In addition to being the Sunday when we celebrate May birthdays and anniversaries, you can see on the front of our worship booklets this morning that today, the Sixth Sunday in Easter, is also known as Rogation Sunday. Rogation Sunday and the three weekdays that follow it, called “Rogation Days,” are an ancient festival of the Church, a time “to seek [God’s] blessing for a community and its sustenance. The word rogation,” writes one author, “comes from the Latin verb rogare, meaning ‘to ask,’ which reflects the beseeching of God for protection from calamities. As the Book of Common Prayer puts it, ‘Rogation Days are the three days preceding Ascension Day, especially devoted to asking for God’s blessing on agriculture and industry’” – and Kevin has chosen music this morning that intentionally celebrates these Rogation Days.
This same author concludes, “Rogation invites people to ask for blessing – for a particular place; for all its inhabitants; for every endeavor to promote the common good. It is totally inclusive – joining everyone in seeking sustenance and a commitment to play their part in its provision.” (theclewerinitiative.com)
Rogation Sunday is about blessing and relationship – the intertwined relationships between God, God’s people, God’s creation, and the labor of God’s people; and while Rogation Sunday is about multiple relationships, today I want to focus on one specific type of relationship that Jesus highlights in this morning’s Gospel reading.
Way back in 1995, the Oscar winner for Best Original Song starts out, “You’ve got a friend in me, you’ve got a friend in me. When the road looks rough ahead and you’re miles and miles from your nice warm bed, you just remember what your old pal said. Boy, you’ve got a friend in me. Yeah, you’ve got a friend in me.”
The second verse continues, “You’ve got a friend in me, you’ve got a friend in me. You’ve got troubles, I’ve got ‘em too. There isn’t anything I wouldn’t do for you. We stick together and see it through, ‘cause you’ve got a friend in me. You’ve got a friend in me.” (Music and lyrics by Randy Newman)
Originally a celebration of the close relationship between the cowboy doll Woody and the little boy who loves him, over the course of the original movie “Toy Story,” the song extends its embrace to include the hard-won partnership between Woody and space explorer Buzz Lightyear, as well as all of the toys in the playroom.
The unique interpersonal relationship known as “friendship,” the pledge to “stick together and see it through,” has been explored by philosophers and orators, by theologians, monastics, and others since long before Randy Newman wrote that song. Back in the 4th century B.C., the classical Greek philosopher Aristotle identified three different types of friendship.
The first type of friendship, he said, is based on “utility,” or usefulness. This is the friendship of connections and of networking, of getting things done. While it may be enjoyable while it lasts, a utilitarian friendship begins out of necessity and ends as situations and individual needs change.
The second type of friendship is that of pure pleasure. Some people are our friends simply because we like their company; we enjoy spending time with them – and although these relationships might last through the years depending on circumstance, there’s no inherent guarantee that they will.
For Aristotle, the best kind of friendship is the third type, and this is a friendship with deeper connections; it’s a relationship where our friend is, in Aristotle’s words, “another self.” (F, J, T, 500) We ourselves might call this friend “a soul mate.”
As a contemporary writer says, “…this kind of relationship is based on a mutual appreciation of the virtues the other person holds dear. In this kind of friendship, the people themselves and the qualities they represent provide the incentive for the two parties to be in each other’s lives. Rather than being short-lived,” he says, “such a relationship endures over time, and there’s generally a base level of goodness required in each person for it to exist in the first place.” (Zat Rava, humanparts.medium.com, “Aristotle on friendship”)
“…[W]e are known by the company we keep,” another commentator says. “[I]n fact, we are very likely to become the company we keep.” “[A]ccording to Aristotle, one of the best ways to [develop a particular virtue in] oneself…is to emulate those who already embody it.” “These best friendships,” he says, “are the most formative: a true friend who loves as God loves will, in time, teach us how to love as God loves.” (F, J, T, 500)
A true friend, who loves as God loves, will, in time, teach us how to love as God loves.
Here in this morning’s passage from John, which is a continuation of the Farewell Discourse with its metaphor of the vine and the branches that we heard last week, Jesus invites those who follow him into this third, and best kind of friendship; this friendship of deep connection, of mutual appreciation; and for those of us who are his followers, this friendship of personal transformation.
“I do not call you servants any longer,” he says, “because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father. You did not choose me, but I chose you.” (Jn. 15:15-16a)
I’ve taken the initiative here, says Jesus. I have blurred the boundaries between us, I have widened the circle around us. I teach you how to love as God loves. You may say that you have a friend in me; I say, I ALSO have a friend in you.
The word Jesus uses for “friend” here is philos, which comes from phileo, a verb in ancient Greek that means “to love.” Usually used to indicate “brotherly love,” as in Philadelphia, the “City of Brotherly Love,” the author of John’s Gospel uses the verbs phileo and agapao (which in its noun form is the love we know as agape) interchangeably, leaving no doubt that Jesus’ friends are in fact in the third category of relationship. Jesus’ friends are “those who are already loved” – loved by Jesus, and loved by God. (NIB, John, 758)
“The English noun ‘friend,’” another author writes, “does not fully convey the presence of love that undergirds the Johannine notion of friendship….”[T]o be Jesus’ friend and to love Jesus are synonymous, because both are defined as keeping Jesus’ commandments.” (Ibid., emphasis mine)
Hold this thought for a moment.
Mutuality. Reciprocity. Indwelling. Dependence. Abiding in, and making a home in. All of these describe aspects of last week’s relationship between the vine and the branches that Mo. Lyn Crow talked about; a relationship where we as the branches, now identified as beloved friends, draw our very life from the true vine that is Jesus, the vine that itself flows with the life and the nature and the essence of God – the vine that flows with Love, and brings that Love on into us.
And yet, as I just said, there are other words that are also integral parts of the relationship between the vine and the branches, also integral parts of the relationship between Jesus and those who are Jesus’ friends – and these words are “obedience” and “commandments.”
“For the love of God is this,” writes the author of 1 John, “that we obey his commandments.” (1 Jn. 5:3a)
As 21st century Western Christians, we’re not big on these two words. We’re Lone Rangers, individual and autonomous. We’re the Marlboro Man riding with self-determination into the sunset, the preteen saying, “You’re not the boss of me!”
And yet, our historic Christian faith is a corporate faith, a communal faith, born in ancient cultures where identities were based in the group, not in the individual – because individuals without a community had no identity. This spiritual heritage remains part of our faith today, because when we gather, we claim that we gather together as the Body of Christ. We don’t gather together as a collection of independent “Body Parts of Christ.”
And we remind ourselves that commandments are gifts of guidance that save us from the random fickleness of our own preferences and our own opinions – and that being obedient doesn’t negate being autonomous.
Instead, says one author, our obedience to the commandment – which is the commandment to love, of course – our obedience is, in fact, the epitome of our autonomy; the proof of our empowerment by God to prevail against the self-centered and power-based ways of the world. Obedience is, he says, “a natural result of [our] new relationship with God.” (F, 1J, E, 495) – a relationship that we have come into by choice.
Love is agape, love is philia, love is decision, choice, and intention; not the feeling, emotion, or preference we might assume it to be.
Love is us choosing to invest in God’s vision for the world, as God has invested God, and God’s vision, in us. God invests God’s vision for all of creation to us.
Back in the 4th century AD, in a treatise called “Grace and Free Will”, Augustine of Hippo reflected on how it is that God makes sure our investment in God’s vision is successful.
Referring to passages in the book of the prophet Ezekiel where God first commands Ezekiel to make for the people a new heart and a new spirit, and then later says that God Godself will give the people a new heart and a new spirit, Augustine writes: “How is it, then, that [God] who says, ‘Make you [a new heart and a new spirit],’ also says, ‘I will give you [a new heart and a new spirit]’? Why does [God] command, if [God] is to give? Why does [God] give if man is to make, except it be that [God] gives what [God] commands when [God] helps him to obey whom [God] commands?”
In other words, even as God commands us to love, God provides the means and the substance for us to be able to obey, already giving us the love that God commands. We just need to put that love to work in our own lives.
And there’s something else here: when passing the Peace, one of my former parishioners back at Trinity, Orange invariably adds, “and JOY” to his greeting. In today’s reading, Jesus says, “I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete.” (v. 11, emphasis mine).
“The unity and mutuality that love makes possible, symbolized by the unity of vine and branches, leads,” says one scholar, “to full joy.” (NIB, John, 758).
And why would we NOT want joy? Why would we NOT want to obey God’s commandment to love, when through God’s Spirit, God is already providing the means for us to make that choice for love – and for our joy to be complete? What are we afraid of?
In seeking to apply Scripture to our own lives, it’s helpful to remember that our understanding of Scripture can change as the setting and the circumstances of the writer or the writer’s audience change – and it’s instructive to consider three different settings.
The first setting is the setting of the Biblical narrative itself. John has Jesus naming his disciples “friends” on the night of the Last Supper as danger, betrayal, and death are looming. How did they hear these words, and what did they understand them to mean?
John himself is doing his actual writing at the end of the first century AD, 70 to 80 years after that night, when there’s a great deal of tension between his community of early Jewish Christian believers and the world around them. More and more, his own readers are needing to choose whether or not they will “stand up, stand up for Jesus” in the face of adversity and social expulsion. How did they hear his words, “I have called you friends”?
Finally, how do we hear these words and these readings today? What does being Jesus’ friend rather than his servant or his student mean to us today? What does being Jesus’ friend, sticking together and seeing it through, look like in today’s world? What kind of ministry or ministries does being Jesus’ friend call us into today?
As an online blogger I quoted earlier writes, “We are, and we live through, the people we spend time with. The bonds we forge with those close to us directly shape the quality of our lives.
“Life,” this blogger says, “is too short for shallow relationships.” (Zat Rava)
Life is too short for shallow relationships.
Life is too short NOT to be Jesus’ friend.
Life is too short NOT to love; and here at St. Matthias, life is too short NOT to do the loving thing.
Amen.