Rethink Church
“Rethink Church” Acts 10:44-48; Psalm 98; 1 John 5:1-6; John 15:9-17
“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.”
When Edgar and I moved here to Mount Vernon from D.C. five or six years ago now, we of course hired a moving company. I say “of course” because I have moved quite a few times over the years, as I know many of you all have as well, and it’s a lot of work. But Edgar thought it was strange. Why would you pay a bunch of strangers to come into your house and carry around all your stuff when you could ask your friends to help you? In his experience in Brazil, that’s what you do when you’ve got a big task in front of you – you don’t pay strangers, you ask your friends. As the song goes, that’s what friends are for.
As you might imagine, I was not very enthusiastic about this possibility. Because, of course, if you ask your friends to help you to move, you need to be ready to help them when it comes time for them to move. And I have reached the stage of life where, to be honest, I really don’t want to help my friends move. I’m sorry, but I just don’t have the time or the stamina or, frankly, the interest in that sort of thing. And I know that most of my friends are in the same stage of their lives. So, we hired the movers.
In modern American middle-class life we are used to paying for things that, for much of human history and indeed in many parts of the world still to this day, people did for themselves, or called on their family and friends for help. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Think of all of the social structures that are necessary before you’ll trust strangers to come into your house, load all your worldly possessions into their truck, and drive off – with confidence that they will not ride off into the sunset and never be seen again, but they’ll actually drive to your new house and put everything there. It takes strong commitments to follow and enforce the law, strong customs about mutual respect and fairness, and a high degree of social trust built up over years and generations – and not many human beings in history have had the good fortune to live in such a society.
For most of the human race, strangers can’t be trusted, and so the people you need to rely on – the only people you can rely on – are your family and your friends. Your family because you have the same inheritance, the same interests in protecting your common heritage, so you know you can count on them. And you can trust your friends because you’ve got things in common with them, interests you share, experiences that you’ve been through together.
In some ways it’s good to be able to trust strangers – not everyone has friends with moving trucks, not everyone is a friend who’s got the physique to carry a couch up a flight of stairs. But in our society that doesn’t rely so much on friends, the statistics say we have in many ways lost the ability to make friends, to be friends. There was a big survey on Americans and friendship published a couple of years ago that was rather bleak on this subject. Most Americans say they only have between 2 and 5 friends; most of them people we know from childhood or school; many of whom we’ve lost track of because one or the other of us has moved away. A majority of Americans said they hadn’t made a single new friend in the last five years – and that was before Covid! Since the most common place to meet new friends is at work, I imagine it’s only gotten worse since this study was published. And most people’s friends are people of similar backgrounds as themselves – same race, same kind of education, same political views, same life experiences.
When Jesus said to his disciples: I do not call you servants any more, but I call you friends – Jesus was speaking not in our world, where friendship has become less and less central to our everyday experience. In the ancient world, friendship implied so much more. Friends are people who can count on one another. Friends are people who feel themselves to be part of something larger than themselves, who have a mutual commitment to something beyond themselves, and so they are people who have learned to trust one another.
Jesus not only proclaims himself as our friend, the one who is there for us, the one who lays down his life for his friends. Because friendship is a two-way street. Jesus invites us to be friends to him, people on whom he can count, people in whom he can trust.
And it’s more than that. Jesus has a lot of friends, and he really loves introducing his friends to one another. There are lots of people who are friends with Jesus with whom I don’t have very much else in common. There are lots of people who are also friends of Jesus, who are trying in their own way to follow Jesus – even though I don’t really understand their experience of faith very well, even if I don’t agree with them on politics, even if we don’t speak the same language, even if I have no idea what we’d find to talk about if we did – but if I know they are a friend of Jesus, and they see me as a friend of Jesus – well, this could be the start of a beautiful friendship. If I know they believe in love, as I do, even if they don’t live it out very well, as I don’t, maybe we do have something in common after all. Or at least we can be genuinely curious about each other’s experience, to learn how Jesus is working in each other’s lives – and in that to learn something how Jesus is working in my own.
This is the experience that we see repeated over and over again in the early Christian community, as in our first reading today from Acts. Peter is called to a group of Gentiles, the family of a Roman soldier. At this point all Christians are Jews; there are no non-Jewish members of the community. Peter is telling them about Jesus, no doubt talking to them like the pagan outsiders that he thinks that they are. And then the Holy Spirit doesn’t even have the courtesy of waiting for Peter to finish his sermon. The Holy Spirit comes down upon these outsiders. Peter stops talking, recognizes God is doing something beyond Peter’s expectations and imagination, and baptizes those whom God has chosen to befriend. And famously the first non-Jewish Christians are baptized.
What is less well known is what follows the baptism of the family of Cornelius in the story we read today from Acts. “So Peter ordered them to be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ. Then, they invited him to stay for several days.” And in fact, when Peter gets back home and finds himself in some trouble with the Jewish-Christian community, the thing that upset them is not so much that Peter baptized these pagans, but that Peter stayed in their unkosher house, eating their unkosher food, hanging out with these unkosher barbarians as a guest in their home. Peter didn’t simply say, Hey, these people may be totally foreign to me, their food and their customs may be disgusting to me, but they have the Holy Spirit, so I guess they can get baptized. Peter also says, Hey, these people may be totally foreign to me, their food and their customs may be disgusting to me, but they have the Holy Spirit, so I guess they’re now my friends, I guess I can share life with them for a little while.
This is the community of friends that Jesus makes possible. A community of mutual respect and curiosity about one another, of dependence on one another, all rooted in the common experience of being befriended by Jesus. The kind of friends that many of us these days don’t make any more – friends who call us out of ourselves into relationships we didn’t expect and might not think we want. But friendships where we discover the living God at work, breaking down walls and building up the community of God. Where what brings us together is that we have each, in our own way, found ourselves invited into a friendship with Jesus.
A brief personal story: The first time I ever went to a Lutheran worship service on my own, at Good Shepherd Church in Pearl River, New York, most of the hymns we sang that day were those 17th century German Lutheran hymns from the old green LBW hymnal, theologically precise in a way that appeal to nerds like me but didn’t seem to move the congregation. Then we came to the final hymn, What a Friend We Have in Jesus – which, with the background I come from, is a song I don’t think I had ever sung before. And the congregation just exploded with enthusiasm as it sang this hymn together, and I remember feeling, OK, maybe I’m not too sure about this. But even if this hymn doesn’t really speak to my experience, I have become friends in Christ with many people to whom it speaks quite profoundly. And it’s the meaning this hymn has for so many with whom I have become friends that has given it meaning for me. And perhaps that’s what friendship in Christ and in the church is all about.