Answers are important, but questions matter more — our questions for God, like “Do you not care that we are perishing?” and God’s questions for us, like “Why are you still afraid?”

Vicar Lauren Mildahl 
The Fifth Sunday after Pentecost, Lect. 12 B 
Texts: Job 38:1-11; Mark 4:35-41 

God’s beloved, grace to you and peace in the name of the Father, and of the ☩ Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

The gospel reading today reminds me of an improv game that I remember watching on “Whose Line is it, Anyway?”.

The game is called “Questions Only,” and in it, the players must act out a scene off the top of their heads, but they are only allowed to speak in questions.  So, it might go something like this:

Imagine a scene is set in a restaurant, one player might ask: “Are you ready to order?”

The other player can’t say yes or no, but they might respond with a question like: “What are the specials?” 

“Can’t you read the board?”

“Would I like the BLT?”

“Do you like Bacon, Lettuce and Tomato?”

“Who doesn’t?”

And it can go on and on like that until someone can’t think of another question or accidentally answers. 

It’s harder than you might think and the joy of it, I think, is when a player messes up. Not only because the mistakes tend to be pretty silly, but also because the format of question after question after question builds its own kind of tension, which can’t be resolved until one of the players finally makes a mistake and offers some kind of resolution. 

And, at least in Mark’s telling, it almost feels like Jesus and the disciples on the boat are playing their own mini game of “Questions Only.”  

When the storm blows up, the disciples ask Jesus: “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?”  Jesus doesn’t answer them directly, but after he calms the storm, asks: “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?” And, like good improv players, the disciples don’t answer this question, but respond with a question of their own which they ask to one another: “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?”

Question after question after question – but the answers are left unwritten. The sea is calmed, but the tension isn’t resolved. 

And it reminded me of a quote from Rabbi Edwin Goldberg, who wrote that when it comes to studying scripture: “Answers are important, but questions matter more.”¹

Faithfully seeking God is not about knowing the answers, it’s about the questions. 

And nowhere is that more poignantly demonstrated than in the book of Job.

The entire plot of the book of Job hangs on one of the most difficult questions of human life: if God is good then why is there suffering?  And famously, “the answer” that God gives at the end, isn’t an answer at all. Just more questions hurled at Job from the whirlwind: 

“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?”

“Who laid its cornerstone when the morning stars sang together?”

“Who shut in the sea when it burst out from the womb?”

And we only heard the first part, it goes on and on with more and more questions like this for three more chapters! The questions are meant to enlarge Job’s perspective. To help him glimpse a God who is too big for storms and whirlwinds, and much too big for simple, declarative answers! God is beyond the declarative – beyond static description. The mystery of God’s being and reality can only be glimpsed in questions, in shifting images and dynamic metaphors–in a tension that can’t be resolved.  It’s the same idea that Augustine observed, when it comes to God, he wrote: “If you understand, then it isn’t God.”  

Which, to be honest, can be frustrating.  

It can even hurt to be reminded of our smallness, of our helplessness in the face of a chaotic universe and a God we can’t begin to comprehend.  And it sure doesn’t stop us from asking different versions of the same question from Job. 

“Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?”  That question the disciples ask in the boat sends a shiver down my spine. 

Because it’s the same question I’ve wanted to ask, during the storms I’ve weathered in my life, whenever I’ve watched whirlwinds swirl around my loved ones.

“God, don’t you care that we are dying?” 

“Don’t you care that we are being gunned down in grocery stores and in Gaza?”

“Don’t you care that we are drinking polluted water and choking on toxic air?”

“Don’t you care that we are so lonely, so hurt, so hopeless that we are killing ourselves?”

“Don’t you care that we are dying?”

These are the hard questions that I think. I wrestle with them. I rage over them. But I don’t often speak them. 

We’ve been taught not to speak these kinds of questions, especially not from the pulpit.  Not to betray any kind of lack of faith, any doubt in God’s goodness. We’re taught to say “Oh sure, I know that God cares,” we’re taught to pray on the assumption that God cares enough to listen, we’re taught to give the good Sunday School answers and never to flat out ask the question. “God, don’t you care?”

Maybe because we are afraid to.  What if we ask and God answers no?  What if God says: “Your mind cannot even contain me. I am the question that cannot be answered. I am the storm and the stillness, I am the thunder and the tempest and the whirlwind and the fire, I AM THAT I AM. How could I care for a speck like you?”

That’s what our deepest, darkest fears whisper to us. So, it feels safer to shove the question down in our hearts and fake an easy faith that we wish we felt. 

But the disciples didn’t do that. 

They were terrified and they asked the question out loud: “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?”

And Jesus doesn’t answer directly.  He doesn’t say, “Of course I care, how could you even ask that?”

Instead he calms the storm. 

We can ask.  We can ask the hard questions. 

Because God speaks from the whirlwind.  Because God’s love is as big as God’s power and as big as God’s self.  Because answers are important but questions matter more. 

The questions we ask God. And the questions God asks us. 

That’s what those four chapters of questions that God asks Job show us.  They show us how much God cares.  How much God cares for the Earth, right down to its foundations. How much God cares for the sea, who God calms and swaddles with clouds. And if we kept reading in these chapters we’d see more questions that show in beautifully strange detail how much God cares for all creation.

“Where is the way to the dwelling of light?” God asks.

“Have you entered the storehouses of the snow?”

“Do you know when mountain goats give birth?”

God cares. God cares so deeply.  God cares for every photon and snowflake and baby goat.  And cares for you.  Cares enough to invite you into wonder.  Into mystery.  Into tension that cannot be resolved. 

God cares enough to ask the hard questions of you. 

“Why are you still afraid?” Jesus asks.

So often, we read this as a rebuke of the disciples, but if you go back and look again, it’s the wind and the sea that Jesus’ rebukes and commands, not the disciples. He doesn’t say “Don’t be afraid.”  He asks them: “Why are you still afraid?”

I bet Jesus knew the answer.  I mean, it seems pretty obvious. But it wasn’t about the answer.  Answers are important but questions matter more. 

Because the question is connection. Relationship. It’s a chance for the disciples, and for us, to search our hearts for where fear is coming from. It’s an invitation to swap that fear for faith. Faith in the God who cares enough for us to ask. 

Why are we still afraid? Engaging with that question is scary in itself. And we’re probably never going to be able to answer it fully.  Never going to be able to resolve the tension. But faith isn’t about knowing the answer.  It’s about opening wide our hearts, and asking more questions. 

In the name of the Father, and of the ☩ Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

^{1. https://reformjudaism.org/learning/torah-study/torah-commentary/answers-are-important-questions-matter-more}

The scribes thought Jesus might be using the power of a demon, but spiritual evil can’t produce life and wholeness and community–that’s what the Holy Spirit does. 

Vicar Lauren Mildahl 
The Third Sunday after Pentecost, Lect. 10 B 
Texts: Genesis 3:8-15; Mark 3:20-35; also Luke 6:27-28 and Romans 12:21 

God’s beloved, grace to you and peace in the name of the Father, and of the ☩ Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

It’s only chapter 3, but Jesus has been very busy!  

So far in Mark’s gospel, Jesus has been baptized and has seen the heavens torn apart and Spirit descending on him like a dove, he has withstood the temptation of the devil in the wilderness, and has come out proclaiming that “the reign of God has come near.” He has called the fishermen Simon Peter and Andrew and the sons of Zebedee, to leave their boats and follow him.  He has cast out demons, healed the fever of Peter’s mother-in-law, and healed a man with skin disease. He has forgiven the sins of a paralytic man who was lowered through the roof by his friends, and also healed his paralysis. He has called Levi the son of Alphaeus, and has eaten with tax collectors and sinners.  He hasn’t fasted when he was supposed to, and he has plucked grain and healed a withered hand on the Sabbath when he wasn’t supposed to.  And he has gathered crowds so enormous that he had to preach to them from a boat off shore and he has found time in there somewhere to appoint the twelve apostles. 

No wonder Jesus went home for a rest! 

But he doesn’t get one. For one, the house is too crowded with followers for him even to sit down to get a bite to eat. And for another, some scribes, some religious authorities, have come down from Jerusalem and started throwing out accusations that Jesus is possessed by, or even in league with, spiritual evil. 

“He has Beelzebul,” they say, “and by the ruler of the demons he casts out demons.” 

Which can seem, to us, like a ridiculous thing for them to say.  

Demons don’t tend to be part of our daily vocabulary.  When was the last time you talked about Beelzebul the Lord of Flies? And even the more familiar figure Satan is more likely to inspire ridicule than terror.  Our cultural image of the Devil is one of red tights and a silly goatee and horns and a pitchfork and that makes it all the easier to mock anyone who starts talking about the Devil or demon possession. 

Oh those silly scribes. Imagine believing in Beelzebul.  Imagine worrying about the Devil.

And I don’t want to get too bogged down in spiritual metaphysics. The fact of the matter is that the people of Jesus’ day thought about the underlying forces of the universe very differently from us.  Our instinct, so often, is to lean away from the spiritual and toward the scientific. But what we assign to the random chance of a chaotic universe, the people of Jesus’ day usually assigned to spirits, busy at work in the world for good or for evil.  But this pre-scientific worldview – that’s not what makes this accusation ridiculous.  

Because though we may think of them in different ways and call them by different names, we do know the forces of evil.  And they aren’t silly.  

We know the hurts that turn into hate – the houses divided against themselves.

We know the fears that fuel isolation and violence.

We know the voids so vast and empty that they begin to consume everything. 

We know the greed that destroys and sucks dry in the name of amassing more, and more, and more. 

We know the spiritual evil that surrounds us. That possesses us. That binds us.  That plunders us. 

To use the metaphor that Jesus uses, we know the strong man that lives in our house. 

And, like these scribes, we know what it’s like to think that the strong man’s game is the only game in town.

When these critics of Jesus thought of power, they thought of the strong man’s power, the power they had experienced at the hands of their oppressors.   That was the kind of power they knew – the power to make others afraid and poor and hopeless. That was the kind of power that changed things.  

And here was Jesus – changing all kinds of things.  

So, it must be “by the ruler of demons that he was casting out demons,” they thought. Jesus must be fighting fire with fire, wielding the weapons of the strong man.  That must be where this power was coming from. 

And, you know, it is tempting to use the strong man’s power.  

It’s tempting to want it and to even think that maybe even some good could come from it.

It’s tempting to think that if that one guy you can’t stand was just out of the way, that then you might have peace. 

It’s tempting to think that if there was just one more zero at the end of your bank account balance, that then you could afford to be generous.

It’s tempting to think that if that one person who wronged you were shamed and shunned and hurt, that then you might be healed. 

It’s tempting to think that if you just eat that good-looking fruit that the snake is offering, that then you might be like God.

It’s tempting to think that you could fight fire with fire, that you could destroy the master’s house with the master’s tools. 

Even Jesus was tempted. 

But it’s a fantasy.  In fact, it’s ridiculous.  Actually ridiculous to think that you could use hate to heal. That fear or greed or violence could produce love or joy or peace. 

That’s the real blasphemy. 

The real unforgivable sin. Not unforgivable because it is so heinous or because God’s forgiveness has limits. But unforgivable because there is no forgiveness in the world of the strong man. There is no power to redeem or to reconcile. Just hurt upon hurt, hate upon hate, centuries of division and anger and revenge and plunder.

And that’s not the reign of God.  That’s not what life in the Holy Spirit looks like. Life in the Holy Spirit looks like everything that Jesus has been so very busy doing over these three chapters.  It looks like wholeness: healing fevers and skin diseases and paralysis and withered hands.  It looks like redemption: forgiving sins and facing those life-sucking demons so that life can flourish every day of the week. It looks like community: reaching out to those on the margins, to the poor and the outcast and to traitors and the immoral, calling them and gathering everyone in a crowd so big and so brimming with new life and hope and joy in the reign of God, that the house is overflowing.

Wholeness, redemption, community: you can’t get those using the power of the strong man.

You can’t get life by wielding the weapons of Beelzebul or Satan or Demons or whatever you want to call the forces that hate and hurt and destroy. You can’t fight fire with fire.  That’s the real blasphemy. 

You fight fire with water.  You fight hate with love. You fight fear with joy. You fight separation with connection. You fight death with life. And you end wars by waging peace.

This is what Jesus desperately wanted the scribes to understand – wanted all of us to understand – that when you are drenched in the Holy Spirit, when the Holy Spirit courses through you – then you start doing what the world thinks is the most ridiculous thing of all: you  “Love your enemies; do good to those who hate you; bless those who curse you; pray for those who mistreat you.”  You won’t “be overcome by evil but [will] overcome evil with good.”

And you will start catching glimpses of the reign of God.

There is spiritual evil in our world. We know it. But we do not lose heart.  Jesus has overcome the world, has tied up the strong man, and freed us life in the Spirit.

Freed us from blasphemy.  Freed us to fight fire with water. 

In the name of the Father, of the  ☩  Son, and of the Holy Spirit. 

All of our words and images fall short of perfectly describing the ancient and difficult doctrine of the Trinity, which is at its heart a description of shared life, shared within the divine and shared with us. 

Vicar Lauren Mildahl
The Holy Trinity, year B
Texts: Isaiah 6:1-8; Romans 8:12-17; John 3:1-17 

God’s beloved, grace to you and peace in the name of the Father, and of the ☩ Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

We start every sermon that way.

In the name of the Triune God.  Not just on Holy Trinity Sunday – every Sunday! And we end every sermon that way too.   But since it is Trinity Sunday, since this is the day that we devote to this ancient and sometimes difficult doctrine, it’s worth pausing a moment on that familiar formula.  

Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  It’s not perfect. This language has contributed to the unfortunate and inaccurate depiction of the Trinity as “two white guys and a bird.” 

And we could say it in other ways.  

We could try some gender-neutral language: In the name of the Parent, and the Child, and the Bond Between.

Or we could emphasize the different roles within the Trinity: Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer. 

Or we could give it an Augustinian flare: In the name of the Lover, the Beloved, and Love.

Or we could lean into the languages of the Bible: In the name of Abba, Christ, and the Paraclete.

Or we could go pure Metaphysical: In the name of the Source, the Word, the Spirit.

And I’m happy to lean in and explore these alternatives, they are all thought- provoking and helpful in their own way, but none of them really solve the problem that since ancient times, we’ve been searching and failing to find the right words to pin down an ineffable mystery.

And it is a mystery.

A mystery we often ignore or argue about or try to explain away.  You know, a significant number of the major heresies of the Christian Church have about the doctrine of the Trinity, as the church has, over the centuries, attempted to demystify it or remystify it, and created leagues of heretics along the way.  It makes a preacher nervous.

So what can I say?   How can I approach this mystery?!  It makes the question that Jesus asked Nicodemus hit a little too close for comfort: “Are you the teacher of Israel and yet you do not understand these things?” Guilty!  It makes me want to throw up my hands like Isaiah in God’s throne room: “Woe is me! I am lost.”

But actually, I think Isaiah is a good place to start. 

Because there is something about his encounter which deeply resonates with me and which helps us get to something important about the Triune God. 

Isaiah sees God and despairs.  And it seems that that despair is fueled by an overwhelming feeling of apartness.  He witnessed God in God’s full glory in the community of celestial beings and all Isaiah can think is, “I don’t belong here. I’m just a man of unclean lips and I live among a people of unclean lips. There’s no way I could dream to be a part of this. I’m lost.”  He feels alone, separate, apart.

But all of those feelings – alone, separate, apart – those are impossible in a Trinity. 

As mysterious as the three-in-one and the one-in-three are, they point to a truth that divine life is inherently communal.  Connected.  Relational.  When we strip away the words upon words we have heaped upon the Trinity, when we abandon the paradoxes and the paracletes and everything that’s problematic about the formulations and the anathemas and the analogies: what we are left with is Relationship. That the life of God is a shared life.  And it is a shared life that wants to share even more. 

Isaiah despairs, until the burning coal touches his lips, until he is told that he doesn’t need to carry around his guilt and his sin and everything real or imagined thing that’s keeping him apart.  And I don’t think there is anything magical about that coal. I don’t think it really “did” anything at all.  Except that somehow, that experience, and the reassurance from the seraph, helped Isaiah realize that he already belonged. He always did.  He was always connected to God, he was always sharing life with the God that shares life. He was never lost.  

And that’s what gives Isiah the confidence to speak up, to throw his hand up when God asks for a volunteer.

“Here I am!” He says, “I belong here and I’m a part of this too. Send me!”

Isaiah joined the dance.  The dynamic dance of mutuality and shared life which we imperfectly call the Trinity based on the witness of countless ages, who experienced God in different ways and used different words to name those experiences, but which all pointed to the truth that the Divine is deeply connected to the Divine and deeply connected to us. 

Like Isaiah, we are already connected.  We already belong.  We are not lost.  

Like family, Father and Son–that imperfect language we borrow for the trinity–that’s the image that Paul uses: “The Holy Spirit is bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God!” Sharing life in the Holy Family. Adoption is the metaphor that Paul uses in Romans, but in the gospel reading Jesus chooses an even more intimate metaphor when he is speaking with Nicodemus: “You must be born from above,” Jesus says.

Birth. I mean, talk about shared life!

Nicodemus is often mocked for taking this image too seriously: “Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?”  But I wonder if that’s why Jesus chose it, because he wanted us to take this metaphor seriously.  To understand the deep connection that exists within the life of God and between God and creation.  Like a mother sharing life in her womb.  Connected and distinct. Two persons, 1 being. 

Now, that analogy isn’t perfect.  No analogy of the Trinity is. Or can be.  I’ll concede that it is definitely missing an element of mutuality, not to mention the third person. But as an example of a life-giving relationship, a relationship of shared life – it’s hard to find one that is more on the nose. 

Nicodemus was afraid.  He was so afraid that he came by night, and yet he recognized the connection that Jesus had with God: “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God, for no one can do these signs that you do unless God is with that person.”  And I hear in that statement an unspoken question, an echo of Isaiah’s despair, “How can I ever be connected to God like that? I am lost!”

And Jesus tries to show him.

You are already born of the Spirit, Nicodemus. You must be. You are already more connected, more intimately related to God than you could ever imagine. 

Jesus wanted Nicodemus to fully experience the God who so loved the world that she shared life.  Wanted Nicodemus to hear the Holy Spirit bearing witness to his spirit, groaning and murmuring to him, touching his lips with the hot coal of truth that he is a child of God.  Just like you are. 

You are a child of God.

You are a child of God, the creator, the author and source of all life, who makes room within herself to share that life with the universe.  

You are a child of God-With-Us, the Word made flesh, the God who entered into our finite lives, lived at our side and shared our life the way we share it.  

You are a child of God, the presence that is the bond of sharing.  Who produces life-giving fruit within you and shows you why life is worth living.  Who whispers in your soul that you are not lost. That you belong.  And who asks “whom shall I send?” and sends you. 

You are born from above, beloveds.  Children of God. 

You share life with the God who shares life.  

And you are sent to share life in the name of the triune God, however you name the name: the Source, the Word, the Spirit; Abba, Christ, Paraclete; Lover, Beloved, Love; Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer; the Parent, the Child and the Bond Between…

In the name of the Father, and of the ☩ Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Jesus left at the ascension, so that we could learn to look for Christ everywhere. 

Vicar Lauren Mildahl
The Ascension of Our Lord
Texts: Acts 1:1-11; Ephesians 1:15-23; Luke 24:44-53

God’s beloved, grace to you and peace in the name of the Father, and of the ☩ Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

If you had stopped by here on Monday, April 8th at around 2pm, you would have seen something unusual: Jim Bargmann and I, standing out in the parking lot, staring up at the clouds.

No, we weren’t looking for Jesus. That, of course, was the day of the eclipse and though we knew we weren’t in the path of the totality, we were still hoping to see something. Anything.  But, as many of you probably remember, we couldn’t see it here at all.  In fact, the clouds were so thick and covered so much of the sky, we couldn’t even tell where the sun was!  We watched and we waited for a break in the clouds, and we shared photos from our friends and family who were seeing this amazing thing. But in the end, all we saw was clouds. And after a while we headed back inside, feeling disappointed. And a little bit empty. 

And I was thinking about that experience as I was imagining Jesus’s ascension. 

Now, we don’t know what the weather was like that day.  We aren’t given many details but we do know that there was at least one cloud. Because in the account in Acts, we are told that “as [the followers of Jesus] were watching, Jesus was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight.” 

Now, we usually picture it as one of those huge, fluffy, white clouds that is just the perfect compliment to the gorgeous blue sky on a sunny afternoon. But what if it wasn’t?  What if it was more like the day of the eclipse, overcast and threatening rain, with gloomy gray clouds covering the sky?  

I know that’s statistically unlikely, given the arid climate of Jerusalem. But, imagining the Ascension happening under gray skies, helped me connect with the underlying melancholy of the event.  Of course that wasn’t the only emotion, and seems not even to have been the primary one.  After all Luke’s account in the gospel tells us that the followers returned to Jerusalem with great joy! And we’ll get to the joy. But I think we can safely imagine that the great joy was also at least tinged with a bit of sadness. 

That there was glory, yes, but something gloomy too. 

Jesus was leaving. The incarnation was over.  And that’s so hard because even death itself couldn’t end the incarnation! That’s what we’ve been celebrating for forty days now – that death wasn’t the end of the incarnation. But this was.  The Word made flesh, who dwelt among us, who died and rose again, was going away. 

The clouds covered up the sun, and we are left in gloomy gray, staring up at the sky.  

It’s a feeling we know well.  When someone important to us, important to our community, leaves, it can feel just like straining to see the sun on a cloudy day.  A feeling of missing something. A feeling of emptiness and longing. 

It’s easy to imagine the followers of Jesus feeling that emptiness, that longing as they stood there looking up at the sky.  As they realized that Easter really is over, and the long wait of Advent was beginning.  No wonder those two white-robed figures had to prompt them to quit their staring and get back to living.  They couldn’t tear their eyes away – they just wanted one more glimpse.  

But, of course, the sun is still there even when you can’t see it.

Jesus may have left, but he wasn’t gone.  And no clouds can cover up or take away Christ’s promise to abide with us, to be with us “always, to the end of the age.”  No matter how empty we feel, Christ fills us.  After all, Christ is fullness, as Paul reminds us in the letter to the Ephesians, the one “who fills all in all.”  Who fills our broken and empty hearts with abundant and everlasting life – who fills us with the gifts of the Holy Spirit – with love and peace and great joy.

And this fullness isn’t only within ourselves, but Christ is the fullness that is so full that it fills the whole universe.  Christ fills everything, is accessible everywhere! 

I apologize in advance for this cringey comparison – but one way to imagine it is that Christ being lifted up in a cloud is a little bit like Christ being uploaded to the cloud.  Okay, I know that’s a groaner, but go with it for a moment. I create a file on my device – and the only place I can access it is on that device, the place where it is saved.  But once I upload it to the cloud, then it’s saved to the network that connects the world and that means I can get to it from anywhere. Christ is the network that connects us to everything – to God, to creation, to one another, even to ourselves.  

And that’s part of what the Ascension, the end of the incarnation, the uploading to the cloud, helps us to understand. 

Because there is one drawback to incarnation.

It’s singular. It’s particular. It draws our focus to one person and time and place, and that’s amazing because it helps us see the Triune God who is beyond person, time and place.  But that focus on the one singular person of Jesus, can blur our peripheral vision, and blind us to the truth that Christ is everywhere, the fullness that fills all people and all things, present and accessible and living from one end of creation to the other. As long as Jesus was here, walking and talking and eating and healing and loving as one particular person, it was a little bit harder for us to see Christ anywhere else. 

Jesus left so that we would learn to look for Christ. 

So that we could learn to see Christ in everyone, in everything. So that we could experience the fullness of Christ.

And that doesn’t keep us from staring up at the clouds sometimes – desperate for a glimpse of the sun.

That doesn’t keep us from singing “Come, Lord Jesus” again and again until our throats are raw.  It doesn’t keep us from feeling empty, even as we are being filled by fullness.  In our longing, we are still clinging to the promise that Christ will return.  As those two robed figures said to the disciples: “This Jesus, this Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go.” Christ Jesus will come again. 

But what do we do in the meantime? We look for Christ, not just in the clouds, but in the dirt and in the mirror and in each other.  We learn to see Christ – especially in those places we least expect, and in those people who are the hardest to love.  We let ourselves be filled with the fullness of the one who fills all in all, so that we can be Christ’s eyes and hands and love in the world. 

We do what we always do in Advent. 

We watch and we wait for a break in the clouds. 

In the name of the Father, and of the ☩ Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Jesus’s command to love one another invites us into unexpected friendships, including the friendship between God and creation.

Vicar Lauren Mildahl
The Sixth Sunday of Easter, year B
Texts: Acts 10:44-48, John 15:9-17

Dear friends, grace to you and peace in the name of the Father, and of the ☩ Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Jesus does something pretty unexpected in the gospel reading today. 

Here in his last hours with his followers, he says to them: “I do not call you servants any longer…but I have called you friends.”  Something has shifted in their relationship, and Jesus names it. “We care about each other. We’re close. I’ve trusted you with everything. We are friends.” 

But, it seems like an odd kind of friendship.  Not only because we know that these “friends” won’t really act like friends in the chapters to come, but also because of the way Jesus describes friendship: “you are my friends if you do what I command you” – which doesn’t sound like friendship.  Following commands, that sounds like what servants do! So which is it – friends or servants? Both? Somewhere in between? What’s going on?

I often feel, when I’m studying or preaching from the gospel of John, that you really need a PhD in Greek and in ancient philosophy to understand what the heck is going on.  In this case, it’s really important to understand what friendship meant to Jesus. And, I don’t have a PhD, but from what I understand, the simple version is this: people in the ancient world took friendship very seriously.  

Friendships came with serious expectations. 

It was sometimes even ritualized with a ceremony involving solemn vows and an exchange of symbolic gifts – basically a wedding, but to celebrate a friendship. Because, just like marriage, friendship meant a serious commitment: to help and give and speak and act in each other’s best interest for the rest of their lives. 

And what’s more, friends were expected to be patient and kind. They did not envy or boast. You see where I’m going with this? They weren’t arrogant or rude or irritable or resentful. Friendship bore all things, believed all things, hoped all things, endured all things and never ended. 

Friendship was love.

Literally the Greek word for friendship is “philia,” which just means love.

I imagine that the people of the ancient world would be mystified at our modern dilution of the idea of friendship. You can become “friends” on Facebook by clicking a button? That’s it?  What do you mean you’re “just friends?”  What is “just” about committing yourself so deeply to one another, that you would even die for each other?

Because that’s how Jesus describes it: “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”

Jesus isn’t so much imparting new spiritual wisdom here as much as he is quoting the common wisdom of his day. Aristotle wrote something very similar – almost word for word- about laying down one’s life for one’s friends almost three hundred years earlier.  For centuries, ancient philosophers had described the ideal, the truest friendship as love, self-sacrificial to the very point of death.

And that’s exactly what Jesus is preparing his friends for. He is about to lay down his life for them. For love. For friendship.

And he wants them to love in the same way. That’s the really unexpected part. 

Because, you know, the interesting thing about the word for “friend” in Greek is that it has both an active and a passive meaning. A friend is simultaneously the one who loves and the one who is loved, the lover and the beloved. There is an equality and a mutuality built into the very word. 

That’s what Jesus means when he says “I do not call you servants any longer.” Jesus is showing how friendship, how love, breaks down hierarchy. It started two chapters earlier when Jesus washed their feet, flipping the expected hierarchy of master and servant. And here, he destroys it completely. No servants. No masters.  Just friends. 

And not only in this inner circle, but on a cosmic scale as well. 

No longer is it going to be God up here and creation down here, with God the subject doing the loving and creation the object being loved. The truth revealed in Jesus, God-with-us, is that it’s both God and creation, both loving and being loved, both subjects and objects of the passion and pleasure and pain of love. Jesus reveals God’s desire for mutual love – deep and abiding and unexpected friendship.

And this unexpected friendship between God and creation keeps creating more unexpected friendships, keeps sowing love in places where love seemed impossible. 

We see it in Acts, with Peter and Cornelius. 

Friendship between them should have been impossible – a wealthy Roman military leader and a poor Jewish fisherman. Come on. How could they love each other?  How could they be vulnerable enough to allow themselves to be loved?  But the Holy Spirit was poured out upon them all. The love of God was bigger than every hierarchy and cultural barrier that separated them. Cornelius invited Peter. And Peter stayed with Cornelius and welcomed him, the very first Gentile to be baptized. They loved each other. And became friends.  An unexpected friendship that changed the course of Peter’s life. And changed the course of the church. 

And that’s exactly what Jesus wanted for Peter, when he called him his friend. And wants for all of us. 

He wants our joy to be complete – the joy of unexpected friendship.

I hope you have experienced this joy already. I hope you’ve had a  friendship that seemed to come out of nowhere–that overcame the barriers of our world that seeks to sort and divide. A friend who, as another ancient philosopher put it, doubled your joy and divided your grief.  

We believe that God’s friendship with creation, God’s love poured out for us and our love poured out in return, can create friendships – true friendships which otherwise would seem not just unexpected but impossible. Between those on opposite ends of the hierarchy. On opposite sides of borders. On opposite sides of front lines. 

And in our world, we are desperate for more unexpected friendships.

We need unexpected friendship – we need the mutual love of the Holy Spirit to break down the hierarchies that surround us – that never seem to change and keep us part.  To break down every way that we let gender, sexuality, race, class, ethnicity, ability, religion, and politics keep us from loving each other. 

We need unexpected friendship – we need the love of God who became vulnerable, who invites us into mutual vulnerability. The love that risks being known and being hurt, that trust others with what is most tender in ourselves.  

We need unexpected friendship – we need the love of Jesus–who laid down his life.  The love that teaches us to lay down our own wants and desires and comforts out of care for each other. That trades happiness for joy.

That’s why Jesus commands us to love one another.

Not because we are servants to be commanded. After all, if friendship has broken down hierarchy, then commands aren’t really commands, are they?  And in case, love can’t be commanded. Love must be given freely or it isn’t love. 

Rather it is the will of God, the hope God has for humanity, that we love one another. And it becomes a self-fulfilling statement. When Jesus says, “You are my friends if you do what I command,” what he is saying is this: “If do what I’ve said, if you love one another, then you will be loved and loving – active and passive – beloved lovers – in a word, friends.”

Unexpected friends, let us love one another.   And our joy will be complete. 

In the name of the Father, and of the ☩ Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.