John 15:9-17
Jesus said to his disciples, “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love. I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete.
“This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father. You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name. I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.”
One of the most poignant times for me in any funeral liturgy here at St. Paul’s occurs in the opening procession. Gary sounds three bells from the choir loft and the congregation rises and turns toward the entryway where those of us who are servers are gathered. We then begin a slow walk towards the altar—slow because we’re not singing a hymn or listening to instrumental music but because we’re walking to the rhythm of words, words drawn from the Gospel of John and the Book of Job,
“I am Resurrection and I am Life,” it begins, “Whoever has faith in me shall have life, even though he die.”
And so we go, step by step, phrase by phrase, asserting resurrection in the face of someone’s death, a trustworthy God in the face of what has often been a grief-filled experience for some husband, some mother, some partner, some son or daughter, some dear friend.
But the big moment for me comes when the procession finally reaches the foot of the altar and these are the words we hear:
“As for me, I know that my Redeemer lives
and that at the last he will stand upon the earth.
After my awaking, he will raise me up;
and in my body I shall see God.
I myself shall see, and my eyes behold him
who is my friend and not a stranger.”
What is it like to think of God, to be open to God, to be in the presence of God, to allow our lives to be shaped by a God who is a friend and not a stranger?
This surely must have been some of what the disciples in our gospel lesson for today were trying to wrap their minds around as they listened to Jesus describing the kind of relationship God wanted to have with them, a relationship summed up in the word “friend.”
These words come from what many call the “Farewell Discourse” in the Gospel of John—Jesus’ final comments to his own before his betrayal, suffering and death, a time when he is doing his best to help the disciples “get it” before he leaves them.
And so he talks about love and connection, God’s love for him, his love for them and their love for one another. But he also uses the simple, powerful and, I might add, counter-cultural image of friendship to describe how God has related to them and what God asks of them as they relate to each other and engage a world that may not always be friendly.
God does not want slaves, but instead wants companions and friends.
God wants friends who within an intimate, risky, truthful and costly friendship will be lifted up, and dignified, will walk the earth as people who have been chosen as friends by God, who no longer wonder whether they are worthy because they have been made worthy.
God does not want slaves, but instead wants companions and friends.
God wants friends who within an intimate, risky, truthful and costly friendship will organically be changed into those capable of befriending each other in much the same way—capable of intimacy, capable of taking the risk of speaking the truth in love, capable of spending their energy in befriending rather than on abandoning, objectifying, or oppressing others.
God does not want slaves, but instead wants companions and friends.
For those of us who for a moment have experienced that kind of friendship—real, intimate, and truthful: a friendship that chooses us, that does not abandon us or seeks to enslave us, for those of us who have experienced this, the idea that this is how God wants to be for us may come as an astonishing idea. For it takes away the distance between us and God, it takes away our ability to hide or to get away with making nice, it takes away our ability to remain unaffected or unchanged by the relationship.
God does not want slaves, but instead wants companions and friends.
And so this morning despite our astonishment, despite our resistance to the idea, despite our inability to imagine it because we have not been fortunate enough to have such a friend in our lives, despite all these things, imagine for a moment, if you can, that God is this: the kind of friend who knows you better than you do yourself, the kind of friend who will tell you the truth and will not leave you, the kind of friend whose presence brings your best self out of you over and over again, the kind of friend who after you are with him or her, you feel more real and more human, more able to befriend your own life, more able to be such a friend to others.
God does not want slaves, but instead wants companions and friends.
Some months ago at a gathering of the consulting network for the Diocese, one of the consultants led the group in an exercise in which we all wrote a few paragraphs describing “This I believe.” Many people have been doing this over the past few years because of the National Public Radio initiative in which people—famous and not so famous—have been asked to write or speak about such statements.
I thought and I thought about what to write, aware that I wanted to say something significant—I suppose that’s what many feel when they are asked to do this.
I wrote my two or three paragraphs—scratching out words and phrases, looking for just the right way to express what it was that I believed.
We then went around the circle and shared what we had written. Most were heartfelt and spoke to deeply held values around community, collaboration, creativity and the love of God.
Our own Alissa Newton who was there spoke about friendship—it’s importance in her life I remember feeling a pang when I heard it because I had not chosen anything that I believed was so immediate or real. Rather, I had striven for some overarching big picture statement about what I believed.
This was my opening sentence. “I believe the facts are friendly.”
What I meant by this was not that the facts of our lives are always easy to bear or understand, but that somehow I do believe the stuff of our lives—the relationships that come to us and the relationships that end, the work that we are given to do and the work that is at times over, the joys, the aches, the pains, the despairs, the insights, the information, the feedback, the weather, the challenges—all these things come to us or can come to us in a friendly way, in a way that can not only be acceptable but truth-revealing, gift-bearing, compassion-building and life-giving.
I did not say it then but I will say it now, that back of this idea that “the facts are friendly” is some kind of theology of God as an immense befriending energy or personality who reaches towards us in the silence of our hearts and in all the circumstances of our lives, a befriending energy from whom all things flow, beside whom we walk as companion and friend and through whom we become capable to be a companion and friend to the world.
