Texts: 1 Samuel 19: 1-7; John 15: 12-19

`They were looking for him. Terrified, Wilsene fled to the house of an old friend, asking him to hide him from Cedras' death squads. He had already ptaken his wife and baby to a safe place outside of Port-au-Prince, telling his wife that he would return. But now he was a man on the run. His friend Victor took him to a safe place to wait for the killing to be over. But a neighborhood chimere, the Creole word for shadow, an informer, had seen Victor spirit Wilsene away. The soldiers came to Victor's house and asked where he had taken Wilsene. Victor refused to disclose the location. As Victor's wife told Wilsene later, the soldier looked at him and said, “You are a fool!” and shot him.

It was January 1992, shortly after General Raoul Cedras had overthrown Jean Bertrand Aristide in a coup the previous September, just eight months after Aristide had won the presidential election. For almost 45 years the Duvaliers had ruled Haiti with their combination of repression and voodoo resulting in the deaths of over 30,000 Haitians and a brain drain as the educated fled the country. The army backed by business interests threw out the popular President, killing thousands more while even more fled again, many held at Guantanamo for processing into the United States as refugees. As a nation, our attention the spring that preceded the coup was fixed on the Gulf where U.S. forces had just routed the Iraqi army out of Kuwait. As usual, we ignored the small black nation of Haiti, responding only when forced by business interests or refugee flows.

When I heard Wilsene tell me the story I wondered how a person lives with the knowledge that someone else had died for him. The only thing Wilsene could do for Victor was to get his family out of Haiti as well. And he did just that. Processed as a refugee into the U.S. from Guantanamo, Wilsene and his family spent six months in the spare bedroom on the third floor of my house in Plainfield. Now a U.S. citizen with three boys, he repays his debt to Victor by volunteering with development projects for victims of the Haitian earthquake that killed over a quarter of a million people in January 2010.

We often use the term friend loosely in our society without much regard as to its real meaning. It's part of the instant intimacy of our society. Everyone goes by a first name – except the President. We don't use titles as a form of address except in court. We have an easy informality that masks our real distance from each other. We talk about friendship in the same way. But friendship entails risks, maybe not the kind of risks that Victor took for Wilsene but risks all the same.

All friendships, true friendships, entail risks. Perhaps the greatest risk in friendship is exposing ourselves, who we really are. A true friend will accept our limitations, warts and all. Acquaintances, a term we don't use much in our instantly intimate society, accept far less. We're more willing to accept critical comments from a friend than from an acquaintance or a co-worker. That's because we trust they are given in good faith. As Emerson notes in his famous essay, the core of friendship is trust,.

Our instantly intimate society plays itself out on Facebook, where everyone is a”friend,” and where people post some incredibly intimate comments for the world to see. We've all heard stories of Facebook information being distributed to people who have no business seeing that information. There are times that I am utterly amazed at what people will put on Facebook or other forms of social media, with photographs that are often compromising. And in the midst of all this “sharing,” as it's called, we have become a society, where we are more isolated from others.

There is something about face to face communication that social media cannot replicate. The sound or tone of a voice, a facial expression, a touch – these do not exist on Facebook. Friends, true friends will expose themselves, even to the point of discomfort because they trust and believe that their trust will not be betrayed. Sometimes, however, friendships collapse and when they do, it can be a really painful experience because we mourn the loss of the relationship as well as the person.

In his essay “Faux Friendship,” William Deresiewicz writes that friendship is unlike any other relationship. First, it is totally elective. We choose our friends, unlike our families who are tied to us by blood links or marriage. It is the ultimate expression of freedom. Secondly, it is totally egalitarian. We do not “owe” a friend. Friends are neither above us nor below us, but are our equals.

In our reading from Samuel this morning, we see one way that Jonathan was a true friend to David and cared for him. He protected David from his own father's increasing fearful insanity, even at risk to himself. When Jonathan is killed in battle and Saul commits suicide rather than being taken captive by the Philistines, David tears his robe in mourning and orders that the whole army fasts and laments for Saul and Jonathan. David's cry is similar to the cry of soldiers who have lost their friends, their blood brothers, in battle: How the mighty have fallen in the midst of battle! Jonathan lies upon your high places. I am distressed for you, my brother Jonathan, greatly beloved were you to me, your love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women. War creates an intimacy bound in blood that is difficult to erase. The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien explores the terrible intimacy of battlefield friendship and why it lingers so.
In this morning's passage from John,Jesus tells his followers that they are no longer servants but friends because he has shared – an overused word in our society – everything that he has received by God. But he also adds something else which seems to contradict our modern understanding of freedom: John's Jesus says: “You did not choose me but I chose you,” a reflection of how his disciples had been literally called to come and be with him. They could have said “No,” of course, and I imagine that the historical Jesus must have experienced that kind of rejection. But the Gospel writers were not writing histories, after all; they were writing gospels, books that would advocate for the man they now experienced as the Risen Christ.

Friendship is something offered to us and that we accept, as Jonathan offered David and as Jesus offered the ones who went about the Galilee with him while their families and others thought them totally daft. . Just think about it: who follows some itinerant preacher and healer throughout Judea? Friendship shapes us and our personality. Think about it: How your friends, your dearest, deepest friends have shaped you and how you have shaped them. There are times. Of course that even those we call friends are threatened by what we become over time. Friends do grow apart just as do married couples. That's because none of us are static, of course. And, thank God, for that!

The loss of friendship is painful just as is the loss of a marriage. When our dearest friends age or die, we mourn the loss of the friend but not the relationship. When those we knew as our dearest friends grow apart from us, we mourn both the loss of the friend and the relationship. And, double deaths are so much more difficult. In the end, friendship is about trust – as are most real relationships. And when our trust ends by either betrayal or just plain loss, we mourn – and we mourn greatly.

Friendship means that we are wiling to listen to and hear what or friend has to say to us whether we like it or not, for sometimes, indeed, our best critics are our friends. The intimacy here is deep and holds fast unlike th instant intimacy fostered by society. And it often survives separation and distance.

My oldest and dearest friend is now approaching her 91st birthday. Now in California with her daughter because she really cannot live alone, we are separated by distance but not in spirit. When I call her, it is as if I had seen her yesterday. The connection is instant, immediate, and intimate. She is the person who stuck with me during my worst days and encouraged me to move beyond them. Now as she calls on me to dismantle her apartment in New Haven, I mourn because it will be the loss of one dimension of our friendship but will now move into another. We are bound by our past experiences, by our present desires, and by our future hopes. That's what real friendship does: it binds us beyond the superficial and into the very depths of our souls.

It's said that God is our ultimate friend because no matter what, we are not abandoned, cast off, or let go no matter what we do. That's true. The true friend calls us to task; the true friend trusts that the relationship will survive even the most severe criticism. That is why, in the end, we have really few true friends. Because we are not equal to God, that relationship is much more like a parent, a loving caring parent who does not abandon us no matter what.

Friendship is different than the relationship we have with God because our relationship with God is not one of equals. But Jesus tells us we are his friends, thus his equals. But what does that mean? It means that we are called as was he to risk all for the kingdom that is ruled by love not hate, by faith not fear, by hope not despair. So let us risk all for true friendship as did the One we follow.

Let us come to God in prayer: O Holy One who graces our lives with your presence, bring us into true friendship with each other, into the hope that empowers us to risk all for you. Amen