FOR THE SAKE OF FRIENDSHIP. It is difficult for me not to make jokes about circumcision. But I shall restrain myself for

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Austen Logan
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1 FOR THE SAKE OF FRIENDSHIP Acts 10:44-48; 1 John 5:1-6; John 15:9-17 It is difficult for me not to make jokes about circumcision. But I shall restrain myself for the sake of the setting and this being Mother s Day. Although in many cases, when religious law does not stipulate otherwise, I would imagine mothers of sons have had a say in the procedure of circumcision. When circumcision is religiously required, I suspect it is a male decision made by fathers from the tradition of fathers having the dominant voice in family and society, the tradition we know as patriarchy. In any case, the procedure as we know it in the Bible is entirely a male concern, because it is only males who matter enough to be so indelibly marked as parties in the covenant with God. When women are circumcised, as they are in certain cultures, it is a terrible process that is painful and does lasting harm to the woman who suffers it and is properly called female genital mutilation. This is no joke whatsoever. Circumcision was an issue in the Early Church. St. Peter represented what might be called the circumcision party, those who believed that before Gentiles (non-jews) could be accepted into the Christian fold, they must first become Jews, which would mean the males would be circumcised. You can see how this sort of thing might have slowed up the effort to make coverts of Gentile males. Anyway, opposing Peter in the Early Church was Paul who thought that it was quite enough for Gentiles to receive baptism in the name of Jesus to make 1

2 them members of the church. Peter came to see the light on this issue, and membership in the church was opened to anyone and everyone, Jew and Gentile. Allow me to remind you how important this decision was for the Christian faith. The religion of Israel is essentially a religion of blood and heritage, a religion of a certain people who are Semites. In a certain sense, the religion of Israel is a tribal faith. Not so the Christian faith. Once the Early Church embraced Gentiles, our faith was off and running to becoming a faith that was available to all persons and in that sense a universal faith. To be admitted to the Christian faith one had only to be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ. And so the Christian faith grew and spread to the four corners of the Earth while the religion of Israel remained largely a religion of a people of a particular racial group. The ease of entry into the Christian faith can be deceiving. It is important to remember that Baptism is only a beginning, an initiation into the Christian life and living as a Christian, the beginning of life lived as a friend of Jesus. I hope it does not sound smug to say that there are considerably fewer friends of Christ Jesus than there are baptized people. Friendship with Jesus, like any friendship requires effort. There are in life friendships we easily slip into, but few friendships are kept and deepened where the friends have not worked to make this so. Baptism is the church s invitation to friendship with Jesus. To accept the invitation we must follow the way of love in the world and find our joy in the way of love. That is easy to say and hard to do. Let s ask ourselves if in the course of the past week we have lived as friends of Jesus. What have we done to demonstrate our friendship? Has the friendship cost us anything a 2

3 change of mind, the exertion of energy, the risk of sacrifice? What have we done to build up the friendship? Is there anything we have done that would suggest we are more the friends of Jesus than we are friends of the world? We are told in the First Letter of John that by living out our friendship with Jesus we will conquer the world. By world the writer of this letter does not mean the planet Earth, as if there is something wrong with nature or the pleasures of our senses, as if life is not to be loved and enjoyed as the gift of God. World means those things that cause us to be corrupt and anything that would make us loveless people, such things as selfishness and hatred and a lack of compassion for our neighbors. That is the world that love conquers when our friendship with Christ is greater than our friendship with the world. Let s consider Mother s Day as a case in point. There is nothing especially Christian about the day as it is presently observed. We all have mothers, after all. Some mothers are better than others, but we all have them. If we are so inclined, we will do something to honor them or thank them or consider them or deplore them a card, flowers, a phone call, going out to dinner, something. That s very nice, well and good, but nothing that is especially Christian by which I mean nothing that necessarily reflects friendship with Jesus. The day is a cultural reminder of mothers, whatever that may lead us to do. It is a thoroughly commercialized and domesticated day, at least since 1913 when Congress designated the second Sunday of May as Mother s Day. The day was very different when it was created and I would say much more evidently an expression of the friendship with Christ that conquers the world. There was nothing 3

4 sentimental or nostalgic about it. The love that was at its beginning was the love that Christ commands, and the day, as founded by Julia Ward Howe, was known from as Mothers for Peace. Her idea for the day grew out of her experience of the U.S. Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War. She called for women to unite across international borders to address the causes of war. In 1870 she wrote the Mother s Day Proclamation that includes the following: Arise, then, women of this day! Arise all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be that of water or tears. We women of one country will be too tender of those of another to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs. As men have often forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons of war, let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel. Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar s but of God. I bring this to your attention because it is Mother s Day. And I bring this to your attention so that we may have a clear example of the love which is friendship with Jesus, a love not limited to clan or tribe or nationality or race or religion, or mothers; a love to be enjoyed and practiced in the world of our experience whether in the peace-making that is care for our community and the lives of our immediate neighbors, or in the struggles of peace-making in the face of the persistence of loveless violence in the world. One of the scenes on the cross that we remember on Good Friday is Jesus commending his mother, Mary, to the keeping of John, the disciple Jesus loved. We might imagine that out of friendship for them both he would say from the depths of his pain and sorrow, Don t 4

5 mourn. Organize. As indeed the church did, if not always in the cause of peace and goodwill and friendship with Christ Jesus. But it is for this friendship that the church exists and it is this I pray we are expressing in our gathering and our work together. Amen. Sixth Sunday of Easter, May 10, 2015 Emanuel Lutheran Church 5

Returning to Community: the work of the people Sharing of Joys and Sorrows Meditation

Returning to Community: the work of the people Sharing of Joys and Sorrows Meditation Mothers Day for Peace The Unitarian Church of Lincoln May 8, 2016 Mother's love is peace. It need not be acquired, it need not be deserved. Erich Fromm Gathering of the Community Ringing of Bell Welcome