Ebenezer eNews/Worship Service at 10 AM - 5th Sunday After Pentecost

There is a book by C.S. Lewis over 60 years ago called The Four Loves. In the book, he looks at these four kinds of love and talks about friendship. If you have a chance to study Christian spirituality, it is no doubt that you would realize that friendship was seen for so long as a higher-order love in medieval and ancient cultures. That's because it was a chosen one that we freely chose in our spare time. He says though that this is the value, “Friendship is unnecessary like philosophy, like art. It has no survival value. Rather it gives us value to our survival.”

Today we are going to talk about friendship as the third way of inner peace and freedom. You may have a question. “How is friendship related to inner peace and freedom?”

Believer or not, inner peace and freedom is closely related to the status of relationship with others (as well as God). It is not estranged to a relational degree. Inner peace and freedom have a large relevance to relational sensitivity and practice. Simply put, relationships are a huge matter to inner peace and freedom. Relationships have a large impact on the possibility of inner peace and freedom. It is true that it is hard for us to maintain inner stability as we are in the midst of enemyship, hatred, spite, and aloofness. In the status of unfriendship, you would feel you are just stuck, so alone, and that you don’t know what to do.

Our culture has gotten to where it's not even set up for true friendship. Max Lucado wrote a book called Outlive Your Life: You were Made to Make a Difference and there I think he could be describing me in the pace of my day. He says, "Call us a fast society and an efficient society. But don't call us a personal society.” We're set up for isolation. We put in earbuds to exercise. We communicate through emails and text messages. He says, "We enter and exit our homes through gates and garage doors that close behind us." Our mantra is "I'll leave you alone - you leave me alone."

If you flip all the way in your Bible to Genesis at the very beginning when God was creating, in Genesis 2:18 God said, "It is not good for man to be alone." And it is a stark thing for God to say it there because this is before the fall. This is before any kind of sin or brokenness or anything like that has entered the world. God has created the heavens and stars and said, "It is good.” He created birds and spiders and said, "It is good." He created fish and reptiles and said, "It is good." Then God looks at me and says, "It is not good for man to be alone."

Even before there was brokenness in the world there is already something that God sensed about us not being alone, about us needing to be in a community.

Let us look at today’s scripture, Ecclesiastes 4:9-12. Interestingly, Solomon, who was promised wisdom by God, emphasizes the significance of friendship. This first part of friendship that Solomon’s talking about in it is a really functional thing. It’s important that we are there to serve and help our friends and to do more together. And as he goes further into the Scripture in verse 10 it’s functional because it really starts getting into the meat of what friendship is about. He says, “Two can pick each other up.” The actual scripture reads like this: “If either should fall the one can pick up the other. But how miserable are those who fall and don’t have a companion to help them up.” This passage was written about traveling companions. About people who are along the road with each other. If they’re out in Israel and Judea and traveling, and one falls then you’re in a pickle.
If you’re in a hole, if you break your ankle then no one can pick you up. Yes, friendship means to be a companion to each other to help one another up. Companionship is one of the many amazing things I have witnessed at Ebenezer and a big part of why I am so grateful to God for letting me serve here.

Solomon includes a specific reference to the characteristic of friendship in verse 11 where he talks about how we can keep each other warm. He said, “Two can provide warmth for one another.” Remember, if you’re traveling and the desert gets cold at night if you’ve been camping you know this. You pitch a tent, and you want more people in it because you’re warmer with the more folks you have with you. I am eternally grateful that we live in a land and a time where we do not have to depend on that. We have central air and central heat. I want to talk about how we infuse warmth into our friendships in a different way. In a slightly different way than physical warmth. This special warmth is what I have experienced from Ebenezer and why I am always thankful to God.

There’s a Jewish philosopher named Martin Buber. Throughout his life, the person of Jesus held a profound fascination for the twentieth century. He says, “The greatest thing any person can do for another is to confirm the deepest thing in him or her. To take the time and have the discernment to see what is most deeply there. Most fully that person. And then confirm it by recognizing and encouraging it.”

Personally, I don’t think our problem is that we are mean to our friends. I don’t think our problem is that we are critical and that we say unkind things. I think our biggest problem is that we are silent to our friends. That we don’t say enough. That we’re not vocal in our encouragement and our praise and our thanksgiving. That we don’t call out things in other people when we see them and say, “I’m proud of you.” Or “I love that about you” or “You can do this. It’s going to be hard, but I know you can do it.” Think about the last time that someone just out of the blue praised you for something or offered a kind word to you. What a difference that made. Or when someone encouraged you when you were struggling, and how it gave you the courage to keep going and persevere. I am so proud to be a part of a church that still retains the importance and loudness of friendship.

But here is another additional and the most absolute reason for my gratitude toward Ebenezer church. Actually verse 12 manifests it I think. In the middle of verse 12 Solomon switches and he goes from talking about two and he says, “A three-ply cord does not easily break.” This is a simple equation and I’m sure you can do this already. The idea is that you and your friend are two, and then you add God and that’s a three-ply cord. And it’s not easy to snap a friendship that has God in the midst of it. And our friendships that have God in the midst of them offer us two benefits. One of them is for us. And one of them is for the world. This benefit for us is that our friendships go deeper. When we have Jesus Christ as a part of our relationships, we are able to go deeper.

Here’s the thing. We often pick friends who we think are like us. Who might not challenge us because they have similar thoughts or world views? Or we pick people who can repay us for our friendship.

But if we are going to live and love like Jesus then we are going to have to do what Jesus did which is to become friends with people who aren’t necessarily able to repay us in the same way or do the same thing. Still, we should show them mercy and grace since that’s what Jesus did. Jesus who laid his life down for us showed us the mercy and grace and depths that made us accepted. In our friendships, the things that we are called to do in our personal relationships is to accept one another. To make more space, to step back from that judgment-seat that was never ours anyway. And to step forward with grace. And to say to someone: ‘You don’t have to have this “well maintained personal boundary.” You don’t have to put up this fence around yourself and say, “I’m fine. I’m fine. Everything’s fine.”’ You can actually share what is going on in your heart and know that the other person through the grace of God through the compassion of Jesus Christ will accept you. That you can be vulnerable with other people - here’s our task that other people can be vulnerable with us. And that we share that grace with them so that they can be transparent. So, our relationships can and should go deeper when they are rooted in God.

Thankfully that’s what I have learned from Ebenezer not just in my head, but in my heart. I could realize that the Ebenezer congregation still has tremendous potential to live its mission out together: TO HELP PEOPLE LIVE AND LOVE LIKE JESUS. That I cannot help but praise God in gratitude.

As you know, Friendship is not about agreement. That’s not what Solomon is saying here. None of this is about agreement – it’s about sacrifice. It’s about working hard with your friends and lifting them up when they fall and keeping them warm and helping them offer resistance. It’s about a mindset that we have toward the world that we will go out in friendship and in compassion and grace and mercy. And when I do that, when I change even just the way I am with my friends. I’m a little more vulnerable, I give them more grace when they’re vulnerable with me. I lift them up when I see they need it. I keep them warm by sharing encouragement with them. When you do that, when we all do that think about how different our community would be. Think about how our corner of the world would be.

This is a real task for all of us, and I hope Ebenezer continues to be a good example of divine friendship. Ebenezer families! You actually have offered and can offer to the world the friendships that say our shared interest is Jesus and the Kingdom and living in such a way in this world that we put that first. I am glad that this is a place where we can make a big difference every day. May God bless all of you to continue to walk together in the world through true friendship so that you live as peacemakers as well as stakeholders of true peace and freedom.

I pray that is true in your life and in mine. (Amen)

Keeping in Touch