John 15:9-17 (Acts 10:44-48)
May 5, 2024
When Zach was in second grade, I
went to pick him up from school and I had a chance to chat with his teacher. I
didn’t get to do that very often because pick-up time was usually organized
chaos. But this particular day was different, so his teacher and I were talking
about how he was doing in school, his abilities, and his struggles, etc. She
commented to me that it was such a treat for her to see friendships develop
between the kids. Zach and another little boy in the class were becoming good
friends, and they spent as much time as possible talking and talking and
talking. The talking wasn’t a problem when they were doing their classwork, but
when they were supposed to be getting ready for recess or lunch or getting to
the bus to go home, she would have to remind them to stop talking and get a
move on. Because we lived in Iowa when my kids were little, several months out
of the year required lots of extra clothing to go outside – like snowpants and boots
and waterproof gloves. It was already a time consuming process to get all this
gear on, so if the kids dawdled and talked too much it made it even longer. But
his teacher wasn’t upset about it. She was a veteran teacher; she was used to
it. She just smiled and told me that this was a special time in a child’s life
– the time when they really began to make friends.
The word friends has taken on
new meaning since the advent of social media. On some platforms, I am “friends”
with people I’ve never met. But I’m “friends” with them because other friends
connected us. I am also “friends” with people I rarely see and have no real
contact with outside of the internet. And I’m even “friends” with people I
didn’t much care for when we were in close proximity with one another – say
junior high school. I once read a comment from a fellow preacher who said that
friendship has been cheapened by social media. I can see how this is true.
Maybe social media has cheapened the
idea of friendship, but despite that, I stay with it. For one thing, if you
want to plan a high school reunion or reunion of any kind, social media is the
best. Social media has also helped me connect with friends I believed I’d lost.
And on more than one occasion, social media has helped my friends and me help
another friend who was struggling from trouble in life and in her circumstance.
There are people that I’m friends with who I wish I had worked harder at
interacting with when we saw each other more often. I wish I had worked harder
at seeing them as fellow children of God, trying to figure out life the same as
I was. If social media has cheapened the idea of friendship in some ways, in
other ways it has widened my understanding of it. Social media has helped me
think outside the box when it comes to friendship.
Jesus might not have referred to his
understanding of friendship with the disciples as thinking outside the box, but
by calling them friends he was changing their status. They were no longer just
disciples to a teacher or servants to a master, they were friends. When Jesus
called them friends, he was not referring to pals or buddies or chums. He was
referring to them as loved ones. Being his friends meant that they were part of
his family, an integral part of his life and of him. Being friends meant more to
Jesus than just a label or category. It was a relationship with God in God.
Friendship meant abiding, remaining in God as well as with one another.
Friendship meant obeying the commands of the True Friend, the True Vine. The
number one commandment that Jesus gave was to love one another. You are my
friends, you abide in me, and I abide in the Father. We all abide together in
love. So, love one another as I have loved you. I chose you, and this is what I
command. Love one another. And this is what love is, laying down one’s life for
one’s friends.
This is the love that Jesus embodied
for his friends. Jesus literally laid down his life. He went to the cross and
sacrificed his life for the love of his friends. However, Jesus does not only
lay down his life for the disciples or the people of Galilee or the folks from
his hometown of Nazareth. The cross was and the cross is for this world.
Earlier in John’s gospel we hear the
words “for God so loved the world …” It was for the world that Jesus was
willing to die. Jesus not only preached sacrificial love, but he also lived it
and he died for it. For God so loved the world – the cosmos, the entirety of
God’s creation. So, I don’t think I am unfairly stretching the analogy to say
that the entire world consists of Jesus’ friends, or at least a wide and
beautiful diversity of people Jesus calls to be his friends and chooses to be
his friends.
In our text from Acts, Peter also
gets a new understanding of what it means to be friends. All of chapter 10
consists of Peter being pushed to see through new eyes what it means to be
clean and unclean, pure and impure. It begins with a centurion named Cornelius
and Peter’s vision of a sheet filled with animals that by the standards of the
Law were considered unclean. Peter wanted to obey the Law, to stick with what
he knew and understood about what was right and what was wrong. But God insists
through this vision that Peter see beyond the box that he previously dwelled
in. This was not merely about clean and unclean food. This was about people.
God was choosing people, calling people, all kinds of people.
Saul, who persecuted believers, was chosen and called. Cornelius, a Roman
centurion was chosen and called. And as we read in our verses in this chapter,
the Holy Spirit descended even upon the Gentiles. In other words, a whole lot
of people were chosen and called and answered that call to abide in God through
Christ. A whole lot of different kinds of people were now friends.
I know that this kind of friendship
goes beyond social networking and the shallow kinds of friendships that we
experience. I know that befriending the entire world is a daunting task to say
the least. But I do think these passages remind us of the fact that loving God
means loving God’s people, all of God’s people. And Jesus did not just suggest
this, he commanded it. He commanded us to love one another, to see the other as
a loved one, a member of the family. As he chose us, we must choose each other.
Love comes up a lot in the gospels,
and indeed in the whole of scripture. So, I know that I have said this before.
Love is not just about how we feel. Love is not just warm fuzzy happy feelings.
Let’s face it, we don’t always feel warm fuzzy even about the people we love
most in the world because all of us make mistakes and mess up and hurt the
people we love. Love is not just something we feel, love is something that we
do. Love is a verb. Love is action. Love is deed. We may not feel love, but we
must live love. We don’t have to feel love to live love. And we should always
strive to live love.
Yet,
it occurs to me that when Jesus commanded us to love one another, maybe he did
mean that we should feel it as well. Maybe we were commanded to show love, to
enact love, and to feel love for one another. By commanded us to feel love,
Jesus commands us to change our hearts, change our minds, and change what we do
as well. Maybe the command to love one another is to truly believe that the
world is filled with our friends, our loved ones. How different would the world
look if we not only acted this way, but felt this way, thought this way? What
would the world look like, what would our country and communities look like,
what would our church look like, if we strived to live out the commandment
Jesus gave us? If we lived as though we were all friends? It is a tall order
indeed. But Jesus is not just our role model. Jesus is our True Vine. We abide
in him. He is the source of our love. He is the source of our friendship. He is
the One from whom all friendship comes, and in whom we abide, remain, and stay.
He chose us and calls us to choose one another. He laid down his life for his
friends, and he did so with a loving heart. Can we do the same? Can we feel the
same?
Let
all of God’s children and all of our friends say, “Alleluia.”
Amen.
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