Friends of the Lord

 One Sunday morning at the end of the service I was standing at the door greeting people, when a little boy and his Mom passed me by.  When the little boy got to me he said, “Hi God.”  I extended my hand to him in the classic “high-five” manner, and I said, “Oh no, just call me Joe.”  He then turned to his mother and said, “Mommy, did you hear that?  God told me to call him Joe!” 

 The little boy was excited because “God” was friendly; God was personal and God had a first name.

The disciples of Jesus must have looked at one another with a similar expression on the day when Jesus said to them, "No longer do I call you servants....but you are my friends." "Master", “Rabbi” or some other clear term of respect was the accepted way for disciples to address their teacher. When Jesus told his disciples that they could call him their "friend," he was initiating and encouraging an intimate and personal form of address that crossed boundaries of class and protocol. And Jesus comes to us with the same offer of friendship.  Will we accept it?

This is both good news and bad news. It is special to have someone of authority, power and love consider us as a friend.   But it is also intimidating to have someone like that as a friend, because if we hang around a friend like that it is likely that some of who he is will rub off and on to us.  Good friends are bound to rub off on one another.  And if Jesus calls us his friends then he is bound to rub off on us.  Does Jesus rub off on you?  Do you spend enough time with Jesus that he even has an opportunity to rub off on you? 

I believe the kind of friendship Jesus offers is different than the everyday friendships of the world.  In the world we choose our own friends and generally we choose people who are like us in many ways: who think like us, look like us, enjoy the same activities and interests as us, etc.

But if we are friends of Jesus, it means that we are included in a very large circle of friends, and that we are called by Jesus himself to be friends with all of his friends.  One difference in the kind of friendship to which Christ calls us and the kind of friendship which is characteristic of the world is that the friendship of Christ is to be radically inclusive and undiscriminating. Christ means for us to get to know each other and to care about each other and to appreciate each other, not merely in spite of our differences, but in order that we may be enriched by our differences. Friendship in the world at large is generally exclusive and very discriminating. It is friendship based on similarities of opinion, taste and style.  But it is not so with Jesus Christ.  It is a friendship that dares to cross boundaries and to connect with those who are very different.  The circle of Jesus’ friends is very large and it crosses boundaries of race, ethnicity, nation, and social class.

Another difference is that we are called to display a kind of friendship that is deeper than that displayed in the world at large. Most of us have had the experience of being hurt by someone we thought was a friend. In the world at large, when people have that kind of experience, they feel free to shake the dust off their feet and let alienation and estrangement exist where friendship once existed. We do not have that freedom in the church. Jesus said, "If you are offering your gift at the altar, and while there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother and then come and offer your gift." (Mt 5:23)

I was sitting in a small group at a seminar somewhere and we were going around the circle doing a little exercise of finishing the sentence “Friends are…”  “Friends are…”  How would you complete the sentence?  I’ll never forget what one woman in the group said when it was her turn.  She said, “Friends are never apathetic.”

What she meant was that you can always count on a friend.  A friend is someone who is there for you in all circumstances of your life – good and bad; trouble and joy; success or defeat.  From the lips of Jesus we hear that a Christian is one who is a friend of Jesus.  A Christian is a person who is there for Jesus; an advocate for Jesus in the world.  A Christian is someone who is never apathetic when it comes to Jesus and his mission. 

For sure Jesus desire his friends to not be apathetic.  What may feel like a chore to do for someone else is a joy to do for a friend. You would never consider helping just anyone with a garage sale or loading a moving van or cleaning their house, but for a friend, by all means.  You don’t even think twice about it. You just do it!  

Good friends also choose to do things for the other that the other enjoys and appreciates.  Ask yourself, “What is it that Jesus enjoys and appreciates more than anything else?”  The answer is in our gospel passage this morning - that we “love one another.”  There is nothing of greater significance or value you can do for Jesus than that. 

 What is the opposite of love?  Most of us would say hate, and you wouldn’t be wrong.  But in my mind the opposite of love is not necessarily hate.  To me the opposite of love is apathy or indifference. 

I believe one of the greatest enemies to the witness of the church and to Jesus Christ is apathy.  When Christians are apathetic the image of Jesus Christ is tarnished. 

I saw a series of questions this week that are a kind of apathy scale developed by Professor Clayton Johnston who teaches ethics at Brentwood College in Canada. He asks his students to answer the following questions:

1. If a girl or boy was drowning beside you what would you do?
2. If he or she was 100 meters away, what would you do?
3. If you were a block from this child, what would you do?
4. If you were 3 blocks away and you heard that a child was drowning, what would you do?
5. If you were 3000 miles away and you heard that a child was drowning, what would you do?
6. If a girl or boy was drowning 10,000 miles away, what would you do?

What the series of questions does is keep pushing the crises farther and father away until we deem it is no longer our problem.  How far away does something or someone have to be before you decide it is not your problem?   How far does someone have to be from you when you deem love no longer applies?  How far?  However far it is, I call it the line of apathy or the line of indifference. 

The incredible thing about Jesus is he had no line of apathy – no line of indifference.  The pages of the gospels unfold with Jesus pursuing the sinners, the sick, the dying, and the outcasts.  Jesus said, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”    First of all Jesus was talking about himself, and his point is that no one is so far away from God, or so lost, of so forsaken, or so sinful that they are not included in his atoning death on the cross. 

The world we live in is very, very small and getting smaller every day.  In our kind of world there is no one that cannot be considered a next door neighbor.  

Not long before she died, Mother Teresa spoke to the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C. She was introduced to that gathering as "the greatest woman in the world." She dismissed that introduction by saying that if she were the greatest woman in the world, you would think that God would have made her tall enough to see over the podium behind which she was standing. But she went on to say,

“I am nothing close to being the greatest woman in the world, but I will tell you the greatest thing about my life. I've been able to be a tiny pencil in the hand of God, someone through whom God writes love letters to the world.”

Each one of us is a tiny pencil. What kind of letter will we write to this world?

Will you dedicate yourself this day to being a tiny pencil in the hand of God, someone through whom God writes love letters to the world? The letters of your life will spell something. What will they spell? I pray they will not spell apathy or indifference, but spell L-O-V-E for the sake of Jesus Christ who considers you to be his friend.