“We Beheld God’s Glory:

In the Friends of Christ”

John 15:12 – 17

“We beheld God’s GLORY!”

That’s the powerful proclamation of those who witnessed with their own eyes the life of the baby whose birth we celebrate this week. In Jesus, people saw God’s GLORY, which is a wonderful Old Testament word meaning “weightiness” or “gravitas”. To see God’s GLORY is to see some clear evidence that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob – the God of the Bible - is God indeed – the one true God, the Creator of everything, the Source of life itself, and the One to whom we can trust our lives, our children, and our world.

“We beheld God’s GLORY!” they said, and they saw that GLORY in Jesus’ life, in his death, and in his resurrection as we have discussed these past several weeks. And today, we’re going to take a look at another glimpse of God’s GLORY seen in Jesus. We see God’s GLORY in the Body of Christ, the Church!

Now, don’t laugh all at once! You can giggle a bit, but please don’t laugh!

I know what some of you are thinking: if the Church is the clear evidence that God is God, then the existence of God is definitely up for grabs! I mean, have you ever watched the Church in action on cable TV? What is this with all the purple hair and all the gaudy make-up and saying the word “Jesus” in five syllables? Is this the GLORY that convinces the world that God is God? Or maybe the GLORY is found in the Church’s elaborate efforts to protect sexual predators from their victims. Or maybe the GLORY is found in the treasures and wealth the Church preserves in the midst of an impoverished world. Maybe that’s the GLORY the followers of Jesus said they beheld.

Or maybe not.

For many people today – especially the younger generations – the Church is often the reason they DON’T believe in God! “All the Church cares about is money,” some say. “The Church is the single greatest source of guilt and hate in the world,” claim others. “The Church never met a good idea it couldn’t find an ignorant reason to be against,” say many who think the Church lives in the past and is irrelevant to the needs of society today.

Take a look around at the Church. There’s one – or more - on every street corner here in East Tennessee. We have more churches than we have people! And we do because we can’t get along.

GLORY to God in the highest?

And, of course, we all know that the Church is full of hypocrites.

Some time ago, a minister prayed to God over the sinful state of his city. "Lord, most of the people in the city are just plain wicked and have no interest in following you. And the rest of us are having a hard time just holding on!"

Well, God heard the prayer and sent down an angel to investigate. Later the angel reported back to the Lord that, indeed, things were bad, in fact, much worse than the minister had said. 99% of the people were more sinful than the people of Sodom and Gomorrah. The remaining faithful 1% were struggling to keep the faith.

So God considered what to do to help that tiny handful of people who were staying true to the faith in the midst of so much sin. Finally God decided to send a letter of encouragement to just those few who were truly faithful.

Do you know what the letter said? Do you know what the letter said, Bob?

Oh…you didn’t get one either, huh?

Which brings us to the GLORY of God seen in the Church!

The GLORY is found in the sinners who gather there!

Can I ask you to shift your thinking a little bit this morning? For a long time now, when you’ve thought of the Church, the Body of Christ, you’ve probably thought of it mainly as an organizational entity, an institution. And I will say to you right up front that there is little, if any, GLORY to be found in that. The Church as an institution is as corrupt and irrelevant as its worst critics say it is. It is all about power, money, and institutional survival. And those of you who don’t see any GLORY in all that are very perceptive people.

But you and I need to shift our thinking about the Church so we don’t get hung up on a phony idea. The Church that we see all around us, and the Church Jesus imagined are two entirely different things. In fact, in our text from John 15, we can see the contrast.

The people of Jesus’ day, like you and me today, were pretty much forced into a kind of religious institutional servitude. It was the Temple that was most important, and serving it and its needs was the obligation of every person. To be a person of faith largely meant to follow rules and commandments that were designed to keep the Temple secure and strong. So there were rules about tithing that kept the Temple running even while causing the financial ruin of little widows. Work was not to be done on the Sabbath to secure the devotion of every person, even if it meant ignoring a human being who needed help or healing. Women were to keep their mouths shut and stay in the background so as not to interfere with the authority of the men who ran the place, and predatory lending and business practices were endorsed and allowed so long as the Temple got its cut. There was to be no thinking for oneself, no compassion for anyone outside, no option except to blindly obey and follow.

They were servants whose job was to support the institution.

But then one day, this amazing man – Jesus of Nazareth – who some – as I do - believed was the actual human incarnation of God, said these revolutionary words.

“I don’t want you to think of yourselves as servants anymore!”

“From now on, I’m calling you my FRIENDS.”

Wow!

And then Jesus went on to point out the difference between being a servant and being a friend. A servant does not know what his master is doing. A servant relates to the institution only, blindly accepting its authority, and almost robotically obeying its commands. A friend, on the other hand, relates to another FRIEND in a relationship of loving trust. And in the process of being in each others’ presence, those friends get to know each other, and learn from each other, and grow. And in this friendship that Jesus describes, he shows his friends what God is like, and teaches them God’s way, so that they can become over the course of their lifetime truly fruitful, happy, and whole human beings – the people of God!!

To be a servant is to have a religion to follow. To be a friend is to have a relationship in which to live and grow.

So when Jesus thinks of his Church, he does not have in mind by-laws and committees and budgets; he is not thinking of rituals and doctrines and theology; he is not thinking about all the trappings of institutional religious life. When Jesus thinks of the Church, he is thinking about the friends gathered around him.

And if you dare look carefully at the friends of Jesus – the people he gathered to himself – I think you’ll be amazed at what you see!

Who are his friends gathered around his birth at Christmas? Why, an unwed, pregnant teenaged girl named Mary. A confused and reluctant boyfriend named Joe. Some smelly old shepherds who society despised for their lack of culture and religion. And some mysterious strangers from the East who practiced the astrological religion of the Magi.

These were the friends gathered around Jesus at his birth. I think you’ll agree, not one of them would be on any guest list of the Temple.

And who were the friends gathered around Jesus throughout his life? Galilean fishermen, who were disdained by the priests of Jerusalem. Tax collectors. Prostitutes. Doubters. Soldiers. Sinners. I don’t think many of them would be on the Temple’s guest list either.

More than half of Jesus’ friends were women, and many of his friends were considered religiously unclean, like the lepers, and the demonically oppressed, and other castoffs. If the population of that day broke down anything like it does today, it’s possible that around ten percent of Jesus’ friends may have been gay; 16% of them are likely to have suffered with depression; one in thirteen probably battled alcoholism; and almost all them were people of color. The friends Jesus gathered represented several different competing religions, and not a single one of them was a Christian you know, because Christians hadn’t even been invented yet.

And yet, these were the people Jesus referred to as his Church. And that’s how Jesus pictured the Church – as the gathering of all his friends!

And did you ever notice what happened to those sinful, mixed-up, morally defective people as they came together in the friendship of Jesus?

They changed! They were transformed!

Those irreligious shepherds returned to their fields praising God. The Magi worshipped Christ, and went home by another way. The fishermen became fishers OF men. The prostitutes learned self-respect. Tax collectors made restitution for what they’d taken. Doubters became believers, soldiers became peacemakers, and sinners learned to sin no more. There’s even a story about a cold-blooded murderer named Saul who became a great saint called Paul.

The people Jesus gathered in friendship were transformed over the course of their lives into the happy, well-adjusted, healthy, productive people God had created them to be!

And when the people of that day saw it, they could only exclaim:

GLORY…to God in the highest!

So what does all this mean for us in our day? Well, there are a couple of things we need to know.

First of all, every person here today – no matter who you are or where you’re from or what you’ve done with your life – is invited into the friendship of Jesus. You don’t have to have a perfect record. You don’t have to believe everything in advance. In fact, you don’t have to believe anything except that there is a friendship awaiting you. Friendship with Jesus is not something you can earn. It is simply a gift he offers. So all you have to do is to be willing to let him BE your friend, and to let that friendship grow over time, and to be open to learning from him. If you’re concerned about having to follow a bunch of religious rules you don’t understand, John 15 assures us we don’t. Only one commandment applies to the friends of Jesus. In John 15:12 he says, “My command is this: Love one another as I have loved you.” Period.

I’ve seen the power of this friendship throughout the course of my ministry – in people like Richard who was a henchman for the mob, but became a tender and loving father and dad through a friendship with Jesus - in people like Dan whose alcoholism stripped him of everything, but whose friendship with Jesus gave him back his life and his dignity – in people like Nelly who grew up and was married and had three beautiful children, but then later in life heard a calling to ministry and now is ready to graduate from seminary, all because of the friendship of Jesus – in people like Teddy who battled mental illness so deep that he couldn’t find a place to belong anywhere, except in a church family that practiced the friendship of Jesus – in people like Joy and Fran who have suffered many tragedies, but who have found the strength to go on, and powerful gifts for helping others, through friendship with Jesus. It isn’t an instant fix, you know. Friendship never is. But over the course of a lifetime, friendship with Jesus transforms us into people we never believed we could become! I hope you’ll accept his invitation to friendship.

And second, there is a message for the Church here. We must get back to being more of an other-serving community of Christian friendship and less of a self-serving religious institution. And in this day and time, when so much of the focus of Christian churches and other religious bodies seems to be turned on what we are against and who we do not accept and need to keep out, there need to arise churches that dare to believe in the message of Christmas, and to follow the Christ born in Bethlehem’s stable. The welcoming arms of the Church must always be as wide as the friendship extended to the world by Christ. To narrow that welcome is to deny Christ. To open those arms is to embrace Christmas!

Listen today to the voices of all those people – shepherds, wise men, pregnant teenagers, confused husbands, fishermen, prostitutes, tax collectors, lepers, demon-possessed, atheists, doubters, soldiers, and even cold-blooded murderers like Saul who became the great St. Paul.

Can you hear their voices this morning?

“We beheld God’s GLORY!”

Now you know why.

And may you see God’s GLORY, too, in Jesus Christ our Lord.