Dialogue Sermon – Bill Carter and Guy D. Griffith
June 19, 2022
“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 servants any 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. You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name. I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.”
Bill
Carter:
Let me read Proverbs 17, verse 17: “A friend loves at all times, and a brother is born for adversity.” (RSV)
I've been carrying that one around for a long, long time. I keep it tucked into my pocket. The proverb is there to remind me and acknowledge what I know to be true from my experience. And this is one of the great one liners of the book of Proverbs. Each proverb in this book of 31 chapters is distilled from human experience. You live for a while. You pay attention, you boil experience down to a single truth and you say it in a single line, and then you carry it around because this is what life is about.
“A friend loves at all times, a brother is born for adversity.” The wise Sage (or group of sages) who compiled this book had a lot to say about human relationships. Every chapter, almost every line. And in this verse, friendship is marked by accompaniment, by someone who is with you by companionship, both in troubles and in celebrations. In that companionship you learn – and practice - making time and space for one another.
So here's one of my all time, best friends. We've been friends for 40 years. But what is a friend? All of us know friendship, but we find it hard to define. Yet we know it when we see it. We know it when we experience it. We know it when we have a friend and the friend has us.
Guy Griffith:
It was such a joy on Thursday to spend a little bit of time with some of the men at your church, talking about our passage from John's Gospel, chapter 15. John's gospel offers an intimate view of Jesus. Some say it's like a Rembrandt painting where all the light focuses right on Jesus, and the rest is in a little bit of darkness. This passage from 15 comes from a section where Jesus is concluding his time with the disciples. He knows that the end is close. These are the last important things he can say to his friends.
What's so interesting about that we don't have or see a defined doctrine of the Trinity, but here in this part of John's Gospel, Jesus is constantly talking about my Father and the Spirit together.
So we, we have a practical experience of the Trinity. John Calvin, the father of the Presbyterian church uses the image of God's fountain, a fountain overflowing as the example of what the Trinity is. God's love overflows because there is such closeness between the Father, Son, and Spirit. They weren't holding it back but letting it out to others and to us.
That's a vision of what does friendship means. It's born in the very depths of God's relational being. We are created for relationships.
Bill and I had a professor at Princeton Seminary named Jim Loder, and Jim had the best definition of love that I've ever heard. You can write this down. It sounds a little bit like a dictionary definition, but the more you live with it, the more you like it. He said, “Love is the non-possessive delight in the particularity of the other.”
I
can't possess the friend. When I see Bill, I don't want to change Bill. I want
to celebrate who Bill is as God's gift. And the Trinity invites us into that
kind of intimacy of God's love overflowing, as we see and appreciate the
uniqueness of the other and want to be in their presence. We move not from the
sense of hierarchy, but a mutuality. We care about one another, not pretending
to be more important, but just standing side by side.
Bill Carter:
When we thought about how we would preach this sermon today, we might have had one of us stand in the pulpit and the other at a shorter music stand. But here we are sitting side by side because this is what friendship is. It's side by side.
And there are a lot of counterfeits to friendship. We learned this very early, like the school kid who has a day ruined by discovering they've been betrayed, or shredded by gossip, or overheard some kind of false witness, some distortion of truth. Or discovering, as one of my kids discovered, a social hierarchy. She came home one day and said, “I'm not one of the popular kids.” I said, “Wait a second. You're in kindergarten.” There had already been kind of sorting out who's popular and who's not.
Some connections are also purely situational. You're seated next to one another in classroom, or play together in a sports team or a band, or work side by side. And when that situation is over, you discover that the bond wasn't quite as tight as you thought.
Sometime back, my wife told me how she had developed a friendship with somebody with whom she worked. The friend left for another job. And in that departure, the friend could not mark they had anything other than a work relationship. It was purely situational, got them through the work days, but didn't last.
So Guy and I met on the very first day at Princeton Seminary in New Jersey, 40 years ago this September. I was unloading my Toyota station wagon, pulling out an electric piano and an amplifier, with only room for a few clothes. And I roll the load to the elevator on my hand truck and hit the button to go to the second floor. The door opens and there he is, head full of curls, in a stained shirt. And I laughed out loud. I thought, “Here's somebody who's just as off balance as I am.” And it brought out the truth. We were both pretty good students, but spent the next couple of weeks wondering how in the world we ever ended up in a school like that.
Guy Griffith:
We had a Dean who wisely told us that, “The first two weeks you'll wonder what you're doing there. And after that, you'll wonder what everybody else was doing there.” Some of the best advice we ever got! Bill and I lived next door to each other that first year. We began to be exceedingly close.
And one of the, the first qualities that we think about when it comes to friendship is a similar perspective. Things don't completely overlap, but there's enough similarity. And for us, that includes the passion for the church and the love of the church.
Bill Carter:
But there is not a complete overlap. Guy played rugby in college. I don't really give a wit about that sport. And he's never quite learned what a 13th chord is in jazz either. Yeah.
Guy
Griffith:
I'm not sure I've known anything about jazz, as a matter of fact.
Bill Carter:
But we have a shared understanding and perspective, a commonality of viewpoints. Frederick Buechner describes one of his first great friends, and this is a wonderful line. He says, “Jimmy was another who saw the world enough as I saw it to make me believe that maybe it was the way the world actually is.”[1]
Or the passage from C.S. Lewis in his book, The Four Loves, where he talks about the love that his friendship. He says, it's the experience of standing by somebody. And you realize that you aren't alone, that you've both been viewing the same situations from the same perspective. Up until then, you thought you were on your own. [2]
Guy Griffith:
Yeah. I think another quality is intentional participation in one another's lives. We talk about who's on your speed dial. Bill has been on my speed dial since 1982. That was before we had speed dials. Bill started a clergy group, while I dropped out of it early because I was not a lectionary preacher and my ministry responsibilities called me in other areas. And I needed to have my continuing ed time that way. But when that group concluded, we've started another one with another close friend from seminary and other friends along the way. So there's been intentionality about that.
Beyond that, nothing that has happened personally or ecclesiastically that we haven't been there for one another. I participated in his ordination service, installation services, weddings, and he at mine, preaching installation services, standing with me at weddings.
Bill Carter:
We’ve been there for one another's divorces and remarriages too.
Guy Griffith:
Exactly. And celebrating our kids together as well.
One of the stories about his wedding: he called me right before he and Jamie got married and said, “I have a challenge. Somebody's asked me to do their wedding at the same time as my wedding. How am I going to do that?” And it's like, “Bill, don't do that.” So we came up with the plan. I would leave the sanctuary in my tuxedo, go to . . . where was it?
Bill Carter:
The Dunmore Holiday Inn.
Guy Griffith:
And between the wedding and reception, I would marry this couple and then come back. It was it didn't quite pay for my trip up here, but it wasn't bad. Close. Yeah. It was pretty close.
Bill Carter:
This continuing connection, this weaving of life, is a third dynamic as friendship moves from coincidence to intention. Over time you develop even more in common than you realized, no matter how much you had in common to start with. My first church was eight miles from the house where Guy grew up.
Guy Griffith:
When he went there, my dad was not in particularly good health. My dad had emphysema and multiple sclerosis and his world had really diminished. He would walk with a cane in one hand, an oxygen bottle in the other, and waddle from the house to his car, drive to his courtroom where he served as a municipal judge. And then waddle from the courtroom three doors down, and at every lunch and every dinner in the same restaurant. But he was really starting to decline.
I asked Bill to watch out for him. And Dad ended up in the hospital right before I got ordained. I called and asked, “Would you go visit Pop in the hospital?” And the first thing he did was ask Bill, “Hey, I've got a legal pad over there, grab that. I want to rewrite my will.” So that night Bill called and said, “Hey, I know what you're getting.” This is helpful stuff.
Bill Carter:
Not only was Guy’s father in the hospital. He was in St. Luke's in Bethlehem, the very hospital where one of my kids is winding up her rotation for medical school this week. These are not coincidences. The same kid also went to a school that I had never heard of before I met Guy. American University, his Alma mater
Guy Griffith:
The best school in the country. Why wouldn’t your daughter want to go there?
Bill Carter:
What else happened to bind us together?
Guy Griffith:
Well, this speed dial thing. We talk once a week. Yeah. So I get this call from Bill, “Hey, I have a member moving down to Nashville. You want to invite her to church?”
Oh, who is that? “Susan Kelly, our director or music.”
Sure
enough, I took Susan out. We went to this great barbecue restaurant. Who knew
she was vegan? Took me a little while to figure that out, but Susan joined our
choir and has been such an incredible blessing. In fact, she and Alan are in
Spain with our church choir on a tour right now.
Bill Carter:
This kind of deep connection leads to another quality of friendship, which is honesty, complete honesty. I see his quirks and foibles with 200% clarity, and he sees mine. We are relentless in busting one another's chops.
Guy Griffith:
Indeed.
Bill Carter:
There's this kind of understanding when we're going through trouble. We understand both the trouble and also the resources. And we push one another. We've been pushing one another to embrace and work through work challenges.
Or in your case for the past 32 years. I pushed him and said, “Would you buy a headstone for your father in Wilkes Barre? Which we went to go see this week. It was finally planted where it needed to be. There's this mutual accountability. It's not just keeping in touch. It's deeply being there for one another.
Guy Griffith:
And I think another thing we looked at was this mutual concern and support which is never one-sided. Love goes both ways.
Bill is often the person I call when I've had a real heartbreak in ministry. This summer, when I was traveling out west, I thought of a young woman in my congregation, who was a single mom with a great young daughter. She was visiting her parents at their home on the Russian River in Idaho. She looked like a 1940’s starlet, good looking, an incredibly important young woman in our congregation, with the gift of encouraging other young moms. She was out for a run. A logging truck took a corner too fast and flipped over on her. I can barely talk about that without the emotion being real.
Who do you call when you have to do a funeral like that? You call your friend. Yeah. Because he's had those things as well.
Bill Carter:
At the same time we've shared an interest, not only in our vocation as pastors, but as Christians, and going deeper into the love of God, and constantly nudging one another about that. Usually down with good humor, which is one way to cope with stress. Neither of us are beyond sending obnoxious birthday cards to one another.
Or push it a little further, sending obnoxious postcards to one another - in care of one another's offices where the secretaries can read 'em. Yeah!
Guy Griffith:
In fact, Nancy in your office could tell stories from over the years.
One other thing about making the priority of time with one another. I served a church in Charlotte for about five and a half years, and Bill was coming down to preach at the Massanetta Springs Bible Conference. Well, that's crossing the Mason Dixon border, so it's in the neighborhood. I don't know how far away it was, but I went up and I was so glad I did, because poor Meg and Katie were absolutely miserable about being there. At least Uncle Guy could be with them. Finding time to spend with one another is important.
And this gets to that last quality. We want to talk about it that there's nothing “useful” about friendship.
Bill Carter:
Say more about that.
Guy Griffith:
Friendship means I'm not interested in using the other for selfish purposes, for nothing reductive or manipulative. The purpose is solely to enjoy one another.
Bill Carter:
Here’s one of the things we've decided to do this summer, I challenged Guy by sending him a copy of a book that I owned, a collection of sermons by Eugene Peterson. I said, “Let's read this together this summer.” One day he calls me up and says, “Turn to page 19, a sermon about Abraham being the friend of God.” And what did you find there?
Guy Griffith:
Two
things I'll read out of it that really captured my mind. What's unusual about
Abraham and Moses is that they are called friends of God in the Old Testament.
And Peterson writes,
Here is another element contained in the word friend. Friend is totally about the relationship, not a function. There's an everyday ordinary quality to it. We find ourselves friends with people not for what they can do for us, but simply for who they are. And if we suspect we're being singled out for someone's friendship, because of what we can do for that person - social privilege, economic advantage, et cetera – we are apt, and rightly so, to resent it. God was not Abraham's friend who ordered to network with him. And there was no hint in the story that Abraham considered God's friendship an invitation into the world of celebrities. Abraham found every day, practical ways to express appreciation or loyalty to God, and God found everyday practical ways to express appreciate and loyalty to Abraham. Abraham was not in love with a dream or aspiring after an ideal. He was God's friend, period. The evidence? The relationship was worked out on journeys and at water holes.[3]
And
then this:
This is how friendship works. Friends remember one another in both common and uncommon ways. They call one another at the spur of the moment. They remember special days. They visit simply for the pleasure of the others' company. Things don't have to get done in friendship. Friendship is not a way of accomplishing something but a way of being with another in which we become more authentically ourselves.[4]
I think that's perfect.
Bill Carter:
It is. So on this unusual sermon today, we reflect on a forty-year friendship. We do it not just to tell our story, but to spark you to reflect on your stories, that you might consider your friendships, your relationships, those people who are on your speed dial. They are bound to you with hoops of steel. This is the “fullness of life” that Jesus invites us into.
Guy Griffith:
During my sabbatical time, I’ve been thinking of friendship as a sacrament. In our Protestant tradition, we say we only have two sacraments, baptism and the Lord’s Supper. The standard for a sacrament is Jesus did them and told his folks, “You do them too.”
I want to argue that, if a sacrament is a means of grace, it's a way we experience God's grace. Then friendship should be included as a sacrament, too. Jesus was a friend. And as John's Gospel tells us, he told his friends to be friends as well. And we experience God's love, this great gift of God's presence. “No one can see God,” scripture says, “except in one another.” And so we experience God's grace in these gifts of friendship, as I have with you for forty years.
Bill Carter:
And lest we forget it, here is the proverb for today: “A friend loves at all times and a brother is born for adversity.” Thank God for that. Amen.
[1] Frederick Buechner, The Sacred
Journey (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1982) 70.
[2] C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1960) 96.
[3]
Eugene H. Peterson, “Friend of God,” As Kingfishers Catch Fire (Colorado
Springs: Waterbrook, 2017) 19.
[4] Ibid,
pp. 19-20.
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