Sermon: What a Friend We Have in Jesus
Texts: John 15:9-17; 1 John 4:7-21
Date: May 17, 2009
Rev. Dee Eisenhauer, Eagle Harbor Congregational Church
Those of us who have been out of school for a while probably don’t get enough opportunities to _________. To what? Fill in the blanks. So I have a little exercise for you. You can write on your bulletins if you want, or do this in your head—either way it’s for your eyes only. Here it is, fill in the blank: “Jesus is my __________.” You can write down more than one word if more than one comes to you.
Jesus is my…what? Lord? Teacher? General? Role Model? Savior? Master? Life Coach? Companion? Conscience? Leader? Co-pilot?
Did anybody write Friend? Jesus is my Friend. That has been a meaningful way to describe one’s relationship to Jesus for millions and millions of believers, and perhaps you are among them. Does your heart resonate with that old hymn,
- What a friend we have in Jesus,
All our sins and griefs to bear!
What a privilege to carry
Everything to God in prayer!
Oh, what peace we often forfeit,
Oh, what needless pain we bear,
All because we do not carry
Everything to God in prayer!
- Have we trials and temptations?
Is there trouble anywhere?
We should never be discouraged—
Take it to the Lord in prayer.
Can we find a friend so faithful,
Who will all our sorrows share?
Jesus knows our every weakness;
Take it to the Lord in prayer.
Can we find a friend so faithful? Beautiful. That is, I believe, what we long for in Jesus, at least in part, and that faithful friend is what many have experienced in Jesus.
Mary Macpherson drew an evocative picture of this relationship in her confirmation journal this spring. The sketched herself, and beside her the outline of a human figure. The figure, portrayed as invisible, was essentially featureless. But it was standing very close, with an arm wrapped warmly around the shoulders of Miss Mary. Can you picture it?
Mary is an astute theologian, so this was not the only image of God she drew that day. She also had, as I recall, a picture that was less personal, more cosmic in scope, with sun, clouds, and so forth. The way I remember her telling about the interplay between these two images is that she experiences God both ways—as a force in the universe, beyond understanding, and as a close personal friend. I think she used the name of Jesus to talk about that personal sense of God (if she didn’t, I filled in that blank in my mind). She dwells in the space between these two distinct understandings of the Divine. She’s bright, if you haven’t figured that out yet. In two little crayon pictures she portrayed what theologians have spilled thousands of gallons of ink over in their descriptions of the immanence and transcendence of God.
In Jesus, God draws near enough to humanity to be our friend. We can affirm that without canceling out the less personal or trans-personal understandings of God which are equally true. Today’s texts lead us to that Friend image, as Jesus used the language of friendship to describe his relationship to the disciples he was addressing. Even if friend was not a word you used to fill in the blank, would you imagine it now, Jesus as your friend? Standing very near, with an arm around your shoulder.
There’s a statue at a minor league ball park in Brooklyn which portrays two men standing together, one with an arm around the other’s shoulders. Neither of these figures is Jesus—they are Jackie Robinson and Pee Wee Reese of the Brooklyn Dodgers. Neither is Jesus, but see if their story reminds you of him at all. Jackie Robinson, you may recall, was the first African-American baseball player in the major leagues. Before he joined the Brooklyn Dodgers, there was a petition circulated by some of the team saying they would refuse to play with a black man. But management prevailed, and Robison joined the team. He was often heckled, insulted, cursed, and spit upon as he played that first season by the baseball fans. Some even threw garbage at him while he was on the baseball diamond. He received death threats. That was the power of racism in 1947.
As the story is told, one day it was really bad. The fans were booing and heaping a lot of abuse on Robinson. It was obvious that Robinson was feeling pretty low, although he had been faithful to his commitment to react non-violently to those who protested his presence. Pee Wee Reese, the captain of the team, called time out. He trotted across the baseball diamond and went and stood by Robinson, quietly putting his arm around Jackie’s shoulder. Standing there, he stared down the most obnoxious of the abusers, quieting them. That gesture of friendship, a signal that racial discrimination was unacceptable, was immortalized in the statue years later.
Two baseball players, not Jesus. But there is something there that is evocative of the way I think many people experience Jesus as a friend. It’s not that Jesus brings an end to troubles any more than Reese ended Robison’s suffering the slings and arrows of racism. It’s that Jesus shows solidarity with us and offers us warm support that helps us endure whatever has to be endured. Right? Jesus as a friend offers us love that gives us strength to carry on. The love of a true friend, love that can be trusted and relied upon.
I believe Jesus really did want his disciples to be able to depend upon his steadfast love for them. When I hear him urging his friends to “abide” in his love, it instills in me a sense of security. Maybe it’s because of the little song we used to sing as children, “In a Cabin in the Woods.” Do you know that song? I won’t go through the whole thing, but it’s about a little rabbit who needs shelter from a hunter, who frantically knocks on the door of the cabin. The little old man invites him in: “Come, little rabbit, come inside, safely to abide.” “Abide in my love,” Jesus says. Come inside the shelter of my love; feel safe here. It’s an indestructible love.
That’s why we want friends here on earth, isn’t it? So we can experience the love of someone who is willing to put up with our foibles, who knows us well and is still willing to hang around with us? Someone who knows where we are coming from, who can put our failures in the context of who we are at our best, who can forgive us and keep on loving us? We long to abide in the shelter of love that is steadfast. No wonder the vision of Jesus as Friend strikes such a deep chord.
Imagine yourself with friend Jesus now, Jesus with an arm slung across your shoulder, like Pee Wee Reese standing steadfastly with Jackie Robinson. It’s a fine image of friendship. But it’s a little one-sided, is it not? When Pee Wee stood in support of Jackie, he was the powerful one in the pair; the white team captain lending strength to his harassed friend. Jackie in the statue image just stands there with his hands at his sides. Something like this is playing out in a great deal of the imagery of Jesus as a friend. It seems to me that when people think of Jesus as their friend, it only goes as far as leaning on Jesus, who is strong where we are weak.
Is that the only way to imagine a friendship with Jesus? That we lean on his powerful presence, draw strength from his sheltering love? I’ve got an earworm of a song “Jesus is My Friend” lodged in my brain and since I can’t dislodge it I might as well talk about it. A weirdly white-bread ska band with a Donny Osmond look-alike sings this on Youtube:
(Chorus) Jesus is a friend of mine.
Jesus is my friend.
Jesus is a friend of mine.
I have a friend in Jesus.
Jesus is a friend of mine.
Jesus is my friend.
Jesus is a friend of mine.
(V. 1) He taught me how to live, my life as it should be.
He taught me how to turn my cheek when people laugh at me.
I've had friends before, and I can tell you that, He's one who will never leave you flat.
(V. 3) Once I tried to run, I tried to run and hide.
But Jesus came and found me and He touched me down inside.
He is like mountie, He always gets His man, and He'll zap you any way he can. Zap!
(V. 4) He loves me when I'm right, He loves me when I'm wrong.
He loves me when I waste my time by writing silly songs.
He loves me when I'm quiet and I have nothing to say.
He'll love me when I'm perfect if I ever get that way.
Whooo! Jesus is my friend…
I’ll leave it up to you if you want to listen to the recording on the internet. Consider yourself warned that you may be hearing it against your will in your mind’s ear in the future as it is one of those sticky songs. On to theological commentary: Jesus is my friend, Jesus is a friend of mine. Do you notice how one-sided this all is? It’s all about what Jesus has done, what he has taught, the durability of his love. Which is all fine and good. But it makes me wonder, would Jesus sing a similar song about any of us? When Jesus says, “I have called you friends,” is he calling the disciples to a friendship that is characterized by mutuality? Is the friend of Jesus more than a passive recipient of the love and understanding of Jesus? We lean on Jesus’ friendship; does Jesus lean on the friendship of the disciples?
We usually think of true friendship as more than dependence. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with depending on Jesus as our teacher, our comforter, our guide, and so forth. But friendship hints at interdependence and mutuality more than mere dependence. If it’s a bit of a stretch to think of ourselves as friends of Jesus, we may be onto something, we may be hearing in his use of the language of friendship an invitation to grow, to mature in discipleship. How do we do more than stand with our hands at our sides when Jesus embraces us as friends? How do we embrace Jesus as disciples, putting our arm around his shoulders in return?
I don’t find it altogether comfortable to imagine it—slinging my arm over Jesus’ shoulder as if I were a friend of his. There’s just something about the gesture of mutuality that makes me a bit squirmy. I attribute some of that to an attitude Wayne and Garth often revealed in “Wayne’s World” when they met celebrities: “We’re not worthy! We’re not worthy!” Jesus dispatches such an objection to his circle of friends by saying to them, “You did not choose me but I chose you.” We are worthy of claiming Jesus as friend because he chose us.
Low self-esteem neatly dispatched, is there still a barrier to embracing Jesus as friend? I suspect there may be. In a way relating to Jesus as Master is simpler than relating to Jesus as friend. Preacher Barbara Brown Taylor wrote about this, saying, “Being a friend is much harder than being a servant. You are self-employed for one thing; there is no one to tell you what to do or how to do it. You are left to your own devices, and there is no pay for overtime—which is just as well, since the hours are highly irregular. Being a friend means taking time out on the busiest day of your life to hold someone’s hand while he waits in the doctor’s office and talking to him on the telephone in the middle of the night when he wakes up afraid. It means agonizing with someone over her decision to leave her job and celebrating with her when she finds a new one. Being a friend means saying ‘I will go with you,’ over and over again, whether you feel like it or not. It means caring about people so much that you get your hopes and fears all mixed up with your own, and that you want the best for them as much as you want it for yourself. At his last supper, that is who Jesus wants around him—not slaves, who follow his orders without a clue as to what he means; nor servants, who do their jobs and go home; but compassionate friends, who accept his ministry as their own and take responsibility for it, risks and all.” [1]
There it is. There’s one source of discomfort. Being a friend of Jesus means saying, “I will go with you,” over and over and over again. I want to—but I’m not sure I’m always equal to this calling. But knowing that Jesus has made the same promise to me—“I will go with you”-- and always keeps it gives me courage.
And another thing. That cliché, “Any friend of ________’s is a friend of mine” keeps rolling around in my head. I’m pretty certain that being a friend of Jesus’ means befriending an enormous number of other friends of Jesus. Bit of a stretch, eh? We can hardly manage it even in a small church like ours—to love each other as Jesus loves us. To befriend each other as Jesus has befriended us. To forgive each other as Jesus has forgiven us.
From time to time someone leaves our community over an offense—someone does or says something that causes hurt to another. It seems inevitable that as fallible humans we will do and say things that will hurt, offend, and annoy each other. It is not inevitable that such occasions mean the end of a relationship with the community or with people within the community. It always feels like a terribly sad failure in a church when relationships are abandoned without even an attempt at reconciliation. To be friends of Jesus, it seems to me, is to bravely take on the challenge of healing hurts rather than taking the less effortful “cut and run” approach. What the epistle says is right on--we cannot love God and hate our brothers and sisters at the same time.
When we do succeed in befriending each other, when we, however clumsily, manage to love one another as Jesus has instructed us, we discover in the love between us evidence of the Big Love of God. I have felt it and touched it again and again in communities of faith, so often that I cannot imagine loving God apart from community. Our love for one another is a foretaste of the Kingdom of God.
John Macmurray , a British philosopher, got to thinking about friendship in connection with the Kingdom of God, about which Jesus spoke more than anything else. As Jesus spoke about it, the Kingdom had contradictory premises. On the one hand, it was already among us. On the other hand, people should watch for it. It could come at any time, unexpectedly. Exploring this apparent contradiction, Macmurray observed that Jesus always spoke about familiar experiences. He rarely dealt with abstract hypotheses. So, Macmurray asked, what is there that we are familiar with already, but that could happen anytime? His answer was friendship. Everyone has known friendship. Most of us have at least one close friend. And yet friendship can blossom unexpectedly, unpredictably. Wouldn’t it be wonderful, Macmurray suggested, if we could treat everyone we encountered as a friend? Or at least, as a possible friend? And could there be a better Kingdom of God than a world in which all were friends to each other?
It’s a beautifully simple conception of the Kingdom of God—a renewed earth in which all people are friends. This is how we act as friends to Jesus—we behave like friends to all that we meet. If we find it too challenging to befriend strangers, we may at least befriend those we meet in a small community like this. As friendships develop, as we learn to lean and depend on each other, as we offer each other the durable love we long for, we find Christ between us and abide in his love.
Mystic poet Hafiz wrote these words:
Admit something:
Everyone you see, you say to them, “Love me.”
Of course you do not do this out loud; otherwise, someone would call the cops.
Still, though, think about this, this great pull in us to connect.
Why not become the one who lives with a full moon in each eye that is always saying,
With that sweet moon language,
What every other eye in the world is dying to hear?
[1] Taylor, Barbara Brown Quoted in Alive Now March/April 1993, p. 39
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