Texts: Proverbs 17:17; Ecclesiastes 4:9-12; John 15:12-17; I John 4:7-8, 11-12
This is the season of graduation ceremonies, of commencement exercises in which young people, in particular, but sometimes an older person or two as well, will take leave of a time and place in their lives and begin to move onward. It is a time, too, for weddings, and anniversaries in which we celebrate the marvelous ways in which people join their lives together. Summertime may also be the season for reunions of various sorts. As you know, this past weekend was the 50th anniversary and reunion of our Lafayette High School class of 1960. All of these traditional June events got me thinking about friendship, and the critical spiritual role that friends play in our lives.
The truth is, that one can’t become fully actualized as a human being alone. “The glory of God,” the old church patriarch Irenaeus once said, “is a human being fully alive.” None of us, it turns out, can do it “our way” as Frank Sinatra sang, ALL BY OURSELVES. None of us is Horatio Alger, self-made. One of the wonderful things about reunions—be they family occasions meant to be just for fun, or the more serious moments when families and friends gather around at a time of a death to a dear one, or to celebrate a marriage—is how much they remind us that we are not who we are because of our singular efforts on our own behalf. Hundreds of people—teachers, parents, relatives, neighbors, business associates, friends—contribute in an on-going fashion to making us who we are at any given moment.
Socrates taught that the “unexamined life is not worth living”, and the point this morning is that we need our friends to expand our understandings of our lives and how we fit into the world, not to mention their help in understanding this ambiguous and complex world that is ours in which to live.
According to a study documented in the June 2006 issue of the journal American Sociological Review, Americans are thought to be suffering a loss in the quality and quantity of close friendships since at least 1985. The study states 25% of Americans have no close confidants, and the average total number of confidants per citizen has dropped from four to two. According to the study:
Americans’ dependence on family as a safety net went up from 57% to 80%;
Research has found a link between fewer friendships (especially in quality) and psychological and physiological regression. Researchers have also discovered that friends work as a kind of “behavioral vaccine” that protects physical and emotional health.
Personally, I suspect that a number of us can also testify how friendships that turn poisonous, for some reason or other—usually caused by envy, jealousy, insecurities—can become agents causing not only unhappiness, but physical and emotional illnesses as well.
Do you remember the great African-American poet James Weldon Johnson’s poem, “The Creation”?
And God stepped out on space,
And he looked around and said:
I’m lonely–
I’ll make me a world.
And far as the eye of God could see
Darkness covered everything,
Blacker than a hundred midnights
Down in a cypress swamp.
Then God smiled,
And the light broke,
And the darkness rolled up on one side,
And the light stood shining on the other,
And God said: That’s good!
The poem goes on to describe the various acts of creation, until we get to these verses:
Then God walked around,
And God looked around
On all that he had made.
He looked at his sun,
And he looked at his moon,
And he looked at his little stars;
He looked on his world
With all its living things,
And God said: I’m lonely still.
[James Weldon Johnson, God’s Trombones, “The Creation”]
It occurred to me as I was thinking this week about friendship and friends that loneliness might just be the creative spark that motivates and generates what was no-thing, into matter, into material reality. That’s why James Weldon Johnson’s great poem came to mind. Even if we are never self-made, we are, I think, as human beings, like our creator in that we are intrinsically lonely creatures. No one can get inside the frame of our being to see events and people and experiences quite the same way that we do, and we often do not have the words to even express what we feel. But with friends, companions, (a word, by the way, that means those with whom we break bread), our sense of isolation is diminished, and our world is expanded.
The Bible knows of three kinds of love: there is EROS, erotic love in which the wonderful coupling of bodies gives a sense of complete union between persons. There is PHILIA: which is the love that we share as friends; hence the name of the Quaker city of Pennsylvania, is Philadelphia: the city of brotherly love. Philia is characterized by empathy, caring, affection, and appreciation or respect for the uniqueness of another person. And finally, there is AGAPE—that love that the hymnist said was immortal, forever full, forever flowing free. It is Agape love that is willing to lay down its life for the beloved: Agape is pure, without self-interest, but always with the interest of the beloved as its primary purpose. Agape love is the kind of love that Jesus taught that God has for all persons.
In the passages from John and First John we learn something about the characteristics of Philia and Agape friendship: first, it rejoices in the very existence of the other, desiring that the beloved be, rather than not be; it is the longing for the presence of the beloved when she is absent; it is happiness in the thought of him; it is profound satisfaction over everything that makes the beloved, the friend, great and good.
Second, it is marked by the trait of gratitude—a kind of thankfulness for the existence of the other and a “happy acceptance of everything that he or she gives without the jealous feeling that the self ought to be able to do as much. Richard Niebuhr says of this characteristic that “it is a gratitude that does not seek equality; it is wonder over the other’s gift of themselves in companionship.” [Niebuhr, H. Richard. The Purpose of the Church and Its Ministry. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1956, p.35]
Third, friendship in these forms of love is marked also by reverence that does not seek to absorb the other, or to dominate, or to subsume into the life of the other, making the friend into a replica of the self. It keeps its distance and gives thanks for the otherness of the friend.
Finally, such friendship is characterized by loyalty and persistence in the relationship despite time, distance, and other obstacles that may arise. [Marks of love taken from the writing of H. Richard Niebuhr, Op. Cit., pp. 34-35]
All of us would like such friendships. We hunger for them, which may be the most compelling evidence there is that we were made for such holy relationships and for the transcendent relationship with the lonely God. Another preacher once wrote, in a wedding homily, that couples reflect the divine image, and I would add that friends, reflect the divine image created in us more fully than we can as separate creatures. If we can sum up the Christian story in a few words, I think we might call it the story of God’s self-giving efforts, God’s agape love to make friends with each of us and all of us.
Some of our friends will continue from childhood until the day we die. We will feel closer intimacy with people we know, who we might call acquaintances, in varying degrees over time. At our reunion last night, we all felt very close. But today people will go back home, to their routines, and that intimacy and its opportunities will diminish. We will be more acquaintances who shared a common experience, than true friends. No doubt, however, some real friendships will have blossomed again after such an event. For example, I have realized for some time what I did not understand as a high school student, that our one lone African-American classmate was a person of enormous courage. She integrated our school, our class, all by herself. We talked a bit more intensely at the reunion, and because she lives here in town, I now want to do more to deepen this relationship. I want to be friends with someone like that.
Sometimes friends turn on us, and we feel a need to create a new web of friends. My young great nephew graduated from Henry Clay on Friday. I encouraged him in the words I wrote in the front of Bill Coffin’s book, Credo, that as he now begins this new chapter in his life, to try to get acquainted with someone new, every day, as the way to live a gifted and rich life, and that it would be especially beneficial to try to make friends with persons whose life trajectory ordinarily would be different from his own, who would be very different from him. Some of our best and most lasting friends are those whom we met in a moment of chance coupled with a little initiative to reach out with warmth and openness to receive their gifts to us.
Marianne Williamson has written a truth for us in this season of Pentecost, of the Holy Spirit: She says “Relationships are the Holy Spirit’s laboratories in which the Spirit brings together people who have the maximal opportunity for mutual growth.” We can’t grow without friends, and friends who are just like us won’t provoke much growth.
It seems there was once a teacher who was revered by the people as a person of God. Not a day went by when a crowd of people wasn’t asking for advice, or healing, or a blessing. There was, however, a disagreeable fellow in the community who never missed a chance to contradict the teacher, observing weaknesses, and poking fun. One day the contrary fellow fell ill and died. Everyone heaved a sigh of relief, except the teacher who was plunged into deep grief. When asked about his grief, he replied: “I was grieving for myself. That man was the only friend I had. Here I am surrounded by people who revere me. He was the only one who challenged me. I fear that with him gone, I shall stop growing.”
And one last story about friends: There once was a woman who longed to find out what heaven is like. She prayed constantly, “O God, grant me in this life a vision of paradise.” This went on for years until one night she had a dream. An angel came to her and led her to heaven, and as they walked down a street in paradise, they came to an ordinary looking house. The angel told her: “Go inside, and look.” So the woman walked in the house and found a person preparing supper, another reading the newspaper; another ironing the clothes, and children doing their homework and playing with toys. She was disappointed and returned to the angel on the street: “Is this all there is to heaven?” she asked.
The angel replied, “Those people you saw in that house are not in paradise, paradise is in them.” The glory of God is a human being fully alive! So may we each discover this truth for our own lives. Amen.
