Easter 6B’24
5 May 2024
John 15.9-17
St. Luke’s Episcopal Church
North Little Rock, Arkansas
The Rev. Carey Stone <+>
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. Amen. – from John 15 NRSV
While at seminary in Alexandria, VA, just outside Washington D.C. I got to make the acquaintance of many people from all walks of life, some of them were either famous or were friends with the famous, or related to the famous. One of my favorites of these was a man by the name of Gerald Warren, who was the deputy press secretary at the While House during president Richard Nixon’s administration. He had many stories and sayings and here’s one that stuck with me, “When I moved to Washington DC, and was being oriented to the White House staff, the Chief of Staff said, “This is DC, if you want a friend – get a dog!” Little did he know how right the chief was when the Watergate scandal became public. He learned quickly that he lived in a ‘dog eat dog world.’
Where would any of us be in life without at least one good and close friend?
Aristotle once said, “Without friends no one would choose to live, though they had all other goods.”1 But, as most of us have already figured out, true friends can be hard to come by. Thanks to social media, even the word ‘friend’ has become trivialized. One social media page that I am on, currently shows that I have 1,500 “friends.” Most are acquaintances, and are usually either related to school, work, or a common interest. Out of 1500 friends, each year on my birthday I get around 200 of them that wish me a Happy Birthday. If I found myself in some type of crisis or needed money that number of 200 would drop dramatically.
What is that sets a true friend apart from just someone who is an acquaintance?
Emerson wrote that “Friendships are gifts and expressions of God; they form when the divine spirit in one individual finds the divine spirit in another.”2 Our close friends truly are gifts, almost like it wasn’t even a choice, somehow, we find each other. We discover someone who can handle us, can handle being around us when we are up and when we are down, the relationship can survive many failures and shortcomings. As a person once said, “with my friend I can think out loud without fear of being judged.” In short, our lives (including our fears, failures, weaknesses, doubts, and secrets) are “safe” with a real friend, who perhaps is someone we or they would even be willing to die for. These people of whatever age, gender, or place in life is good news for us. But today we hear about the best news of all – God wants to be your friend!
The first mention of what sounds like something too good to be true is written about patriarchs like Moses, of whom it is written, the Lord spoke to him, face to face, as one speaks to their friend.” In the book of Exodus, as well as in Isaiah we read where God calls Abraham “God’s friend.” Centuries later, Jesus makes it very clear that this status of being a friend of God was not reserved for the patriarchs and matriarchs of our faith, it is a status that is being offered to every one of us. In our gospel reading today we hear Jesus say, that he doesn’t want to call us servants but Jesus wants to call us “friend.”
Maybe we are blessed with a friend who might be (might be willing) to die for us, but in Jesus we find our best friend of all who did die for us: “Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down their lives for their friends.” Because Jesus’ gift of his very life being laid down, a pathway to friendship with God is now open to us. The God who knows us best, loves us most. Jesus said, “you did not choose me but I have chosen you.”
May we take this reading in St. John’s gospel as our personal invitation to be God’s friend. Invitations often have the letters RSVP written on them: they are French “repondez s’il vous plait” which translated is “Respond, if you please.”
How will each of us respond to this personal invitation?
1 Robert I. Fitzhenry, ed. The Harper Book of Quotations
2 William Bennett, The Book of Virtues (Simon & Schuster: New York) p.336