Tuesday, May 1, 2018

Easter 6 B

On the Sixth Sunday of Easter in 2015 I was providing supply at a church that had scheduled for that Sunday to have an informal children’s sermon followed by a sermon for the adults. Here is how I spoke about friendship and love to both the children and the adults. 

Easter 6 B
May 10, 2015
The Rev. Valerie Hart


Children's sermon 

Any of you have a best friend? Raise your hands.
Tell me, what makes a good friend?
See how they respond. Bring up
Fun
Trust
Honesty
They are there no matter what
Someone we can tell our secrets to
Won't judge us
Jesus tells us that we are his friends. Jesus is like that. He will care about us no matter what. We can trust him. We can tell him our secrets. We can even have fun with him. He says that he wants us to have the joy that he has and for our joy to be complete. 
Say a prayer telling Jesus we want to be his friend. 



Adult sermon

During the children's sermon we talked about what a friend is like. (Refer back to some of the things the children said.) 
I'd like you to bring to mind one of your really good friends, either current or in the past. Think about what made that relationship so special?
Really good friends are always there for you, no matter what. If at three o'clock in the morning you are stalled by the side of a lonely highway you can call them on the phone and they'll get up out of bed and come to get you. They may be cussing you out the whole way there, but they will pick you up. 
A good friend is one that you can ask them if a pair of pants make you look fat, and they'll tell you the truth. 
Such friendships are built over time. They usually have to do with going through stuff together. It might be a coworker or someone you volunteer with or a neighbor, but a good friendship is built on being tested together. Soldiers who have been on the battlefield say that the one thing they remember positively about that time was the friendships that they developed. Successful soldiers in battle form a cohesive whole where each of them is willing to sacrifice themselves for the others. The same is true of firefighters. They are people who are willing to risk and even lose their lives to save one another. 
Given that it is Mother's Day I have to include that mothers are like that too. They are willing to do whatever it takes to keep their children safe and healthy. 

In the Gospel today, Jesus says, "I have called you friends." What we have been talking about is the type of friendship that that Christ offers us. We are offered a deep and abiding friendship with God. 

There is a tradition in the Hebrew Scriptures of friendship with God. Abraham is the best known friend of God. In fact, that is the term that is most often used to describe him. He was a friend of God because he totally trusted God. He trusted enough to leave his homeland and wander without knowing where he was going, trusting God’s promise of a home. Now if you read Genesis you will see that Abraham was not always courageous, that he sometimes did not live up to what we might have expected of a hero of the Bible, but he was always God’s friend. He was willing to argue with God and to sometimes doubt God, but he was always God's friend. 

Jesus says that we are his friends and abide in his love if we do what he commands. 
And what does Jesus command? That we love one another as he has loved us.
We are to love. 
Now in Greek there are several words that all get translated into English as love. The Greeks had a more nuanced understand of the concept of love than we do. 
The first is Eros. It has to do with emotion. It is the romantic, sexual kind of love. It is about feeling good. 
The second word is Philio. This has to do with affection and positive regard, as in a friendship. We find the word Philio in Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love. Philio is that brotherly love. 
And then there is agape. Agape love is not about emotions. It is not about feeling warm and fuzzy inside. Agape love is not about how one feels, but what one does. It is about action not about warm feelings. 
It is a love that is unconditional 
It is a love that is sacrificial
It is a love that sees beyond the surface of things. 
In agape love there is no self benefit. It is not concerned with what is in it for me
Agape love is offered whether it is returned or not
C.S. Lewis describes agape love as "gift love."
It is not a feeling - it is a choice. It is a choice to care. A choice to give. 
Thomas Aquinas describes agape love as "to will the good of another." 
And it is the Greek word Agape that is used each of the many times love is used in these passages. 

When Christ says that we are to love one another as he loves us it is this is the kind of love he is talking about. It is a universal, unconditional, sacrificial love that he is talking about. 

Christ wants us to obey his command to love, not out of fear, not out of concern for punishment, but out of friendship and love. 
It is like how hard we worked to obey a teacher that we really respected; that we knew had our best interest at heart. Not out of fear of punishment but out of a desire to do what he or she wanted us to do. 
Christ invites us to be his friends, not his servants. He wants us to obey not out of fear, but out of friendship. 
He wants us to love one another in the sacrificial way that he loves us. He wants us to choose to love. He wants us to choose to will good for another. 
He wants us to do this not for his sake, but for our sake. He wants us to do this so that his joy may be in us and that our joy and be complete. 
There is no greater joy than this, to abide in his love - to be Gods friend. 
Amen

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