The Fourth Sunday after Pentecost

Paul was wrong in his Epistle to the Romans. Paul said, "rarely will anyone die for a righteous person – though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die." There are some 3,000 fire fighters working all around Colorado today to save our homes and forests while we sit here in a comfortable church. They are putting their lives on the line for people they don’t even know. They don’t know if they are saving the house of a righteous person or a crook. And they don’t even ask.

To be fair, Paul wrote in a day when helping one’s neighbor was perhaps a little different than it is today. We know that giving of our own life to help another, even giving up our life to save someone else, is the highest form of love. But we know that because it is what Jesus taught. "No one has greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends." says Jesus in the Gospel of John. And the radical notion of whom could be identified as a neighbor or friend has become a common teaching as well. The Good Samaritan is how Jesus defined a "neighbor". This teaching, common to us, was a different way to look at the laws God had given the Jews.

To be fair, Paul was teaching the words and ways of Jesus to the people of Rome – and to assume that everyone knew them and that part of the culture was based on the teaching of Jesus would be inaccurate. So perhaps for his day and his culture Paul was quite correct in saying that rarely would someone die for even a righteous person. But for our day, in this time and place, the words seem to be wrong.

Good people do give up their lives for us. We hope and pray that none of the firefighters lose a life while they are fighting wildfires, but we know that firefighters die every year in cities and forests. And we hope and pray that no soldier loses a life defending our liberty and the life and liberty of people who are our neighbors, our Samaritans. But some soldiers have died this year and more may still.

All of this has to do with the calling that Jesus gave to his disciples and to our understanding of how we are to carry out that calling. Not all of us see ourselves as disciples, but we are. We are just like Peter and Andrew, James and John, Philip and Bartholomew, Thomas and Matthew, James and Thaddaeus, Simon and even Judas. And there were undoubtedly other disciples. Mary Magdalene, Mary and Martha, Lazarus, and later Matthias, Stephen, Luke, Barnabas, Phoebe and even Paul. All of them were to carry out the teachings of Jesus. And that is what we are to do.

Many of us probably believe that we are not capable of being disciples. In our culture we put people through years of training to become disciples and missionaries. If we haven’t taken the training, we must not be capable. This assumes some things that are true, like the helpfulness of knowing a little about a language or a culture that we are teaching in, and some things that are not true, like having to know a language or culture first before we are able to share simple things with each other or give ourselves to our friends and neighbors. We sometimes assume that one has to be trained in order to love other people or to be a friend.

It’s not a bad assumption. It is easier to be a friend to someone you can talk to. But I’ll tell you from my experience in Haiti a few years ago and from my experiences in Mexico that friends can find ways to help one another without a common language. In fact, teaching each other words and phrases becomes part of the action of friends. We do that without thinking for people who already know our native tongue. We teach them what we mean when we say, "How about meeting for coffee next week?" or, depending on your age bracket, "Have you seen my latest Play Station game?" Of course, we drink the coffee and play with the Sony Play Station, but the real purpose is to spend time sharing our lives.

But surely discipleship is more than being friends, isn’t it? Well, is it really? Wasn’t Jesus a friend to the people we call his disciples? And didn’t they learn through having a relationship with him about God’s love for them? A love so powerful and so incredible that they were willing to give their lives to be able to share that love with others because that love is in fact what life is about?

Bruce Larsen, a Presbyterian minister and author, tells a wonderful story about discipleship and evangelism that happened in his congregation. There was a young woman who had moved to the United States from Angola in West Africa. Maria was bright, cheerful and always smiling and laughing. Her good spirit was infectious and she seemed to spread God’s loving Spirit wherever she went.

Maria went to a meeting on evangelism put on by the larger Presbyterian body. It was an all day affair and there were many different pamphlets for different strategies and demographic studies and mission objectives and you name it, they had it. They had all the latest information and gizmos and printed material that could be found to reach out to the unchurched. If you’ve been to anything like this for either the church or your own profession you can well imagine the assortment of information and presentations.

Toward the end of the day someone turned to Maria and asked her what kinds of techniques and programs they used in Africa to reach out to people. Everyone had heard of the great successes of the church in reaching out to people in Africa and the thousands of converts that might be reached in a single year. They were all quiet to hear what Maria would tell them, which technique she would confirm as the best.

Maria, a bit nervous, stood and thought for a moment and then explained, "Well, we don’t give any pamphlets to people – we don’t have any! We just send one or two Christian families to live in a village. And when people see what Christians are like, they want to be Christians themselves."

Is there any better form of discipleship, any better technique than friendship freely given? We forget in our busy lives how important it is to do unto others as we would have them do unto us. We forget, in the rush to get somewhere 37 seconds sooner, to love one another as Christ loved us. But this is what makes us Christians, following these ways of Christ.

We are in the process of calling a new Bishop to this Diocese. And we are taking surveys (which by the way you will find on the table in the Narthex along with pens to help you fill them out and despite what I’m about to say I would hope you would share your thoughts with our Search Committee), running focus groups, writing histories of the Diocese and hopes for our future. We are writing descriptions of what the new bishop has to look like and talk like and walk like; and we’ll put all that together and go search for someone who has years of experience in parishes, degrees from special institutions, knows how to raise funds, is a great preacher, has built a church with his or her own hands and – regularly sees visions that can be transmitted into a Diocesan Mission Statement. And does a little healing on the side.

We really are going to do everything we can think of to find the best bishop we can find, the one that matches our needs and gifts and whose gifts and needs can be a compliment to our lives together. But what I hope we find is someone who will come among us as a friend and guide us and lead us the way that Jesus led his friends and then sent them out to do the same.

The best leader we could have is someone who is willing to lay his or her life alongside ours and helps us to lay ours down for the sake of the love shown us in the life of Christ. The best leader we could have is someone who will come among us and heal us and then send us out to heal others in this broken world.

That is what it means to be a disciple. To be a friend. To be a shoulder to lean on and someone to share the times in our lives. Whether it is death or birth, graduating from high school and college or starting kindergarten, retiring from years of service or the first day on the job, we all want to share those times with people we love, and people we count on to love us as we are while always hoping the best for us.

Our lives are deeply enriched by the discipleship that Jesus has called us to, the discipleship of friendship and honest caring for those around us, even when we haven’t yet met them. In this Paul was not wrong. He was right on target. God loved us before we knew who he was and died for us while we were ungodly, while we were without reverence and awe for God. "While we still were sinners Christ died for us." Paul says that this is proof of God’s love for us, that we did not cause Christ to die for us, but that he chose to die for our sake.

This is the love God has for us and the love the Jesus shared with his friends. This is the love that heals the sick and brings comfort to the grieving. This is the love that Jesus shares in our lives and relationships today and the love we can share with others. It does help to have a little training. The training of watching what a Christian family looks like so that we can be that Christian family for someone else. The training of having a Christian friend so that we can be a Christian friend. Let us all pray that we can learn from one another how to lay down our lives for our friends.

Let us do unto others as we would have others do unto us.

And let us love one another as Christ loves us.+