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This passage from John is special to me. It was many years ago, when I was roughly 20 and really struggling with where my life was heading that a verse from this passage spoke to me. Things weren’t going according to “the plan” for me. I was a very smart kid of good stock and should have been doing well in university and dreaming of where that career as a lawyer or scientist was going to take me. But my first attempt at university didn’t go so well. I dropped out. You see, I had to work and commute to school and my part-time job at the restaurant was where my relational bonds were, not at school. That’s probably the largest component as to why things didn’t go so well. The university I commuted to was huge and there was no hope of this shy kid forming meaningful relationships there without living there. I was alone and on my own having flown the coop into adulthood…and it wasn’t going well.
It was also in the midst of all that that I turned to Jesus feeling I had nowhere else to turn. I started going to church every Sunday first at a small staid, tried and true Presbyterian church frequented by my best friend’s mom. You may have heard me mention Mom Landis a time or two. Then, I switched to a more charismatic type Nazarene church at the invitation of a girl I was interested in. I had just come to the conclusion that if my life was going to go anywhere then it was going to have to be where God would take because I was blowing it.
So, I was reading my Bible one afternoon, and those words of Jesus, “You did not choose me, but I chose you” leapt off the page to me as if Jesus was saying them directly to me. That was the first time that I had experienced anything that seemed like communication from the God-side of things while reading the Bible. Prior to that moment, the Bible was just the book of the stuff that God wants us to do that we have to do if we want things to go well. That day the Scriptures became “living” to me, if that makes any sense.
To a young adult who was floundering and carrying some hurt hearing Jesus say to me “I chose you” became the rack on which I hang my hat. I know what it’s like to be a kid and to not get picked for the team. That happens to just about everybody growing up in one way or another. But this was a bigger scale. This was life. It felt like life wasn’t picking me for the team. It’s like I had big dreams of playing ball for “that team”. I had the natural talent. I had trained hard. Try outs came, they didn’t go well, and I didn’t get chosen for “that team”. I felt worthless; that I wasn’t meeting the expectations everybody had of me, myself included. And then Jesus said, “I chose you”. Game changer.
Arising from Jesus’ choice of me there suddenly was a purpose for me to which I have devoted myself. By this I don’t mean simply the calling to be a minister; as if people who go into the ministry get something special from God that any other disciple of Jesus doesn’t get. Ordained ministers are no different than anybody else in the Church excepting we are set aside to be within the Body of Christ what the Body of Christ is set aside to be in the world. Just as the church fails miserably, so do ministers yet even so, Jesus still calls us all his friends. The purpose that I mean is a life-changing friendship with Jesus discovered among the fellowship of his friends as we together try to be his disciples in this world distinguished by the way we love each other. We love as he has loved us. As I minister, I simply work to get you to live in love in the same way you, the Body of Christ, tries to get the world to live in love.
Anyway, chosen-ness, that’s a good topic for Presbyterians to get into. We Presbyterians have an interesting history with the topic. We carry the nickname, “the Frozen Chosen”. Our theological roots in Calvinism places a lot of weight on the sovereignty of God over his creation and we pushed that to the logical extent of saying that God has foreordained everything that happens in his creation. We pushed that to an even further logical conclusion to say that God has foreordained or predestined who would be saved and who would not. The logical end of that was saying God created some people to know the eternal joys of heaven and some to know eternal damnation in hell all regardless of how they lived their life here on earth in the meantime. Sometimes being theo -“logical” has more to do with logic than with God.
We were wrong to come to those logical conclusions. By our logical conclusions we were saying more than Scripture itself said. So, in 1904 most churches of Presbyterian and Anglican rootage disavowed that way of thinking. But the damage was done. It did have negative effects in the church. We became quite dour and joyless in our expression of faith and in turn, stuck in our ways. Worship had to be done in a certain way as not to offend God. Dress codes, conduct codes – legalism. Cold we were! Frozen in place! Totally contrary to my experience of being chosen which involved joy. Anyway, that was a rabbit hole. Back to the pea patch.
To define what it is to be chosen we should take a route that is relational rather than logical. When Jesus said “I chose you” to the Disciples, he said it in the context of a conversation with his friends. He had just told them that he considered them friends rather than servants (slaves actually). Slaves do not know what their masters are up to, but friends do. Jesus had shared with the Disciples everything he could about who he was and what the Father was up to in the world through him and they in the power of the Holy Spirit would be doing the same things he did once he was gone. He summed it all up by saying abide in “my” love – a love which he and the Father share, a love which is the same love that he has for his disciples, a love which is the same love they will have as the Holy Spirit dwells in them if they love one another in the way Jesus said to.
The particular love that Jesus wants his friends to share is the type of love in which we lay down our lives for one another. So now, what did Jesus mean by laying down our lives for one another? Well, the word for life there isn’t the word for literal life. It is “psyche” in Greek which usually gets translated as “soul”. In the Bible, the soul isn’t this immortal blip of energy that departs the body when we die. That’s Greek Paganism. The soul is basically what we would call “me”. It’s who I am. It’s everything thing I am; body included. It’s identity, who I bring to the table in relationships regardless of whether I am able to say who I am or not. It’s the me I know and the me I don’t know. It’s the face I put on and the me I fearfully keep hidden behind that face. The soul includes everything I want to be and do, all the baggage I carry, my habits, and all I have become due to my relationships with others. My soul is the “me” I bring to you. It’s the me God knows better than I know myself.
Jesus says the love that he wants his disciples to share is that we lay down our souls for our friends, that we set my “me” to the side for my friends for their growth as followers of Jesus. I’m going say something about what a friend is here in a moment but first something about laying down our souls, our “me”. For Jesus to say we must lay down our “me” is something we don’t readily take to, particularly in our culture in which we believe that figuring out who I am and putting myself and my own happiness first is something I most do before I can think about the needs of others. We are fairly well indoctrinated in the philosophiy of “Be who you want to be”, “Pursue your dreams”, “To thine own self be true”. But if you haven’t noticed, that way of thinking just isn’t working.
Yet, there is a healthy side to that approach to life we should consider. When I was in seminary, one of the things they tried to help us do was to come to an awareness of our weaknesses and hurts for if we do not, we would inadvertently get hurt by and/or hurt the people we serve by making our ministry all about ourselves. We were all taught the fine art of how to listen to another person so that they feel heard. Oddly and powerfully, it was in the process of learning how to listen that we soon discovered like a Pandora’s Box the personal junk we brought to the table because it was that junk that got in the way of our being able to listen to people in a way that’s helpful. It is a rare minister, and I am not one of them, that can actually listen effectively to people who come to them in need. The number one reason we (and not just ministers) can’t listen to each other is that we are unable to set aside our need to be liked by people. In situations where all we are being asked to do is listen to a person and reflect back “What I hear you saying is…”, we will instinctively say and do things to try to get that person to like “me” rather than feel heard. We will rather say things like, “Yeah, I felt that way once.” Loving requires listening and we have to lay our souls, our “me” aside if we’re going to do that. Ain’t easy. Ain’t easy.
In the context of abiding in Jesus’ love, of enjoying the fellowship in which Jesus dwells, we have to lay down our “me” aside for the purpose of the healing and the wholeness of each other. Laying down doesn’t mean “O Me the Martyr”, where everybody but me gets their needs looked after and I wind up wallowing in self-pity. The point is that if everyone is laying their me down for the healing and betterment of their friends, then we all get better together. We all are broken and we all have needs and it is the responsibility of us all not to let our own needs take priority over the needs of others. We must also be sure that we not let one of our own burn-out and die for looking after us. Jesus already did that.
One thing you learn in how to care for the family courses is that there is almost always somebody in the family that’s silently bearing the deadly load of everybody else’s whims of self-actualization. The greatest gift a family can be given is help in coming to the realization of who that person is in their family and in compassion lay their “me” aside to help that one person heal. That’s love. We have all heard that if Mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy. On Mother’s Day we must acknowledge, that too often it is our mothers who have been silently bearing that deadly load of making sure everybody else’s needs were met to the neglect of their own and we have been to involved in our own me-ness to notice. Let’s do better by our mothers.
Well, about friends. What Jesus means by a friend here is a loved one. Someone, whether they be blood relation or not, whom we treat like family. A friend is someone whom we chose to let into our lives because of a felt bond that we so often just can’t explain. They are people for whom we will drop everything and inconvenience ourselves to help. They are the people we call together when we’ve got something celebrate. When Jesus talks about his joy being in his disciples and our joy being made complete in him, he means the joy we feel just being with our friends in him. It makes us happy to be with our friends and especially when eat and fellowship and kick a few back together. There’s a lot of vulnerability in friendship, because we have to trust our friends to care for the “me-junk” that we don’t want everybody to know. Friendship is where we lay our burdens at each other’s feet and we bear them up together. Marriage doesn’t work without friendship. Family doesn’t work without friendship.
It is said that you can’t choose your family, but you can chose your friends. Jesus has chosen us each to be his friends, but to be his friends we must be friends to one another. The fellowship of sharing friendship in Christ is what the Church is about. We can easily mistake that the Church exists for worship, or religious education, or moral development, or feeding the hungry, or lifting up the downtrodden, or worse – spreading Democracy and Western civilization throughout the world. We can also easily mistake that the Church is just the place that fits with my private spiritual beliefs. Something I fear with online worship being so readily available is that it is too easy to mistake that Church is something I can do by myself in my living room, in my pajamas, disheveled, with coffee in hand. There is a place and time for that, but Church is so much more. Church is about a group of friends whom Jesus has chosen to be his friends and whom he has entrusted to each another to love each other in his physical absence. The church is first and foremost about building the bond of friendship that Jesus has entrusted to us as a congregation.
Let me say that again. The Church is first and foremost about building the bond of friendship that Jesus has entrusted to us as a congregation. Being Jesus’ friends by being a friend like him to one another is what we are about. We are to lay down our “me” for one another as Jesus has directed us. There’s joy in it for us. There’s a purpose in it. Jesus has chosen us to be one of his friednship places in this world where he manifests salvation – meaning healing, wholeness, and peace. The salvation that is to come in its fullness when he comes.
You may be saying, “Randy, I don’t feel chosen. I don’t feel like Jesus is a friend and your little self-sharing at the beginning of this little feel-good rant only made me feel inadequate.” Well, I’m sorry. That was not my intention. That said, I will totally act like I haven’t listened by saying “O but you are.” If you understand that Church is primarily about the love we share as Jesus’ friends rather than steeples, organs, choirs, pews, Sunday School rooms, and who makes the best pot-luck dish, and being hypocritically good; then you are Jesus’s friend and he has chosen you to know that. In fact, the very fact that I’ve just so super-fantastically, clearly explained this to you, is how he has chosen you to be his friend. So now, enough said. Let’s be the friends Jesus has chosen us to be. There’s joy to be shared. Amen.
