"I Wouldn't Say This If I Wasn't Your Friend: Friends as Prophets"

Rev. Tony Lorenzen

First Parish Church in Weston, MA

Sunday, July 22, 2007

Copyright, © Tony Lorenzen, 2007

Lesson: Amos 8:1-8

Gospel: Luke 4:16-20

Responsive Reading: Micah 6:6-8

Minister: With what shall I come before the Lord,

and bow myself before God on high?

People: Shall I come before him with burnt-offerings,

with calves a year old?

Minister: Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams,

with tens of thousands of rivers of oil?

People: Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression,

the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?

Minister: He has told you, O mortal, what is good;

and what does the Lord require of you

People: but to do justice, and to love kindness,

and to walk humbly with your God?

This is the third sermon in my four part series on friendship as spiritual practice based on the work of Pastoral Psychologist Robert J. Wicks. I've told you about friends as Harassers -- who nag you into humility when you're full of yourself and friends as Cheerleaders -- who tell you can do it and pick you up and carry you when you can't. Today, I'm going to tell you about friends as prophets -- the friend who tells you what you don't want to hear, but need to hear, the friend who begins with, "I wouldn't say this if I wasn't your friend."

One of my favorite I-wouldn't-tell-you-this-if-I-wasn't-your-friend moments comes from the film, Good Will Hunting. Ben Affleck's character is Chuckie, best friend to Matt Damon's character Will Hunting. Will is a late-adolescent genius, with a complimentary photographic memory and a history of child abuse who was raised in foster homes. He's doing high-level graduate school combinatorial mathematics with a famous MIT professor and seeing a counselor played by Robin Williams per court order to keep himself out of jail for assaulting a police officer.

Late in the film, after Will brushes off yet another job offer from the MIT professor, Will and Chuckie are working on a construction site and Chuckie asks Will about the latest job which would bring Will a lot of money, doing math for a living. Will tells Chuckie he turned down another job "doing long division for the next fifty years." Chuckie informs him that, "at least you'd make some nice bank," and more importantly, "it's a way outta here."

Will replies:

"What do I want a way outta here for?

I want to live here the rest of my

life. I want to be your next door

neighbor. I want to take our kids to

little league together up Foley Field"

Chuckie answers him (I'm editing a bit for church):

Look, you're my best friend, so don't

take this the wrong way, but in 20

years, if you're livin' next door to

me, comin' over watchin' the

Patriots' games and still workin'

construction, I'll kill you.

And that's not a threat, that's a fact. I'll kill you.

Will asks Chuckie what he's talking about and Chuckie tries to tell Will that Will's "got something none of us have," but Will cuts him off not wanting to hear any, "I owe it to myself talk," but Chuckie cuts Will off right back and tells Will:

No. You owe it to me. Tomorrow

I'm gonna wake up and I'll be fifty

and I'll still be doin' this. And

that's all right 'cause I'm gonna make

a run at it.

But you, you're sittin' on a winning

lottery ticket and you're too much of

a [coward] to cash it in. And that's

bull- 'cause I'd do anything to

have what you got! And so would any

of these guys. It'd be an insult

to us if you're still here in twenty

years.

Will says to him:

You don't know that.

And Chuckie tells him:

Let me tell you what I do know. Every

day I come by to pick you up, and we

go out drinkin' or whatever and we

have a few laughs. But you know what

the best part of my day is? The ten

seconds before I knock on your door

'cause I let myself think I might get

there, and you'd be gone. I'd knock

on the door and you wouldn't be there.

You just left. Now, I don't know much.

But I know that.

Chuckie speaks with the prophet's voice, telling Will what he needs to hear, not what we wants to hear. That's a prophet!

Ralph Waldo Emerson would have approved of Chuckie Sullivan from Southie. In his essay on friendship, Emerson tells us that two elements go into the composition of friendship. The second element Emerson mentions is tenderness, but the first is truth. Emerson writes:

"A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud. I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and so equal that I may drop even those undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second thought, which men never put off, and may deal with him with the simplicity and wholeness with which one chemical atom meets another." -- Today we call it being real. Emerson continues -- "Sincerity is the luxury allowed, like diadems and authority, only to the highest rank; that being permitted to speak truth as having none above it to court or conform unto. Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person hypocrisy begins." [1]

Emerson wants friends to be able to be blunt when necessary, to cut through the niceties when appropriate, to just be able to tell it like it is without fear of losing face, or our approval or our love whatever the cost. If we have to count the cost it's not worth being our friend, truth is a requirement. Yes, we still need the Cheerleader's voice in our lives, someone to tell us we're okay, that it's always going to be all right, to keep us smiling and when needed to pick us up and carry us, but if we listen only to this voice, we'll think we can do no wrong and we never have to do the hard work ourselves. We need the prophet for balance and perspective. As Emerson says, "Better be a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo." [2] Chuckie Sullivan would drink to that at the L Street Tavern in Southie.

Friends serve as prophets, according to Robert Wicks, by challenging us to look at ourselves and ask "to what am I listening when I form my attitudes and take my actions each day." [3] Wicks argues that in a world where there is an overwhelming "glut of negativity" in the media telling us that all is lost, evil manifests itself as despair. Wicks writes: "The evil of omission is not the failure to do impressive little things for each other and God. Rather, the evil of omission is not doing the little things that we are capable of, the small things God may be calling us to do." [4]

We all fall into this trap. People have been falling into it for a very long time. Micah spoke to it. God isn't asking us to do grand things so much, or to do grand things for each other. What God requires and what we need to do for each other is simple: do justice, love mercy, walk humbly with God. Mother Teresa put it this way: "We can do no great things, only small things with great love."

"The question prophets present to us is this," writes Robert Wicks, "Are we doing what we can?"

I left the Catholic Church in June of 2003 for a variety of reasons: among them my views on Jesus, the trinity, Mary, homosexuality, the role of women in the church and human sexuality all differed from official church teachings. At the time I was a theology teacher in a Catholic high school so leaving the church meant leaving my job. I ran a volunteer program and then worked as a substitute teacher. I began the process of becoming certified to teach English in public high schools.

During this time period I also joined First Church Unitarian Universalist in Leominster. I had many talks with Rev. Susan Suchocki-Brown about what I was doing with my life and how I would make a living. One day she looked across her desk at me and said, "You've got the qualifications, haven't you ever thought of just becoming a minister?"

I told her, "Yeah, I've thought about it."

"You should think some more," she said.

I did think some more. Here I am.

I didn't want to see or hear what I knew in my heart I should do. I didn't want to face the possibility of another church telling me I couldn't, shouldn't be ordained. I had to be called to do what I was called to do. The prophet read the signs of the times and made the critique. Here I am preaching.

How do you know when a prophet's voice is real? When should the prophetic voice in your life be heeded? When should you listen to the friend calling you to attention? The answer to this question in ancient Israel was that a prophet's message was true when the prophecy came to pass. I don't think we need to, nor can we afford to wait so long in our lives. We need to be more active agents in taking care of our well being, and I think we have advance clues as to the legitimacy of the prophetic voice in our lives -- remember the prophet in our life points us towards God, points us toward what's whole and good and sacred.

Today's Gospel reading gives us most of the major clues we need about deciphering the authentic prophetic voices in our lives. Jesus stands in the synagogue in Luke's story and reads from the prophet Isaiah about what God has anointed him to do. What has God anointed Jesus to do? What all prophets do:

Announce good news to the poor, proclaim release to prisoners, recovery of sight to the blind, set broken victims free and proclaim the Lord's favor.

It's not that long a list, but have prophets really done anything else in any context? The poor may be financially poor, or poor in other ways. Prisoners may be literally in jail or imprisoned in dungeons of their own psychological, spiritual and social making, and those who are blind may have eyes that physically function. People may be broken in so many ways. The Lord's favor is proclaimed for them all. Thus says the Lord. What the prophetic voice points to is a way to new life.

Robert Wicks uses the story of the Jesus meeting the Samaritan woman at the well to illustrate how the prophetic voice directs us to life giving and sustaining things on our journey.

A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, "Give me a drink."

The Samaritan woman said to him, "How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria? -- Jews and Samaritans just weren't friends then.

Jesus answered her, "If you knew the gift of God and who it is that is saying to you, 'Give me a drink' you would have asked him and he would have given you living water."

Jesus said to her, "everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life."

The woman said to him, "Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water."

For Wicks this story points to the central idea that prophetic voices in our lives direct us to living water. Friends who play the prophetic role for us call us to that which gives life; prophetic friends call us to what is life-giving in our own lives. It's astonishing how easy it is for us to fall into ruts that are life-deadening at times. Remember the anonymous quote from the first week of this series, "a friend is a person who knows the song in your heart and can sing it back to you when you've forgotten how it goes," -- the prophetic voices in our lives are the choir directors in this regard.

I'll leave you this morning with a few thoughts, reflections and exercises from Robert Wicks -some things to ponder about who plays the prophetic role in your own life and how you speak to others in a prophetic voice.

Wicks asks us these questions:

* Who in your life helps to bring to the surface inner conflicts or hidden tensions, and how does he or she do this?

* If there is no one in your life who serves as a prophet, what sources -- worship, books, public figures, and so on -- speak to you in a prophetic way?

* A prophet is someone who points. What qualities have you been given that allow you to point toward God?

* A prophet is someone who offers us a mirror to see into ourselves. How do you do that for your friends?

* o When you speak as a prophet to a friend, do your words direct the other to his or her real need or do they reflect your own desires and needs in the relationship? [5]

Now go out and prophesy and listen to the prophetic voices in your lives and remember, I wouldn't have told you all this if I wasn't your friend.

_________________________________________________________________________

[1] Emerson, Ralph Waldo, "Friendship" 1841 from The Essential Writing of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Brooks Atkinson, Ed. Modern Library/Random House, New York, 2000. p. 207.

[2] Ibid., p. 210.

[3] Wicks, Robert J., A Circle of Friends, p. 51.

[4] Ibid., p. 51.

[5] Wicks, Robert J., A Circle of Friends, pp. 57-59.