A Chosen Friendship

 John 15:1-17

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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.

 

Conquer the World

1 John 5:1-8, John 15:9-17

I think I’m getting old.  I pledged allegiance to Jesus back when I was 19 and that was over thirty years ago now.  That’s a long time and it went fast.  I look back on those days with nostalgia and nostalgia is the number one clue that you’ve lived longer than you’ve got left to live.  It also might be a symptom of some sort of weird mental disorder to say that I am nostalgic about the 80’s particularly with respect to my walk with Christ.  Those were the early days when things were new for me with respect to him.  I had suddenly begun to know that God is really involved in my life and not just a distant judge.  I had discovered Jesus lives and “What a friend we have in Jesus.”  I began to experience that the Holy Spirit was with me and in me working to heal me and assuring me that God loves me, that all things are in God’s hands, and that I need not fear the life that lies ahead of me. 

TV preachers were big back in the 80’s and I watched my share of them.  A good many of them talked about something called “victorious living”.  They said Jesus won the victory for us and all we got to do is by faith live that victory and we will have a victorious life and making a donation to their ministry was a good place to start.  By victory they meant becoming financially successful and free of worry.  In the 80’s there was a lot of that "faux-preaching" going around.

Their way of victorious living was basically a positive thinking spin on the ideas taught by the first great atheist philosopher, Ludwig Feuerbach.  Feuerbach said two things: one, that God is just a made up image of our best selves that we project out there and idolize; and two, we are what we eat.  Victorious living preachers just said imagine the successful life you want and go for it and God will make it happen and don’t think negative thoughts because if you think defeat you’ll only receive defeat.  Incidentally, the Greek word for victory is “nike” – Just do it.

So, victorious living according to the TV preachers went like this.  God will give you the best life you can imagine filled with blessing and joy.  Thinking negatively will keep you living in defeat.  So, keep hoping for what you want and praise God in everything.  Get your eyes off of the circumstances and fix them on Jesus the Author of your joy.  When setbacks happen don’t accept them as defeat just keep praying, immersing yourself in the Scriptures, and living the Christian life of service and God will bring you the victory.

On the surface there is some good pastoral advice hidden in there.  Faithful living is victorious living.  Fill your life with hope and praise and prayer and devotion and service.  I say “Amen” to that.  But don’t do it just to get the successful life you’ve always dreamed of – a life of success is not the victory Jesus won when he was crucified and died for us and the Father in the power of the Holy Spirit raised him from the dead victorious over it.  John is not telling us here to be faithfully devout so that God will make us successful.  Success and a suffering free life is not what John meant when he wrote that the victory that conquers the world is our faith and that whoever believes that Jesus is the Son of God conquers the world.  Bear with me a bit and I will take you down a rabbit hole.

Sometimes the last thing a person says is the most important thing they say.  Looking at First John, the very last thing John just up and out of the blue says is “Little children, guard yourselves from idols.”  What idols were people worshipping that John would be concerned about?  You’ll need a little historical background.  John likely wrote this letter from the city of Ephesus, which is in western Turkey.  He wrote it at the end of the first century very close to the time he would have been arrested and imprisoned on the island of Patmos when and from where he wrote the Book of Revelation.  One of John’s major underlying themes in Revelation is encouragement for Christians in western Turkey to keep their confession of Jesus being Lord in the face of persecution.  In Revelation those who “conquer” and “overcome” are those who remain faithful in their confession of Christ in the face of persecution even to the point martyrdom.

The Romans were persecuting the followers of Jesus at that time because we were refusing to participate in the civic worship of the Roman Emperor as a god.  The Emperor at that time was Domitian who claimed himself to be a god and demanded to be worshipped as such.  He had temples with his statue in them all over the Roman Empire for that purpose.  Most emperors just claimed to be a son of the god Jupiter and it was when they died that they became fully a god.  Domitian was a bit shrewd, if not crazy, and claimed to already be a god and should be worshipped as such and this helped solidify his rule throughout the empire.  Therefore, when Christians refused to do their civic duty of worshipping the Emperor and instead called Jesus Lord, Saviour, and Son of God, that was treason.  That’s the reason I think the Romans arrested John in his nineties and imprisoned on Patmos. 

Throughout this letter John keeps emphasizing that Jesus is the real Son of God, the One True God and encouraging Christians to hold firm to that confession and to demonstrate their allegiance to Jesus by loving one another as Jesus loved them.  Victorious living, as I see it here, is the followers of Jesus together loving each other as Jesus loved and died for us each – unselfishly, unconditionally, even to the point of death.  Jesus conquered the world, conquered sin and death.  In the power and presence of the Holy Spirit Jesus made this victory real in the small communities of his disciples who loved as he loved.  As John saw it Lord Jesus and his Kingdom of Holy Spirit-filled disciples by building loving communities were conquering the Roman Emperor and his empire built by means of fear, economic domination, and military might.

The immediate question that follows on all this is “what does this have to do with us today?”  Well, all of us were brought up in a world that was undergirded by the institution of the Christian Church.  In our life times we have seem this same institution lose its favoured status.  Oh, the church still wields some power.  It was the Evangelical Christian vote that provided the swing vote that elected the current President of the United States.  Here in Canada, I really don’t see where the Christian vote has any sway at all as less than 20% of the culture still goes to church on a regular basis.  Our culture as a whole is either indifferent to the Christian faith or biased against it.  The lifestyle of those who call themselves Christian does not look all that different than everybody else around us.  We seem to differ from the world around us only in our individual beliefs and our being more likely to volunteer.

I started this sermon talking about victorious living, about us as individuals being faithful in prayer, devotions, and service; about keeping hopeful and praising God in all things; and fixing our eyes on Jesus.  That’s private faithfulness.  But Jesus didn’t say that people would know we are his disciples by how we privately practice our faith.  He said people would know we are his disciples by the way we love. For the last 1700 years the church has been undergirding the empire that Jesus in actuality conquered.  We have a prime opportunity to simply be about the love of Jesus these days, but it means that beyond simply holding to our private beliefs, we have to start being public in our loving.  Amen. 

Obey? We're Not Dogs

John 14:15, 23-24; John 15:9-17

This is the fifth in a series of eight sermons based on Greg Ogden’s book Essential Guide to Becoming a Disciple: Eight Sessions for Mentoring and Discipleship.

So, Dana has been taking our dog Nellie to agility classes lately.  Agility is the run, jump, obstacle course stuff.  It’s fun for energetic little dogs who like a challenge.  Yet, to do this sort of thing, one needs a dog who will obey, which means do what it is expected to do when it is expected to do it. 

To get a dog to be obedient isn’t too difficult. You have to make the reward for your dog doing what you want it to do greater than the pleasure it would otherwise get from doing what it wants to do.  You have to spend a good deal of time with your dog showing it lots of love and playing with it to build the bond that will make it want to please you.  Then, when it is time to train, it will experience the training exercises as a really fun play time with you.  In time, the dog will learn and will obey without reserve even for no reward because it’s fun and it pleases her person.

  But there are some prerequisites to canine obedience training. First, the dog person needs to have the right kind of temperament, which includes patience, understanding, love, self-control, the ability to express affirmation enthusiastically, and the desire to feel the joy of watching one of God’s finest creatures learn and excel at completing tasks.  Second, you need a dog who really wants to please you.  This is most every dog so this is why the temperament of the dog person is most important.  Grumpy, angry, impatient people who yell and dole out negative, overly punitive consequences for undesired behaviour will have difficulty getting a dog to want to please them.

Some dogs are easier to train than others.  Our dog Nellie is quite smart and quite stubborn.  She requires a lot more patience and time.  We even had to get a shock collar.  The joy of harassing our cats is way more reward to her than a bland cookie treat.  To walk her, we have to use a gentle lead that fits on her nose instead of clipping a lead to her collar.  She can’t pull or go after stuff without a bit of discomfort.  One day she’ll figure obedience out.  She’s not even a year yet.  Dogs and obedience training, it’s an adventure.

When I think of the word obedience dog training is the most benevolent thing that comes to my mind.  Obedient and obey are two words that I really don’t like, I mean I really don’t like them.  They make me think of a relationship in which the parties concerned are not equals.  They make me think of someone of a higher standing trying to impose their will on another more vulnerable person.  Slavery was a system based on “obedience”.  It used to be, and unfortunately still is in many parts of the world, that marriage involves a system of obedience that is male dominated and abusive.  Raising children is too often seen as a system of obedience.  I don’t want my children to “obey” me.  I want them to respect Dana and me, their elders, their teachers, and coaches and strive to do their best in the many systems of rules in which they have to live realizing that we have their best interests in mind and there are consequences for their actions. 

I don’t like it when Bible translators put the word “obey” into the mouth of God, into the mouth of Jesus.  We are not dogs.  Jesus doesn’t call us his slaves.  He calls us his friends.  In the Great Commission when Jesus commissions his disciples, gives them the charge of making disciples and empowers them to carry it out, he instructs them to teach these disciples they’ve baptized into the life of God to keep, to observe his commandments.  Obey is about the worst word you can throw in there.  Let me explain (and this means a Greek lesson).

The Greek word here, “tereo”, primarily means to watch over, to guard, to keep safe; like a teacher or a sitter watching over children.  It is the idea of protecting something precious.  Jesus’ teachings are precious.  Jesus’ commandments are precious.  They are of value.  A commandment isn’t just a rule written on the books somewhere to be obeyed or suffer the consequences.  A commandment is a commission, a responsibility entrusted to us to carry out.  A commandment from Jesus is a precious responsibility he’s given to us for us to guard with our very lives by incorporating it into our lives.  His commandments are precious because they are life giving to those who follow him.  To incorporate his teachings into a system of “obedience” would be to legalize them and make them death-dealing duties that we grow to hate rather than a source of life that we love.

Looking at John’s Gospel, Jesus calls us his friends because he has made known to us everything that he heard from God the Father.  He has spoken to us the words of God the Father that he himself has heard.  The powerful thing about words from God is that when God speaks, what God says comes about.  In essence, Jesus has spoken words from the Father to us, into us in the power of the Holy Spirit; words that will take effect and grow in us.

The primary word to us that he has spoken is that the Father and Son by the Holy Spirit have come to us made their home with, in, and among us.  We have been given a wonderful gift.  God is here, among us, in us.  This wonderful gift in turn produces in us in us a hunger, an inexplicable compulsion to want to know Jesus and to live according to his ways, his teachings because it pleases him and gives us joy. 

There are two primary ways for us to keep Jesus’ his commandments, the words of God.  First, from Jesus’ word spoken to us arises the desire and capacity to carryout his command for us to love as he has loved us.  We lay down our lives for one another.  In Matthew it would sound more like “Love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and your neighbour as yourself.”  This precious commandment is a living word spoken into us that we are to keep safe and nurture by incorporating it into our lives as our way of life.  By doing this we will discover and experience the eternal life that Jesus promises us.

As Jesus’ commandments are a words of God spoken to us that get into us and have effect, they create in us a hunger to know Jesus and to love him by keeping his commandments.  We will find what Ogden calls “a spiritual growth plan” helpful.  This is incorporating into our lives daily devotional time to worship and pray and to read and study the scriptures and meditate upon them.  A spiritual growth plan must also include meeting together with other disciples to do the same with the added benefits of fellowship and sharing our lives.  Finally, God did not mean for us to keep this precious gift to ourselves, we must find ways of sharing it with those who don’t know they’ve been given the gift too.  Alcoholics know that the best way to stay sober is to help somebody else stay sober.  So it is with Jesus and the love of God.  The best way to know Jesus and his love is to share it with those who don’t know it.

We will have difficult choices to make.  Jesus’ way is utterly counter-cultural and will have us struggling with our own selfish nature’s.  There will be times when we wish Jesus would put a shock collar on us or stick us in our crates until we are refocused.  But one thing is certain, as we go along the way of discipleship we will more and more come to realize that God truly loves us, enjoys us, even likes us; and we will come to know just how patient and understanding God is, how God only wants what’s best for us.  God feels joy over us and is enthusiastically affirming.  God is not some grumpy, impatient, yelling, beat you with the paper because you peed on the floor tyrant who demands complete obedience or else.  God is the loving communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and God has chosen you to be a part of his family.  Isn’t that wonderful.  Keep this precious word deep within your heart, soul, and mind, and heed it with all your strength.  Amen.

Love One Another

Text: John 15:9-17

John 15:9-17   "As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love.  ¹⁰ If you obey my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have obeyed my Father's commands and remain in his love.  ¹¹ I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete.  ¹² My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you.  ¹³ Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.  ¹⁴ You are my friends if you do what I command.  ¹⁵ I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master's business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you.  ¹⁶ You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit-- fruit that will last. Then the Father will give you whatever you ask in my name.  ¹⁷ This is my command: Love each other.

“Love One Another”

Ed White was a church health and growth consultant for the Alban Institute.  Alban is one-stop shop for all things involving how to do church.  Mr. White had a neat question he liked to ask churches when he worked with them.  He would ask, “What business are you in?”  Now, that’s a very pointed if not prophetic question for congregations here in the last 25 or so years when to our detriment business models have risen to dominate the way churches go about being the church.  The question is a play on words.  We can substitute busyness for business.  Yet, Mr. White’s question isn’t asking how we make our money as churches but rather it comes at why we, the church, are here.  It’s like being asked by the Border Patrol to state our business in Canada. 

So, why are we here?  What’s our business?  I think, and please correct me if I am wrong, most congregations these days are having a very difficult time answering that question.  We do things we think churches ought to do, all the while seeming to have forgotten why we do them.  Fortunately, Jesus at John15:15 gives us a subtle hint as to the nature of our problem.  He says: “I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business.  Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you.”  We are good, very good servants of the Lord.  Yet, how many of us shy away from being able to talk about Jesus being our friend and how he’s been faithful to us each.  That shyness affects how we go about our Master’s business.  In fact, it makes us look as if we don’t know it.

You know, that hymn “What a Friend We Have in Jesus”?  It’s not about “doing” or being a servant.  It’s about friendship with Jesus.  Jesus’ friendship has every thing to do with prayer; with his bearing our sins and grief and sorrows which we unload on him in prayer; his going through our trials and temptations with us.  It has to do with us discovering his faithfulness, his encouragement, his strength, his comfort.  He knows our every weakness and doesn’t reject us.  He’s always there with us even when we are sinning.  He’s always placing his life before us for us between us and our perishing to heal us.  He’s our truest friend.

Jesus calls us friends but somehow, somewhere we have resolved ourselves and the purpose of our churches to being places where we just sign up to do something that we believe churches are supposed to do rather than being fellowships where we come to share Jesus’ friendship with each other.  We like to talk about, or should I say we like our ministers to talk about Jesus being a friend to everybody, but we don’t want to share how he’s been a friend to each of us personally.  How he’s befriended and loved “me”.  Unfortunately, our reserve in this matter pretty much makes irrelevant our message to others that they too have no greater friend to find than Jesus…and that they can find the same kind of friendship among his friends.

Jesus calls us his friends because he has made known to us everything he has learned from God the Father.  He makes known to us love and a particular kind of love; a love which compels us to position, to orient our lives to be for or on behalf of our friends in Christ.  If I might answer Ed White’s question - our business is loving one another the way Jesus has loved us each.  “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.

Let’s talk about love for a few minutes.  Love is probably the most misunderstood word in the English language.  The problem is that we allow a very wide range of meaning to one, little four-letter word.  Love can be anything from a feeling with no action, a crush, to an emotional bond to an action with no feeling.  The Greek language of the New Testament, on the other hand, is more specific.  It has four words to our one little word.  The first Greek word is eros.  We get the word erotic from this one.  Eros means romantic love.  The second Greek word for love is storge.  This is the love that binds family together.  Next is the word philos, the love bond of friendship.  And finally, if you have been around the church long enough, then you have heard the word agape.  Agape is the heroic sense of love.  It is situating the entirety of one’s being – our heart, spirit, mind, and strength – to be for or on the behalf of others.

Agape is key to understanding the Greek notion of love.  All the other forms of love are shallow without it.  Eros is nothing more than infatuation if it is not made complete by agape.  Eros may get me into a relationship, but marriage is built on agape.  The family bond is a mystery.  It’s powerful and unless agape undergirds that bond, the family can be a very destructive place.  Friendship is nothing more than acquaintance unless friends are actively for one another.  In the Greek mind agape is what makes any kind of love to be love.

Looking at John’s gospel, agape is the word for love that Jesus most frequently uses.  He uses philos as well, but not as frequently.  Some translators would say he uses them interchangeably, but there is a subtle difference.  For example, in the last chapter of John’s Gospel Jesus now resurrected meets the disciples on the shore of the Sea of Galilee and eventually confronts Peter about Peter’s denial of him.  He asks Peter, “Simon son of John, do you agape me more than these?”  He meant “Do you lay your life down for me more than you do for these others?”  Peter, wisely avoiding the comparison, responds, “Lord, you know that I philos you.”  “I love you as the dearest friend.”  So, Jesus accepts Peter at his word that he loves Jesus dearly as his friend and then commands Peter, “Feed my lambs.”  You see, to love Jesus, to position yourself in life to be for or on behalf of Jesus is to serve his disciples.  We love him by loving one another as he has loved us.  This is particularly true of church leadership where modeling agape must come before anything else even things like meetings and preaching.  If we leaders, elders and ministers, do not agape our people, everything else is hypocrisy.

Well, this point is such a big one that Jesus again asks Peter, “Simon son of John, do you agape me?”  Peter again answers, “Yes Lord, you know that I philos you.”  “Take care of my sheep,” Jesus tells him.  Jesus is really beginning to cut to the core of Peter’s problem.  Peter denied him when push came to shove.  His philos for Jesus had no agape, no laying it down for Jesus.  So Jesus must push Peter to see if Peter will do the same with Jesus’ disciples.  Peter’s problem was that his agape was for himself out of fear for his own well-being rather than having true agape-based philos for Jesus and being loyal to his dearest friend.  So he denied Jesus.  Peter has to come to realize that to agape Jesus is to be more than just his friend, it is to put fear and self-agape aside and situate himself to be and act for Jesus’ followers in agape love as Jesus has done for them.  Denying Jesus himself is one thing.  We will do that…daily.  It is a failure of philos.  But, turning our backs on one another is entirely another.  That’s a break down of agape. 

A third time Jesus confronts Peter yet this time Jesus changes it up a bit, “Simon son of John, do you philos me?”  He uses philos here rather than agape.  This hurt Peter’s feelings.  Peter truly is quite remorseful for his denial of Jesus.  He truly loves Jesus as his dearest friend.  Peter responds, “Lord, you know all things, you know that I philos you.”  Jesus is really pushing here to get Peter to realize that loving Jesus as a friend is more than just a bond of friendship and loyalty.  So again Jesus commands again, “Feed my sheep.”  Surprisingly, Jesus who knows all things and does indeed know that Peter loves him dearly tells Peter he will eventually be martyred for Jesus and commands him, “Follow me.”  Peter’s strong bond of friendship with Jesus will due to agape for Jesus lead him to die for Jesus.  Yet, for now Peter must show his philos for Jesus by showing agape to Jesus’ followers.

In the passage we read today Jesus commands us to agape one another, to place or position ourselves in life to follow him by serving one another.  The fellowship of agape love in the Christian community is the heart of what the Christian reality is all about.  It is our business, so let’s make it our busyness.  Jesus did not come and live and die for us to get a bunch of people to decide to believe in him so they could go to heaven when they die.  Jesus didn’t live and die just to get a bunch of people to show up periodically to get their moral compasses realigned so they can get on with being good citizens.  In, through, and as Jesus of Nazareth the Christ the Trinity – the loving communion of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit - was and is making a new humanity renewed in his loving-communion image.  We are human beings now indwelt by the Holy Spirit who binds us to Jesus the Son to share in his resurrected humanity so that we are able to agape one another in Christ in order to show the world the Trinity’s agape for it.  The Christian church is not a gathering of people who share common private beliefs about Jesus and who strive to live morally upright lives so they don’t go to Hell.  It is the communion of people who have in various ways met Jesus Christ through the work of the Holy Spirit and in, with, and through him experienced the steadfast love and faithfulness of God the Father and are therefore now able to agape others, to position our lives for others…and we do so. 

Indeed, Jesus has chosen us each for this very purpose.  There has been a wealth of materials written in the last thirty years helping churches to discern their purpose.  Everywhere you turn now congregations, Presbyteries, whole denominations are coming up with vision and mission statements to say what we are here for.  I did my doctoral thesis on it and therefore I can say with learned and earned authority that a lot of words have been spent on trying to re-invent the wheel that Jesus so plainly gave us and we so stubbornly avoid.  That wheel?  Love one another.  That’s our purpose.  Love one another as he has loved us and people will know that we are his disciples.  People will know because the Holy Spirit, the real and felt personal presence of God will make that very clear to them.  I’ve never heard of someone leaving a church with their excuse being “those people were so loving that I knew God was in their midst.”  No, that’s the reason people give for why they choose to stay at a church.

Jesus’ command to agape one another as Jesus himself has agape-ed us is a difficult task for us.  It is a difficult task for us because it is our nature to be like Peter and out of fear agape ourselves rather than one another.  John says something very interesting at the very beginning of his gospel.  He writes: “This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil” (3:19).  The word for love there, for loving darkness is agape.  We will love the darkness in the same way that Jesus has loved us.  Our tendency is to position ourselves in life on behalf of ourselves, for what we perceive to be to our own benefit or gain.  We are self-minded rather than communion-minded. 

Being truly God-minded is to show agape to one another in Jesus name.  The light that has come into the world is Jesus, God the Son become human.  He revealed to us that God is within himself agape.  Loving, agape-ing one another is what church is all about.  Not saving souls, not choirs and robes, not guitars and praise songs, not dinners and fundraisers, not moral uprightness or spiritual edification.  Being a human community of people placing the entirety of our very selves on the table of life to be for one another rather than for ourselves is why we are here.  What the hymn “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” says about how Jesus is a friend to us each is the way we are to love one another.  We are to bear with one another in our sins and grief and sorrows.  Share with one another that we can pray for one another.  Strengthen one another in the midst our trials and temptations.  In the midst of our loving each other as he has loved us Jesus will indeed make himself known so that we more deeply discover his faithfulness, his encouragement, his strength, his comfort.  Just as he knows our every weakness and doesn’t reject us.  So we would share our weaknesses with one another and not reject each other.  Church is a place we are to come not in our strength but in our weakness. Stick by one another that healing from sin may arise.  Sin’s power over us is the shame that makes us feel alone, powerless, and hopeless.  True, authentic human friendship should mark the relationships that Jesus’ followers have with one another.  For, you see, agape-based community is where God has chosen to make his agape readily available.  A better way of saying this is that the Trinity makes himself readily and unhinderedly available in the midst of Jesus followers who devote themselves to the very hard work of agape for one another. 

There is a huge repent and believe that comes along with what I’m saying here.  Jesus’ command for us to agape one another places a huge need for the re-prioritization of our commitments.  If we are the followers of Jesus and do want to know him and his philos for us, then we must put the agape of our brothers and sisters in Christ before other commitments we have.  One thing that I treasure about smaller churches is that agape stands more evidently at the fore of what we Christians are about.  It is this agape that comes so naturally in smaller churches that we must learn to give to our surrounding communities with the expectation of nothing in return.  Agape is not agape if it is done with the motive of saving a religious institution that is addicted to buildings and paid ministers who will do everything to keep themselves employed.

To close, it has unfortunately befallen the church in our culture today that we be dwindling.  A major worldview shift has hit our culture in the last fifty years and the institutional security of most churches is gravely threatened.  Our culture has taken a very narcissistic turn.  An agape of the darkness abounds.  But we, each of us, are whom Jesus has chosen to shine his light of agape through to the world, the light of God’s very self through to this world that loves the darkness.  He’s chosen each of us to be crucial participants in his own laying down of himself in unselfish love for this world that he also loves.  For God so loved the world that he sent his only begotten Son.  You each are part of that.  Love one another.  Love one another deeply from the heart.  Listen to one another.  Support and encourage one another.  Discipline one another.  Pray for one another.  Study the Bible together and together feed the hungry, give water to the thirsty, help the poor, clothe the naked, visit the captive.  People will know you are Christians by your love…and because of that love they just might be inclined to hang around.  Amen.