Sermon: Annual Friends Service

Preacher:

Nicholas Thistlethwaite

Date:

Sunday 8th July 2012

Service:

Eucharist

Readings:

John 15:15

Friendship is something we easily take for granted.  It is both less immediately exciting, and less newsworthy, than the torrid relationships of footballers and television celebrities, film stars and members of the royal family.  The passion of first love, and the blossoming of a romance, are the stuff of poetry, drama, and grand opera.  We think less, and talk less, about their quieter – yet often more enduring – counterpart: friendship.

           In doing so we are missing something important.  For friendship is a metaphor for the Christian’s relationship with God.

           Jesus has this to say to his disciples:

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.  (John 15: 15)

The relationship Jesus describes in this verse from St John’s Gospel is one of privilege.  The servant simply does as he is told because that is the lot of a servant or slave: they don’t know, and they don’t need to know, why they are ordered to do something.  But to friends, all is revealed: they are taken into the confidence of the master: they share his understanding, know his purpose and are trusted to cooperate with his plans.

           That note of trustworthiness (loyalty) is one of the main characteristics of friendship.  We reveal ourselves to another person because we trust them.  Because we have come to believe that they have our good at heart and share our values, our defensiveness falls away, and we feel able to disclose privileged information (confidences) about ourselves with them.  Aelred of Rievaulx, a Cistercian monk who lived in the twelfth century, was one of comparatively few Christian authors to write about friendship, and he had this to say:

There is nothing more praiseworthy in friendship than loyalty, which seems to be its nurse and guardian.  It proves itself a true companion in all things – adverse and prosperous, joyful and sad, pleasing and bitter – beholding with the same eye the humble and the lofty, the poor and the rich, the strong and the weak, the healthy and the infirm.  A truly loyal friend sees nothing in his friend but his heart.  (Celebrating the Seasons, 364)   

This, in other words, is not a fair-weather friend, but (as Harpo Marx put it) ‘a foul-weather friend’: someone who sees beyond the outer circumstances; someone who isn’t influenced in their affection by our fortune or misfortune; someone who knows us as we are, and yet remains loyal and utterly reliable.

           That lack of guile is another characteristic of friendship.  A true friend is honest.  In Exodus we read that God used to speak to Moses ‘face to face, as a man speaks to his friend’ (33:11).  The image is naïve, for who can look upon God and live, but the writer is seeking to communicate the frankness, candour and honesty of the relationship between God and his servant.  In a rather different way, Jesus communicates with his disciples – who hence become friends – making known to them ‘everything that I have heard from my Father’, as we heard a moment ago.  Often, the value of a friendship lies in the complete honesty that is woven into the relationship.  Dissimulation, the need to keep up appearances, can be set aside.  When Queen Elizabeth I appointed William Cecil as Secretary to the Privy Council (the Elizabethan equivalent of Prime Minister) she famously told him: ‘This judgement I have of you, that you will not be corrupted with any manner of gift, and that you will be faithful to the state, and that without respect of my private will you will give me that counsel that you think best’.  Despite their inequality of status, this was the beginning of an honest and at times tempestuous friendship which – almost alone among Elizabeth’s relationships with her councillors – was characterised by sometimes uncomfortable honesty; true friendship indeed.    

           Generosity is the third attribute.  Jesus tells a story about a man who goes knocking on his friend’s door at midnight seeking three loaves of bread: another friend has turned up unexpectedly, and his larder is bare.  He may have misjudged the strength of his friendship: the supposed friend has gone to bed and is reluctant to get up and help him; but he has not misjudged the quality of friendship.  Friendship presupposes generosity: a willingness to help.  In a friendship, the care and affection we have for another means that we want to help: it isn’t a matter of selfish calculation but of generous impulse.  Generosity is a movement of the heart, not of the head.  As a modern writer expressed it, ‘Too many people have decided to do without generosity in order to practise charity’.  By contrast, that movement of the heart is a response to Jesus’s great commandment, ‘that you love one another as I have loved you’ (John 15:12).  In practising that, we learn both the costliness and the reward of friendship.

           We said earlier that friendship is a metaphor for the Christian’s relationship with God.  The former Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Michael Ramsey, wrote this:

The fellowship with God for which man is made is indeed described in Holy Scripture in terms of friendship; God is the Friend of man; man is to be the friend of God, but it is a friendship shot through with awe, dependence, and the realisation of creatureliness.  (Love’s redeeming work, 669)

Friendship changes us because we become a little like the friend in our sympathies, our humour, our preoccupations.  It differs from the passionate identification with another in marriage, but the affection that leads to this commonality of interests and outlooks is not entirely unrelated to it.  The saints are described as the ‘friends of God’ precisely because in their otherness they reflect the holiness of God.  The closer their identification with God – the deeper their friendship with him – the more authentically God is revealed to others.    

Today, we give thanks for the work of the Friends of Guildford Cathedral.  Most cathedrals and greater churches have their Friends.  They represent a constituency that may include, but also reaches out beyond, the regular congregation, bringing together those who may be occasional worshippers, people who have past associations, or just people who are appreciative of the building or the music and want to offer practical support.  Like all true friends, they are drawn by that ‘commonality of interests’ which we mentioned a moment ago.  In this instance, the focus is the Cathedral building, its completion, and its adornment.

           Over the years, we have been indebted to the Friends in all sorts of ways.  They paid for the great curtain which hangs behind the High Altar, for the sculptures on the west front, and (last year) for the new font and nave altar.  They have also helped us in less conspicuous ways, with support for choristers and repairs to the building.  We know we can turn to them with confidence, as to any true friend, and if they can help, they will.  For this we are profoundly grateful.

We thank all our friends – but there is one friend in particular that we remember today.

I spoke of trustworthiness, honesty and generosity being characteristic of friends.  They were certainly qualities that we all recognised in Colin Kirkland.  For many years a trustee of the Friends of Guildford Cathedral, Colin was also a member of the Guild of Stewards from 1961, Chief Steward from 1994, and the first lay member of the reconstituted Cathedral Chapter in 2003.  He had a distinguished professional career in engineering, detailed in a lengthy tribute in the Times following his untimely death in 2005, most notably as technical director of Eurotunnel between 1985 and 1991.  For more than forty years, Colin was an exceptional friend to the Cathedral: trustworthy, as someone to whom confidences and tasks could be entrusted; honest in giving the best advice he could; generous in every way.  As his obituary expressed it, Colin ‘gave an example of integrity, infectious      enthusiasm for all he turned his hand to, and concern for those he worked with’.

For many years, Colin guided the Friends and ensured that their support for the Cathedral was effectively targeted where it was most needed.  As a thanksgiving for his life and work, the Friends have donated the wooden flower stands which have done so much to enhance the presentation of the flower arrangements that we enjoy week by week, and so I will now dedicate them to the glory of God and with a thanksgiving for Colin.