook happens with a click.  Unfriending happens just as conveniently. 

         Even here at Open Table we are so steeped in our culture’s assumptions about friendship that we may not honor our relationships at church quite as we ought.  We may at times forget we are not a social club.  We are not an affinity group. We are not a civic or political group. We are not a nonprofit organization or business. We do not come together because we share in some strange habit or hobby on Sunday nights.  We are not in relationship because we necessarily LIKE one another. Our bonds lie in a shared friendship with Jesus. Though we do enjoy being together, the kind of love that forges relationships within a faith community is not based on liking one another.  It is based on the selfless love Jesus lived and that we are, with one another’s assistance, are trying to emulate. 

         As mutual friends of Jesus, you and I are also called to befriend the world.  We are called to lay down our very lives for our friends, the friends we know and the friends we’ve not yet met.  While few who follow in the Jesus way of friendship will be called upon to die for another, we are regularly challenged to live for others, often at the expense of our own individual wants and wishes. As friends of the type Jesus means, we hang in there when relationships get frustrating.  We try to think the best of one another. We speak our truth honestly but gently, empathetically, with enough self-knowledge to keep our own ego in check. We care less about being right and more about doing what is right for the other. We see the other’s happiness as essential for completing our own joy. We become friends to the friendless. It’s not easy to love in that way, but we believe that our friendships in this faith community and in the larger world are qualitatively different when they are grounded in the kind of loving friendship Jesus offered.

         What’s harder to wrap our minds around is the idea that you and I are friends of Jesus. A friendship with a person who lived 2000 years ago might feel as phony as those Facebook friendships with total strangers. A friendship with Jesus might sound like a 3-year-old’s relationship to his invisible friend.  But the community that composed the Fourth Gospel was trying to express their experience of continuing to “abide in” the love that Jesus embodied, long after he had lived on this earth. 

         Experiencing God’s-love-in-Jesus did not require the Johannine community to strive harder to love more or better. They instead lived trustfully and mindfully in that environment of love, a love that is likewise already and always available to us, too.  Rather than making spiritual growth into yet another challenging achievement or attainment, the mystical Johannine community said there’s one commandment—to love—and that difficult/effortless commandment both demands our whole lives and releases us into full joy. Written two generations after Jesus and written by one of the communities committed to The Way, the Gospel of John continues to invite new generations of Jesus followers to join an ever enlarging circle of friendship.

         I know it’s possible to extend this metaphor into silliness. Let’s not pretend to be BFF’s with JC.  But the poetry of John captures for us the comfortable intimacy of our mutual friendship with Jesus, which can in turn enhance or deepen the relationship between you and me.

         When I was a child, I attended a big family reunion at which I met for the first time some distant cousins in my mother’s large extended family. I was taken aback at the way these adults I’d never met before seemed to already know so much about my siblings and me, seemed so delighted to see me when they’d never set eyes on me. But I observed the way they loved on my mother, the only one of her siblings who lived outside the county in which they’d all been born and one of the few in the extended family who no longer lived in the state of Georgia.  I saw how tenderly they spoke her name, how eagerly they flocked to her and doted on her and told her children how special she was. “You're Molly’s oldest!” another relative would exclaim while embracing me.  I realized they loved me because they loved my mother. 

         God’s family is like that. The stranger on the street is someone we can love because we already love someone who is a friend to that stranger: Jesus, friend of all.   We are friends of one another when we are friends of God. We are friends when we abide in God’s love.

         Have you noticed how I address you at the beginning of each of my emails to the congregation? Yes. “Friends.”  I have called YOU friends.  Some pastors employ a churchier salutation:  “Dear Congregation” or “Sister and Brothers in Christ” perhaps.  But I have always loved the way Jesus calls his little congregation “Friends”—that simple term of affection.

         Some pastors-to-be are taught that their relationship to the members of the congregation is not primarily one of friendship. I have appreciated the lessons I received in maintaining appropriate boundaries in ministry: not showing favoritism toward some members, not transgressing moral boundaries, not self-indulgently burdening the congregation with my needs, not compromising my values in order to be liked, not becoming so chummy that the congregation sees the pastoral role as secondary to the friend role and therefore fails to avail themselves of real pastoral care in times of need.  You have many friends; you have one pastor.  I want to protect the primacy of that role—for your sake. 

         But I focus less on particular roles I play and more about relationships we build together, relationships grounded in God’s love.  All else flows from there.

         A story is told by John Phillip Newell about how the founders of a new religious community in Scotland visited an established monastery for a three-day retreat in preparation for starting their new community.  A wise old monk was going to teach them all the essential of community life throughout those three days.  On the first day the old monk shambled into the room and said, “Today I have just one thing to say: ‘God loves you.’ Now go away and think about that.”  And he left them to their contemplation.  On the second morning he again stood before them.  He announced, “Today I have just one thing to say to you.  ‘You can love God.’  Now go away and think about that.”  And off they wandered and pondered.  On the third morning, the wise old monk appeared again and said, “Today I have just one thing to say to you. ‘You are to love one another.’  Now go away and live this truth as a community” (122-123).[iv]

         You know, the sermon today could have consisted of these three sentences, punctuated by silence, concluded by action:  God loves you.  You can love God.  You are to love one another.   

Amen.



[i] Marche, Stephen.  “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely” Atlantic Magazine (May 2012). http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/05/is-facebook-making-us-lonely/8930/

[ii] Parker-Pope, Tara.  “What Are Friends For? A Longer Life” New York Times (20 April 2009). http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/21/health/21well.html .

[iii] Pilch, John. The Cultural Dictionary of the Bible. Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1999.           

[iv] Newell, John Philip.  A New Harmony: The Spirit, the Earth, and the Human Soul.  San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2011. 

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