May 5, 2024 “God is First a Friend”

Lisa Wiens Heinsohn

Homily for St. John’s Episcopal Church by Lisa Wiens Heinsohn given May 5, 2024

The Sixth Sunday of Easter: John 15:9-17

Let me begin by asking you two questions. First, who do you understand Jesus to be? The second question may be harder, so I’m going to hold a little silence after I ask it to let you truly consider your answer. How do you experience Jesus?

Perhaps for some of you the answer is, I don’t. Perhaps for some of you the answer is, the name Jesus evokes all kinds of things, many of them uncomfortable, given your history with the church. Perhaps some of you are like Anne Lamott who Diana quotes as saying, “It is just mortifying to be a Christian, except for the Jesus part.” Perhaps some of you have a warm and good relationship with Jesus, regardless of whether your experience of religion or church is good or not so good. Please continue to hold your own experience of Jesus in your awareness this morning.

Diana Butler Bass is a contemporary author, religious historian and public theologian who has written many books, of which her latest is called Freeing Jesus. In it, she describes her own experience of Jesus. She said that one day she was praying in a small chapel in the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., kneeling and looking up at this beautiful and massive icon of Jesus. She says that she distinctly heard a voice saying to her, “Get me out of here.” It was a message that repeated several times. It was so startling she didn’t know what to make of it. It seemed to refer to the image of Jesus. Diana Butler Bass is an intellectual and a prayerful person who does feel spiritual insight come to her, but she had never experienced anything like this. What in the world could it mean, Jesus saying “Get me out of here”?

Over the course of the book Diana describes how she came to feel that God might be asking her to help free Jesus from the static and limiting ways modern religion has seen him, by exploring who he is for us. She says that neither conventional religion, which has seen Jesus in an exclusive way that emphasizes only his divinity, nor modern scholarship, which analyzes the historical Jesus but can sometimes breed distance and skepticism, completely work for her. Instead, she talks about the Jesus she experiences. And the very first way she experiences Jesus is as a friend.

I don’t know if the word “friend” came to you when I asked you how you experienced Jesus. But in today’s gospel reading, that is exactly what Jesus says he is to his disciples. The context for today’s gospel reading is that they are having their last meal together before Jesus is arrested, crucified and killed. So he is giving them his final teaching, what he wants them to remember.  And he says to them, I am not your master, but your friend. It gets a little confusing because he then gives them a commandment, which might seem to put us right back in master-servant mode. But the commandment itself just to love. He seems to be saying that love is the one thing that needs to characterize their friendship with him and with one another.

What is a friend? Can one have a relationship with Jesus or with God that is grounded in friendship? Friendship implies equality. It implies two people who are peers with one another. The college that I went to was called Earlham College in Indiana, which was founded by Quakers. The name Quakers call themselves is “the Society of Friends.” Quakers are profoundly non-hierarchical. At Earlham we called all our professors by their first names. Quaker meetings don’t have a setup like this where clergy are elevated above the congregation and everyone is facing toward the chancel, which is like a stage. Instead, Quakers meet in what they call a meeting house, where no one is above anyone else, and they sit in silence, trusting that God dwells within each of them as what they call the “Inner Light,” and they share what they feel the Light is revealing to them, each deeply revering what the other is saying.

The book of Exodus describes the prophet Moses meeting God face to face, as a friend. Jesus hung out with “tax collectors and sinners,” those hated and shunned by society, and he was called a glutton and a drunkard and a friend of outcasts. A friend is someone you have fun with, someone you talk to when you need to work things out, someone you enjoy and appreciate because you can go through good and bad times together. The Celts have what they call “anam cara,” which means soul friend. Some Celtic Christians believed that one could not evolve spiritually without a soul friend, that everyone needed someone to whom they could share everything, who wanted the best for you, who wouldn’t judge you if you told them the truth, and you would do the same for them. Jesus is saying in today’s gospel reading that he is our friend, and that the one non-negotiable characteristic of this friendship is love. What if we really took this teaching at face value and approached God, first and foremost, as a friend? What if we imagined that the risen Christ can truly be a friend to us? That would mean you would be God’s peer. It would mean you have a deep sacredness and wisdom, and therefore a responsibility too, you might not have associated with yourself. It would mean God isn’t an overlord master in the sky, an old man with a beard, but a companion who walks shoulder to shoulder with us, sharing life with us. It would mean we are never alone.

Interestingly, this characteristic of friendship, of equality and reciprocity, is making its way to another set of relationships most of us weren’t raised to think of in this way, and that is with nature. There is a new movement called Church of the Wild, happening all over the country, in which people go outside to encounter God in and through the natural world. In particular, Wild Church folks are recovering the experience that indigenous peoples have always had, which is that one can be in intentional, reciprocal relationship with all living things—including animals and birds, even plants and trees. St. John’s has had a number of Wild Church services and will likely have a few more this summer. Wild Church isn’t just forest bathing, or going outside to feel peaceful, or even going outside to feel closer to God. It’s seeking communion with a being of the natural world, to seek empathy and reciprocity and relationship. It’s a kind of friendship. It’s about mutuality and connection. I was speaking about Wild Church with a newcomer to St. John’s at Turtle Bread this past week, and one of the young adults who works at Turtle Bread was so interested in what she was hearing that she came over to the table to ask more about what I was talking about.

This characteristic of friendship with God, friendship with the natural world, friendship with Jesus, is about transcending a transactional way of relating to the world. It’s about recovering the deep connection, the relationship, that is the heart of the web of life. It’s about shifting our paradigm of understanding ourselves –neither too important, the center of the universe, nor unimportant, cut off and isolated. Instead, we find ourselves in a primordial relationship with God and Jesus and each other and the natural world, first and foremost as friends.

There are other characteristics of our relationship with Jesus that are worth exploring, such as Teacher, Healer, Savior, Brother. There are aspects of the natural world that are not friendly to us although they aren’t malevolent either, like Coronavirus and forest fires. But that basic stance of friendship, of caring and mutual respect, of enjoying the other and trusting that the other enjoys us, of learning together and walking through life as companions, is priceless and worth recovering. I say “recovering” because I believe that deep in our DNA, the experience of humanity is not survival of the fittest or competitive zero-sum game winners and losers, but collaboration, interconnection, a balance and equilibrium of life in which many creatures support each other. In the Garden of Eden, God brings all the animals to Adam to see what Adam will name them, and ultimately creates a human companion for Adam, because it is not good for a person to be alone.

The single non-negotiable characteristic of our friendship with God is love, and it begins with God’s overwhelming, unconditional, constant love for us. If you want to experience God’s love for you, I suggest you set aside time to be in communion with God in prayer, specifically with the intention of treating God as the very best friend you could have. Take the risk of trusting God’s infinite love for you, allow your own divine sacred wisdom to arise, and be in conversation with God. See how this friendship and delight, mutuality and connection, permeates your other relationships. Jesus says, I have called you friends. Let us experience this truth for ourselves. Amen.

10am Service