John 15:9-17
“As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love. I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete.
“This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. I do not call you servants any longer, 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. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name. I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.”
One of my favorite movies ever is “Stand By Me.” I realize it’s not the best movie by the standards of a seasoned film critic or the Academy Awards. But I like it anyway. I like it because I liked the short story on which it is based which, a lot of people don’t realize was written by Stephen King. There are no pet cemeteries, clowns in the sewers, haunted hotels, “Children of the Corn,” or any of the other terrifying things for which Stephen King is known, so…
Anyway, “Stand By Me” is the story of four adolescent boys who, though they would call themselves friends at the beginning of it all, become the best of friends as the story moves along. It takes place in the 1950’s, when one of the boys learns there is a dead body somewhere near the railroad tracks in a neighboring town and the four pals make it their mission to find it and report it to police and the media in order to become famous.
The story – and their adventure – turn out to be less and less about the search for a dead body and more and more about the friendship that develops among the boys. As they hike and camp and get into and out of all kinds of trouble, they tell stories around the camp fire, get chased by dogs and trains, threatened by older brothers and bullies, they get into fights, they confess their fears, they save each others’ lives, and they “come of age,” whatever that means. The short of the long is that the boys become the very best of friends during that short season of their young lives and the movie ends with a line from the book that I think of often: "I never had any friends like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?"
“I never had any friends like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?”
Which makes me think about Confirmation Sunday and this rite of passage for Lutherans like us, where we gather adolescents around the waters of their baptism and – this time around, anyway – hear this bit from Jesus about what it means to be friends with, instead of servants to or slaves of, the God of all creation – which was a new way to understand the God of the universe for those disciples who were hearing about it for the first time.
Jesus said, “…I have loved you; abide in my love. …so that your joy may be complete.
“You are my friends … I do not call you servants any longer … but I have called you friends.
“You did not choose me but I chose you. … And I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.”
And it’s easy to imagine that those first disciples might have been surprised to hear this from Jesus, who they were trying to understand as the Messiah, the Christ, the Son of God, because it’s just another way that the God we know in Jesus was different from the way they thought or believed or understood God could ever be. And the same might be true for us too much of the time, it seems to me.
See, throughout Scripture – from the Hebrew Scriptures of those first disciples all the way through what we call the New Testament – the nature of God is revealed as something altogether different from what people expected or thought they were looking for.
The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob wasn’t a God who lived “up there” and “out there” in a galaxy far, far away, like the “gods” they were used to or had been told about or that some of their neighbors worshiped. No, the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob was a God who dwelled among God’s people – who moved around in the Garden of Eden “at the time of the evening breeze”; who led the people through the wilderness by pillars of cloud and fire; who camped out in the tabernacle; who spoke through the prophets.
And the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was a God who centered grace, who was motivated by love. We’ve been tricked into believing that grace was hard to come by in those Old Testament days, but it’s there. It’s relative to the day and the age and the stories that surround it all, but there’s grace in the rainbow that follows the flood, for example. There’s grace in those 10 Commandments that promise life and blessing and abundance and justice if only we let those laws guide our life because we get to, not because we’ve got to. And there’s grace in the overarching theme of those Hebrew Scriptures, for a people being released from slavery, oppression, and suffering, and for a people promised freedom, abundance, and new life, simply because that was God’s desire for them. Again, this God was different that way.
And this is the same God who showed up in Jesus, of course – living and moving and breathing in and for and with the world. Like the evening breeze or the pillar of clouds, like the tabernacle and the prophets, Jesus showed up, this time as one of them; as one of us. And he showed up preaching and teaching and healing and forgiving – all expressions of and experiences with that same amazing grace God was working to share with the world.
And now, this Jesus was showing himself, yet again, to be a different kind of god than the world had ever seen or heard of or expected God could be. Jesus wanted to be friends with his people. Friends!
No longer were people to see God as a slave master or a slave driver. No longer was God to be seen as a master manipulator or as a purveyor of punishment. No longer were people to walk on egg shells through their lives in this world fearing the monsters beneath their bed or the demons in their closet or the grumpy old man in the sky holding their feet to the fire or holding their sins over their heads or holding an everlasting grudge for every sin and indiscretion they could count.
No, we have a friend in Jesus. A friend who wants to hold our hand through it all – nothing more and certainly nothing less: a companion for the journey; a humble servant, himself; one who suffers for our sake; one who lays down his life for those that he loves.
We have a friend in Jesus who abides in a kind of love that is everlasting and generous, abundant and without limit.
In Jesus, we have a friend who always, always, always chooses us, even when we forget or neglect or lack the courage, ability, wisdom, or faith to choose him back.
Like I said, my love for “Stand By Me,” the movie (and the Stephen King story that inspired it) is wrapped up in that rhetorical question that ends it all: “I never had any friends like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?”
There has always been some measure of truth to that for me, to be honest. I’m lucky to still have some of those friends in my life – ones who knew me and loved me and grew up with me during the formative “coming of age” adventures of my childhood. I had dinner with a couple of them two weeks ago. I just spent time with two more of them last weekend. My son Maxwell David, who’s affirming his baptism this morning, is named after another.
And my hope for him and for each of these young people making their Confirmation today – Bethany, Charlie, Kylee, Max, Ella, Ally, Alex, Evelyn, Natalie, and Nate – is that they will know and hold onto and have reason to celebrate those kind of friends now and in the years to come.
And my hope for them, even more – and for all of us, just the same – is that those kinds of friends, the ones who abide, the ones who sacrifice for our sake and compel us to do likewise, the ones who choose us when others don’t, who make our joy complete, and who inspire us to love well and deeply and without shame… I hope those are the friends who remind us of the God – of the friend – we have in Jesus, who does all of those things, to perfection, for us and for the sake of the world.
Amen
