Keeping it Simple: Friends and Family
May, 14, 2017
Dr. Tom Pace
John 15:12-15; John 19:26-27

We’re in the middle of a series of sermons called “Keeping it Simple” and if you could crystalize, summarize the Christian faith and what it means to be a follower of Jesus in a few principles, what would those principles be?
We’re trying to look at some simple Scriptures, short ones, ones you can memorize without any trouble. Last week we looked at compassion and the Scripture: “When he saw the crowds he was moved with compassion and healed their sick.”
This week we’re going to talk about relationships, our friends and our family. Our passages today are from the second half of the Gospel of John, both of them. The second half of the Gospel of John is called the “Book of Glory.” The first half is called “The Book of Signs” and the second half is called the “Book of Glory.” I want you to just listen for what seems to be most important for Jesus.
Let’s listen as we hear the Scripture read:
“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 servantsany 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. (John 15:12-15 NRSV)
When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, “Woman, here is your son.”Then he said to the disciple, “Here is your mother.” And from that hour the disciple took her into his own home. (John 19:26-27 NRSV)
John 10:10 is one of my favorite Bible verses. Jesus is speaking here, “I came that you might have life and have it abundantly.” One Bible translation is: “To have it in the fullest…”
So how do we live that way? What does it mean “to live in the fullest”? If you were going to put what it means to be a follower of Jesus into some specific principles for abundant life, how might you do that?
I have identified four of them, but I hope you might look for some others. I don’t want these to be a comprehensive list. I’m inviting you to try and identify sort of a significant “bucket list.” Not like you jump out of an airplane before you die but when you reach the end of your life you’ll be able to look back and say, “This is how I lived.”
So I’ve identified four. One is that I will be a compassionate person that I can look back and say, “I was a compassionate person. I cared.” The second is that I invested in relationships, my friends, my family and others around me. Third is that I did meaningful work, where I put my shoulder to the plow about something that mattered and gave myself to it. And fourth, that I received, that I embraced with gratitude all of the laughter and tears, the good times and the bad times, that will fill up my life, that I will receive and embrace them all with gratitude to God for the way God has blessed me.
Now I suspect you may have others and in fact, this wouldn’t be an exhaustive list for me. But I wanted to lift up these four and let us think about them and see if we can begin to crystalize some of these thoughts for ourselves.
So today we’re going to talk about relationships.
Let’s pray together. O God open us up, open our eyes that we might see, our ears that we might hear, our hearts, open up our hearts God, that we might feel. And then, O Lord open up our hands that we might serve. Amen.
Maybe it’s too simplistic but I think maybe not to say very simply, Jesus loved people. Jesus loved people. He spent his life, certainly the three years of his ministry, loving people. He loved his friends. The first thing Jesus does out of the gate in ministry is gather 12 around him. And what’s their responsibility? To “be with him.” That’s what it says: “He called twelve to be with him.” To hang out. “Hey, let’s go hang out for three years, what do you say?” He had these friends.
When he reaches the end of his life near the end we see what he does as described in chapters 14, 15, 16 and 17 of John, a section that’s called “The Farewell Discourse.” In that Farewell Discourse what Jesus does is tell the disciples how much he loves them. Really, that’s the bottom line.
He tells them, “Look, I’m going to go to the cross and I love you so much, God loves you so much…” Actually chapters 14, 15, and 16 are him telling them that. Chapter 17 is where he prays for them that they would be unified and safe, that God would care for them. Jesus loved them so much.
And his family. We don’t always read too much about his family. His father Joseph has passed away is what most scholars believed, but his mother was the first disciple. When he is not yet even born she acknowledges him as the Messiah. The angel Gabriel tells her, “You’re going to bear the Messiah.” In fact, in a sort of foreboding phrase he says, “And your heart will be pierced by a thorn, too.” Wow!
She celebrates when she says, “My soul magnifies the Lord.” Then when he begins his ministry we see Mary his mother as part of the band of people that follows him around. He goes to Cana, a little town, and there he turns the water into wine. You remember that story?
But here’s why – his mother asked him to go to this wedding and when he gets there there’s this odd exchange. Mary comes to Jesus and says, “Jesus, they’re out of wine.” And Jesus says, “Woman, what is that to me?”
Now I think that the rabbis have left out a part of Scripture – the part where Mary slaps him and says, “Do not talk to me that way, young man!” Because the very next thing that happens is he turns the water into wine. So there’s clearly something that went on between there, that went from “Woman, what is that to me?” to the water’s changed to wine.
Nonetheless, she’s there and she’s with him. When he makes this journey from Galilee down to Jerusalem Mary is there. And at the cross, she’s standing there with John, the one many believe was Jesus’ best friend. Jesus says from the cross to John, “Behold your mother.” And to her, “behold your son.” And he entrusts his best friend with the care of his mother. The tradition is that when the disciples finally left Jerusalem, John went to Ephesus and took Mary, the mother of Jesus, with him. And if you go to Ephesus today there’s a house there where tradition says that Mary lived. All the way through his mother was important to him. Always in the background there. Mothers are important.
Yesterday I had the marvelous privilege of going to my 4-year-old grandson’s soccer game. We are the Mighty Texas Trolls. And we defeated soundly the Knight Ninjas, by the way. I hope there aren’t any Knight Ninjas here. We did defeat them.
My grandson scored a couple of goals and that’s not necessarily a usual occurrence. Let me just say that there are one or two kids on the team that score lots and lots of goals, but everyone kind of gets to score some. What was so awesome about this was – and I wish you could see the video… We should have a party where we all come watch my grandchildren. That would be lovely!
So my daughter is taking the video of him and he goes and kicks it in and scores the goal and in an instant he turns and runs right toward the camera. He just wants to jump in his Mom’s arms and say, “I scored a goal!” It starts really young and I’m not really sure it ever goes away.
I’ve shared with you Peter Marshall’s preaching before. I think his language is just so powerful. He tells a story in a sermon and the sermon is called “Keepers of the Springs.” It begins with a fable that begins telling about how there was a little village that’s up in the mountains. The village is fed by springs that come down out of the mountains. There’s a hermit who lives up in the mountains whose job it is to clean out the springs so they flow clean. Here’s the way Peter Marshall says it – he does it so much better than I do. He writes: “He patrolled the hills and wherever he found a spring he cleaned its brown pool of silt and fallen leaves, of mud and mold and took away from the spring all foreign matter so the water which bubbled up through the sand ran down clean and clear and pure. It leaped sparkling over rocks and dropped joyously into crystal cascades until, swollen by other streams, it became a river of life to the busy town.”
The town council is going through their budget and they see that there is established a salary for the Keeper of the Springs. They say, “We’ve never seen him. We don’t know anything about him.” So they decide to build a concrete reservoir and fired the Keeper of the Springs. Well, you can guess what happened. The springs became brown and polluted and that river of life began to dry up. The town council quickly realized the error of their ways and began to pay – to value – the Keeper of the Springs again.
Here’s how Peter Marshall concludes: “Do not think me fanciful, too imaginative or too extravagant in my language when I say that I think of our mothers as the Keeper of the Springs. The phrase, while poetic, is true and descriptive. We feel its warmth, its softening influence, and however forgetful we have been, however much we have taken for granted life’s previous gifts, we are conscious of wistful memories that surge out of the past. The sweet, tender, poignant fragrances of love. Nothing that has been said, nothing that could be said, or that ever will be said would be eloquent enough, expressive enough or adequate to make sure articulate that peculiar emotion we feel to our mothers.” “So I shall make my tribute a plea for the Keepers of the Springs who will be faithful to their tasks.”
When we cease to value those who shape our lives, who knows where we end up? It’s not just mothers, we know that. It’s mothers and fathers and all sorts of surrogates for mothering and fathering. It’s that realization that the people who are close to us are the ones who will shape us the most.
So Jesus loved his friends, and Jesus loved his family.
My sermon today is really designed to encourage you to do the same thing. To invest yourself, your time, your energy, in nurturing, valuing, investing in, and cultivating those relationships with people that you love. To invest in relationships to make them deep and wide and long. That’s what I want to talk about – deep and wide and long.
First, to cultivate relationships that are deep.
When Jesus is in that farewell discourse he says, “I no longer call you servants but now I call you friends. Because I have revealed to you, I have shared with you, everything the Father shared with me. I have shared with you everything.” That’s what it means to be a friend.
The problem is that so many of us have shallow relationships. Our relationships are about a half inch deep. We have lots and lots of those “Hey, how about those Astros?” relationships. We have those relationships where we feel that we really enjoy doing things together but when it comes to really sharing ourselves with others we don’t seem to really know how to do it.
Patrick Morley has written many books on men’s ministry and one of them is The Man in the Mirror. Let me read to you what he says, “Are the friends you call friends really friends? Are they the kinds of friends you can go to when you are in trouble, when you’ve really blown it?” “Most men could recruit six pallbearers but hardly anyone has a friend he can call at 2 a.m.”
Do you have a friend you can call at 2 a.m.? Someone you can really be honest with when you’re struggling? What was it we sang a few minutes ago? I love this hymn: “For those faithfulness has kept us through distress, who shared with us our plight, who’ve held us in the night.” Do you have some people like that? Do you have a friend whom you could really go to and say, “You know, I am really struggling in my faith and I’m not sure I believe this stuff anymore.” And they wouldn’t judge you. Who could you go to and say, “I think maybe I’ve made a wrong decision about the direction in which my life should go. I decided when I was 25 what I wanted to do with my life and I think now 40 years later I’ve made the wrong decision.” Do you have somebody you could say that to?
Do you have a friend to whom you could say, “I’m afraid of dying?” Do you have a friend who whom you could say, “I have made a mess of my financial life. I just didn’t have any discipline and boy, it’s a mess now.” And they wouldn’t judge you, or look down their nose at you. They wouldn’t even feel sorry for you. They would just be there for you. Do you have any friends that are that good? The call that we are to invest in relationships that are that deep, where we care that much.
Second, do you have wide friendships? You know, we think of Jesus’ friends as those 12 disciples and they were, but it wasn’t just them. Remember how he got in trouble for eating with tax collectors and sinners? You didn’t eat with people you didn’t love. To eat with someone indicated that you had a particular relationship with them.
One way of viewing the story of the Gospels is just this procession of people who come into Jesus’ life. They just come into his life. He has to deal with them each one at a time. The centurion whose servant is sick and he needs to heal. The woman who reaches out and touches the hem of his garment to get a cure for the flow of blood she’s had for years. The leper who says, “If you will, you can make me clean.” All of these people are coming into his life and he doesn’t see them as the crowd. He doesn’t see them as patients. He doesn’t see them as clients. He sees them as people. And he cares for them as people. He builds –short term perhaps – but real relationships with them.
Let me make this contrast with you. I have a daughter who lives in New York City. She is a New Yorker now. That means that when she goes to work she has to walk a long way to the bus and then she has to ride the bus to the subway, and then she has to ride the subway to Times Square where she works. Then she goes to her office there at Times Square. Now I would tell you that on that journey every day I suspect she passes maybe a thousand people. I’m just guessing, I don’t know for sure. I’m guessing a thousand people. And I bet she has no connection with a single one. Earbuds in your ears, that’s how you do it in New York. You move through water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink.
It’s not just her and it’s not just New York. It’s all of us. We live in these big cities; we’re surrounded by more and more people, and yet we connect with fewer and fewer of them.
Contrast that with the way that my father-in-law, Dr. Boyd Wagner, lives his life. You can’t really have lunch with Boyd unless you want to get to know the waitress, probably the person who parked your car if it’s a valet person. And maybe five other people in the restaurant at the same time. Because each of those people is now someone that you can have a conversation with. And he will – it’s a wonderful experience. He gets to know all sorts of people, and not as strangers.
He works at Christian Community Service Center as a volunteer and it’s because he loves to talk to the people. He wants to help them of course, but when they come and sit down his question is, “Tell me about you.” And he actually cares to have that conversation. “Tell me about you.”
We had a birthday party for him a few years ago and there were all these people there. I’d ask them, “How do you know Boyd?” and they’d say, “Well, we were eating in a restaurant one day and he came up and he started to talk….” I’d think, “He met you just hanging out at a restaurant?”
Right now he’s working as an usher at the Skeeters games out in Sugar Land. It’s the baseball team out there. He works as an usher and just yesterday he said to me, “Hey, I met these people at the game…” And I thought, “How do you meet all these people?” Because you don’t view them as the crowd, you see people. And that’s what Jesus did – he saw people. They don’t have to be lifetime friendships, but to recognize that this five minute conversation can be a blessing to you, and you can be a blessing to them. You can invest in wide relationships, many, many different ones.
God has given us a smorgasbord in life of people around us. All sorts of different kinds of people with different experiences who see the world in different ways. And to sit down and say, “Tell me about you.” Wow – what a gift that is. But we are so interested in the next thing we’ve got to accomplish. The next task to be done and whoosh! We just go right on by.
Invest in relationships that are deep, that are wide and finally, that are long.
Here’s how John chapter 13 begins: “Jesus knew that the hour had come for him to leave the world and to go to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.” He loved them to the end.
When I went to be the pastor at Christ Church in Sugar Land one of the first hires I made, one of the first people who joined our staff, was a guy who came on as the youth director. He stayed as youth director for a while and then he went on into the ordained ministry, then went on our staff as a pastor there. So we worked side by side for ten years. Then I left and came here to St. Luke’s and he left and ultimately took his own church.
But here’s the awesome thing. We talk almost every week and text back and forth, and anything we hear going on or want to know about how they’re doing, we talk about it. It’s the miracle of technology. And what a gift it is to have a friendship that can age like wine. There’s a trust that develops when you give something time to grow and you nurture it and care for it over time.
Now I have to be honest with you – I’m not very good with this. I don’t take care of those relationships, those long term ones, as much as I should. And many of them wither from lack of care. But what a difference they make!
A few weeks ago I was going through a cabinet in my office and I found this old photo album. In seminary I was the youth director in Duncanville, Texas for a little over a year and when I left there they gave me this photo album. It was pictures of things we’d done together of the time we’d spent. I saw all those faces of the teenagers and remembered them. All these memories just came flooding back. I got to thinking how they’re in their 50s now! But I just thought about all of them. Those were wide relationships. They may have been short term but they were awesome! Then right in the middle of all those pictures is one of my wife and I together enjoying those kids. And I thought, “Golly, we’re young – man, we were shiny faced!” Dee still is but I have changed dramatically.
I looked at those and I honestly thought, “Man, what a gift it is to have had someone to love for all those years.” To go through ups and downs and for better or worse or richer or poorer, sickness, health and all that. To have children, to have grief, to have difficulties, challenges. And as those relationships, as it grows over time, it really does age and temper. It also becomes stronger and more tenacious. To decide you will invest in relationships that are deep and wide and long.
So here’s the point of today’s sermon. That’s the stuff that really matters. Those relationships. To decide to make them a priority.
Walt Whitman has a poem and one of the lines that I like best is from “Leaves of Grass.” He says, “In the end we were together, that’s all that I can remember.”
The simple verse I hope you will remember is John 15:12 where it says, “This is my commandment that you love one another as I have loved you.” That you invest in those relationships.
I wonder if there’s someone you’ve taken for granted. Someone you’ve allowed those relationships to maybe wither a bit? Maybe James Taylor, the great theologian, has it right: “Shower the people you love with love and show them the way that you feel. Things are going to work out fine if you only will.”
Love the people that God has put into your life. Deep and wide and long.
Gracious God, we thank you for all those you have put into our lives. For friends, for mothers, for fathers, sisters, brothers, grandparents, grandchildren, aunts and uncles. Friends that are so close we think of them as family. All of those people. Workmates, and colleagues... We’re so thankful, God. Show us how to nurture those relationships. In the name of Christ we pray, Amen.