Sermon: “Friends of God,” May 9, 2021
Korean War Memorial Epitaph, Brockville, ON
Preacher: The Rev. Ryan Slifka
Scripture: John 15:9-17
Back in elementary school my friend’s dad was a local Calgary newscaster. They lived in the fancy part of our neighborhood—on the lake. Big house. They had a projector screen to watch movies when you could only buy a 21-inch tv. It’s like I entered into a whole other world.
The thing that impressed me the most, though, was the fact that my friend’s parents were friends with legendary Calgary Flames hockey great Lanny McDonald.[i] This may not seem like a big deal to you. But for a hockey-obsessed kid my age in early 90’s Calgary this guy was larger than life. Just how wealthy and impressive did you have to be, I thought, to be this guy’s friend? A height I’d never reach. He was just too famous, too talented, too cool. People like him, I thought, just aren’t friends with ordinary people like me.
Now, obviously my sense of relative fame and importance back then was a little off. The likelihood of friendship with a local hockey player wasn’t quite that impossible. But I had a point. Certain people are in a class, a league, a category out of the reach of relationships with the great swath of humanity. No one here is about to go to a Toronto Blue Jays game with Justin Trudeau. There’s no craft beers with Beyonce or chili dogs at the Nascar Rally with Bill Gates, unless it’s some passing parade or carefully choreographed media event. We may be able to get a job cleaning one of their many houses, but that’s as close as it gets. They have more important things to do, and more influential people to see than us. Some human beings are simply beyond us, a cut above the rest, precluding any kind of direct interaction. Let alone friendship.
It’s the nature of things when it comes to famous, influential, and powerful people. That is, except for the most famous, most influential, most powerful (depending on your definition of power) human being in all of history—Jesus Christ.
“I do not call you servants any longer,” Jesus says. “I do not call you servants 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.” Not servants, but friends.
Now, as a culture we’ve been stewing in Christianity for so long that this doesn’t get our spiritual Spidey senses tingling. The idea that a powerful person shouldn’t discriminate against a weak person is just a given for us.[ii] But in John’s gospel, it is a big deal, huge deal, in fact. Because Jesus isn’t just an influential dude. He’s God in the flesh. The Creator of the universe touching down, the center and Source of all things embodied. In importance, influence, power, status, God is at least a tier above Joe Biden, Oprah Winfrey or Jeff Bezos. At least two tiers above Lanny McDonald.
And who are God’s friends? Jesus doesn’t start with the religious authorities, or the Roman governor, or the King. Not even the priests and ministers. He bypasses them all. And who does he befriend, but twelve-plus ordinary, nothings, nobodies without a single dollar to their name or a drop of political influence.[iii] And this is crazy because in Jesus time—and indeed through most of history—the divine didn’t really do this. The god or gods would be intimate with kings or high religious officials. Not as friends, even, but as servants. Gods at the top of the pyramid, then kings, then nobles and then the rest of us. That’s the chain of importance. But Jesus goes to working people, to women. To soldiers, to tax collectors and sinners of all kinds. It’s like Lanny giving my family and I box seats and insisting on coming over for dinner every Sunday. It’s like the Pope leaving the Vatican to play cards with some dingy old guys in the slums or Rome. Like Xi Jiping sitting down to watch Netflix and share a pizza with a family of Uighurs. Jesus has got friends in low places.[iv] Not people just to do his bidding, but to share the very life of God with. Not slaves, not servants, but friends.
And maybe the most astounding thing is that they don’t do anything to earn this friendship. I mean, you might assume that these people were drawn to Jesus. They sought him out. They worked their way into Jesus’ good graces. A rags to riches story where someone’s cunning, or hard work, or moxie caught the eye of the talent scouts. But really, among his disciples Judas betrayed him and just about everyone else abandoned him when the hammer came down. The people who usually think of as close to God are people who are holy or mystical, or good kind courageous people. But no, Jesus says. “You did not choose me… I chose you.” Jesus chooses his friends based not on whether they come looking for him, but he goes looking for them. He chooses his friends, based not on their merit, or their holiness.
What does he choose his friends based on, then? Why, love, of course. But not just any kind of love.
I’ve said this in like, half a dozen sermons, but when the Bible talks about love that arena rock classic by Boston comes to mind: it’s more than a feeling. “This is my commandment,” Jesus says. “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.” The love that Jesus is talking about, is self-giving, sacrificial love. This is why you’ll see this scripture passage on memorials for soldiers across the English speaking world. Because Jesus isn’t just talking about the willingness to go for a beer on occasion, or just barbecues in the backyard, or Facebook friendship. The kind of friendship he’s talking about is absolute loyalty to that person. Absolutely loyalty to the point of death and beyond. Love through thick and thin. Nothing the friend does can negate it.
This is radical stuff that we just don’t get, because our culture has been so influenced by Christianity and texts like this. Even if we’re not important at all, specks on the big boot of history. Even if we are spiritually unimpressive and morally compromised. These are the people who Jesus calls his friends… we are the people who Jesus calls friends. The ones who he’s loyal to the point of death.
Which—if we truly get it—is good news for each of us. I mean, in a world where importance and worth are measured by who we know, and who our friends are. A world where our worthiness is measured by what we can do or accomplish. A world where the value of a human life is on a sliding scale. In a world like ours, I guess you could say that Jesus shows us that the Creator of the universe has incredibly low standards for friendship. That we may not be buddy material for our world’s best and brightest. We may not be productive, or attractive. We may be liars, cheaters, betrayers, people looking out for no one else but ourselves. And yet, the Creator of the universe has called us his friends, dying to save us, for no reason other than grace. No pre-condition other than prior love and loyalty.
“Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person,” says the Apostle Paul. “Rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die. But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.”[v] To put it another way we’ve been made the friends of God in spite of ourselves. To channel my inner evangelical—when all our other friends despise, and forsake us, even when we’re tempted to despair… what a friend we have in Jesus.[vi]
Of course, one thing about friendships is that there’s always a catch. Of course, there isn’t anything we could really do for God. Kind of like Lanny McDonald with the box seats—there’d be nothing I could do to pay him back. God is God, doesn’t need us to be God, we don’t add anything to God’s nature.
Jesus does say, though, that he chooses us that we may “bear fruit.” There’s that agricultural metaphor again. The friendship has a product in our lives. And that product is to love like Jesus loves. “You are my friends,” he says. “If you do what I command you.” Not love in general, but the very specific call to “love one another.” We show our friendship to God by letting God’s love work in and through us in befriending and loving God’s friends. Even those who we consider our enemies.
Not to love humanity in general, but to love another human being with that same sacrificial, self-giving love that is given to us in Christ. The way to respond to love is to love in return, the way to return God’s grace in practicing gratitude, is in delivering that grace to somebody else in the same way. Somebody who didn’t earn it, somebody who didn’t deserve it, somebody who can’t do something for us or pay us back. Not a single act of charity or random act of kindness or a soup or sandwich. But to befriend them, to lay down our lives for them in the same way we’ve been befriended by our Lord. And that is where he promises to bear fruit in our lives.
Which brings me, finally, to the importance of the church. Don’t get me wrong, Jesus elsewhere tells us to love our neighbors in the same way, to love the world in the same way. God is makin’ friends all over the place in and outside of the officially authorized boundaries of religion.
But the church, it's an absolutely dependable place to learn how to be a friend of God by truly befriending other people. The great theologian Stanley Hauerwas says that “Church is where you learn to love people who you wouldn’t even necessarily like.”[vii] And I testify to you that this is true. Nowhere else in my life have I seen and experienced this kind of love. It’s the church where I have seen sick people cared for by virtual strangers. People taking time to pray for troubled kids. Someone giving someone else big money to cover the bills, giving a place to stay when they’re just about on the street. Holding a hand at the bedside of someone who‘s dying. Putting up with us when we’re someone who’s hard to put up with, and insisting on loving us anyway. Somebody’s even cleaning somebody else’s bathroom! That’s what I call friendship!
And the beauty of the church is that it’s not race, or gender, or politics, or culture, or social class, or even moral goodness that brings us together. The only thing that brings us together is love. The only real reason we’re together is the fact that we’ve discovered that in Christ we’ve all somehow been befriended by the Creator of the universe, in spite of our own limitations and foibles. Where to the rest of the world we might be a write off, here we’re infinitely precious and worthy of love and affection because of the One who first loved us. And somehow through it all this God uses this to make us more loving, more like himself. I know what Jesus says here is true because the fruit’s right in front of my face. Even when we can’t be face to face.
So, my friends… Know this. Through no merit of your own, in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ you have been made forever friends with the Source of all that is. This friend will never forsake or leave you, having gone to hell and back again for your sake. And the only thing you gotta do in response is to love the other people he’s called as friends in the same way. There are plenty of places to start, but the easiest most reliable one might just be the least expected. The company of saintly sinners called the church. The body of Christ.
May you learn to love one another in the same way Christ has loved you. And in doing so may your life bear fruit, may you experience that bountiful harvest, that bumper crop we call grace. For you, for me, for the whole world.
AMEN.
[i] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanny_McDonald
[ii] While we’ve been taught that this is an outcome of enlightenment humanism and secularization, I believe the more compelling case is that this attitude is the child of Christianity. See Tom Holland, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World (New York: Basic Books, 2019) and the more combative David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). Here’s a review that provides a helpful summary of Holland’s book.
[iii] Though not as one of “the twelve,” John’s gospel appears to make the strongest case for the inclusion of women as disciples. Mary Magdalene is both the first to confess Jesus as the Messiah, and the first to be visited by the resurrected Christ.
[iv] Garth Brooks, of course.
[v] Romans 5:7-8.
[vi] Joseph Scriven, “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” Voices United: The Hymn Book of the United Church of Canada, #664.
[vii] Not sure where he said this!