Sermon, Rev. David Robins. February 17 2008:
A person once came to me with an ethical dilemma. He worked for a company in New Hampshire. He explained to me that his boss had called him in to help interview a person for a job in their area. The woman who had applied for the job, as it turned out, was one of this man’s close friends. The man belonged to the same book club as his friend. They and their spouses socialized a lot together. They sang in the same local chorus. The man’s friend, however, had had a massive stroke, that nearly killed her. She had been left partially paralyzed, with damage to arm, leg, and speech. The boss told the man, “This woman has the education and experience to be good in this job, but the disability would severely affect her ability to do the job. What would you recommend?”
What does a friend do in such a situation? Friendship includes both honesty and loving kindness. Can we be honest with friends, without losing their friendship?
The Unitarian Ralph Waldo Emerson said in an essay on Friendship:
“There are two elements that go in to the composition of friendship, each so sovereign that I can detect no superiority in either. One is truth. A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before a friend I may think aloud. I am arrived at last in the presence of a person so real and equal that I may drop even those undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy and second thought,…and may deal with the simplicity and wholeness with which one chemical atom meets another. Sincerity is the luxury allowed….”
“Reflective, sensitive, honest criticism is the highest duty we owe our friends,” wrote Harriet Beecher Stowe.
Emerson wrote that the second element of friendship is tenderness. “We are holden to people by every sort of tie, by blood, by pride, by fear, by hope, by money, by lust, by hate, by admiration, by every circumstance and badge and trifle---but we can scarce believe that so much character can subsist in another as to draw us by love. When a person becomes a friend to me I have touched the goal of fortune.
Friendship…is for aid and comfort through all the relations and passages of life and death. It is fit for serene days and graceful gifts and country rambles, but also for rough roads and hard fare, shipwreck, poverty and persecution.”
With Emerson’s glow of friendship in mind, it is worrisome to note a USA Today survey from 2006 that claims the number and quality of friendships has been declining for the past 20 years. This study claims that 25% of respondents claim no close confidents, and that the average number of friends claimed by respondents has shrunk to two friends.
The report saddens me, but also helps me to count my blessings. I have chosen to work in an environment with very friendly staff members and very friendly people. I treasure this friendly environment dearly, hoping to give back in care and appreciation and friendliness as much and as good as has been shared with me. We are sustained, and we sustain one another through “the rough roads and hard fare, and the shipwrecks…”
A church is to me a home where one may find an atmosphere conducive to friendship. In the atmosphere of this house of worship, I urge you to take time and space to grow a friendship with your own soul.
In the atmosphere of this house of worship, I challenge you to find time and space to grow a friendship with the transcendent and the deep mystery which is often perplexing. Here we are afforded the time and intentionality to grow into friendly terms with the universe.
In the atmosphere of this house of worship, I challenge you to discover the simple pleasures of friendly bonds of trust and appreciation developing across generations of those who once were strangers.
In the atmosphere of this house of worship, I challenge you to gradually friendships that look outward toward helping the stranger and the neighbor.
We know friendship when we see it in the movies or on tv, or in our children’s lives. We know friendship with our senses and with our intuition. Words can barely capture the essence of friendship. Friendship means cooperation and support. Desiring what is best for the other person. Sympathy and empathy….varying degrees of honesty and truthfulness…mutual understanding…sometimes even covenants and bonds.
Jesus said to his followers; “Greater love hath no one than this, that a person lay down their life for their friends.” And then, to prove his point, he laid down his life for his friends. I challenge you to be the kind of friend for whom another friend would lay down his or her life.
Friendship involves mutual affection, respect, esteem.
Friendship blossoms in times of crisis and need. Friendship connotes a certain loyalty, shared activity, perhaps mutual interests and tastes. Friendship allows space for vulnerability, and the trust that one will not be hurt, or if hurt, that loyalty and love will find a way to heal this wound. Many friendships find their way back from truth spoken that hurts, or truth unspoken that likewise hurts. Freindships have to find their way back from broken trust or misplaced trust, from differences that divide, from selfishness and inconsiderateness. Some friendship do not find their way back.
No sermon on friendship would be truthful without noting the importance, even the necessity of interspecies friendships. Having been befriended by two great hearted dogs in my life, I can only hope that I was at times as good a friend to them. Likewise, cats are our friends, birds, horses, and a myriad of animals.
Animal friends, like human friends support us through emotional, financial, relationship crises. The saying goes, “If you need a friend, be a friend.” We all begin as strangers. Friendships are made, not born. A friendship is made from a chance meeting, a decision to stay in touch. It becomes a choice to invest time in getting to know another and revealing ourself to them. Friendship begins as an acquaintance that involves friendliness that unfolds a layer at a time.
Letty Pogrebin wrote a book about friends and friendships called Among Friends. Some of the people she interviewed told her:
“A friend is someone who would hide me from the Nazis.”
“To be a real friend, a person sticks by me no matter what.”
E.M. Forster put it plainly, “If I had to chose between betraying my country or betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.”
The person who asked me for advice on what to do when his disabled friend applied for a job in his workplace, loved this friend enough to find in their friendship, his own soul and a spark of the divine. During the interview, the friend realized that the job would entail more responsibility than she could handle. The friend applying for the job may have realized the awkward situation in which they had placed a friend. The friend gracefully withdrew her job application.
You will find in friendship a window onto your soul.
You will find in friendship a spark of the divine.
Emerson said, “The glory of friendship is not the outstretched hand, the kindly smile nor the joy in companionship. Rather, it is the spiritual inspiration that comes when he or she discovers that someone else believes in them, and is willing to trust them.”
I close with some wisdom from a modern sage of Public Television, Mr. Rogers: “That’s what being friends is all about—sharing sad times and happy times and helping each other grow in many different ways.”
