Sermon - Facebook Faith

John 15:9-17

Facebook Faith

James Sledge                                                                     May 13, 2012

I’m guessing that I don’t have to tell anyone it’s Mother’s Day.  Whether you think this is a great idea or a manipulative conspiracy devised by the greeting card and florist industries, you’d have to be really tuned out not to know. 

As the new pastor here, I suppose I should let you know that I don’t really preach Mother’s Day sermons.  Nothing against Mother’s Day or mothers, it’s just that I like to keep worship focused on God.  Our worship is something we offer to God.  It is about drawing close to God.  But there are constant temptations to turn worship into something else.

Some of you may be familiar with the critique of worship by Soren Kierkegaard, 19^th century philosopher and theologian.  Kierkegaard said that worship is drama, but he thought that churches often got confused about who played what roles.  He complained that worship was too often understood as a drama where God was a kind of director, while preachers, liturgists, and musicians were actors, and the congregation was audience.

Kierkegaard thought this entirely wrong.  Rather, he said, preachers, musicians, and such are prompters within this drama, and they and the congregation are actors.  But it is God who is the audience. 

I’m with Kierkegaard on this which is why I tend to stay away from honoring mothers on Mother’s Day, or America on the Fourth of July, or, for that matter, Presbyterian heritage on Presbyterian Heritage Sunday, which is next Sunday if anyone’s interested.

But that is not to say that I never speak of America on the Fourth of July or mothers today.  In fact, mothers and, in particular the love that many mothers give, may be instructive in understanding what Jesus says to us this morning.

I think the reason that Mother’s Day gets more traction than Father’s Day is that many people learned more about love from mothers than from fathers.  No knock on Dads here, and I know there are plenty of exceptions, but for many people, the active, hands on loving that they received came largely from their mother.

When people in our culture talk about love, we very often they are talking about the heart, about warm feelings, about passion.  I like to think that my mother has warm feelings about me, that there is a special place in her heart for me, but the assurance that my mother loves me is rooted more in things she did for me, the ways she cared for me, and the sacrifices she made for me.  And I suspect that when many of us think about a mother’s love, it’s more about changing diapers, bandaging skinned knees, trips to the park, a forgotten homework assignment delivered to school, a care package at college, or a financial gift just when it was desperately needed than it is about feelings.

The love Jesus commands us to have for one another certainly includes how we feel, being kindly disposed toward others.  But the love Jesus talks about is tangible, like a mother’s love.  He speaks of it bearing fruit, fruit that will last.  And he says that the supreme example of the love he’s talking about is “to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” 

I don’t know if you noticed this, but Jesus seems to speak of love and friendship almost as if they were synonyms.  “If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love… You are my friends if you do what I command you.”

Now that I’ve moved to Falls Church, I’ve started to get friend requests on Facebook from church members and others in the area.  I tend not to send out my own friend requests to members because I don’t want to put people in the position of needing to say “No,” the first time the pastor contacts them.  But I’m happy to accept friend requests from almost anyone.

According to Facebook, I currently have 437 friends.  If you’re not on Facebook that may sound like a lot, but those of you on Facebook know better.  I know people with many more Facebook friends, sometimes in the thousands.  Of course the term friend here gets used in a distinctive, Facebook way.  I don’t necessarily know my Facebook friends.  Many I have never met, and I’m not really sure why some of them asked to be friends.  And I sometimes get comments or messages from Facebook friends I didn’t realize I was friends with.

I’m not complaining.  I have no problem with Facebook style friendships.  I’ve had some very interesting conversations with people on Facebook and Twitter.  Sometimes I even feel like I’ve gotten to know them.  But these friendships are of a very different sort than what Jesus is talking about.

The friendship Jesus speaks of is more like that one special friend you’ve had for years, the person you tell things even your spouse or partner doesn’t know, the person you call when you need help wrestling with a difficult decision.  This sort of friendship involves a deep intimacy.  It’s the sort of relationship where the person will drop everything, no matter how important, when the other person calls.

When Jesus says, “You are my friends if you do what I command you,” I don’t think he is saying that he’ll be our friend if we do what he wants.  Rather I think Jesus is describing what it looks like when we enter into this sort of intimate friendship with him.  We want to drop everything and do as he says.

I’m not sure how much to make of this, but the way the original Greek of the gospel says friend is to take the word “beloved” and put a “the” in front of it.  The Greek word for “friend” translates literally as “the beloved.”  Now perhaps I’m making too much of quirk of Greek grammar, but Jesus certainly speaks of friendship with his disciples in a beloved, intimate sort of way, the sort of relationship that would die for the other.

For whatever reason, that’s not the sort of relationship a lot of us have with Jesus, with God.  A lot of us are more Facebook friends with God.  We clicked “Confirm” when Jesus sent us that friend request, and we occasionally notice something Jesus has posted.  We sort of know Jesus, but not in the intimate sort of way Jesus speaks of to his disciples.  We’ve got lots of other friends and lots of other priorities.  And we’re really busy.  No way we can drop everything for Jesus.  Better to keep this a Facebook type relationship.

In just a few moments we will celebrate the Sacrament of Baptism.  Sometimes people think of it just as that thing we do to babies.  Families get invited and pictures get taken, a bit like what happens at a first birthday party.  We often make a big deal of it, but I’m not sure we realize the intimate thing that takes place. 

In the waters of baptism, we are joined to Christ, connected to both his death and his resurrection.  We become something new.  The Apostle Paul spoke of experiencing an entirely new quality of life because we are now “in Christ.”  In the waters we are made brothers and sisters of Jesus and so children of God.  We are initiated into the same sort of relationship with the Father that Jesus knew.  The Spirit of the risen Christ comes to dwell within us.  I could describe it many different ways, but suffice to say that in the waters of baptism, God seeks to draw us into the deepest, most intimate love and friendship.

So why would we settle for a Facebook faith?