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 comm.church for more information.

We released a new book last week. It's called Dirt and Stardust. It will be available on Kindle soon, but we have free paperback copies right now for you as a gift to start the new year. We continue to experiment with new ways to move beyond the Sundays and to keep the community connected and growing toward Jesus. This is just one more small experiment that we've tried out this year.

You can drop by any time to pick one up. They are in the mailbox by the 23rd Street entrance right now for you. We'll keep them stocked so that you can grab yours, and this is just a happy New Year's from us. Today, however, we launch into a new series, and it's about friendship. January is that time of year when we often turn our attention to relationships.

We have used this month to talk about our sexuality. The last time we did that was a series called Swipe Right a couple years ago. Last year, we used this month to talk about forgiveness in a series called Reunion. This year for January, the series is called relearning friendship. And let's be honest here.

When we were planning this year, season eight at Commons during the spring, we were fully expecting that we would be hitting the other side of this pandemic in 2022, and that we would be talking right now about relearning old patterns of gathering and meeting and making new connections. We really did think that we would be post pandemic when we were reconnecting with each other and talking about relearning friendship. And that not only is not the case, but this first message of this series is online only. And so as we've had to do for almost two years now, we continue to pivot. And by the way, you pivot enough, you end up just going in circles, and that kind of feels like life over these last few years.

But the truth is, maybe we need these conversations even more than we expected to. And so we trust that spirit continues to guide us even when we don't see what's coming particularly clearly. And so in this series, we want to talk still about knowing ourselves and our friendship needs. We're gonna talk about loneliness and what it is we're really trying to find our way out of when we talk about being lonely. We're gonna talk about sharing and openness and how we do that well, and we're going to ground our rooted need for each other in this humanity that Jesus demonstrates for us so clearly.

But on the agenda today, as an introduction to this series, is making friends and social networks, not everyone is your friend, and resurrection friendships. But let's start with a story. As you know, we have been in the midst of a deep freeze here in Calgary, minus 20 consistently now for more than two weeks. Although, me say this to anyone watching outside of Calgary, this is cold. There's no getting around that.

No one is going to pretend that Calgary is some kind of tropical paradise. But in the midst of a minus 20 block, we had two absolutely lovely days hovering right around zero. This is what Calgary does well. It will punish you with cold. But just when you think you can't take it anymore, it will let you up to breathe the warm air to fill your lungs with winter goodness in a sunny day just before plunging you back into the freeze.

And that might sound cruel, but I will tell you, it's better than Edmonton, where it just never lets up. So at least there's that. Count me thankful for Calgary Chinooks and the reprieve that they bring. The thing is, you have to learn to take advantage of them. And so when we had this little gap of wonderful winter weather, our family made sure that we were out of doors.

It seems, however, so did the rest of Calgary, because we hit the toboggan hill near our house last Saturday, and so did everyone else in the city. And it was a blast. I took my daughter on her first sledding run, big success, she loved it. And my son hit the jumps and got some epic air. Actually, take a look at this, and then we'll come back.

This is our full on slow motion record. He made sure I was there to capture the whole thing. Let's take a look at this one more time because that was amazing. Watch this. Look at the air he gets here.

Incredible. Right? Okay. Now that is awesome on its own, but the best part of this story is still coming because my son hits the jump, nails it, slides down the hill, grabs his sled, and starts the long climb back up. But as he's about 10 or 15 feet away from me, I call out, that was amazing.

Great job, bud. And then this kid from behind me, who I had no idea had snuck up behind me, jumps in and says, yeah, that was epic. Do you want to be friends? And my son says immediately, yeah. And then off they went playing together for the rest of the afternoon.

Check out this photo. Now, the best part was that this kid had a GT Snow Racer, and my son had only ever seen one of those when Scott rode in on Christmas Eve. And if you don't get that reference, then go watch Christmas Eve service. There's still time for you to do that. But he had an amazing time playing with his new friend, and the two of them just made it seem so simple.

Funny addendum. When we got in the car to go home, I asked my son about his new friend. I said, hey, you guys looked like you had a lot of friend. What was your friend's name? And he said, I don't know, but I really liked him.

Hopefully, we'll get to play together soon again. So good at making friends, not so great at planning for future play dates. Regardless, I could not help but walk away from the day mesmerized by the willingness of, first, this kid to just put himself out there. Like, hey, nice jump. Do you wanna be friends?

Sounds like the scariest sentence ever uttered. But second, my son's willingness to just take that compliment at face value, jump on a new sled, and get to the work of playing with a new friend. Unless you enter like a child, you will never grasp the kingdom of God, I once heard someone say. But what about the rest of us? Those of us who can't rely on the naivete of childhood to lubricate our social interactions, how are we supposed to make friends?

Well, in 1958, the average adult said that they had six close friends. Some of you right now are gasping at that. Like, how could that possibly be? Who can manage six entire human interactions? Astonishing.

Well, hold on, because by 1985, that number had dropped to three. And in 2004, which was the latest research I could find, in an article entitled social isolation in America from the American Psychological Review, that number had dropped to just two. And that was pre COVID. Now I don't have a lot of information about this yet, but I would wager that two years of pandemic life has radically altered our experience of friendship all over again. And in some ways, for the good.

I don't know about you, but I have actually intentionally engaged several close friendships this year. I've worked hard to keep those connections alive, partly because I started to see how much I needed them. Again, I don't wanna speak for anyone else here, but for me, as someone who has taken, probably at times, an unhealthy pride in being, quote, unquote, self sufficient, to realize that nine months into the pandemic, I had taken up cocktails to keep myself busy and was not managing that hobby well at all. It was a bit of a wake up call. And so for this past year in 2021, I was much more conscious of the ways that I maintained my friendships, and they asked for connection when I needed it, and how I understood myself as essentially a social being that needed support.

However, I realized that that was taking more intentional work than it ever had before. A lot of the friendship muscle memory that I had built up over forty some odd years, all of a sudden, it seemed out of date. At the same time though, new relationships, new friends, all of that has been much harder. Like, I can't count on spontaneous conversations at church or a drink after hockey or running into someone at a friend's house. Everything needs to be more intentional, it seems.

And in some ways, that's been a gift. But at the same time, with everything moving online, there's just so many more options to distract yourself with. Social scientists tell us that for most of human existence, we have maintained a social network of less than a 100 people. That's probably all that our brains are evolved to handle. Slowly, that crept up to an average about 250 by the middle of the twentieth century.

But today, the average person has almost 400 friends on Facebook, let alone Insta and TikTok. And so what's happened is that technology accelerated by a global pandemic has enabled this wide scale broadening of connection, while at the same time contributing at some level to the hollowing out of our concept of friendship. By the way, that's that's not a shot at technology. I have family all over the world, none of them here in Alberta. Without FaceTime, those connections would not be possible in the way that they are.

So I'm incredibly grateful that we've been able to do groups on Zoom and church on YouTube these past two years. We fully intend to keep all of that going even when we return to patterns that are more familiar to us. But technology has enabled relationships that take different types of commitments. And they're not necessarily harder, but they are certainly different. I can maintain several close friends with the same effort.

I can manage thousands of followers, but those are not the same thing. And the thing is, of this is actually all that new. We're told that thousands of people came to listen to Jesus. People were fascinated by his ideas in life. Many of them traveled from their homes to hear him.

They pushed in to see him when he would address the public. But of those, some left as soon as he said something they didn't like. There's this passage in John six where Jesus is pushing some boundaries and the gospel records that people started grumbling. This is a hard teaching, they said. And many of the disciples turned and went home.

So this is even more than just the crowds, even those who considered themselves disciples of Jesus backed away at times. Still, there was the 72 that Jesus commissioned and sent off in Luke, and, of course, there are the 12 that Jesus worked closely with through most of his ministry. And there's this sort of awareness in the gospels of Jesus in the social media and public sphere. And then there's a smaller group maybe that he knows by name, and then there's an even smaller group that seem to know him well. An acknowledgment of the limitations of our intimate relationships.

So technology today might enable thousands of connections for all of us, but you and I, just like Jesus, we don't have the emotional horsepower to handle all of that. This is why sometimes I think our frustration with friendship is rooted in that kind of misunderstanding. We think that more is what's missing when sometimes it's actually less that we need. I saw this comment this week. Normalize using words like colleague, classmate, acquaintance, neighbor, client.

Not everyone is your friend. And I think if you're like me, you kind of immediately balk at that. It feels rude not to call someone your friend, but at the same time, there's something really profound there, isn't there? Our friends are important precisely because they are rare. Jesus had followers, and he had disciples, and he had friends.

There's an interesting example of this that's sort of buried in the Jesus story. I mean, yes, of of course, there's Peter and there's the disciple that Jesus loved. Those friendships kinda pop out when we read the story. But I've always been fascinated by Jesus' life between the pages. These sort of hints that we get at a more nuanced life beyond the gospels.

And one of those friendships that Jesus seems to lean into is one that shows up buried in the pages of the gospel of John. The problem is this person gets buried, pun intended, you'll get that in a second, in this miraculous moment that almost threatens to overshadow what I think John is really trying to say. In chapter 11, we get this story where Jesus has been traveling and teaching and word comes to him about a friend who is sick. And in verse one, it says, now a man named Lazarus was sick. And this is actually the character's introduction.

We know nothing about him up to this point. And yet we read that he was from Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister, Martha. In fact, 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. Now what's really interesting about this phrase is that we don't even know that story yet. It doesn't happen until the next chapter, which is kind of a strange way to introduce it.

However, we do have a version of that story about the perfume and the hair in Matthew and Mark and Luke, and so it seems like John is counting on the fact that we've read those other earlier gospels first. In fact, it actually seems like he wants to clarify some things here. In Matthew and Mark, the woman who brings the perfume is unnamed, but both specifically say the scene happens here in Bethany. In Luke, however, the place is unnamed, but the woman is described as a woman of the city who was a sinner. That unfortunately has led to a lot of assumptions about who we now know is Mary.

I think John is actually trying to clarify some things for us here that, no, the woman who brought the perfume was not just some random woman of ill repute. This was a close friend, a family Jesus knew very well. And so he links these stories to give us more context, but he's also going to offer his own rendition of the perfume story in the next chapter. We'll come back to that in a moment. But next we read, that the sisters sent word to Jesus saying, Lord, the one you love is sick.

And already, we should be cluing into the idea that there's some background here. You and I, we don't know who Lazarus is, but very clearly Jesus does. In fact, Jesus knows the sisters. He obviously has spent time with his family. The sisters don't even feel the need to mention Lazarus' name.

They just know that Jesus will understand when they say, look, the one you love needs you. Now you may know the story from here. Even if you've never touched the Bible, the name Lazarus is associated culturally with resurrection today. Right? In verse five, John tells us that Jesus loved Martha and Mary and Lazarus, and so he wanted to go back to be with them, but the disciples try to talk him out of it.

They protest. A short while ago, the people there tried to stone you, and yet you want to go back? That seems like a bad choice, Jesus. Still, Jesus insists and they head back to Bethany. Thing is, Jesus doesn't get there in time.

Lazarus dies and he's placed in the tomb, hence my buried pun from earlier. In fact, when Jesus arrives, it's actually been four days since Lazarus died. People are starting to show up to mourn with the family. Martha goes out to meet him, but Mary is just too upset. Either by the death of her brother or maybe how long it took Jesus to come, but she decides to stay home.

Still, Martha comes to Jesus and says, Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died, but I know that even now, God will give you whatever you ask. Basically, she's asking him to fix this. And Jesus says, your brother will rise again. Now Martha, thinking he's talking in religious platitudes says, sure. I know that he'll rise someday, but I miss him now.

And so Jesus says, I am the resurrection and the life. And it's a pretty interesting moment because I think Jesus has already made up his mind here. Like, Lazarus is coming back. He's already said as much to his disciples. But he also seems to want to make the point that living is about more than just breathing.

It's also about Lazarus connection to Jesus somehow. That friendship plays a part. Still, from there, Jesus decides to visit the tomb. He sees the family and the mourners, and this time Mary does come out. She says to him, if you had been here, this wouldn't have happened.

Her grief comes tumbling out almost in an accusation this time. And so now it's Jesus who breaks down crying. Here's that trivia question. What's the shortest verse in the Bible? It's this one, John eleven thirty five, Jesus wept.

But in the next verse we read, everyone who saw this moment realized how much he loved his friend. And so he goes to the tomb, and he asks for the stone doorway to be opened, and he calls to his friend, and Lazarus walks out. I mean, pretty remarkable moment, granted. But still, it's clear that between the lines, there's a lot of unstated emotional background to the story that we just don't have access to. I mean, we, you and I, as readers, we are meeting Lazarus for the very first time here as he leaves this tomb, but clearly Jesus is not.

Yes. Of course, the writer of John has his agenda. He's setting the stage for the resurrection of Jesus that will follow, but what's interesting to me is that the gospel does that in the context of a close private friendship that is only revealed to us in glimpses and hints. Lazarus, as the precursor to Jesus' resurrection, isn't random. This is someone that Jesus cares very deeply for, someone he has a private shared history with.

Specifically, someone whose relationship with Jesus is personal and private and out of the spotlight away from all of our prying eyes. In other words, I am the resurrection and the life. The miracle of those words is represented in someone that Jesus shares a deep connection to, one that you and I will never get to know about. Almost as if to say that that's where life, that's where friendship really takes place in those off screen encounters between friends. But the more I sit with the story and think about it, the more I think that maybe that's part of what Jesus means when he speaks of life and resurrection to Martha.

I mean, obviously, Jesus isn't just talking about breathing. Right? Lazarus dies again at some point. He's not still living today. So the point of resurrection isn't just biological.

It's relational. It's what Lazarus was brought back to, brought back for. Now I get it. Lazarus isn't really a major character. And I think because of that, we get dazzled by the miracle and forget to pay attention to the connections.

But if we do, if we look between the lines, it's pretty clear here. There's history. There's depth. There's grieving. There's celebration, of course, but all of that because of what Jesus shares with Lazarus out of you.

None of it's written down. None of it's documented. All of the important stuff happens just between the friends. And I don't know about you, but I love this idea that Jesus knew the difference between a friend and a disciple and a follower. And that it was the friend that became the symbol of resurrection in the gospels.

Now we'll see a little later in John. Just as Jesus is about to head to Jerusalem toward his death and his resurrection, that he visits his friends one more time. In chapter 12, we read that six days before the Passover. So this is getting really close to Jesus' death. Jesus came back to Bethany where Lazarus lived, whom Jesus had raised from the dead.

And so they made dinner for him. Martha served while Lazarus was among those reclining at the table with him. And if you read the other gospels, you find out that this dinner is happening at the house of a neighbor named Simon. That's what Matthew and Mark fixate on. But for John, this story is not about where it's happening.

It's all about the friendships that are present. The story is about Jesus visiting Martha and Mary and Lazarus one more time. And all of a sudden, in that context, the perfume makes a lot more sense to me. It's not just a random woman who barges in with a jar. It's Mary, a close friend who saw what was coming for Jesus, who took a pint of pure nard, expensive perfume, poured it on Jesus' feet, and wiped it with her hair, and the whole house was filled with the fragrance of that friendship.

See, this moment is about Jesus visiting his friends one final time. This moment is about those friends realizing how fragile their connection to Jesus was. This moment is about Jesus enjoying the purpose of resurrection, the friendship that he brought Lazarus back for. See, Jesus needed the people around him. He needed people that would parent him.

He needed people that would mentor him. He needed people that would work with him. He needed people that would push him to demonstrate all that was within him. He needed followers, and, of course, he needed disciples, but he also knew that he needed friends. People that he enjoyed spending time with for no one's benefit but his own, and he very specifically made time for that.

He made time for friends in his most miraculous moment. He made time for friends when he faced his most difficult moment. He made time to come back to the friendships that made him stronger. And I imagine Jesus here heading to Jerusalem, dreading the outcome, knowing what was coming, and knowing that first what he needed was to stop in to see some old friends. Just to laugh and eat and sit and cry together to gather the strength that he knew he needed for what he knew was coming.

Because this is a Jesus who knew that friendships are resurrection. They are miraculous and they are uncommon, but they don't just happen. They take time and work and investment and tears, and sometimes they start as easily as, hey, that was an awesome jump. Do you wanna be friends? But they grow only because we choose to invest in them.

And so I think that Jesus learned to use words like client and neighbor and follower and student and disciple, all so that the beauty of his friendships could play that very unique and important role he needed them to in his life. And personally, I just I love this idea that maybe Jesus' best friend was the one that you and I know almost nothing about. So as we begin this year, let's think about the myriad relationships in our lives, all the good that each of them brings into our life, the experiences of the world that we have, and the beauty of all of the diversity expressed in all of our human connections. But let's also reflect on those we choose to name as friends and all the ways that we would not be ourselves without them. As we begin this year, this month, this series, may we discover friends, may we become friends, may we learn to invest ourselves deeply in the friendships that arise near us and help us become us.

Let's pray. God, as we enter another stage of this pandemic, all the ways that we continue to be drawn towards each other and pulled apart from each other. May we recognize the intention that needs to sit behind our friendships, the ways that we choose to invest our time, our energy, our openness and vulnerability in those that we name as friends. Right? We spend some time even in this moment bringing to mind those who we call friend.

May we be thankful for your intervention in our lives through them. May we be conscious about the gratefulness we express to them. May we commit ourselves to the work of building those friendships, making them deeper, more profound so that they can help us become the people we were meant to be. In this series, may we learn to be good friends, trustworthy, and honest, and open with each other. And may we recognize that self sufficiency is an illusion.

It was always our dependency on each other that reflected your love for us. In the strong name of the risen Christ, we pray. Amen.