The gift of friendship and a slice of cake

 John 14:15-21
I want you to take a moment and think about your friendships.  For some of you, you know exactly what I’m talking about with friends.  And you’re very jazzed to see them in school tomorrow! For others of you, these are the friends that live on the other side of your backyard fence, the people you sit next to at the little league game, the people in your water aerobics class. Maybe it’s a person you cross paths with weekly in a meeting.  There are also the people that you connect with once in a while for lunch, Or there are those friends who you’ve known for a long time that you don’t talk to often, but when you do, there is an ease that is almost supernatural. 

What is it that makes friendship so special? 

Journalist, Julie beck once wrote that, when people talk about their friends or with their friends, they are “their most generous, their funniest, and their most fascinating.” 

It seems like a lot of researchers focus on relationships we have with our parents or our romantic partners. Friendships get less attention.  But friendships, also shape and anchor our lives. 

There also aren’t a ton of places in scripture where we specifically hear of friendships.  Maybe they are implied: obviously Pricilla and Aquilla had to be friends if they were working together in the streets of Corinth. Tabitha most certainly had deep friendships with the women in the early church.  She has a whole posse of ladies in Antioch. Or the old stories of David and Johnathan—they were good friends.  Jesus is certainly deeply affected when Lazarus dies. One can only suppose that he was friends with Lazarus and his sisters, Mary and Martha. 

There’s another place in scripture that got me thinking about friendship. There’s this little section of the gospel of John that was read a moment ago. In this scene, Jesus is with his disciples and they’re all talking at the table.  He says to them, I’ve been here with you, but I’m not going to be with you in the same way going forward. The way I’ll be with you is to send you the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit, according to the gospel of John, is the one who is called to be alongside us. You can see it right in the word that John uses to describe the Sprit. The first part of the word, para means “with” or “alongside,” the second part of the word is kaleo or “to call.” Para-clete. So, the holy spirit is the one who is called to be along side of us.  

I heard an interview with Dr. Vivek Murthee, the surgeon general, where he talked about friendship. He mentioned that when he was young man, he felt really fulfilled socially, but then, he said, he started to get more deeply involved in his work. He had two kids, life was busy and, with time, he stopped paying attention to his friendships. It was an insidious thing that didn’t happen overnight, but eventually at the pinnacle of his career, he found himself consumed with work, and isolated. He talked about how this seems to be a little more common for men than women. He said he was ironically surrounded by people, but that the quality of the connection with them was thin. Loneliness, he said, masquerades as depression, addiction, anger, violence, grumpiness.  Then, he said, he happened to be on a retreat, where he saw two old friends that he looks up to and respects. He hadn’t been in touch with them.  He said at one point at the retreat, the three of them took a walk and he told them he felt like he was struggling with a lack of connection and good friends.  The friends made a pact then to check in once a month and call and it has helped. 

Social scientists say that a lot of our close friends are friends of utility. They’re certainly real friends, but we’re friends with them because our paths cross consistently at work or in our kids’ lives. Sometime, these people become our very best friends, often they’re not.

If your friendship is utilitarian or connected because of work, for example, you might always be hanging onto a little bit of your professional demeanor and you don’t want to risk messing it up by sharing something personal or speaking up if something really matters to you.  Maybe you could say that there’s always a little bit of our guard that’s up? It can keep the quality of your connection with that friend thin.

But there’s another deeper kind of friendship. It was Aristotle who said that when friends share a love of something bigger than either of them that is outside of you both of them, you move to another level of friendship. These kind of friendships don’t depend on work or family or ambition.  You’re connected by something that is outside of you that you simply enjoy. Maybe you share a love of baseball or you love to make music together, or you share a common love in your… religion.  Over time, when we get to really know one another. These are the friends who come up along side of us (like that paraclete Jesus speaks of) not because we need them, but just because we love them.  They don’t need us, they just…love us. There is no useful purpose to the relationship other than knowing and loving each other. 

Or--is that the most transformative thing of all?…That there is no useful purpose other than knowing and loving each other?

Some studies say that being truly known is central to achieving change in psychotherapy.  I wonder if the same could be said about growth in our faith.

In the gospel of John, Jesus talks all the time about knowing God and being known by God, and abiding in God and abiding in one another. I wondered if that level of friendship is a kind of discipleship, and, in its’ own way, a way to follow Jesus.  Was that kind of closeness, and enjoyment of one another almost like a spiritual practice?  I have not yet landed on the answer to that one, but I’m thinking about it.

I’ve been thinking about friendship, in part because about a month ago, Liza mentioned at a staff meeting that her friendships and relationships were part of an experience here at this church that has had a deep impact on her.  

She shared in our worship service how these relationships impacted her and you can see some of her reflections here. 

How have you experienced being deeply known or a powerful friendship that has changed you? 

I want to take a moment to acknowledge that some people feel really known at church, and some people feel impossibly lonely in the church and like they don’t fit (maybe it’s useful to point out that: basically everyone over the age of 10 questions and frets about if they really belong at church at some point or another. Ironically, everyone finds common ground there)

**** 

For a variety of different reasons, over the years, many of us let the friendship muscle atrophy and we stop intentionally practicing friendship. There are any number of other reasons, we stop being intentional with our friends. Maybe, like, Dr. Murthee, we get caught up in work: professional success has become almost virtuous--it certainly seems more virtuous than hanging out with friends. maybe we have a family member with a health crisis that is consuming us and it’s hard to connect with friends.  Maybe… there’s a global pandemic and we all become a little socially awkward and unsure about how to connect with each other. Strange as it sounds, like other practices, Friendship is a skill that we have to cultivate and practice …or we get bad at it. 

Here at church, while there are certainly a lot of tasks we can get caught up in around here, one of the main things is relationships.  We could do this God thing on our own, some people do which is just fine, but there is also something about faith that is a team sport, a group project and we show up here with a group of people to practice it. there is no utilitarian function to the relationships or friendships you will make here at church. I mean, maybe you’ll network with someone, or find a play date for your kid, or find someone who can retile your bathroom, but that isn’t the point.This place is about relationships for the sheer sake of relationships.  That is how Christ is made known in this world. And we practice that together.

******

We are, of late, a little rusty at relationship here at church.  In the last couple of years, we’ve trimmed out a lot of the places where we used to cultivate those relationships and even practice friendships. Wednesday night meals or choir practice. It has been hard to get coffee hour going. It’s difficult to see each others’ faces with the masks. This fall, we’re going to get some things going where we’ll hopefully be able to connect more deeply with each other through some cottage meeting conversation groups, maybe an occasional men’s group bonfire, or music rehearsal on Wednesday night. We hope you’ll find space to connect. But in the meantime, right here, right now, we are going to pause our worship service for a ten minute moment of fika. 

During this short coffee break, your task is to turn around and make eye contact with folks and introduce yourself.  When the music starts you’ll know it’s time to continue with the communion liturgy.