With Friends Like These

Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
02.20.11; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Matthew 5:38-48

We all enjoy having friends.   Heck, we don’t just enjoy it.  We need it.  It’s a baseline necessity of the human experience.  We’re social animals, creatures that really enjoy the company of others of our kind. 

That’s why solitary confinement is such a terrible, difficult, horrible punishment, something that breaks the mind and the spirit.  One of the hardest things you can do to a human being is to isolate them, to force them into a little box where real human relationships are nearly impossible to develop.   You know, like spending forty hours a week in a telemarketing call-center cubicle, where the only voices you hear really don’t want to be talking to you.

There are some things we just shouldn’t inflict on other human beings.

Having a healthy network of people with whom we play and laugh and socialize is something that most of us need to be happy and healthy.   We like having a group of people around us who will always have our backs, who will always be there for us, who will do pretty much anything to help us out when the going gets tough.   Wherever you are, and whatever you’re doing, friendships make life...better.

School without the friendships you’ve made would be just brutal.  No one wants to be the guy sitting alone at the table in the far corner of the cafeteria.  Friendships in the workplace make the day to day of our working lives far more tolerable.  If you can get together with your buddies after work and laugh at the boss over a few cold ones, it makes work almost tolerable.   And yes, even here, even in church, friendships seem to be vital to our happiness.

Study after study has shown that churchgoing folks are happier and more content in life.   Take the findings of a recent book by sociology professors Chaeyoon Lim and Robert Putnam entitled Amazing Grace:  How Religion Divides and Unites Us.   That book reviewed results from thousands of interviews with church going folks.  What they found was that going to church didn’t necessarily make you a happier person.  What makes folks really content in life was if they not only went to church, but they developed meaningful relationships in church.

People who went to church regularly but had no close friends in the church were less than half as likely to say they were very satisfied with their lives.   This comes as no surprise.  Isolated people just don’t tend to be happy people.

So the data is clear.  What’s best and most happiness-making about church is having church friends.

And here, we encounter a problem.  The name of that problem is, as it so often is, Jesus.

We heard Jesus today, once again, from the Sermon on the Mount.  Running from Matthew chapter 5 to Matthew chapter 7, this collection of teachings is the heart and soul of the Gospel, the essence of what Jesus taught, and how Jesus expected us to live.

Today’s passage continues the pattern we’ve seen earlier in the Sermon.  In each of the two sections presented, Jesus starts by saying “You have heard that it was said,” and then takes it to the next level by saying, “But I tell you...”   He begins by presenting us with the Biblical  teaching on revenge in Matthew 38 through 42.  

We’ve all heard the saying, an “Eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.”  It comes from Exodus 21:24, and Leviticus 24:20, and Deuteronomy 19:21.  We tend to interpret it as meaning revenge pure and simple and sweet, in the “You hit me, I take you out” kind of way. 

But the real meaning of that saying is different.  The intent and purpose of that saying is not revenge.  It’s measured justice.  It means, if someone harms you, you are only to seek balance.  That means you don’t take more than you are due.  You don’t poke out both of their eyes, then sue them and take their house.   Justice, as presented by the Torah, is balance and fairness.

But Jesus goes further.  If you want more than simple justice, if you actually want healing and reconciliation and not just balance, if you want to aggressively and intentionally make things better and tip the balance to the side of grace, then you need to press it.  You need to pour out your grace, even to those who seem to be taking more from you than is their right.

Then, in verses 43 through 48, Jesus talks about friendship.   Throughout Torah, the commandment to love those near to you is made clear.  You are to care for your kin, and for those close to you, and for those in need.  But Jesus takes it further, because he knows what human beings are like.

We all have friends.  We all have people who we like, and who like us, and who are like us.   Everyone does.  It’s the nature of human beings.   We all look out for each other, particularly if the “each other” means “people like us who like us.”  It’s the nature of friendship.

But that isn’t the standard and measure of the Christian walk, because standing by your friends can be morally meaningless.  Take, for instance, the difficult story that just came to light out of the University of Virginia, my alma mater.  In an article in Marie Claire...my wife subscribes, and I read whatever is in front of me because you never know what you might encounter...a woman described being drugged and sexually assaulted by a brother at one of the big fraternities on fraternity row, three years before I attended.  Her efforts to find out who had attacked her...and those of the police...met a brick wall of silence at the fraternity.  No-one was talking.  No-one knew anything.

Years later, a guilty conscience led her assailant to reveal himself, and to submit himself to justice.  But at the time...well...he got by with a little help from his friends.

Looking out for the folks who are right around us, and who are part of us, well, that’s easy.  Even the Taliban do that.

But caring for and showing grace to and being moved by Christ’s love for those who are different, who we do not like, who are not “us,” or who are actually our enemy...that’s a much harder challenge.  It’s much easier just to fight them.

But when we do so, we are not acting as God would have us act.  What Jesus is demanding of us is the same sort of transforming, powerful, relentless love that he offered up to us, even as we crucified him.

He asks us to be that person, moved by and changed by the same Spirit that led him to ask forgiveness for those who took him.

And that is just not easy.

Still.  It’s what he asks of us.  And if we want to be disciples, then we have to take that seriously.  It’s what shows the world we have a clue what he was talking about.  We have to live it.  Let it be so.  AMEN.