Meg Peery McLaughlin
I’ll Be There For You: Friends
May 5, 2024
John 15: 9-17
Prayer of Illumination
Truth-telling, life-giving Spirit–
we are hungry for your guidance.
Breathe your truth among us,
breathe your story of death and life
that our story may be submitted fully to your will.
We pray in the name of Jesus risen to new life. Amen.
John 15: 9-17
As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love.
If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love,
just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love.
I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you
and that your joy may be complete.
“This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.
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, because the servant does not know what the master is doing, but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father.
You did not choose me, but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name.
I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.
This is the Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
I confess that I picked this week’s sermon title just for fun.
I wasn’t intending on referencing the 90s sitcom Friends at all.
But things changed at worship meeting on Wednesday.
That show has a catchy theme song—hence the sermon title.
And there was a slight argument about how many claps come after the opening lyric of the song.
Of course we had a sing it to prove our points.
So no one told you life was gonna be this way.
Hadley and I instinctively clapped 5 times.
Tristan very clearly, very plainly stated. It’s four claps.
We went back and forth.
Hadley and I told Tristan that we were older that him,
that he was barely born in the 90s.
He just smiled kindly and said I’m sorry, but you. are. wrong.
Tristan is my friend, but he held nothing back.
Then he got out his phone and proved us wrong.
Today, 13 young people will stand on these chancel steps
and be asked if they trust in Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior
and if they want to confirm the promises made at their baptism,
if they desire to live a life of discipleship.
Later, around lunch tables down in Dunham Hall
3 families and 3 graduate students
will answer similar questions, as they too,
join the company of disciples here at University Presbyterian Church.
—
Listen today, church, to a stunning theological claim.
In the Gospel according to John,
to be a disciple is to be a friend of Jesus.
“I have called you friends,” Jesus says.
“You are my friends if you do what I command you,
This is my commandment, that you love one another.”
This is unique to John’s telling of the Jesus story,
and is not found in Matthew, Mark or Luke.
I found it providential that this text from John is the Lectionary reading today,
on Confirmation Sunday.
Scientists have long told us that forming friendships is one of the most important developmental tasks of adolescence. High-quality friendships correlate to positive developmental outcomes and strong mental health.
UPC offers confirmation class in the 8th grade,
presumably when young women and men can make decisions on their own.
But we all know the frontal lobe does not really fully form until we are 25.
But perhaps there is no still better age to do confirmation than adolescence,
when much of these young peoples’ lives
pivot around their social circles—around their friends:
friends in the classroom, on the field, around the neighborhood, on their screens.
As these young people are working out their self-identity
amidst attachments beyond their parents
we as the church ask them something crucial:
Do you see yourself as Jesus’ friend?
Do you trust that Christ has already claimed you as friend?
Maybe there aren’t better questions.
Thomas Aquinas suggests that part of the goal of the Christian life is to become friends with God. What a gift that today, we will get to witness these young people embrace that call with an enthusiastic yes.
Now, if the language of friendship with God feels intensely intimate, or overly-familiar, you’re not reading it wrong.
“A friend” in Greek is literally means “one who is loved.”
God in Jesus Christ shows us that we are loved without limit.
Loved to the end.
Loved beyond what we thought the end was going to be.
Bring to mind a friend with whom you are close.
What does that friendship mean to you?
What does is ask of you?
What good does it pull from you?
—
One of my dearest friends is Joanna Clarke Sayer Wade.
My childhood memory is fuzzy,
but I first remember meeting Joanna
while singing carols at the Old Craggy Prison in Asheville.
I must have been in elementary school at the time,
our family would have been visiting the mountains from
Charlotte in the days after Christmas.
Joanna’s mom and my dad had been classmates at St. Andrews Presbyterian College.
After the prison caroling, Joanna and I had periodically crossed paths at summer camp at Camp Grier in Old Fort.
So when I moved to Asheville in the middle of my sophomore year of High School,
Joanna was the kind hearted soul who welcomed me to the lunch table when I was the new kid with no friends. Our friendship grew such that we decided to room together just across the way in Cobb Dorm for our first two years at UNC.
When we moved off campus our junior year,
I remember unpacking stuff to fill our duplex on Caldwell Street.
Joanna pulled from a box a black and white print in a green picture frame.
It was woodcut that had simple illustrations, and words from Matthew’s gospel.
I was hungry and you gave me food.
I was a stranger and you welcomed me.
As she unwrapped the frame from it’s newspaper packing,
my smile widened and I said, Oh I love that print so much.
We have that same thing hanging in my kitchen back home.
Joanna chuckled
Oh sweetie. Nope. Not true.
I’m not surprised you recognize it, though.
This print was in MY kitchen back home, not yours.
I was her friend—
so much her friend that my brain claimed Joanna’s family heirlooms as my own.
The interior of her childhood kitchen was now something that was a part of me.
—
This scripture from John is part of what we call the Farewell Discourse.
Jesus is preparing his disciples for his death, resurrection and ascension,
with a long monologue.
My New Testament professor liked to say that in John’s Gospel:
Wordy is the Lamb.
Jesus doesn’t just say that the disciples are his friends. He tells them why and how
discipleship is linked to friendship.
Jesus says, “I have called you friends,
because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father.”
Eugene Peterson translates this same verse
“I’ve named you friends because I’ve let you in on everything.”
The disciples are so close that they’ve seen the inside of the kitchen.
They know the heirlooms.
They’ve heard it all.
This is good news, and as it goes with the good news,
church, there is more depth to plummet.
I think it helps to share a bit of historical context about the Greco-Roman time.
When these words were first heard in John’s community,
friendship was much discussed. Friendship was a highly esteemed relationship.
In the ancient world you’d never say: “we’re just friends.”
In this time, friendship was not casual.
Two out of ten of Aristotle’s books about ethics were on the topic of friendship.
No, to be a good friend was to be a good citizen.
Thus, there was a great deal of thought and writing about what made a friend good—
what made a true friend as opposed to a false one.
The late Gail O’Day ’s scholarship on this is fascinating.
She notes that a true friend speaks same truth in private as in public.
They have integrity regardless of the cost.
The opposite of a true friend is a flatterer.
Someone who speaks just to suit their own ends,
rather than speaking candidly, plainly.
Thus, a distinguishing mark of friendship is the use of frank speech.
The Gospel of John uses the word for frank speech, in Greek “parresia”
more than any other New Testament book.
Speaking plainly about God,
who God is
what God does
what God is pointing us toward
is of utmost importance in this gospel.
Jesus has spoken plainly, fully, honestly about God to his disciples,
he has let them in on all of it,
and thus, they are friends.
If I understand the text,
this is an invitation for us
to recognize ourselves as Christ’s friends—
as those who are called into a similar frankness of speech and integrity of action
in our love for one another.
I suppose I’ve been mulling on parresia, frank speech,
because of the what has been happening across the street this week on campus—
the protests, the university response, the news coverage from every angle.
It seems we’ve been asking ourselves a lot of questions about our speech—
When does the right of free speech on college campuses or anywhere else
trample on other rights? The right to learn or right/teach work safely?
Where did we get the idea that speaking up for Palestinians and calling for a ceasefire—equates to lack of support for homeland for Israel, or that such speech is anti-semitic?
Does critique of American policy have to translate to a lack of patriotism?
What power does our speech have?
It seems to me it is faithful to be considering such questions,
especially if we are those who are commanded to love one another,
and if that love is indeed the kind of love that speaks frankly, and holds nothing back.
I started this sermon referencing an argument, a difference of opinion. 5 claps or 4.
The conflicts of our day have no such simple answers.
You can’t pull up a you tube and settle it right then and there.
And Jesus knows that. Knows living a life of discipleship is complex and hard.
Which is perhaps why Jesus gives us this commandment.
Love one another.
Be a friend. Remember you already are one.
Behave in this world as the kind of disciple
who is so close to God
that you know in the inside of the kitchen,
act as one who has been told it all, who has been let in on everything:
the amazing grace
the justice that rolls down
the peace that surpasses all understanding.
Go say to the world,
I’ll be there for you.