fg,

WHAT ARE GOOR FRIENDS FOR?

June 2, i993
8:30 and 11:00 a.m. Worship Services
John M. Buchanan
Fourth Prebyterian Church, Chicago

Scripture
Mark 2:1-12

"And when they could not brine him to Jesus...they removed the roof...and
let down the mat on which the paralytic lay." -Mark 2:4 (NRSV)

ees HFA

It was the kind of telephone call that ministers occasionally receive |
and, I presume, doctors and counselors and other people as well. This call
came years ago, but there have been similar ones since. I did not know the
caller. She did not know me. "You're a preacher, aren't you, and you're
supposed to talk to people, aren't you?" she asked. I indicated that she
was correct on both counts, and the flood gates apened and out came a sad
but not unusual story ~ a teenager, cut off from all contact with her
parents, hurt by some very damaging mistakes, pregnant, trying to make her
way alone and not doing very well. I did what my training and experience
have taught me to do: J listened. And when she asked me directly what I
theught she should do, again I drew on my experience and, without
infringing oan her right to determine her own course of action, I made some
gentle but I thought appropriate suggestions: how about contacting your
parents or another family member, how about counseling, or any one cf the
myriad of helpful agencies in the community? She cut me off mid-sentence
in language only the young feel free to use. "The hell with that!" she
said. “I've heard it all before. I'm just lonely." And she hung up.

It was a reminder that we live in a world where scmetimes what people
need more desperately than anything else is a friend, a world where people
can be radically alone in the middle of a crowded city; a world in which
words like "community," “neighbor,” "friend," are vestiges of a dim past.
Someone suggested that air-conditioning is the culprit. In the small towns
from which many of us came, when the weather was hot and humid, people
sat on porches in the evening, or walked down the street to visit with
neighbors sitting on porches, until the lateness of the hour forced
everybody inside. Something important and not altogether healthy may have
happened, the editorial suggests, when the first movie theaters installed

machines to cool the air and lured people off porches and into dark
solitude.

be ath

NASA knows that the technalogy of sustaining human life for extended aw
periods of time in a space station, for instance, will be simple compared

to cultivating the trust, acceptance and grace required for human beings to

live together, that is to say - friendship.

Modernity, it has been observed, has compressed human relationships
into three malds: business, sex and acquaintanceship — acquaintances being
those people you smile at on the bus, elevator or grocery store; business
relationships include those with whom you work; and sex, I take it, doesn't
need to be exegeted - at least here. In any event, a whole category of
human relationships is missing, or at least rarely present, in much of the
busy life we live. Friendship... which leads me back to an incident in the
Gospel of Mark and a small detail which has always intrigued me.

Pa

It's remarkable how much of the human story fits into this little
story. [see The Courage to Love, William Sloan Coffin, Jr.]

Jesus is at hame in Capernaum, So many people crowded in the house
to hear him that they spilled out the door and into the street. Four
people brought a paralyzed man on a stretcher. It was too crowded to push
through so they went up on the roof. It was a house made of an adobe type
material, so they actually dug a hole through the roof and lowered their
friend down on his stretcher. That must have been a moment! Can you
imagine what the owner of the house thought as his roof was being
destroyed? \ Jesus was impressed with the faith of these four people. So he
said to. man on the stretcher, "Your sins are forgiven." That's a
surprise./ No one has said anything about sins. The man's problem is
paralysis Anyone can see that. Besides, only God can forgive sin. Some
religioug officials in the room object to his presumptuousness. So he
turns tof the man on the stretcher and says, "Stand up, take your stretcher
and walk out of here," which is exactly what the man does.

Cirere are a lot of issues here: | the authority of Jesus, the conflict
with eStablished religion, the relat#@nship between guilt and paralysis,
forgiveness and health, and the whole ma{ter of standing up and walking
away. William Sloan Coffin, Jr. thinks the point is the responsibility the
man now has as a result of Jesus' love for\him. “If it's hell to be guilty
it's certainly scarier to be responsible," h& wrote and suggests that it
doesn't take much imagination to see ourselvés on that stretcher. "If
Jesus said 'get up and walk' my inclination woWd be to murmur, ‘no thanks,
i think I'll just stay here on the stretcher.'" \[Ibid, p. 12]

And of course, digging that hole in the roof hecomes a paradigm for
what churches, including this one, must now do to make themselves
accessible to everybody,

That's all going on inside this little story,lhut I am fascinated by
the role played by the man's four friends; by the way they model friend-
ship, by their determination and ingenuity and ultimate commitment to
their friend on the stretcher. ey will do whatever they have to do to

et him in-Jesus! presence. Mz2€) :
- P| to #5 (96 P22)

And perhaps the most significant thing of all about this incident is
a detail you can miss if you are not careful: it is their faith - which I
take to mean their committed behavior on behalf of their friend - it is
their faith that gets the paralyzed man forgiven and cured. The story
never mentions his faith - or whether he has any, or whether he even wants
to be there. It invites you to imagine him saying something like, “It's

6/2/91

all right. Don't bother. I'll be okay. Maybe we can come back some other
time when it's not so crowded and he's not so busy."

Jesus saw their faith, saw the strength of their commitment to
their friend, called it faith and it was enough.

People who reflect on the human condition almost unanimously conclude
that friendship is a casualty of modern life. C. S. Lewis said once that
the modern world simply ignores friendship. Ellen Goodman says friendship
is undervalued and underrated and thinks we should be much more intentional
about making friends. She wrote:

"We are friends. We‘cook for each other. We hold
parties for each other's birthdays, promotions,
pregnancies. We spend dozens of Saturday nights and
occasional weekends together. Our children call us by
first names. We are remembered when they say prayers
or sell raffle tickets."

It may be one of the truly redeeming words the church has to say, and
one of the redeeming services it has to perform - the nurturing of friend-
ship in a world that is inclined to be too busy.

So there are attempts to be the place where friendship can happen -
coffee hours and lunches and brunches - opportunities for communion to
happen as bread is broken and cups are lifted around the Communion table
and the lunch table. It's a great lesson that every young clergyperson has
to learn. In seminary you are taught a bit of academic disdain for some of
the mundane activities church people love and which often, as a side
benefit, generate money. The most important events of the year in the
smal] church where I started were the Women's Bazaar and the Men's
Spaghetti Dinner. What an education to come to grips with the fact that
more of them were interested in pothelders and white elephants than my
learned homilies on incarnation; that men would happily plunge their arms
into a kettle of spaghetti sauce, who were rarely in the pews on Sunday
morning. Was there something of importance here? You bet, and it is about
friendship and the fact that at the very heart the Gospel of Jesus Christ
is so corporate, so social, that it's hard even to talk abont it apart fram
some community, some group of friends like those four who carried their
paralyzed friend to Jesus. ;

We know there is something radically wrong when church doesn't
cultivate and celebrate its corporateness. I read a travel book one time
written by an American couple visiting Scotland. They suggested that if
you wanted to know the people, the village pub was the place to go. There
you would find laughter, camaraderie, kindness - a dynamic the producers
of “Cheers” certainly know about. And they concluded that the Church of
Scotland was the most. impersonal, coldest institution in the village. Not
universally true, thankfully, but there is enough truth in the observation
to sting a bit.

Robert Raines wrote, "We belong te Christ by belonging to each other,
We have no choice in the matter. . Some of our brothers and sisters we may

6/2/91

like; others we may dislike. But they belong to tts and we belong to them.
Through them we move claser to Him." [Reshaping the Christian Life,
p. 17]

"Through them we move closer to Him.” An important observation.
“And when they could not bring him to Jesus, they removed the roof...and
let down the mat on which the paralytic lay.’

I think that is at least in part why we are here, why we go to all
the trouble to be part of this corporate experience, when we could have
remained in the air-conditioned comfort of our homes watching a TV
production - worship as show business - without the nuisance of all these
people, and all this heat, and it is always over in exactly sixty minutes
I think we come here because we know intuitively that religion has to do
With other people as well as my personal relationship with God. I believe
something of those strong hands letting down the stretcher is going on in
every act of corporate worship. I believe that when we put our voices to
the task of singing, we are helping those who have no heart for singing;
and when we put our spirits and voices to the work of praying, we are
helping those who this day are feeling too weak or sick or depressed to
pray for themselves. And I believe that when we stand as one and say "I
believe in God the Father Almighty..." we are speaking for friends who May be
standing but are paralyzed by doubt or fear or guilt and who don't this
morning believe much of anything, And so when it comes to communion, 1
have a mystical mental picture of people helping each other to the table,
and some are strong and some are not, and same are eager to be there and
some are afraid or worried or anxious and some hang back around the
perimeter af the room, and some can't make it under their own power and my
mental picture is of people holding and helping each other up, and holding
chairs for each other, and squeezing together so that there is always roam
and when there isn't, of doing whatever is necessary to get everybody a
place at the table where Jesus can say the words they need to hear.

That is why we Presbyterians go to this immense trouble of serving
communion to one another, so that we receive the Sacrament, the word of
God's love, not from consecrated, ordained hands, but from the hands of the
man or woman or child sitting beside us. And it is appropriate - it is
good - to say, "This is for you," and it is appropriate to say, “Thank
you," because there is a sense in which we all need ather hands to help us
into the presence, ,

John Updike wrote a short story which has something of the power and
mystery and grace of friendship about it. It's called Poker Night and it's
about a man who has just been to the doctor's office and has been told that
he has a terminal illness and does not have long to live. He leaves the
office not really knowing what to do or where to go, so he goes where he
planned to spend the evening, to a poker game with a group of friends who
have been playing poker every other Wednesday ever since they were all
newlyweds.

"It did seem pretty silly, at moments, sitting there
with these beered-up guys (it gets pretty loud at the
end) playing a game like kids, killing a rainy Sunday
afternoon when I'd just been told my number was up."

6/2/91

He looks around at his friends' hands and notices - “we've all grown
old together" and then without warning, "my throat began to go rough, they
were all so damn sweet, and I'd known them so damn long... the crazy
thought came to me that people wouldn't mind which it was so much, heaven
or hell, so long as their friends went with them." [Poker Night, Trust Me, Ap
Short Stories, John Updike, p. 187] tT

It was one of our preatest thinkers, Karl Barth, who said once that Cynclusn
God calls us to the humility of a servant, the thankfulness of a child and
the boldness of a friend.

What are good friends for? To stand with us, to stay with us, to
open up the roof and lower us into the presence of Jesus - to remind us
that we have a friend, ultimately, who invites us to be guests at his own
table.

All praise to him.

Amen.

6/2/91 :