God's Friends

People known as Christians are called to be Friends. Our commission, our way of being, our manner of life, is to be friends. Recently I signed up for Facebook – part of a technology craze that has included creating three new websites (including this one) for Trinity and our collaborators at Union and St. Luke’s in the last week. Stay tuned for next week’s Buzz from Trinity which will include links to those websites that survive Beta Testing. Through Facebook I connected with some long lost friends.

Facebook takes email to a whole new level. Once you electronically knock on someone’s door and if they agree to be your friend, you can write on your friend’s wall and they can return the favor. Everyone in your network of friends can stay in touch with the goings on of the whole web. I’ve been ‘friended’ numerous times by people I don’t know very well, people I might call acquaintances rather than friends. And yet isn’t that line pretty fuzzy? Once in awhile we fall in friendship at first sight, but generally friends grow on us.

Its been great to see posts from teenagers in the Youth Group at Christ Church Norwich Connecticut where I served last year. I’m getting to see what my colleagues from seminary are reading. I heard about the hate induced vandalism of a UCC Church in Santa Barbara California, where my friend Berkley is a campus minister. Apparently someone took issue with the church sign that read “A Family of Faith for Everyone”.

Being a family is what we treasure about Trinity. There are generations who have worshiped here, and who are still here in the pews today. Among us there are lots of kissing cousins. I think we would be telling the truth to our neighbors if we put on our sign that we are a Family of Faith For Everyone. But I think that Radical Hospitality calls us to live in love beyond our family. We are called, fundamentally, to be friends, to have a open and porous boundary about who belongs in our circle of love, to extend the good things we have – comfort, communion, a place at the table - to all.

In today’s Gospel Jesus changes the status of those who follow him. No longer do I call you servants … but I call you friends. In the Greek culture in which the Gospel according to John was written Friendship was a really big deal. It involved more than just congeniality. Your friends were your peers, or your patrons, the people who affirmed your place in the community, your social standing, your social location. Your friends had obligations to you, and you to them. You had your friends over for dinner. You extended your credit, and your life, for your friends. Friends were the ones you could count on to the end. No wonder the Religious folk were scandalized that Jesus hung around with sinners. No wonder Pilate turned white when the crowds, demanding the execution of Jesus, taunted him by saying “you are no friend of Caesar.”

Our status is not one up and one down, insiders and outsiders, our status is to be friends, companions of in joy and sorrow, focused on God’s world, and the work God calls us to do together. Our responsibility as friends of God, and Friends of God’s Earth, as well as Godly friends of each other is to Love as Jesus Loved.

Love like sunlight is essential to growth, to flourishing, but it has many qualities. The first rays of the day invite Morning Glories to open up. Bright hot noonday sun is essential for the Tomatoes to ripen. Brilliant Sunsets draw us away from our evening chores to stand in awe at the world God’s playfulness with color and texture and shape. CS Lewis describes the kinds of love humans experience in his book The Four Loves.

Affection (storge, στοργή) grows out of just rubbing up against each other. We can have affection for our obnoxious cousin Eddy even if sometimes we don’t like him very much. We can appreciate, tolerate, cherish someone in an affectionate way without wanting to spend all our waking hours with her. Affection comes with being woven into a place, a gathering, being part of a common history. Out of the times and places in which we are friendly true friendships can grow.

In the dance of life many of us are blessed with the love of a life partner. Eros (ἔρως) includes all the passion of the mating dance, the love that bonds two into one. The Love of God is a passionate love for you and me. The Love of God involves our whole being body, mind and spirit. Throughout history God’s embrace of us humans has been compared to the spark and sizzle that connects the Bride and the Bridegroom. Out of such passion new life is born. And God is always giving birth to New Possibilities. But we are not God. Creation does not start with us. We are invited to answer God’s knock on our door, to respond to God’s primordial passionate love of us, and to be God’s friend, to collaborate with God’s fecundity, God’s creativity.

The love of friends (philia, φιλία) is deeper than affection. It requires a common place, a common story but its not about the two friends. Lewis says that friendship has to be focused on a shared purpose. It only exists if it is about something other than the friends themselves. Friendship has been defined as the intimacy of looking together in the same direction. We deeply and truly befriend people who vote differently than we do, people whose soul hums a different tune, because we are woven into the web of the People of God, the Body of Christ. If any one of us drops out of the web, or is pushed out, the web is wounded and damaged. If one of us falls out, there is a hole in the web God is weaving. Filia or loving friendship makes demands on us to be careful and gentle and to speak the truth as we see it in love, knowing that each one of us only has a patch of truth, not the whole truth. Becoming friends helps us grow from casual affection for another person to whom chance connects us, into deeper commitment to the others to whom God connects us.

In the Gospel we read today Jesus commissions his followers, his friends, to work together in the quality of love that can grow into (agapē, ἀγάπη) the outpouring of self. The community of saints including – St Francis and St. Elizabeth of Hungary – illustrated behind the High Altar in our church – lived this life that Jesus invites. It is possible. And Thanks be to God, we have this web of friends here today, and connected to us through time and space to keep us company as we listen for God’s voice, God’s knock on our door, God’s question: Will you be my friend? AMEN