Mystic Congregational Church, UCC

Mystic, Connecticut

Sermon from May 21, 2006

“Untitled”

Rev. Patricia L. Liberty

Scriptures:

1 John 5:1-6

John 15:9-17

When William Brosand, pastor of the First Baptist Church in Rochester, New York, returned after a three-month sabbatical, his congregation was anxious to hear what he had learned that would help the church.  In a recent Christian Century article, he commented, “In all seriousness, I answered, the most important thing I learned is how to breathe in and how to breathe out.”  He goes on to say, “I have not yet learned how to meditate but I now know how to sit quietly for a few moments and breathe in and out.  I’m learning how, in those moments, to be aware of how Jesus sits with me and loves me.  I imagine myself reclining like the beloved disciple, sitting with Jesus, leaning on his shoulder, abiding in his love.”

It’s a great image and not one that’s necessarily easy to wrap our brains around because abide is one of those words that kind of belongs to another time.  It’s fallen out of common usage in our daily conversation.  As someone remarked recently, highway motel signs read “Stay here”, not “Abide with us”.  Baseball announcers don’t sum up in innings with “One hit a walk and two abiding on base”.  The Oxford Dictionary lists 17 uses for the word abide and 8 of them are obsolete.  But the word appears in John’s Gospel more often than it does in any other book of Scripture.  That gives us a hint about what John’s Gospel is all about, what the central message is.

William Brosand continues, “The trouble is that few of us are clear about what it means to abide in Christ .”  Move to Capernaeum?  Not likely though it has been tried and visits to the Holy Land can be quite rewarding.  Go to the desert or the monastery of the hermitage?  Well, perhaps, if that’s your calling.  For most of us, it is not.  What about the foreign missions deal or your local Christian community?  Certainly, if that is your calling. 

But such suggestions are grounded in an understanding of abiding that seems more about place than presence.  The kind of abiding that Jesus is talking about here is presence.  It is an invitation to disciples of all times to know ourselves as God’s beloved.  To truly know in those moments of poignant awareness, times of profound sadness, impending loss, times of wrenching uncertainty or utter failure, deep disappointment, to know in those moments that we are God’s beloved is the spiritual discipline of a lifetime.

When Jesus says these words, he is speaking to his disciples as part of his farewell discourse.  He’s getting ready to leave them and they are fearful.  In that moment of impending separation, comes these words about abiding:  that they and we might know ourselves as God’s beloved.  It is not because of what we do or fail to do.  It is not because of what we are or fail to be.  It has nothing to do with what we accomplish or fail to accomplish in the course of our days.  We are beloved of God because that’s who God is, not because of who we are.

In 1847, Henry Francis Lyte penned the words to a favorite old hymn for many, “Abide with me, fast falls the eventide; the darkness deepens.  God, with me, abide.  When other helpers fail, and comforts flee, help of the helpless, o abide with me.”

Drawing to a close the 24-year pastorate in England in the midst of declining health and certain retirement, he knew he could no longer keep up with the demands of parish ministry.  In his journal which is recorded for us speaks of a Sunday evening walk that he took through his beloved garden.  During that week, he was completely overwhelmed by this sense of God’s care and presence.  So he returned to his study and wrote the words of that wonderful hymn.  He bears witness to the truth of that deep, wonderful, unwavering sense of God’s presence in the most human moments of our days.

Jesus says that is the foundation of everything.  “I have said these things to you that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete.”  Complete joy has very little to do with happiness.  Much of what passes for joy in our lives is one part sentimentality, one part having everything we think we want and, perhaps, one part hitting the bull’s eye as the world’s definition of success.  Jesus lays waste to that idea here and advises us to the true joy that comes from knowing ourselves as beloved.

It is pure gift—there is nothing that we have to do and there is nothing we can do.  It simply is.  There’s no score-keeping here, no tote board theology that racks up all of our good deeds on one side and all of our less-than-good deeds on the other side in the hope that, when we come to the end of our days, there will be more things in the “good” column than in the other one.  It is pure gift and it is the foundation of everything else, the place from which we go forward to live in the world.  Love one another as I have loved you.  I think we have a lot of our service and discipleship run amok when we think that we’re doing it on our own, of our own volition.  True discipleship flows from our connection to God into our connection with others.  In short, we love because God first loved us.

Again, we need to clarify what we mean when we talk about love because it has nothing to do with that sentimentality that captures much of our contemporary usage.  It has little to do with the feeling or any kind of sentimental connection to God or to each other.  Love, as it used here, means love that that is for one another, love that acts on behalf of one another, even at cost to oneself.  Just to make sure that we don’t miss the point, the next sentence is:  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. 

Here’s why I think it gets a little bit weird because love, commandment and friendship are not necessarily things that I all use in the same sentence easily.  I don’t know about you but commanding love is not something that really ever worked all that well for me.  Have you tried to ever love someone?  It is not an act of our own volition.  The friendships that are most satisfying are not the ones that are filled with commandments and oughts and shoulds but grow in a different kind of soil.  Friends that matter most are those who share an emotional intimacy with us, a deep connection that nurtures heart and head, that feeds soul and spirit.  Such friendships are not automatic.  They are intentional.  They require time, attention, risk and commitment.  There are no oughts or shoulds.  When Jesus goes ahead and calls his disciples friends, he is shifting the boundaries of the relationship considerably.

Kris Lewis, writing for The Witness this week, notes, “Friendship in first-century Mediterranean world was a serious proposition.  To be considered a friend was to be in a position of honor.  Being a friend meant being treated as a kin, with all the attendant obligations.  To be a friend meant to look out for the welfare of the other and to put one’s needs on equal footing with your own.  Friendship implied reciprocity as well.  To consider someone a friend meant counting on that person to return that level of concern and care.”

So when Jesus calls his disciples friends, he’s upping the ante considerably in terms of what he expected from them.  He has shared with them what God revealed to him, and he’s now giving them and us the task of going out to do the same thing and sharing that revelation with the world.  Needless to say, it was quite a promotion for the disciples.  I’m not all that sure they thought they were up to it.  Sometimes, I’m not so sure that we are either.  I doubt that the disciples were comforted or reassured by Jesus’ calling them friends.  I’m not sure they were ready to be friends in return.  In some ways, it’s easier to be a child, easier to be a servant, easier to be a student because there wasn’t quite so much that’s expected of us.

Friendship with Jesus raises all friendships to the highest possible level.  It means that, as we go out to live our way and find our way in the world, we are to be intentional about our relationships and to reach out without regard to the possible cost to ourselves, without thinking of what we might get in return.  Just as Jesus broke down boundaries by calling his disciples “friends”, we, too, go out to break down barriers by reaching out in friendship to those who are different from us—the poor, the marginalized, the needy.  It means that we no longer treat love and friendship as a kind of goal-oriented affection.  We love so that something will happen either to us or to someone else.

In his book Peace Is Every Step, Thich Nhat Hanh writes, “If our love is only a will to possess, then it’s not love.  We must look deeply in order to see and understand the need of those we love.  This is the ground of true love.  Understanding happens when we are present to the other and when we abide with her or him as Christ abides in us.  It is not a burden but a present.”

That is the gift of discipleship—not something we do or accomplish on our own but a partnership that we build with Jesus.  So we go from this place to ponder what it means to be Christ’s friend—servants in the service of others.  Amen.