May 6, 2018 – Acts 10:44-48, John 15:9-17
Acts 10:44-48; John 15:9-17
Expanding the Circle of Friends
6th Sunday of Easter – May 6, 2018
First Lutheran Church – Winnipeg, MB
It’s weird when a god calls you friend, right?
Christianity is a strange religion, and I think we need to reclaim some of its strangeness.
We frequently call Jesus “Lord,” much less frequently “Master,” but they mean the same thing.
And I am not against that – back in the day, Caesar had the title “Lord,”
so when Christians called Jesus “Lord,” they were saying, in effect,
“Jesus is Lord, and Caesar is not.”
We should never forget that – that our highest loyalty is to Jesus.
And so we remind ourselves almost every time we pray that Jesus is our “saviour and lord.”
However – how different would our relationship with Jesus be if we ended all our prayers,
every day, and several times on Sunday, with the phrase,
“through Jesus Christ, our saviour and friend”?
It would sound strange, but apparently Jesus would prefer it.
In this amazing reading from John’s Gospel this morning,
Jesus calls us his friends.
We are, according to Jesus, not to call him lord and master any longer.
We are to be his friends, not his slaves or servants.
I imagine friendship was a very important notion to Jesus.
As I have said before I believe it very likely that Jesus was on the outs with his family,
for what he was doing and saying and above all who he was interacting with
brought shame to his family.
At the very least, he was separated from them by distance and travel.
And so Jesus surrounded himself with friends.
Friends who, most likely, also were on the outs with their families for
precisely the same reasons as Jesus.
And so this tight knit group formed a close circle of friends, with Jesus at their centre,
who seemed to need them – in the same way as they needed him.
And he tells them to love one another in the same way that he has loved them – as friends.
As friends who lay down their lives for one another.
For, in one of the most significant New Testament passages, Jesus tells them,
no one has greater love than this – to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.
We are friends, says Jesus to his disciples – to you.
And you are friends.
This is the nature of our community life, and it defines who we are as a people.
Friendship.
Well Jesus, as usual, was right.
Friendship is one of the greatest and most wondrous gifts in life,
and as you grow older your appreciation for it deepens.
Friends do those things that sometimes family cannot.
Friends sometimes understand when families cannot.
Friends sometimes can accept you for who you really are when family cannot.
Friends listen. And friends love.
What Jesus creates is a community of friends.
And at its best, that’s what church is: a circle of friends.
Within that circle, Jesus included just about everyone he could muster.
That was the really radical thing about Jesus and his community.
There were, essentially, no rules about who was in and who was out.
Most of the circles of Jesus day were very exclusive and you only were supposed to relate to
those of your own “class” or “type.”
But, as we know, Jesus was just not like that.
Jesus, as we know, was just the opposite.
Jesus seemed to take every opportunity to include everyone he possibly could within
the circle of friends.
Women? Check.
Children? Check.
Criminals? Check.
Hated tax collectors? Check.
Prostitutes? Check.
Foreigners? Check.
And the list goes on.
Jesus spearheaded God’s loving mission to break down all the stupid barriers we
as human beings put up between ourselves.
He enlisted Jews, Samaritans, and foreigners into the circle.
And when he died, he entrusted that mission to break down human barriers to his disciples –
to his circle of friends.
One way of looking at the ministry of the early church is to look at it as
the expanding of the circle of friends.
We get a nice glimpse of this in the Book of Acts,
which describes the ongoing work of Jesus’s body – the body of the church –
after the resurrection.
First, there was Pentecost when the Spirit of God’s love was poured out on the
Jews who were gathered in Jerusalem and their subsequent baptisms.
Then, Philip went to the Samaritans in Samaria who – after proclaiming the good news about
what God was doing through Jesus – wanted to be baptized.
So, at the risk of getting into trouble – he baptized them!
And they too entered the circle of friends.
Last week we heard the story of the first non-Jewish person to be baptized –
the Ethiopian eunuch – and he too, after hearing the good news,
demanded to be baptized and admitted to the circle of friends!
And now today, we hear a parallel story about Peter, who –
while seemingly trying to avoid it at all costs – ends up baptizing
the non-Jewish soldier Coronelius and his whole household
after God first has to give them the Spirit!
And so the circle expands some more.
And while you would think that the Spirit gets stretched pretty thin after all this,
just the opposite is true in the economy of God’s grace.
The more friends that are admitted to the circle, the more Spirit there seems to be.
Peter needs to learn this.
He needs to learn about the limitless reach of God.
He needs to learn that God doesn’t really care about the labels and judgments
that we human beings heap on one another every day.
The friendship we share is a great gift of God – maybe one of the greatest gifts of all.
That people can put their friends’ well being above their own, even for a bit, is a
great and wondrous mystery of life.
That friends stick with one another through both trials and boredom,
that they see something of value in the other besides a transitory business transaction is
truly one of the great things about life.
That the friends you have when you were young are friends you will have when you are old is
a gift I am almost at a loss to describe in words.
That Jesus is just the same kind of friend is a miracle.
We are intentionally a community of just such friends –
that, apparently, is how Jesus would have it.
It is how he would like us to think of ourselves.
As a circle of friends that is ever expanding to invite and include new friends within our circle.
Friends to listen to and learn from, friends to delight in and work with,
that God’s great mission to expand the circle of friends might be furthered.
In an age that increasingly seeks to label and judge, this is a very relevant thing to hear.
Jesus has included us in the triune God’s circle of friendship and love,
and so we too are called to include all in the invitation to the same circle.
As United Church minister Catharine Faith MacLean wrote in the Christian Century recently,
We rally for the remotest of possibilities: that people will love each other, that community is worth it, that difference is a happy blessing, that every relationship we attempt has value.
(https://www.christiancentury.org/article/living-word/may-6-easter-6b-john-159-17)
You, the people of First Lutheran Church, the First Lutheran Circle of Friends,
are good at this.
You are being the resurrected body of Christ when you welcome people into our circle.
You are being the resurrected body of Christ with your welcome statement.
You have welcomed people from the Congo and the Sudan and Tanzania.
You have welcomed people from the Philippines and from Brazil.
You have welcome people from Germany and from France.
You have welcomed people from Steinbach and the West End and even Island Lakes.
And together you have expanded the circle of friends.
You have done Jesus’ work. You have done the Lord’s work. You have done the Friend’s work.
So together, through Jesus Christ, our Saviour and our Friend, let us say, “Amen.”
Pastor Michael Kurtz
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