St. Paul’s United
Church Sunday,
July 2, 2006
Friends Forever – Rev. David Mundy
2 Samuel 1:1-17-27 Mark
5:21-43
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You can
tell by the photo that he was just a kid really, as were the rest of the
boy/men sitting beside him. Young Barney Danson was one of the tens of
thousands of Canadians who enlisted to fight for king and country during the
Second World War. As with so many enlisted men he became fast friends with
others who experienced the horrors of war. Sadly, Danson was the only one of
the four in the photograph to survive the war, and he was badly injured during
the Battle of Normandy, the decisive military offensive which turned the tide
of the war.
Barney
Danson’s name may be familiar to you because he was a member of parliament and
the Defense Minister in a previous government. If my memory serves me
correctly, it was two years ago, at the age of eighty-three that he returned to
Normandy as part of the sixtieth anniversary commemoration. An old man now, he
needed his walker for support, but he still looked dignified in uniform and he
was decorated with his medals. When he found the grave of one of his comrades,
he was overcome with emotion all those years later. I saw the moment on
television and was moved myself. I have visited those grave markers, row on
row, and was moved to tears. I could only imagine what it would be like to
stand their remembering comrades and friends.
I really
don’t need to tell you that friendships can be powerfully important
relationships in our lives. Do these relationships have much to do with our
relationship with Jesus and with God?
This
morning we heard a wonderful gospel passage about two women who were restored
to health and life by the healing touch of Jesus. They
remind us that the gospels want us to know that Jesus was more than a sage or a
teacher. He possessed a power which we would describe as miraculous.
We also
listened to another of the passages in the Old Testament or Hebrew scriptures
which tell us of one of the flawed heroes of the bible, David, the shepherd
king. You may recall that two Sundays ago we read about David’s unlikely
anointing as the king-in-waiting for Israel. Last week it was the story of
David’s heroic challenge and defeat of Goliath, the champion of the
Philistines.
Today’s
passage was David’s
lament for a fallen warrior and his closest friend, a young man
named Jonathan. Both Jonathan and his father, King Saul, were killed in battle
and David is overwhelmed with grief. The lament is called the Song of the
Bow because of Jonathan’s skill as an archer. We are told that David played
the lyre, a hand-held harp, and composed psalms, so this could well have been
his composition to commemorate his fallen friend.
Jonathan
has been described as one of the most open-hearted and likable human beings in
the bible. He was fiercely loyal to David, even when David fell out of favour
with his father, the king. There were times when the two friends met secretly to avoid Saul’s wrath and
in this passage David speaks of the depth of their relationship.
How the
mighty have fallen in the midst of battle!
Jonathan
lies slain upon your high places.
I am distressed for you, my brother Jonathan:
greatly beloved were you to me;
your love to me was wonderful,
passing the love of women. 2 Samuel 1:26
Such a
strong statement! When David was king he married several women, as monarchs
were wont to do, and he was the father of a number of children. But Jonathan
was like a brother to him, through every challenge.
Sometimes
we need to ask why certain stories are included in scripture. After all, God
isn’t mentioned here in the first chapter of 2 Samuel. Yet the ongoing saga of
David’s life includes this important friendship, including its sad conclusion.
How
essential are friendships to us? We can make a strong case that friendship is basic to human nature,
that no man or woman is an island. We flourish in relationship to other beings,
divine, human and otherwise.
Are
friendships “holy” in the sense that in friendship something is created that is
greater than the sum of the parts? In the early church through to medieval
times friendship was considered to be a Christian virtue. Strangely it was at
the time of the Protestant Reformation that friendship virtually disappeared
from the dialogue about the faithful life.
I can only
recall a couple of other occasions in my ministry when I have spoken on the
subject of friendship,
yet there is really no question that friendships can shape our lives. Look at
the computer screen-saver of a teenager and it’s likely to be a photo of a
group of friends with their arms around one another grinning at the camera. Or
check out the “Face Book” of a university student and find the same. Actually,
those photos are often not fit for parental consideration, so don’t look at
them! When teens are polled about what
they want in life, friendship ranks above virtually everything else except
personal freedom and any youth leader will tell you that the success of a group
depends on friendships.
We could
make a case that the friendships of our youth have a different quality to them,
because of the bond and the loyalty which develops. When I was in highschool, I
had a very close male friend. We shared a similar sense of humour and we could
laugh together as well as discuss deeper issues of faith, which was a rarity
amongst guys. Our friendship survived a succession of girlfriends and attending
different universities, but eventually we went our separate ways and eventually
lost contact. I noticed in the newspaper
one day that his father had died, so I tracked my friend down by phone in
Calgary to express my condolences. The moment I spoke, before I could identify
myself, he knew who I was and we chatted as though it hadn’t been more than a
decade since our last contact.
This said,
friendships tend to be different for men and women, don’t you think? It’s my sense that women are more inclined to
share their deepest and most intimate feelings with other women in a way that
men often avoid. Someone has quipped that the reason we have the term “bosom
buddies” is because you need a bosom to have a buddy. Men tend to be a little
leery of intimacy although we need and desire friendship as much as anyone
else.
There is a
rumour going around that you can actually be friends with your marriage partner
as well. It’s probably twenty years now since the magazine Psychology Today
asked couples who had been married more than fifteen years what they considered
key factors for marital longevity. One was making sure that they didn’t go to
bed angry at their partner or harbour resentments. Another was the strong sense
that their partner was a friend as well as lover.
I think we
all know that there is a difference between an acquaintance and a friend. There
are qualities of gentle honesty, and openness, and trust. Often we don’t
realize the depth of our friendships until our backs are against the wall. Friendship
has healing properties when we are wounded or overwhelmed. Friendship rebuilds
when we are broken down. It is when we are overwhelmed by grief, or faced with illness or what appears to be
insurmountable problems that we find out who are friends really are. Not long
ago I visited one of our St. Paul’s members who had just been diagnosed with
cancer. She was brave but it was still a blow. I went to visit her and found
her with a longtime friend who had driven several hundred kilometres to spend a
few days.
Of course
there is also love in friendship, and that brings us back to the spiritual,
holy nature of relationship with one another and with God. We’re told that
after several years of being on the road with his disciples Jesus shared a last
meal with them before his crucifixion. While they were accustomed to calling
Jesus him master and teacher he encourages them to believe that their
relationship had a different quality
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.
John 15:12-15
As Jesus
says goodbye there is the reassurance that they will be friends forever because
they are children of the God who overcomes death and gives us eternal life.
Perhaps the encouragement to all of this
morning is to remember who our friends are, even though some of those
individuals aren’t with us anymore. We might not be able to write a song
celebrating their lives, but we can say a prayer of thanks for the friends who
are no longer with us.
We might
choose to let our friends know that we don’t take them for granted, whether it
is our partner in life, or the person we speak with on the phone every day.
It’s not very often that we let friends know what we appreciate about them and
it could be a truly Christian act to thank them for who they are.
Most
importantly we can remember today that friendship was Jesus’ way of being in
the world and “what a friend we have in Jesus.”
In Christ we enter into the forever friendship with God through which we
will experience security and hope and new life. It’s not without cost because
every meaningful friendship carries with it a level of commitment. In a book
called Becoming Friends Paul Waddell offers that
To speak of friendship with God can sound so cozy and consoling, as if we are all snuggling up to God; however, there is no riskier vulnerability than to live in friendship with God, because every friendship changes us, because friends have expectations of each other, and because friends are said to be committed to the same things . . .
But rather than putting too much emphasis on the responsibility of friendship with God, we can be grateful that God seeks us out and loves us. We are friends forever. Amen.