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Friendship Part 1
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
Welcome to the commons cast. 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. Inglewood, we are so excited about what's been happening there.
Speaker 1:Congratulations on your first birthday. From all of us here in Kensington, we want to say a huge happy birthday. Congratulations. Thanks, everyone. We will see you soon.
Speaker 1:Congrats. Now before we get to friendship, today is also epiphany in the Christian calendar, and that marks our entry back into ordinary time. And a lot of us are setting resolutions around this time of the year. We have goals and aspirations. We have imaginations for what this year might bring, which is really beautiful.
Speaker 1:But in the Christian calendar, the New Year is also where we lean into the normal. Hope has arrived. The world has changed, and this is now our ordinary. And so this new year amidst all of your goals, let's also learn to embrace the normal. Earnestness over cynicism, justice over vengeance, service over power, hope over despair, truth over lies, joy over rage, and love over it all because Christ has come, and this is now our new ordinary.
Speaker 1:Remember, what you choose to love is always going to be the most powerful force for change in your life. And so if you want to be healthier in 2019, then learn to love the body that you have right now. If you want to be kinder, then celebrate the small moments of generosity that surround you all the time. If you want to be more courageous, then practice telling yourself stories about how brave you are because the things about you that inspire you, these are the things that God is working hard to bring out of you. And so if you learn to love them, then they will be part of your new normal in 2019.
Speaker 1:Let's pray. And then we have our first new series of the year. God of new beginnings, who is always ahead of us, inviting us forward, encouraging us to begin and begin again. Would you be present in the start of this new year? As we imagine ourselves in new moments and situations, as we learn to love the best about what you have created in us, as we survey a new year laid out before us full of possibilities and dangers and triumphs and failures.
Speaker 1:Might we become captured by what you see in us, goodness and kindness and strength and resolve. Fill our lungs with the fresh breath of spirit. Allow us to see with new eyes the possibilities ahead. Bring us in joy as real as grace to celebrate your holy presence with us In the strong name of the risen Christ, we pray. Amen.
Speaker 1:Okay. It's January, and over the last few years, we have taken this period in the calendar to talk about our relationships. And it just sort of seems to fit. Right? It's a new year.
Speaker 1:We're making new resolutions. We've got renewed energy to invest at least for a few days before the grind of work catches up with us again. And so two years ago, we did a series called Ashes where we talked about forgiveness. And then last year, we talked about loneliness. And both of those were really meaningful conversations for a lot of people.
Speaker 1:You can track both of them down online at commons.church, but coming out of that we also knew there was more to talk about. Now this series is certainly not going to exhaust the conversation on relationships. There's always more to be said, and luckily that bodes well for someone in my line of work. But it does seem that after we discuss forgiveness and after we lament our loneliness, then we should turn our attention to what we want to construct in our lives. And friendship occupies this incredibly potent and yet, at times, I think undervalued place in our social world.
Speaker 1:I mean, don't get me wrong. We all want friends. We all know we need friends, and yet friendship often feels like something that just happens. We don't often talk about friendship as something to work on. We don't talk about friendship as something to cultivate.
Speaker 1:We just sort of hope that friends will happen to us. And I think a lot of that comes from our experience of childhood. I don't know about you, but for most of my time growing up, my friends were the kids that were near me. I'm probably gonna date myself here a bit, but most of my childhood was spent playing road hockey in the cul de sac around the corner until it got too dark to see the ball. And for most of my childhood right up until high school, my friends were whoever lived close enough, had a hockey stick, and extra points if you had those road hockey goalie pads because they were awesome and I never had a set and that's what friends are for.
Speaker 1:But the point is friendship is basically proximity based for most of our childhoods. Then something begins to change in junior high and high school. We all start becoming a little more discerning and being close by isn't enough anymore. And now we wanna have something in common and this is where we start trying to impress each other. We do embarrassing things, and we wear embarrassing clothes, and we look back and we wonder, wow, what are we thinking?
Speaker 1:This is one of those moments where I'm very glad that social media was not a thing when I was in high school because there would be a lot of embarrassing photos and no, I'm not showing any. Don't get me wrong, high school was probably tough for a lot of us as well, but most of us muddled our way through and we found friends. And then adulthood hit. And there is a real growing body of research that says that most of us are struggling with friendship as adults. In 1958, the average adult said that they had six close friends.
Speaker 1:And some of you are gasping right now. You're like, how can that be? I mean, who can manage six friends? Well, in 1985, that number had dropped to three. And in 2004 the latest research that I could find from the American Psychological Review in an article titled, Tellingly, Social Isolation in America, that number had dropped to two.
Speaker 1:Now at the same time fifty years ago social scientists tell us that the average person had a social network of about 250 people. Today the average person has 338 friends just on Facebook. And so what's happening is this wide scale broadening and at the same time shallowing of our concept of friendship. The term friend is evolving in front of us right now. Facebook has forever altered what that word means.
Speaker 1:Look, don't hate Facebook. I use Facebook. I use it personally. I use it professionally, but I do try to be aware of the way that social media impacts not just my friendships, but the very concept of friend that I carry with me through life. We've talked before about the necessity of regular social media audits in our lives.
Speaker 1:Where is it actually helping and where is it hurting and where do I need to be aware of and modify the space that social media takes up in my life? Because here's the thing, the concept of friend is changing for us. I don't know if you've heard this, but right now by some accounts the fastest growing social anxiety in culture today is what we're calling telephobia or telephonophobia or just phone phobia. We haven't really figured out what to call this yet. But our fastest growing fear right now is our phones, which also happen to be the things that we can't put down.
Speaker 1:It's not that we don't like our smartphones. We love our smartphones. We're just afraid of the phone part of it. So be honest here. And you don't have to put up your hand, but how many of you dread the sound of a ringing phone?
Speaker 1:As in you actively avoid answering it and you mute the ringer and you just wait for the person to text you instead. I do. And why do we do that? It's because we become accustomed to interaction on our terms. I can read a text.
Speaker 1:I can think about a text. I can compose and then recompose my reply to a text. I can ignore a text, and then three days later, I can text you back and say, oh, I'm sorry. I'm just seeing this now. And I know none of you would do that, but I'm only human.
Speaker 1:The thing is this is radically reshaping what we think of as friendship. Never before has friendship been filtered through each person's dictating the terms of engagement with this kind of precision. And what does that precision do? It allows us to manage our interactions with more people and less depth. Now, social media and technology and texting are not the problem, but they're certainly not helping us with it either.
Speaker 1:One of the other things that happens when you get to adulthood is kids. In our case kid. Rachel and I were well into our adult lives when we adopted Eaton. We're well into our thirties. We've married for more than a decade.
Speaker 1:We had some regular and reasonably healthy rhythms in place by the time that we brought him home, and everything changed when we did. Now, first it was slow. So new parents, that first six months is really nice. Enjoy it. You basically just have a hungry backpack that you bring with you everywhere you go.
Speaker 1:But the thing is you still go. However, once that backpack starts moving on its own and thinks it has the right to decide things for itself, things get a little tougher. I'm Gen X. I grew up right in that transitional generation where my childhood was a mix of my schedule and my parents' schedule, but that rarely seems to exist anymore. And most of us that are parents have lives that revolve around school and gymnastics and swimming lessons and field trips and that's a real problem for our friendships.
Speaker 1:And of course this doesn't just apply to parents. We are all working longer hours. We all schedule our recreation more tightly. We are all just busy. And oftentimes, it's all that we can do to make sure that Rachel and I have a date night once a month, let alone find the space for each of us to cultivate the friendships that we need.
Speaker 1:Actually, Friday, Rachel and I were out on a date, and she said to me, what are we gonna do next week? And I said, next week? Are you crazy? She said, hey. It's the new year.
Speaker 1:Let's be ambitious, and so we're gonna try once a week. But look. We wanna be engaged, present, participating parents in Eaton's life. We wanna invest in our marriage at the same time. But to do that, we also need to be healthy individuals.
Speaker 1:And research published last year in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, sounds like a good journal if you wanna subscribe, But it said that it takes fifty hours of socializing to move from an acquaintance to a casual friend. Takes another forty hours to move to a, quote, real friend, and it takes an additional two hundred hours of FaceTime, the actual kind, not the Apple kind, in order to become close friends. That means that if you can manage to make one hour a month for a new friend, you will be close in about six years. And so what often happens is that we start relying on our partner as our friend. And hear me, I'm glad if your partner is your friend.
Speaker 1:Rachel is absolutely my friend. But this almost ubiquitous language of talking about our partner as our best friend has a dark side to it as well. Because as awesome as your partner is and mine is, they are not capable of carrying all of your relationship needs. That's not what they're for. And when we begin to place outsized expectations on each other, we are not loving each other well.
Speaker 1:Now, I can only talk about this from my perspective, but there is a body of research that shows this is particularly a problem for men. In social theory, it even has a name. It's called the male deficit model. And on the blog On Being, Courtney Martin writes that as I began digging into the research on men and friendship, I found the convincing evidence that men aren't great at creating lasting genuine bonds. Men's friendships tend to be more episodic and short term, forged over beers after work and then abandoned when someone gets transferred to a new department.
Speaker 1:Perhaps born climbing up hills with rich conversations, but then lost to injury. Men often rely exclusively on women, their partners first and foremost, to be emotional surrogates of a sort. This is where she starts to talk about her own experience here. She says, women then often feel weighed down by the burden of braving our internal world while mentoring our favorite men to do so as well. Now that's just one person's experience.
Speaker 1:I don't think we can map that onto everyone's. But if I'm being personal here, one of the ways that Rachel has consistently and gently mentored me into a more healthy version of myself is that she has very intentionally encouraged me to invest in building a number of small close friends. Now I know she would like me to have more, and I know she would like me to continue working on this, and I am, but Rachel has always had the wisdom to recognize that being a good partner for me involves acknowledging that I need more than her. And if that doesn't sound romantic to you, I wanna challenge you on that. Because what it actually means is that Rachel values my well-being over her need to be needed.
Speaker 1:And men or women, if we could master that, I promise we would be perceived as more romantic. But what this means is that once again our concept of friendship is shifting on us. On one side, it's become more broad and more shallow. Everyone is a friend. And then on the other side, it's become entangled in any type of intimate relationship to the point where friendship doesn't really occupy a unique category for us anymore.
Speaker 1:That's a real problem because it doesn't allow for the space for the variety of needs and obligations that bring real nuance and depth into our relational experience of the world. Now my conviction is also that when we look to Jesus, we find all kinds of theological significance to add to all the research that already tells us just how important our friendships are. And what's particularly compelling for me is to recognize Jesus' commitment to friendships as an expression of both his human and divine nature. Friendship for Jesus is not ancillary. Now this is not a concession to his human limitations.
Speaker 1:It is in itself an expression of the sacred divine incarnated in the Christ. Most of us realize that Jesus had 12 disciples, 12 close friends that he spent most of his time with. The legit best tweet of 2008 was mooremonger, March 18, with 433,908 likes as of yesterday. Nobody talks about Jesus' real miracle. Having 12 close friends in his thirties and I love it.
Speaker 1:Absolutely miraculous. But as the series unfolds, we're gonna unpack some of those friendships that develop, particularly between Jesus and Peter. We're gonna look at cultivating vulnerability in our friendships next week. We're gonna look at the role of forgiveness in our friendships after that. And we're gonna look at the necessity of unfriending at times as we close out the series.
Speaker 1:But at the same time, these 12 were not the only relationships Jesus invested in. And for me, this is actually really important because it says to me that Jesus' friendships were more than functional. Now that doesn't mean that his relationship with the disciples was purely functional. I think as we watch Jesus move through these friendships and invest in these people, we're gonna see the depth and care that defines their interactions. But I love the idea that there were people that Jesus just liked.
Speaker 1:He enjoyed them. He spent time with them. He gained nothing from them but a more full experience of humanity. One of those friendships that Jesus leans into hard is someone who shows up in the gospel of John. The thing is you almost have to read between the lines to make sense of this story.
Speaker 1:And that's because it's buried in this miraculous moment that almost threatens to overshadow what I think John is trying to say here. In chapter 11, we get this story where Jesus is traveling and he's teaching, and word comes to him about a friend who is sick. In verse one, it says, now a man named Lazarus was sick. This is actually the character's introduction here. We know nothing about him at this point, but we read that he was from Bethany, the village of Mary and his sister Martha.
Speaker 1:And these women we've met before in the Gospel of Luke, so it seems like John is counting on the fact that we've read that gospel. But then he adds that this Mary whose brother Lazarus now lay sick was the same one who poured perfume on the Lord and wiped his feet with her hair. It's a story that's gonna come up a little later. And the sisters send word to Jesus saying, Lord, the one you love is sick. Now already we should be picking up that there's some background here.
Speaker 1:We don't know anything about Lazarus. We've never met him, but very clearly Jesus knows him. Jesus knows the sisters. He spent time with the family. The sisters don't even feel the need to mention Lazarus' name.
Speaker 1:They just know that Jesus will understand when they say, Lord, the one you love is sick. So there's some history there that we don't know about. Now you probably know what happens if we follow this story from here. Right? Even if you've never read the bible the name Lazarus is culturally associated with resurrection.
Speaker 1:And, of course, Jesus is not able to arrive in time. Lazarus dies and he is placed in a tomb and some four days later Jesus arrives just as people are coming to mourn with the family. And in verse 20, when Jesus arrives Martha goes out to meet with him but Mary is too upset and she stays home. Lord, she says, if you had been here my brother would not have died. But I know that even now God would give you whatever you ask.
Speaker 1:Jesus says, your brother will rise again. And she answers, I know he'll rise again in the last day. And so Jesus has to say, I am the resurrection and the life. Now, what's fascinating to me is that from here Jesus goes and he visits the tomb and he sees the family and he breaks down crying. He calls out his friend and Lazarus is resurrected.
Speaker 1:The key verse being John eleven thirty five. It's the shortest verse in the Bible, two words, Jesus wept. So it's clear that there's an unstated emotional background to this story that we're just not privy to. At the same time, it's also very clear what the writer of John is trying to do, setting the stage for the resurrection of Jesus that will follow. But what's interesting to me here is that John does that, Jesus does that in the context of a close private friendship.
Speaker 1:Lazarus isn't random. This is someone that Jesus cares very deeply for. Someone that Jesus has a history with, but it's someone whose relationship with Jesus is personal and it's private and it's away from the spotlight, away from our prying eyes. In other words, the miracle of life and resurrection is represented in someone that Jesus shares moments with that you and I, we will never know about. It's almost as if that's where life takes place in the off screen encounters between friends.
Speaker 1:In fact, maybe that's part of what Jesus means when he speaks of life and resurrection here because obviously Jesus isn't just talking about coming back to life. I mean Nazareth dies again at some point. Right? But before that, he gets to live again in that friendship that he knew with Jesus. You see, Lazarus, because he's not a major character in the story, we sometimes make the mistake of thinking that his miracle is a random moment, but it's not.
Speaker 1:There's history there, and there's depth there. There's grieving there, and there's celebration there, but it's because of what they share out of you. What they share away from the public, not written down or preserved, but just between friends. And almost as if to make sure that we don't miss it a little later in the gospel, just as Jesus is about to head back to Jerusalem in his passion and his death, he visits his old friend again. In chapter 12, we read that six days before the Passover, Jesus came back to Bethany where Lazarus lived, whom Jesus had raised from the dead.
Speaker 1:So they made dinner for him, and Martha served while Lazarus was among those reclining at the table with him. Mary took about a pint of pure nard, expensive perfume. She poured it on Jesus' feet and wiped it with her hair and the whole house was filled with the fragrance of friendship. Of course, the text says perfume, but you smell it. Right?
Speaker 1:This is the thing about Jesus. It's the thing about life. This is the thing about what it means to be human in the way that Jesus were human. He knew he needed people. He needed people that would parent him.
Speaker 1:He needed people that would mentor him. He needed people that would work with him. He needed people that would challenge him to demonstrate the best within him, but he also needed people that he just enjoyed being with. People that he could laugh with and eat with and recline with and spend time with. And when it came time to show us his most miraculous miracle and when it came time to face down his most difficult moment, those are the people that he went back to.
Speaker 1:I mean, I imagine Jesus heading to Jerusalem, dreading the outcome, knowing what's coming, but deciding first to stop in and see an old friend, And to laugh and to eat and to sit and cry and gather the strength that he would need to move forward. Because this is a Jesus that knew wide and shallow is for waiting pools not friendships. And so when you find someone that brings you joy and makes you smile and challenges you to be better, you go back to that and you dive into that. This is a Jesus who knew that friendships are miraculous and they are incredibly uncommon, but they don't just happen. And they take work and investment and tears and time and so he intentionally made space for it particularly when he was busy and he had a lot on his mind.
Speaker 1:And I love the idea that maybe Jesus' best friend is the one that we know almost nothing about. Because maybe that friendship was for him, not for us. This year, as we begin this conversation, my hope is that we can actually take Jesus as our model and learn to see in the divine, not just the self sufficiency and the sovereignty that often dazzles us, but also this deep model of interdependence and fundamental social need that Jesus shows us. Because I'm convinced that Jesus' friendships were not a concession to his humanity. They weren't a weakness.
Speaker 1:They were an expression of his divinity. Part of the very life and resurrection that we are invited into now through our friends. So may you recognize your need for friends this day. May you sense that longing as inherently holy. May spirit begin to bring persons across your path in sacred moments, and may you work to cultivate the depth that you uncover in those who are near you.
Speaker 1:Because friendship is narrow and deep, and it takes time and work, but it is part of what you were built for. Let's pray. God, as we begin this new year and this new conversation, would you remind us of the interdependence, the social need, the relying on others that we see demonstrated in your son? Might we see this not as a concession to humanity, but as part of the very image of God, the Imago Dei in Christ and in us? That we are built for friendship, that we are built to be partnered, that we are built to have mentors, that we are built to pour into each other.
Speaker 1:But all of those different relationships bring nuance and depth to our relational world. This is part of the beautiful mosaic that you've created for us, that you live yourself and that you invite us into. Now for those of us who need friends, would you be active by your spirit making those opportunities available to us and visible to us so that we could do the work and put in the time and make the investment even when we're scared? For those of us who have friends, would we be renewed in our investment, in our commitment? Would we call each other up and spend time and know that this is more than fun, it is sacred and holy and beautiful?
Speaker 1:And, God, as we encounter each other, would you give us a divine curiosity to be fascinated and excited to know each other, to go deep, to share the store the stories that are the core of our being, to do life together with each other in the model of your son. In the strong name of the risen Christ, pray. Amen.