Memorial United Methodist Church

Memorial United Methodist Church
White Plains, New York 10605

de Amicitia – On Friendship

A Sermon by Joe Agne, Pastor
Based on John15:9-17
May 17, 2009 (Not edited or proofread)

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John 15:9-17

⁹As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. ¹⁰If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love. ¹¹I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete. 12 ‘This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. ¹³No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. ¹⁴You are my friends if you do what I command you. ¹⁵I 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. ¹⁶You 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. ¹⁷I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.

I like today’s passage from the Gospel of John. In it we find three essential affirmations for living fully: we are loved, we have friends and we are chosen. Let’s look at the original setting. Jesus is talking to the closest disciples. It is Thursday night. The next day he will die in a form of state terrorism. The purpose of crucifixions was to end the life of the leader of any resistance movement and to let the rest of the movement know what will happen to them if they keep living in the nonviolent, non-Ceasar-following way. These people had all left their jobs to be in this new community of Jesus. They left their homes and families. They had staked everything on the promises of new life, of really mattering in the world. They had found meaning. It was all ending. Soon they would lose everything and have to start over. Maybe it was like losing a job, a home, health insurance, a retirement plan in 2009.Whatever security they had was gone. Their shared meaning was challenged. Jesus, soon be gone from among them, had some things to say.

We Are Loved

The first thing Jesus says is “God loves you and I love you.” There is almost a parenthesis passage after it that says, “And there is nothing you can do about it.” This is the gospel. We are loved by God no matter what. It is unconditional. Nothing can separate us from the love of God – not failure, not lost love, not diving stock markets, not lost investments, not incredible debt, not children or parents going incommunicado, not a lost job, not loss of health, nothing. People who want to sell things to us will tell us what we have to obtain to be lovable. People who want to manipulate us will tell us what we have to do to be lovable. They are liars. We are lovable --every single one of us. That’s the gospel. No one can take this away. We can’t give it away. We can’t bargain it away.

We have friends

For some reasons -- I’m not sure what -- we lose the affirmation of this passage as we tell the story of Jesus. Jesus says, our relationship with him and with each other is “friends.” We are not master and servant. We are friends. Jesus obliterates hierarchical relationships. None of us is to have dominion over another. Earlier some of his friends had tried to “Lord it over” the other friends trying to get Jesus to name them to a special place in relationship to him. Jesus told them to knock it off. Jesus and his friends spent their three years together fighting the domination system of the Roman society. Now Jesus says, “Don’t you get it? I want to be your friend, not your Lord. I want you to be friends of each other.” I have convened over ten men’s sharing groups in my life. At some point in all of them we have been perplexed about what a friend is. For some reason, it is difficult for many men to have friends. I don’t want to tell you I can analyze why this is so. I just know that friendship, for me, is an essence of life. I might go so far as to say that to live without a friend is to live without full life. I have a friend who I wronged at one point of our life. Our relationship ended. It was mostly my fault. We met and ended our relationship. My friend said to me, “If you ever want to pick up our friendship, at any time, I will do so.” I didn’t pay much attention to that comment at the time. For the next ten years, I saw my former friend twice. I went to his mother’s funeral and his father’s funeral. We spoke a bit at each but we didn’t reconnect. After ten years I called him and said I wanted to pick up our relationship. I wondered whether he would be willing. He was and we did. What had he done that was the heart of our friendship? He kept his word. He said he would pick up our friendship when I was ready and he did.

What is a friend? According to Jesus, it is someone for whom we would lay down our lives. There are times when we actually have an opportunity to lay down our biological lives for another. There are people in history that have done so. We read of people in the news occasionally. Some of us can name persons who may have done so for us. This is the ultimate, an ultimate that almost puts Jesus’ definition of friendship outside of the realm of consideration for most of us. So let me ask some penultimate questions: For whom might we lay down our calendars? For whom might we lay down our resentments? For whom might we lay down our importance? For whom might we lay down our acquisitions? You get my questions. I am asking what are our relationships that Jesus would call “abiding in love.

We are selected

Almost all of us have stories from our lives of the painful process on playgrounds, in school, in work settings, in love, and in all kinds of life situations when we have not been selected. I can remember “girl’s choices” at sock hops when I would not be asked to dance, jobs offered to others, awards not received, conversation exclusions, loves lost. You have some of the same stories. I don’t have a very good memory so it is hard for me to remember the pain of not being selected. Others have very good memories and can relate all the times they have been left out in their families, in school, in the community, in so many places. Sometimes we choose places we want to be selected and we are not chosen. It can really hurt. Jesus understood this and he said to his closes friends. I selected you. You didn’t select me. I have chosen you to be my friends. As the story goes Jesus is saying the same to each of us. This is why hospitality is everything in a church. When we welcome someone on a Sunday morning, whether we have known them forever or are first meeting them, we are conveying the message of Jesus, “I chose you.” Each Sunday -- in our outer narthex where we come in, in our worship neighborhood time, in our coffee hour we are rehearsing for each other the message from Jesus, “I chose you.”

Jesus says to those closest to him, on his last night with them, “I love you. You are my friends. I have chosen you. He says the same to us. We can pass on the message to others.