Welcome to the CommonsCast. We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to commons.church for more information.

If we haven't met in person, my name is Yelena, and I'm one of the pastors on the team here at Commons. Thank you so much again for joining us this Sunday. Here in the room, online, via podcast, it is really, really special how our community and the space we all create here extend way beyond this building. We do not take any of that for granted. So thank you so much for being here.

Well, today, we are starting our new series that will take us all the way to launch Sunday in September. This is our last series in season seven and the final section in your journals for this year. And we wanted to end on a happy note. We literally call this series What Makes You Happy. We're all emerging from a pretty challenging time while trying to navigate a constantly changing social landscape and our own changed selves.

So with this series, we want to attend to those parts of our individual and communal lives that give us joy and make us come alive. So this series is about being mindful of the happy, wholesome moments that come our way every day, but sometimes go unnoticed. We will talk about what we love, what we miss, what fills us up, and points us to the abundance of God's grace in God's world. Every week, we'll bring you a new topic. And today, we are talking about friendship because this is what makes me happy.

A quick story. And I know we're talking about happiness, but let's start with grief because I'm Russian, and this is where we go right away. Thanks, Rowan. Just read our best writers. You'll get me.

So about a month ago, my husband Dennis and I did a workshop with one of our commons groups. It was about learning a conversation structure for processing grief in community. And the first step in the workshop was to identify something that you have experienced as grief or loss over the last twelve months. And after that, you get four journaling prompts to explore your grief a bit deeper on your own before you're ready to share about it with others. And the first prompt goes like this: Yes, it is true that Then you just need to finish the sentence.

I did not have an experience of grief or loss tucked away in my back pocket for this one. Sometimes I do, because I know that I will need to step in and model the process as a volunteer. But this time, we were with a group who were very, very comfortable with each other. So I just allowed myself to be a participant and see what unprocessed loss will make an appearance for me. And to my surprise, what bubbled up to the surface was that I was still grieving and processing the loss of opportunities for friendship, which I, and I'm sure many of us here, experienced during the pandemic.

When I journaled my response to the first prompt, it was something like this. Yes, it's true that out of forty eight months of my life in Calgary, the first twelve were filled with anxiety and uncertainty of where I would end up professionally and in terms of community. Yes, it's true that my last sixteen months have been impacted by the global pandemic, and my hopes for deepening some of my new friendships did not get realized. So yes, it's true that twenty eight out of the forty eight months of living in the new city, I struggled to make and cultivate friendships, especially during the time when Calgary finally started to feel like home. And putting those silly numbers on the page just helped me realize that, actually, I was grieving all this disruption, prolonged disruption to all the ways I would normally invest in friendships.

And it felt like a loss because friendship is a value, and it is a huge part of what makes me happy. So today, I invite you to join me on a bit of an exploration of friendship in the Gospel of John. And if you enjoy having an outline, we are going to talk about friendship as a source of life, making yourself at home, and commitment to love. But first, join me in prayer. A loving God.

To you, all hearts are open and all desires known. You bring us together in all manner of ways and spaces and conversations. You give us good friends for the journey, and you teach us how to be good friends to one another. For all that, we give you thanks. And as we take time today and over the next four weeks to reflect on joy and happiness, We are deeply aware of our privilege to attend to those beautiful movements of our souls, especially in the time when there's so much uncertainty and suffering in the world as we know it.

But we also know that joy does find us in dark moments. This is how your grace breaks in and heals us from inside out. So would you make us attentive to the work of your spirit in our lives, through our deep longings for friendship, and through the happiness it brings us? Amen. Well, let's start with Jesus' words to his disciples in John chapter 15 verse nine.

As the father has loved me, so I have loved you. Now remain in my love. If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father's commands and remain in his love. I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. Now, we are jumping in in the second half of the extended metaphor of the vine and the branches that Jesus has been developing for his disciples.

At this point in the conversation, he is ready to give them some practical implications for friendship. But it will be helpful for us to get a bigger picture. So the metaphor proper begins in John fifteen one, was the last of the I am sayings in this gospel. Jesus has already spoken about himself as the bread of life, as the light of the world, as the good shepherd, and now he says, I am the true vine, and my father is the gardener. Remain in me as I also remain in you.

No branch can bear fruit by itself. It must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me. I'm the vine, and you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit.

Apart from me, you can do nothing. So chapter 15 is part of a larger section in John known as the farewell discourse. We're looking at the last words of Jesus to his closest companions spoken over their last meal together just before Jesus is arrested, tried, and crucified. And in this last conversation, Jesus wants to prepare his followers for life in his physical absence and also to anchor them in his vision for what this life can look like. This whole section is about the kind of relationships that will keep them together after Jesus is gone and will make this emerging Christian community possible.

And those relationships that he is talking about look surprisingly like friendship. But let's look at divine imagery first. Vineyards were very common in the Mediterranean world. In the Old Testament and Jewish literature, the images of a vineyard or a vine were used to portray Israel. A huge golden vine decorated part of the temple as a symbol of strength.

And one of the ways that scholars interpret Jesus' metaphor here is that he symbolically identifies himself with the nature and role of Israel. And this idea that when God planted the original vineyard, Israel, it failed to produce fruit or produce sour grapes. When in contrast, Jesus is the true vine that bears good fruit. And this interpretation is consistent with the use of the vine imagery in the writings of the prophets who continuously rebuked Israel for unfaithfulness. But what's interesting here and perhaps closer to what Jesus wants to emphasize is this inseparable link that he makes between the vine and the branches.

As we see here, Jesus is not really talking about accomplishing something that Israel failed to do or uses any kind of comparison or judgment language. What he does instead is that he names himself as the source of life for the branches and gives us this beautiful and deeply organic image of connection. The vine needs the branches to bear fruit, and the branches cannot do so without the vine. It is not only an image of partnership. It is also an image of health and creativity.

So Jesus just points out a vine to his friends, perhaps one just quietly growing around the house where they're eating, and says to them, Remember this picture because this is how life works. It is all interconnected. This is how you and I work. Lydia Danworth, a science writer and author of the book, The Evolution, Biology and Extraordinary Power of Life's Fundamental Bond, believes that we often treat our friendships as those humble vines. We don't fully appreciate them.

Otherwise, we would take cultivating those intimate bonds as seriously as working out and eating well. She writes that our social relationships, and especially close friendships, extend way beyond fun social lives. They influence our health on the cellular level, from our immune system to our cardiovascular system. And loneliness is so much more than just a difficult emotion. And friends are so much more than a lovely addition to our lives.

Friendship is literally a matter of life and death. Because, as research shows, life is not about survival of the fittest. It is about survival of the friendliest. For me personally, and I'm sure for many of us here, this last season has probably been one of the most loneliest stretches in a long time. Our friendship circles have shrunk significantly, and our secondary friendships, those weaker social ties, have practically disappeared.

So another journaling prompt from the grief working, grief walking exercise goes like this: I will always remember and I will never forget. And one thing I do not want to forget about this season, I probably want to forget most of it, but one thing I do want to remember is this fresh awakening to my need for connection, for deep conversations with friends over a glass of wine, and for light hearted banter with strangers, for all those small and big ways we energize each other, and which we often take for granted. Another thing I want to remember is how Dennis and I got to know a bunch of dog walking people in our neighborhood in the off leash park. First, we learned the names of the dogs. Then we learned their names because it always works in that order.

Trust me. And then over time, we just started talking about our lives, about our jobs, the podcasts we were listening to, of course, our dogs. And those lovely, lovely people, those lovely friends became our community and a source of surprisingly life giving encounters in a very heavy season. So knowing that very soon, the disciples will experience a huge and potentially life sapping transition, Jesus told them, stay connected because connection will be your source of life. And then in verse nine, he begins to explain what that connection will look like.

He moves from remain in me to remain in my love. Or, as Eugene Peterson puts it, make yourself at home in my love. And it is a really beautiful and a really good translation of the Greek verb that the gospel writer uses here. Can mean remain, stay, or dwell. And Jesus uses it here over 10 times, almost as often as he uses the word love.

Now a couple of things here. First, Jesus' language of making yourself at home in my love is a language of friendship. Our friendships are our homes, be it for a season or be it for life. And making others feel at home in our company is a precious gift of hospitality that we can offer each other. John O'Donohue, an Irish poet and teacher of Celtic spirituality, writes that home is one of the sweetest words in any language.

It suggests a nest where intimacy and belonging foster identity and individuality. He calls home a subtle, implicit laboratory of spirit where we learn to be at home in ourselves and at home in our own life. Now one of the reasons friendship means so much to me is that many of my friendships have become that kind of home for me quite early in life. I was 17 when I moved away from my parents to start a university in a different city. And my first few months, first half a year, I would say, were just brutal.

I had no relatives in the city. I had no friends. And my housing situation turned out very shaky. It was a super stressful time for a 17 year old whose parents just decided to take off and move to Russia. But those friendships those friendships that came into my life during that season and over the following seven years that I lived there have been instrumental in shaping me as a person and setting me on a trajectory that I could have never imagined.

Stanley Howard Wass says that to be a friend requires the readiness to be surprised because we can never anticipate how God may show up. After all, who could have anticipated God showing up as Jesus? Well, I definitely did not anticipate God showing up in my life as a group of friends who would want to be part of my life in such ways that would give me shelter, that would draw me closer to God, help me discern new directions, move countries, and grow into the person I am today. So, so many dear friends have made me feel at home in their love, and that changed my life. And I'm sure a lot a lot of your story cannot be told without telling some incredible friendship stories.

Now, another thing about this verb remain is that usually, when used in the present tense or present imperative, it implies a static relationship, more like stay where you are, don't change anything, do nothing. But here, when Jesus says, remain in my love, the writer uses aorist imperative, which suggests an act of the will, a conscious decision to actively participate and to make one's home in the relationship. And that really resonates with me. Friendship, be it with the divine or with other people, does not just happen to us. It is always possible, but we need to step into that possibility.

For our interconnectedness to work, we need to open ourselves up to it. And Jesus' words here in verse 10, If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love. Speak of that relational intentionality and of our experience of divine love through our commitment to receive and extend our human love. So let's pick up in verse 12. My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you.

Greater love has no one than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends. You are my friends if you do what I command. I no longer call you servants because a servant does not know his master's business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my father, I have made known to you. You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit, fruit that will last.

And so that whatever you ask in the name of my father, in my name, the father will give you. This is my command. Love each other. So here, finally, we see Jesus explicitly call his disciples friends. And in the world of those days, not unlike today, friend had a wide range of meaning.

It was commonly used in the language of politics to communicate obligation to Rome. There is numismatic evidence that the word was printed on coins to educate the semi literate or illiterate population about the political alliances in their area and their submission to the emperor. In John 18, for instance, when the religious leaders want Pilate to crucify Jesus and Pilate tries to set him free, the crowd shouts, if you let this man go, you are no friend of Caesar. Then friend also had the connotation of inequality and was used in patron client relationships, where one party with more resources would act as a benefactor for the other party. But it was also used for equals, and the kind of friendship where friends were ready to die for each other was considered the highest virtue.

And then early Christian communities used this word for close, intimate friends, but also for the entire community. So when we hear Jesus say, you are my friends. I will lay down my life for you. And then we hear him say, here's my command. We are in this creative tension.

What kind of friendship is this? Is there equality? Is there an obligation? Is it generic? Or is it deeply personalized?

What is it? And maybe this is a personal question for all of us to answer. What does it mean for me personally to be friends with God? But Jesus gives us some clues here. The word for friend, philos, and the verb to love, philio, share the same root.

So Jesus is saying that his friends are those whom he loves. And to be his friend is to accept oneself as lovable and loved by God and others. And then Jesus tears down the last barriers that separate him from his disciples. The common practice of the day was for people to, choose a teacher and then attach themselves to them as their inferior. And Jesus here inverts this whole thing when he says, you know, it is actually I who chose you.

You are not only loved and lovable, you are also the ones I want to be with. You are exactly the friends I need. And you're not only my friends. You are my partners. In the ancient world, servants and slaves, the same word in Greek, did not have any freedom or knowledge in regard to their master's work.

To be a servant was to be a human tool, an extension of the master without any independent will or reason. But to be a friend was to be a free agent. So Jesus is saying, you know me. You know what I'm about. But I also want you to know that you are loved, free, and welcome to participate in my work of befriending the world.

So, here's what I believe about friendship. Science tells us that it's great for our health. Absolutely. I'll take that. But friendship is also where we need God.

For us humans to know love, especially divine love, it needs to be incarnated in human bodies and caring hearts, in laughter and meals, in hugs and tears, in intense conversations, and surprise birthday parties, in long hikes, and quick, hey, are you alive? Text messages. God looks us in the face through the faces of our friends. And I hear that command to love one another as an invitation to commit to friendship in all its expressions and in all kinds of ways it crosses our path. In the Gospel of John, the Great Commission, the sacred task that Jesus gives to those who walk in his way is not about making disciples of all nations.

It is about making friends. So to go back to the grief processing exercise, the final journaling prompt goes like this: Now that I have written about my loss, it may be possible to. I made a list of friends I want to reach out to. And I also wrote a little note to myself: Have reasonable expectations. Be patient.

Meet people where they are. And if you're like me, looking forward to reengaging with some of your friendships or maybe opening yourself up to some new ones, let me share with you one last thought from Stanley Howarwas that gave me a lot of hope about this whole enterprise. Writing to his godson about friendship, he says, We live in a world that seems to think that time and patience are in short supply. Yet as Christians, we believe that God has given us all the time and patience necessary to be friends to one another and be friends with God. So may you trust that God is your friend.

May you know God's love through the friendships around you, and may the security of those friendships set you free to befriend others. Let us pray. Loving God, in your incredible grace, you've called us your friends, and you've given us each other so that we might know your love. So would you bless us with good friends who can inspire us and help us find our way back to ourselves when we get lost? And would you help us to treasure our friends, be there for them, and be grateful for all the change they bring in our life?

May we be mindful of strangers who can become our friends, And may your spirit guide us on all our friendship journeys. In the name of Jesus, our friend, we pray. Amen.