The wedding program was beautiful. The font was elegant. The typesetting was appealing. The liturgy had theological symmetry. It would be a keepsake to cherish for years to come. Yet with all its lovely detail, there was an omission of some significance
.[1] Our beloved friend and minister had reviewed our wedding program and observed that Rachael and I had forgotten something. Now you can imagine after months of planning a blushing bride and groom standing at the altar in front of all their family and friends and being told by their minister that their wedding program was misleading. Rachael panicked wondering what it could possibly be that we had left out of our wedding program. Well, we listed the name of the church; the time of the wedding; the list of the wedding party. But no where did it announce the funeral that must precede our wedding festivities.
Yes, we neglected to tell our guests that there would be two services on our wedding day: one a funeral and another a wedding. In fact the title of our wedding homily was, “The Funeral at the Wedding.” The Gospel text we selected for the most romantic occasion of our lives? John 15:9-17.
The point was that without dying to self first we would not know the joy of committed marital love. To love is to be willing to die for the one you love. To risk and give one’s life for the good of another. You’ve heard it said, “til death do us part.” This funeral before the wedding idea meant that “without death, we will part.”
And so before we could be alive to each other we would have to have a funeral to put to rest selfish preoccupations and lift up the well-being of each other. Well crafted rhetoric; a sermon full of wisdom, actually. But it’s just hard to hear funeral language when it’s your wedding day.
Why did we choose a text that was part of Jesus’ farewell discourse?! It was a day for romance, not realism!!
Yet what is real in John 15 is what’s most beautiful of all. Consider Jesus’ words again: 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…but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father.
Without a proper understanding of friendship, we don’t know how to care for each other. A friend said it poignantly this week: John 15 is the closest Jesus gets to explaining atonement. If we don’t get friendship, we’ll never understand what it means for Jesus to die for you and for me.
So why don’t we spend more time talking about what it means to have and experience life-giving friendships?
Sometimes it’s so hard to say what you really want to say to people; especially to those you love the most. To capture all the nuances of feelings and emotions and thoughts that run through your body and brain and put them in a single word or sentence. Like saying it all just right in a wedding speech or trying to remember your wedding reception; all your friends’ faces and what you wish you could’ve said to them; or the grateful silence you feel as you walk the graduation line and remember everybody who helped you get there; or all the things you wished you could have said to your spouse or a parent or a friend before they died. You want to hold on to your memories fiercely as possible.
Seems Jesus is trying to make sure his friends know exactly who he is and how he really feels about them. He is saying again what he said in so many countless ways and words before.
Except this time Jesus knows he is in a heap of trouble. Ever since Jesus raised his friend Lazarus from the dead, the chief priests and Pharisees planned to put him to death; a high price to pay for a radical act of friendship.
With the hour of his death looming, Jesus gives a eulogy of his life. We get to overhear this intimate scene among friends. Jesus is trying to say goodbye hoping his words can get through to them. Shifting in his seat trying his best to listen and not talk is Jesus’ friend, Simon Peter who earlier in John’s Gospel had said to Jesus, “I will lay down my life for you.” Jesus said, “You say you will lay down your life for me, but before the cock crows, you will have denied me three times. But Jesus keeps talking, “I have called you friends.”
Only a little while later (John 18) Peter is spotted around the campfire of a Jerusalem courtyard answering the accusations of his friendship with Jesus once: I do not know him. Twice. I am not one of them. Third time: I don’t know what you are talking about.
And Peter’s words betray his heart and Luke says he went out and wept bitterly. But you might recall after Jesus resurrection (John 21), Jesus shows up on the shore to meet Peter and the other disciples for breakfast. And when they had finished their bread and fish, Jesus turns and asks Peter, “Do you “love” me unconditionally? (Agape, God love, unconditional love). Peter responds, “Yes, Lord, you know you’re my friend. (Friendship love). Jesus asks him a second time, “Peter, do you “love” me unconditionally? Again, Peter says, “Yes, Lord, I’m your friend.” Finally, Jesus says, “Peter, are you my friend?” “You know I am your friend,” Peter says.
Jesus was looking for Agape, but all Peter could offer was filial love—friendship kind of love. I always thought it was Jesus condescending to Peter’s capacity to love (from agape to fileo). But maybe Peter needed Jesus to tell him after all they had been through, through the pain of Peter’s betrayal, they were still friends. Peter was asking Jesus, “Can we still be friends?” And even more, Peter wants to hear Jesus say, “Yes, Peter, we are still friends.” Peter wanted his friend back!
Where would Peter have been without Jesus’ deep friendship? Can you imagine what your life would be like without the people who welcome you back even when you’ve messed up? People who believe the best in you even when you’re riddled with guilt and anxiety about yourself?
To have no experience of what it’s like to be freely chosen and freely loved in friendship, we will have a hard time trying to figure out how to love strangers very well.
Without a genuine experience of friendship, we do not know how to reach out to our neighbors.
And yet we tend to talk more about servant-hood than friendship in the church. Maybe we don’t talk about friendship as much because so few of us really experience it.
It’s easy to drive alone to work each day; to sit in our offices and cubicles and never really connect to anyone. Then drive back home at night just in time to help the kids with homework, throw dinner together and gather ourselves to do it again tomorrow. The fast-paced world is lonely. Yet we live in a culture starved for community and friendship. In this friendless, competition-oriented world, we need friends. We can’t be fully human without friends.
So what makes for a genuine friendship anyway? What really brings people together?
Aristotle defined friendship in 3 ways:
a. Friendships based on pleasure. These are relationships in which people may share common interests like Mavericks basketball or they may go to the same gym or share the same political opinions
b. Then there are friendships based on use: like, “what can you do for me? Can my professional or social life be better by associating with you? What can you do for my image?
c. Finally, there’s a friendship based on character. Such a friendship has a quality of soul and mutual commitment to love and honesty; the giving of oneself for the good of another in spite of differences of opinions, income, race, imperfections, or personal history.
This friendship based on character has more to do with the nature of Jesus’ friendship. Friendship with Jesus is a relationship based on character rather than convenience.
Friendship based on character is what our souls really long for today; the quality of loyalty and presence with a person; those ones who respect us for who we are and accept us for who we are.
And we learn what it is to truly serve others through our friends. We know what it means to be freely chosen and loved through our friends. Through our friends we discover what it means to share “the sweet communion of life”
[2] even when life is more sour than sweet. The “sweet communion of life” is lived in the company of people who see your warts; people who know your hang-ups and who love you through them anyway.
Look around your life. Who are you with when you feel most yourself? When you commit to serve your fellow friends at Wilshire in some way, what is it you enjoy doing the most?
It’s easy to believe we choose our friends as easily as we choose our hobbies. Maybe we become friends with others because we are about the same age. Maybe it’s because we live in the same neighborhood or went to the same college.
An assigned seat in English 101 or a chance meeting on an airplane; these are some of the ways we “make” friends. But it seems like we do very little of the “making.”
[3]In his book, The Four Loves, C.S. Lewis says there are no chances when it comes to friendship. Christ, who said to the disciples “Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you,” can truly say to every group of Christian friends “You have not chosen one another but I have chosen you for one another.”
All our loves are preceded by Christ’s love for us, which is our first love. So the ways we love must be measured by the way Christ first loved us: as friends rather than servants.
Being a real friend is harder than being a servant. When you are a servant, you work for somebody else. You clock hours. You punch in at 8:00 o’clock and punch out at 5:00. But friendship is closer to being on-call 24/7. It is not so much a role you play but a relationship you relish. It’s hoping and praying and wanting the good of the other as much as you want it for yourself. It’s driving your friend to get his cancer treatments when he’s too scared to go alone. It’s listening to your aging parent talk about the weather when you’ve got a million other things to do. It’s being loyal to your best friend when she’s in a whole heap of trouble and has no one to rely on except you.
So may our friendships lead to God’s work being done…for the good of others and for our own good. If it’s not exactly romantic, it is nonetheless real. And where two or three friends are gathered, there Christ is with them…and with us all. Amen.
Special note: Thanks to The Reverend David J. Wood for his insights and conversations that contributed to this sermon. His book on friendship is forthcoming next year.
[1] With thanks to Dr. Brad R. Braxton’s sermon, “The Funeral at the Wedding,” 23 April 2005.
[2] A phrase associated with the philosophy of Marsilio Ficino.
[3] Daniel, Lillian, “Sustaining Pastoral Excellence—The Rough Edges of Holy Friendship.”
under the chosen Sunday to hear audio of sermon (mp3 format) (beginning March 11, 2007).
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