May 13, 2012 – John 15:9-17
John 15:9-17
Loving Friends of the Friend
Sixth Sunday of Easter – May 13, 2012
First Lutheran Church – Winnipeg, MB
I was called “friend” once this week.
And because friendship is a key word in Jesus’s words to his disciples this week,
When I heard it spoken, it jumped out at me.
I was at the Community Health Clinic on Leila with a fellow I have known from some time
From food bank.
I took him there on Thursday morning because he needs to be assessed for home care:
He needs someone to come to his apartment every day to dress his wounds.
I fear that without this he will die.
He has poor circulation because of vascular problems, and,
because his legs got infected from bedbug bites last fall which still haven’t healed due to
the poor circulation, his legs are deteriorating.
His skin is weeping, both legs are swollen and stiff,
essentially one big open wound, skin is peeling from them and they are always wet.
His feet are bleeding.
It’s painful for him to walk.
The nurse wants to dress his wounds so she asks him to take off his jeans.
He can hardly get them off because they’re so still from being encrusted with
all the fluid that’s been leaking from his skin.
He finally manages it and she tends his wounds.
He can’t get to the Laundromat to wash his jeans and so I’d told him on the way to the clinic that
I’d take them home and run them through my washing machine and drier.
So when the nurse told him the same thing – that his jeans really needed to be cleaned –
He said to her, “My friend Michael said he would wash them.”
My friend Michael.
The word kind of caught me up short.
Was this guy my friend?
We normally think of a friend as someone who gives you something.
Who does something for you. Who makes you laugh. Who brings something to you.
But in the Christian vocabulary, Jesus, as usual, turns the definition upside down.
“I call you my friends,” he says to the disciples.
Not because they have much to give him right then,
not because they can do much for him just then (it’s the same evening before his death
when they’re about to abandon and betray him after all),
not because they make him laugh just then or bring something to him.
He calls them friends because he’s about to die for love of them.
Because he’s about to give them his life.
The important thing in my relationship with this fellow isn’t that
he has a lot to offer me right now.
The important thing is not that he’s my friend. But that I’m his.
My friend Michael said he would wash them.
And so, with my boy Peter’s help, the jeans got washed. And returned.
And yesterday home care started coming to this guy’s place.
The truth is that Jesus befriends the disciples because he has something to give them.
And they really, really need what he has to give.
Because the first thing he gives them is a job.
And that job is the same as his: to love the world even as God loves the world.
And that’s a tough job according to John’s Gospel, because the world’s not just a place of
Wonder and beauty as the Psalmist points out this morning,
But the world’s also a pretty dark place.
The world is going to string Jesus up for announcing and embodying God’s loving reign in
Opposition to the Roman Emperor’s violent reign.
The world is going to put Jesus on a cross for criticizing the way religion and state have
Treated the marginalized and institutionalized injustice.
And should the disciples continue to be heralds for and the embodiment of the reign of God
That Jesus is ushering in, they can expect just the same.
If the disciples befriend the world in the way that Jesus has befriended the world and,
Indeed themselves, they too can expect a hard road.
In the very next verse of John’s Gospel, which the lectionary conveniently omits,
Jesus says, “If the world hates you, be aware that it hated me before it hated you.”
John writes to a community that has experienced a hard time.
It was a community of Jews who began to worship Jesus while
continuing to worship at the synagogue.
Soon enough they were expelled and marginalized.
They faced persecution and mistreatment from their own community.
What John is saying – the good news from John this morning – is just this:
Jesus continues to befriend his disciples, continues to invite them to abide in his love,
Continues to love them, so that they can have the power to love the world,
Even though the world responds in a way that is not loving.
A lot of bad stuff happens to us.
And it can be disheartening.
We can wonder where God is in all of it.
Did God cause it? Did God will it?
In our personal lives, in our work lives, in our church lives: bad stuff happens to us.
The important thing to remember is that a lot of bad stuff happened to Jesus too.
Jesus befriends us by entering into the bad stuff with us.
We face job loss, and aging, and illness, and grief,
not as pawns in a game of contending superpowers,
not as collateral damage in some cosmic game of Risk,
not as grovelling servants of some inscrutable will,
but as friends.
As friends: as ones who, writes the Christian teacher Kathryn Huey, as ones who have been let in on the big picture, the reign of God, and given our role in bringing it in.
As ones who are loving friends of the Great Friend.
As ones who know what it is to be loved by the Great Friend,
Without conditions, by the one who loves the darkness in us as well as the light,
By the one who calls us friend when all we seemingly have to give him is
Denial and excuses and half-hearted commitment.
My friend Michael said he would wash them.
Jesus befriends us again this morning by calling us friends, and by feeding us of his self.
He befriends us though we do not really trust him that finally with him all will be well,
And all will be well, and all manner of things shall be well.
He befriends us though we deny our full humanity and the glory and wonder that
A human being is.
He befriends us though we do not really believe what the Belgian priest wrote long ago:
that we have been chosen [by Jesus] to make our own limited and very conditional love the gateway for the unlimited and unconditional love of God.
Friends, the truth is that God in Christ befriends us so that we might be friends to the friendless.
The truth is that Jesus makes us strong in order to be strong for those who need strength.
The truth is that Jesus feeds us in order to feed those who need food.
Jesus heals us in order to heal those in need of healing.
Jesus forgives us in order to forgive those who need forgiving.
My friend Michael said he would wash them.
Long ago, on February 16, 1967 I was washed in the gracious waters of baptism and
Clothed in a garment of love that was pure gift.
It is a gift that I can give away without fear that it will ever be diminished like
The light from the Paschal candle we share at the Easter Vigil.
It’s fine, I suppose, to take time to ask where God is in an often dark world.
Where is God in injustice. Where is God in the lives of the poor.
Where is God in the lives of the marginalized and the sick and the grieving and the imprisoned.
But on Tuesday in that community health care clinic, with his legs sore and swollen and
With his feet bleeding, I knew precisely where Jesus was.
Pastor Michael Kurtz
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