Pentacost Sunday

The Good News: 

John 15:9-17  New Revised Standard Version

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.

Reflection: “Anam Cara: Soul Friends”

Jesus is gathered with the people he has chosen as his followers, the people who have chosen him as their teacher and leader. They are his disciples, named and called. We can assume that the women who also followed him and supported him are present as well. They have all left their homes and families of birth and marriage to be a part of a different kind of community, this family of Jesus followers.

This passage is part of the long speech that Jesus makes to his followers just before his arrest, trial and death. He has washed their feet and they have shared a meal. He knows what is going to happen, and he is trying to prepare them for their lives together after he is gone. He is the center of this community, he is the reason for this community, but he is forced to move on. What can he give them so that they can survive and carry on as a community? What can he give them when they feel as though they are losing everything that matters?

I am reminded of two excellent novels set in different times and places, but with a similar theme. Both tell the stories of a few people who, like Jesus’ disciples, appear to have lost everything. Their stories can be very hard to hear.

In “The Color Purple”, Alice Walker tells the story of Celie, a poor black woman, growing up in a time when Jim Crow laws and racial segregation were still strong in the southern US. Celie has been raped by her step-father and her two babies have been taken from her. She is married off to an older man who beats her and separates her from her sister Nettie who is her only close friend. She has internalized her oppression to the point that when her stepson is having problems with his new wife, she advises him to beat her. She has nothing left, and nothing to hope for beyond mere survival in a brutal world.

In “Ragged Company” by Richard Wagamese, four people live on the streets of a large Canadian city, all with different stories of unbearable loss and tragedy. There is a residential school survivor whose entire family has died, a former carny who can no longer work on his beloved ferris wheel and turns to drink to kill the pain, a mentally disabled man haunted by the death of his baby nephew for which he was responsible, and a wood carver who has run away from the love of his life when she suffers a brain injury and no longer recognizes him. They call themselves “rounders”, always looking out for number one because that’s what you have to do to survive on the street. Like Celie, they have lost everything but their will to survive one more night.

In our reading from the gospel of John, several themes are highlighted with words that are repeated over and over throughout these nine short verses. Commandment, love, abide, joy, choose, and friends. 

Jesus uses the word commandment to emphasize the importance of what he is saying.  He is telling them that through his family relationship with God, he is now giving them the most important commandment, the commandment of love. He is telling them that even on this saddest and scariest of nights, there can be great joy in their relationships with each other and with God. He is telling them that their true home and family is God’s household, where they can abide together because he has chosen them.

Family love and relationships permeate this passage, but the word family is never used. Instead, Jesus leaves his disciples with the amazing gift of naming them as his friends. They are his friends because they do what he commands them, because he has taught them everything that God has taught him. They are his friends because he has chosen them. They are his friends because he loves them, and because he loves them he is commanding them to love each other.

Jesus knows that families and friends aren’t perfect, that his followers aren’t perfect. He has just been betrayed by Judas, he knows that Peter will deny him, he knows that they are all frightened and weak and wondering how they will survive. But in his relationships and his teachings, Jesus models for the disciples and for us what true family and friendship looks like. 

True family and friends share with each other the kind of love that Jesus shared with them: agape love, the kind of love that God gives us and that is primarily interested in the good of the other person, a love that does not attempt to possess or dominate. Jesus gives the disciples the great gift of this agape love when he names them as friends, as joyful equals in God’s love. This agape love binds them and binds us as the family of God embodied in the church. And we continue to abide in this love as we gather in beloved community, as his disciples did on that last sad night.

In Christian Celtic spirituality, friends who share a deep bond with each other as children of God are called anam cara, which roughly translates as “soul friends”. I’d like to share a few quotes from the book “Anam Cara: a book of Celtic Wisdom” by the Irish poet and philosopher John O’Donohue. Listen to a few short pieces from this book, and see whether they bring up any echoes from today’s gospel reading.

“In everyone’s life, there is great need for an anam ċara, a soul friend. In this love, you are understood as you are without mask or pretension. The superficial and functional lies and half-truths of social acquaintance fall away, you can be as you really are.”

“Love is anything but sentimental. In fact, it is the most real and creative form of human presence. Love is the threshold where divine and human presence ebb and flow into each other.”

“When you learn to love and let yourself be loved, you come home to the hearth of your own spirit. You are warm and sheltered. You are completely at one in the house of your own longing and belonging.”

“Real friendship or love is not manufactured or achieved by an act of will or intention. Friendship is always an act of recognition.”

Jesus says, “Abide in my love.”

Jesus says, “You did not choose me, but I chose you.”

In the novels I mentioned, Celie and her family, and the ragged company of rounders, are saved by agape love, by finding their soul friends, sharing their stories, and caring for each other more than for themselves. 

And we are saved by God’s love and our communities: the families that choose us and the families that we choose. We are saved when Jesus names us as his friends. In these families and friendships, we give and take agape love, we become soul friends, and we live out Jesus’ command to love one another.

I’ll close now with John O’Donohue’s Friendship Blessing, and as I share this blessing I hope and pray that your family are your friends and your friends are your family, and that you are both blessed and a blessing in those relationships. 

“May you be blessed with good friends.
May you learn to be a good friend to yourself.
May you be able to journey to that place in your soul where
there is great love, warmth, feeling, and forgiveness.
May this change you.
May it transfigure that which is negative, distant, or cold in you.
May you be brought in to the real passion, kinship, and affinity of belonging.
May you treasure your friends.
May you be good to them and may you be there for them;
may they bring you all the blessing, challenges, truth,
and light that you need for your journey.
May you never be isolated.
May you always be in the gentle nest of belonging with your anam ċara.”

Amen.

For Reflection

How are you experiencing Spirit moving in your life today?

Maybe Spirit is Jesus, a friend at your side, maybe Spirit moves in the people and community that support you, maybe Spirit is in the Elements of Creation.