Sunday, May 13, 2012

Spiritual Friendship in a Facebook World

By Rev. Gusti Linnea Newquist

Sermon May 13, 2012

John 15:9-17


“I do not call you servants any longer,” Jesus says in our Gospel lesson for today. “But I have called you friends.”
                                                   
And of course my mind goes immediately to Facebook.

For the uninitiated among us, Facebook is a multi-billion dollar online social networking tool—about to be traded publicly—with which you, too, may “friend” an unlimited number of the eight hundred thirty five million other people on the planet who also use Facebook. And join in the frenetic craze to keep in touch with those you say you love the most through news feeds, status updates, photo galleries, political posts and counter-political-posts.

In two seconds flat with the click of a mouse on the wall of your “friend,” you may “like” everything from the mundane report that your nephew got his hair cut this morning to the reminder that your former high school sweetheart’s new wife’s birthday just happens to coincide with Mother’s Day to the groundbreaking news that our nation’s highest elected public official has finally come out of the closet in support of marriage equality. Himself, of course, the child of a marriage that would also have been illegal in the state of Texas at the time of his birth. With Scriptural citations also abounding in support of such blatantly prejudicial “family values.”

If you are like me, you might “like” such groundbreaking news so much that you would update your own status report to say something like, “It’s about time.” Or “Alleluia!” Or “May the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) follow suit at General Assembly this July.” And then see where your Facebook friends follow.

Some of them will undoubtedly “like” your “like.” And they may even go so far as to comment on your “like.” Or re-post your “like.” Or comment on their re-post of your “like” that they “like”-d. Of course we may not want to admit it, but there maybe might be a few Facebook friends who don’t like the “like.” Who mutter to their mouse, “there she goes again on one of her liberal crusades.” Which would be true except that marriage and family have always been fairly conservative values, even though the expression of those values has evolved over time and across cultures and even in the trajectory of the biblical witness.

So if your Facebook friends are truly your friends, they will know that your heart is good and your intentions are pastoral, and they will simply ignore the Facebook “like” that they don’t like, because the friendship matters more than the conflict. And then they will go on about their on-line business.

But then, of course, there are those Facebook friends who are really more like “on-line acquaintances.” Or really just people we feel guilty for not “friend”ing in the first place. I mean, let’s be honest, if you weren’t actually friends in high school, but they “friend” you on Facebook twenty years later, are they really now your actual friend? I doubt it.

These so-called Facebook friends might scathingly “un-like” the “like” that you really do “like.” Or even sabotage the “like.” Or if they really truly don’t like the “like” or your comment on the “like” or the fact that you saw fit to remove their blatantly un-like-able comment on your “like,” well they might just (and I gasp) “un-friend” you for your comment on the “like” they didn’t “like”! Or you might “un-friend” them. Even though you were never really “friends” in the first place!

Whew! This is what we have become in the Facebook friendship world. Which is not, I hasten to add, what I think Jesus had in mind when he called us his friends and asked us to befriend one another. To love one another as he has loved us.

Don’t get me wrong. I love Facebook. I think it is a great tool for staying connected in a transient society. And I have even used it to find a job on more than one occasion. But I am also slightly worried about what all this “friend”-ing and “like”-ing and “un-friend”-ing and “un-like”-ing might have to reveal about the fracturing fundamentals of human connection and divine intervention we expect to experience in the basic sociological and theological phenomenon we call human friendship.

The fact is that we, as a species, are social animals. From the beginning God saw that it was not good for us to be alone. We were created to live in relationship, which is how I interpret those earliest chapters of Genesis that our marriage equality opponents use to deny this covenant relationship for same-gender loving couples. We were created to live in relationship.

And yet we have become lonelier as a species than we have ever been in modern memory. According to a 2010 AARP survey, thirty five percent of adults older than forty five are chronically lonely, as compared with roughly twenty percent a decade ago. And according to research quoted in an article by Stephen Marche in May’s Atlantic Monthly, sixty million Americans are “unhappy with their lives because of loneliness.”

We have fewer close confidants than we used to. Twenty five percent of us say we literally have no one to talk with about our deepest fears and hopes. Twenty percent of us say we have only one such friend. For an astounding total of forty five percent who are one person away from complete and utter isolation. Even though we may have six hundred ninety-three friends on Facebook.

And this loneliness is profoundly hazardous to our health. When we are lonely, we are less likely to exercise, more likely to eat to the point of obesity, less likely to survive a serious operation, more forgetful, less able to deal with stress, and more likely to need the care of a nursing home at an earlier age than our less lonely counterparts. Studies by John Cacioppo at the Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience at the University of Chicago reveal that loneliness literally affects our DNA, altering the way our genes are expressed in our white blood cells!

In another age a sermon on friendship might sound frivolous for a pastor and a congregation so fundamentally focused on mission beyond our walls. But in the age of Facebook, honest-to-God spiritual friendship is an issue of survival. And I mean that literally.

At Madison Square you know what it is to be “welcomed home” by the God who created us to be spiritual friends in the age of Facebook. But I would suggestion this community has some decisions to make about how you are going to move forward in a new era as friends of God and friends of one another. Because the truth is that real friendship, true friendship, spiritual friendship of reciprocal love with genuine space for the other to live into the fullness of who God created them to be, the kind that Jesus called for in his farewell address to his disciples . . . well, it is just plain messy.

When we are actually really real friends with one another in this very human community called the church—and not just Facebook friends—we may be forced to confront those parts of each other that we really may not ever “like.” Not ever. And when we are actually really real friends with one another in this very human community called the church—and not just Facebook friends—we may find thoughts and words and actions rising from our own minds and hearts and bodies that embarrass us, that shatter the myth of “spiritual centeredness” we would all like to hold of ourselves in this house of our God.

When we are actually really real friends with one another in this very human community called the church—and not just Facebook friends—we may have to learn over and over and over again the meaning of forgiveness and trust and love. And we may be forced to change our minds—and our public positions—on social matters of seemingly great controversy. Because we, like our president—or our children—now have true friends who are gay . . . or homeless . . . or undocumented . . . or in need of the full spectrum of reproductive health services. And we can no longer pretend that our friends are not human, made in the image of God.

And when we are actually really real friends with one another in this very human community called the church--and not just Facebook friends--we may have to believe the divine image dwells also in those with whom we have very painful disagreements on these matters of great controversy. And we may have to trust that someway, somehow, the love of God is enough to save us all. 

In his book called Anam Cara, about spiritual friendship from the perspective of Celtic spirituality, John O’Donahue writes that “one of the deepest longings of the human soul is to be seen.” Not only in an online profile carefully crafted to promote a public image of perfection but in every nook and cranny of the secret soul-life within us that holds our deepest promise and our deepest shame. And when we finally, faithfully, freely connect with another person in the fully messy human reality of our lives in honest and open spiritual friendship—with the gift of the grace of God as our 4G network—our souls really can begin to flow together in beauty and light loving one another as we really are and not who we “virtually” are.

I think this is what Jesus meant when he asked us to be friends with one another. To lay down those parts of our lives that seem to have such great importance but really do not. In order to make time to be someone’s friend. And in the process maybe save their life. Or at least their very human spirit.


Here at Madison Square you rightly pride yourselves for prizing spiritual friendship above superficiality. This is, truly, an open and welcoming community of faith bearing witness to the universal and unconditional love of God. It is written in your DNA.

But I would suggest it is time to ramp it up a bit, especially as the report of your Transition Team comes before you next and as you prepare yourselves next month to elect a Pastor Nominating Committee that will seek your next installed pastor. You have said a great many goodbyes and hellos in just the short time I have served you as your interim pastor. Many have been wonderful. Many have been painful. But you are a new community now. And now is the time to re-commit this new community to the grace of rebuilding and repairing the friendships that may have been muddled throughout this transition. Or to look around this sanctuary and pick out someone you do not know and go out of your way to invite that person to dinner, or lunch, or Starbucks. Or to take a risk of sitting in a different pew next week that will place you worshiping beside a complete stranger, and watch the love of God bind you together in ways you never imagined. Or to approach the coffee hour fellowship after worship as an every Sunday communion in the spirit of soul friendship. Especially today as you “welcome home” the newest member of this family in faith. And to really . . . truly . . . mean it.

You are my friends, Jesus says. I have chosen to see the depths of your soul in all of its glory and all of its grit. And “I am giving you these commands,” Jesus says, “so that you may love one another” in return.

And so we will. And so we must.

Because it is the only way to save the world.

I pray it may be so. Amen.

1 comment: