i sALENDSHIP John M, Buchanan
John 17:1-15 Broad Street Presbyterian Chusch
October 23, 1977 Coluubus, Ohio

It was one of the more distressing telephone calls I have received, JE did not
know the caller and she did not know me, In her words, "You're a preacher aren't
you and you're supposed to talk to people, aren't you?" When fT indicated that she
was correct on both counts the floodgates opened and she told a very sad, but not
unusual, story: a teenager, cut off from all contact with her parents, hurt by some
very damaging mistakes, trying to make her way in life alone and not doing very well,
I did what my training and experience has prepared me to da: I listened, And when
she asked directly what I thought she should do, I drew on the resources available
to all of us: I suggested making contact with the parents or some family member: I
suggested counseling: I pointed her to the myriad of helping institutions in the
community. She cut me off in language only the young feel free enough to use with
a minister: The hell with that,’ she said, "I've heard it all before, I'm just
lonely." And then she hung up.

Tt was a rude reminder that we live in a world where some people are alone,
It was a flesh and blood illustration that even in the best of circles, in the midst
of cocktail parties and bridge and tem.is and dinner at the club there are people ~
perhaps many people ~- who need nothing so much as a friend, The academicians who
observe us objectively have been saying it for some time, The litany of descriptive
words is familiar to all: we are alienated, estranged, cut off, lonely, Our Llitera-
ture betrays us: books sell best that offer some clue to establishing better re-
lationships and if all else fails we are led to the court of final appeal and told
how to become “our own bast friend", 'See all the lonely people ~- where did they
come from?" the Beatles whined a decade ago, And I’ve never been able to get the
phrase out of mind because it's an observation that ministers and doctors and
social workers make every day.

Popular wisdom, on the cther hand, maintains that distance, not closeness, is
the best stance between people, Some sociclogists are suggesting that in our
culture there are only three kinds of relationships: a sexual relationship, real or
imagined or hoped for: a business or functional relationship with persons we need:
and acquaintance - that expensive umbrella under which we crowd the casual encounters
with neighbors, fellow church members, people we meet on the street or at social
gatherings. Absent, say the scholars, is a deep relationship with anyone that might
be called friendship. Students of marriage suggest that our culture is so obsessed
with sexuality that it never occurs to men and women that they must become friends
if they are to make it over the long haul,

Tt have read and reread Robert Trost's Mending Wall many times, The poem deals
with two men replacing stones in the vall that stands between them, Listen to the
poet -

"My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him,
He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’

Before i built a wall I'd ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offence,
Something there is that doesn’t ilove a wall,
That wants it down,

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He moves in darkness as it seem to me,

Not of woods only and the shade of trees.

He will not fo behind his father's saying,

And he Likes having thought of it so well

He says asain, 'Gond fences make good neighbors. ‘"
Mending Wali, The Callected Poems of
Robert Frost, Modern Library, p.35-36),

Close friendship with another human being can be tedious, exasperating, risky,
The anonymous neighbor in Frost's poem imew that, It is simply easier not to go too
deeply: to keep others safely at. arm's length. Don Rickies is poking fun at the
late Will Rogers when he says, "I never met a man I couldn't dislike," but he is
also saying something profoundly true,

On the other side of it evidence keeps cropping up in our society that the need
for friendship is still alive and well. A dear friend of mine who has an important
position in educational radio and television, a very sophisticated media expert,
oncé a@ year, no matter what else is crowding his schedule, pushes everything aside
and travels to some remote place for a weekend reunion with his artillery battery
from World War IZ, When I asked him why it was so important he said simply, “They're
the best friends I've ever had," There is a Lot that is wrong vith the Fraternity
system: what is right about it is the opportunity for intimate friendship, And in
a book on Life in the Lowlands of Scotland which I read recently, the author and
his wife, after visiting every institution in their village, decided to spend most
of their time in the pub because that is where they discovered camaraderie and
trust and Love, They cxossed off the Church, by the way, as the coidest and un-
friendliest gathering in Scottish society,

There is no way to read the New Testament without sensing that the Christian
Life has everything in the world to do with relationships between people, Christian
people are part of a community conspicuous in the eyes of anyone who sees it in the
way it exhibits love, forgiveness, acceptance and openness, [It is impossible to
read the New Testament without seeing that. Yet the simple truth is that it is
nearly as impossible to look at the life of the contemporary Church of Jesus Christ
and notice it. Thc greatest discrepancy between what we say we believe and how we
act is precisely here, The most damning indictment of the institutional church I
know occurs when people find it cold, unfriendly, when it lags behind secular in-
stitutions in graciousness and forgiveness and acceptance, And I don’t think young
people, with their impetuous integrity, will ever take us seriously until we
resolve that one,

One of my favorite theologians is Langdon Gilkey, at the University of Chicago,
Gilkey spent Worid War II in a Japanese internment camp, not unlike the one in which
Art Romig was held, Gilkey wrote about his experience in an excellent littie book
Shantung Compound. Space was at a premium in the camp, particularly in the sleeping
quarters, Nine, ten and eleven people were housed in rooms ten by eleven feet.

Most of them were Christian missionaries, Christian businessmen and wives, teachers
and British Government officials, It vas impossible for this group to arrive at an
equitable and satisfactory allotment of space

"At one point the American Red Gross sent fifteen hundred parceis of food to
the camp. The Japanese suggested that one and a half parcels be given to every
American prisoner and that one pareel be given to all other prisoners, But the

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majority of Americans wanted seven and a half parcels, which was their share if none
were given to others. In both instances, as in most other problem times, the prob-
lems were solved only by recourse to the power and authority of the Japanese captors,"
(Shantuns Compound, p.34-35).

On the night of His betrayal and arrest Jesus talked to His disciples about
the future after He was gone, It is a remarkable passage in which He oses the word
"Friend" » the only time He used the word in the Gospels, He began His discourse by
invoking a very familiar image. When they entered the Temple in Jerusalem they sav
the image of a vine on the gates: the vine by which Jeremiah and Ezekiel had described
the nation, '"I am the vine," He said: “you are the branches,"! The relationship be~-
tween us is organic, life and death, And because of that you are related to one
another in a dynamic way, As individual branches, with separate functions but
equally dependent on Him He called them by a new name: "you are my friends," And
then, almost as if He anticipated the fatal misunderstanding that friends of Jesus
need no one else He added a new commandment: "Love one another.,,'' "There is no
greater love than this, that a man should lay down his life for his friends,"

That, of course, is precisely what He went out and did, Jurgen Moltmann,
perhaps the most widely read contemporary theologian, in his latest book The Church
in the Life of the Spirit, suggests that of all the ideas and concepts and images
with which we have customarily talked about Jesus, the most dynamic has heen neg~
jected, Jesus is a friend, That is to say, even though Presbyterians don't sing it
anymore, there may be more theological relevance in the old Gospel Song, hat a
Friend We Have in Jesus" than in a whole library of books on the incarnation, Karl
Barth put it simply: "The grace of God to sinful man is that He encounters ‘*m as
the hearing God; that He calls him not merely to che humility of a servant and the
thankfulness of a child but to the intimacy and boldness of a friend," (See
Moltmann, p, 115),

What is the thing about which ve have been thinking? What did Jesus mean by
friendship? He defined it not only verbally but also by the very nature of His
relationship with His disciples. Three big ideas emerge immediately, First, self-
giving. He called it “laying down one's Life" and history is full of noble illustra-
tions: the Marine who saved his companions by falling on a grenade: the chaplains
who gave up their life preservers: Mother Maria Pilenko who took the place of a
young girl in the line outside che death chamber at Ravensbruck on Good Friday, 1945:
and Obi Wan Kenobi in Star Wars who sacrifices self so that his companions may
escape, Those are the extraordinary, You and I may never eonfront the necessity in
such dramatic terms, But the fact is we give ourselves, or withhold selves in
hundreds of ways every day, Very few of them are clear or spectacular, As a matter
of fact, the opportunities sneak up on us, The most common form I know is in the
simple effort of a person to share something with us, a joy or a burden or an
anxiety or just an opinion tentatively extended, In effect, we are asked to give
part of ourselves by listening and internalizing what the other is saying, and to
contribute part of our being by trying to feel the joy or hurt or anxiety the other
is expressing. Now it's hardly laying down one's life, but it is an opportunity to
share a part of one's self for the benefit of the other, But we don't do that very
well, do we? Rather, we regard the initiative as a challenge and the name of the
game is "Mine is better than yours,,,"” "If you think your back hurts, Let me tell
you about mine..." "It's nice that Johnny got an A in English, but have 1 told you
about Suzie's Science Award?,.," "How nice that you enjoyed Nev England: we leave
Tuesday for London..." “Don't worry about your operation,,,why the time I had my

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gall bladder removed I nearly died..." ctc,, ete, ad infinitum, Every day we have
the opportunity to be a friend by contributing part of ourselves by listening and
being there for another,

The first element in the friendship of Jesus was self-pgiving. The second was
acceptance: acceptance of persons as persons apart from what they owned, what they
did, or what name society had given chem, Recall again that His opponents tried to
discredit Him by pointing out that He was "the friend of sinners".

Carlile Warney has added his voice to those suggesting that we are obsessed,
in our culture, with a person's function and his or her acquisitions, We become,
for all practical purposes, what we do and what we own, He writes, "By and large
you have been hiding behind your having and doing: you know you have misused these
verbs, and most of us have missed the point, A teenage paraplegic, who has no hands
er legs to use, Little voice, no way to be mobile, and really almost nothing but a
mind, was asked by some ill-made social worker if she wouldn't as soon be done with
it all, arcvered, "I wouldn't have missed being for anything,'" (Priests to Bach
Utucr, pe 45).

Jesus cut through all chat - all the having of the rich Pharisees and the not~
having of the poor man: all the doing of the prostitute and the pic” Scribe - and
eot through to the being - the personhood of the individual child of God, the
brother or sister standing in front of Hin,

That too is what friendship feels like: self-giving. accepting, and trust,
finally. I continue to be impressed with the fact that the friends of Jesus had
very Little to commend themselves for discipleship. Time and time again they let
Yim down: they vould not understand: as He prepared for death they argued about
status: when He was arrested they fled and even while He was being tried in a
kangaroo court His best friend Peter was outside lying through his teeth, Even at
the moment He was calling them friends one of them was planning to betray Him, He
extended confidence and somehow that trust, when they contemplated it later, gave
them the strength to live like men - te be brave and honest and faithful to death,

Friendship is a trusting thing although under ordinary circumstances we
insist on some demonstration of trust - worthiness before extending it to anyone,
“show that you can be trusted," we say - but it rarely works - with spouses, or
children, or friends, Jesus suggested that trust begets trustvorthiness: that
friendship means taking a risk in seeing more in others than they are able to see
in themselves,

Self-giving, acceptance, trust add up to friendship as it was extended by
Jesus Christ. Anc it comes into focus here, in the church, where we invoke His
name, Being a ‘friendly church" sounds almost Like a cliche, a simmick, It is
net that at ali, It is what wo are about,

One writer comments: "We belong to Christ by belonging to each other,..
We have no choice in the matter, Some of our brothers we may Like; others we may
dislike, But they belong to us, and we belong to them. Through them we move
closer to Him..,We belong to Christ only by belonging to each other," (Rebert
Raines, Reshaping the Christian Life, p.17).

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"Through them we move closer to Hiiu,'' That's how important all of this is,
I confess that it took me years to learn it, In the tiny, smali town church where
I began my ministry the most important avents on the church calendar were not
Christmas and Easter, but the Women's Bazaar and the Men's Spaghetti Dinner, What
a shock to discover that the saints were so profane: that they preferred fooling
around with white elephants to listening to my scholarly homilies on incarnational
theology, or spamhetti and meat bails to my exposition of atonement, God bless
them for teachings me - "Through them ve move closer to Him,''

In the final analysis the Good News, the love of God in Jesus Christ is just
an idea in the mind until it is falt, experienced and made personally real, In some
circles it is an event, a soul shattering, emotional upheaval, In other circles
it is a seminar topic to be discussed, Missing from both is the simple New
Testament reality that people experience the love of God when they Learn to Leve
one another,

The miracle of the incarnation becomes important when it happens in us. The
idea takes on flesh when Christian people learn to give themselves, accept and
trust one another,

Tt is all, finally, that we have to offer the world, We are the vehicle,
the model, the community of those whose friendship is right here for the whole
world to gee,

Let's not be guilty of hiding that from a world so desperately in need, In
fact, let's mot ceprive ourselves of the saving love of God which we are privileged
to give to one ancther,

"This is my commandment, that you Love one another as I
have loved you, You are my friends if you do what I
command you,"

Amen,

Father, teach us to love - give us the strength to love as You loved us,
Help us to learn the grace of self-piving and accepting and trusting - so that
others may see Your love in us, Through Jesus Christ our Lord,
Amen,