The Telos of Hope
Isaiah 41:8–10; Revelation 21:1–5; John 15:12–17
A Homily for Hope College Faculty & Staff Worship, August 26, 2022
I. August
It’s August. This is the month that inaugurates the end of some things. In August, I watch the last pockets of uninterrupted time drain out of my calendar. August means my summer is over. It’s a sadness to know that the season of long light is slowly begin to constrict into the narrow confines of incremental darkness.
It’s August. August also, means, for me the end of the wedding season. The season begins in May and runs through about the middle of August. As you can imagine, I go to a lot of weddings. Which means, I hear a lot of speeches. Friends, if you ever needed an argument for the benefit of a liberal arts education, with a mandatory course in rhetoric, it is listening to wedding speeches! My Lord, the things you hear!
Despite some tortured uses of the English language, I like wedding speeches. I like to hear friends and family tell stories, and share their affection for the bride and groom. The wedding speech is one of the last places where it is publicly acceptable to speak from the heart. Family and friends are given permission - at least for a moment - to say the things that we often fail to articulate in our normal day-to-day conversations. At the wedding, we say the things that lie beneath the surface. This is always where the best stuff is located!
I was at a wedding a few weeks ago, and a recent Hope alum, Josh, got up to speak on behalf of his best friend to Sam. Josh said, “Coming out of High School, I was awkward. It was a struggle for me, to connect with people. I didn’t have a lot of friends. Any. When I got accepted to Hope, and decided to go – I prayed, “God, help me to make a friend – just one.” Josh said his biggest hope was that at the end of college he would know what it is to experience a true friendship. He said, simply, “Sam, thank you for being my friend!”
That got me. This was a pure and generous word. Rare. What Josh wanted more than anything when going to college, what he wanted at the end of his Hope experience, was not just a degree, or a job, he wanted a friend.
II. They are Coming
It made me think about August in a new way. It’s true, August is the end of somethings, but it is also the beginning of another. Today, August 25th, we begin, again, a fresh school year. Our campus is still wet with dew – and before us is an undefined future – a future that welcomes a new generation of Hope students. Tomorrow nearly 1,000 freshman and transfer students are coming to Hope for the first time! (One of our largest freshman class ever - yes? Let’s give our admissions team some love!)
They are coming. Tomorrow! We can’t stop it if we wanted too! As we speak, students are folding up worn sweatshirts from their high-school proms. They are packing up black, and brown, and red suitcases filled with kit from Target, Meyers, & Bed Bath & Beyond. They are also packing with them hope. I can’t help but wonder if one of the biggest hopes they are packing in their hearts is for the gift of a true friend. I know – I know – they are coming here to study and learn, choose a major, compete for banners, create, perform in concerts, and ask the big questions, and on and on – but at the end of the day – I wonder if the unnamed hope – the hope just below the surface – is the desire to find a true friend?
Each desires a friend who will see who they truly are; a friend who they laugh with; a friend who will challenge them, and bring out their best; a friend who will encourage, challenge, and inspire them. They are coming to Hope with lots of hopes, and one of them, deep down, is the hope to make and be a friend who will be strong and true.
I imagine they are not alone. I’m guessing it is also true of you. I know it is true for me. I carry with me into this year – into this storied campus –the hope that this will be a community where I can experience the kind of friendship that is worthy of an amen – a friendship that gives my life a steady direction and sustaining purpose as we pursue a shared mission in Christ. I’m guessing that our shared hope for Hope is to go to work not just to do a job, but to do our jobs within a geography of friendship.
Right here – right now - is an amazing assembly of talent! Gathered here are some brilliant minds – (and Schoony! Though I’ll say this - his heart has an intelligence you can’t earn with a PhD! This man knows how to love people!) – Gathered here are those with organizational brilliance – coaches who inspire – selfless staff who go not one but two miles – here among us are teachers who change lives – researchers who advance new insight and knowledge. It’s humbling, its beautiful, this gathering of Hope’s faculty and staff! Each of you could be in a lot of places – and you choose Hope – and allow Hope to choose you! You are here, I know for something more than just a job. And I bet all the money in my pockets, against all the money in your pockets, that one of the reasons you are here in this place is because of the relationships and friendships you enjoy – and or are hoping to make!
III. What we all Need
Friendship is what we all desire and what we all need – you, me, our students. It’s ironic isn’t it. In an age when we have more technologies, gadgets, platforms, and opportunities to connect, it’s easy to feel more disconnected from each other than ever? Never has friendship seemed more important for our lives. Which is maybe why it has been a recent and frequent theme in the NYT, WSJ, and periodicals like Comment Magazine and the Atlantic monthly. Research even proves it’s significance. For example, social-scientist Roben Dunbar, in his book Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships – argues, that the research says “friendship may be the most important factor in our lives for experiencing lasting fulfillment, health, and longevity of life. He goes so far to say, “that friendship makes more of a difference for your overall health, than does your diet, whether you smoke or drink, fail to exercise regularly, or eat poorly.” That’s amazing! Having friends, more any other factor, contributes to your overall health – and well-being![1] (I can’t wait to tell this to Kristen! Don’t worry love about my health I got me some friends!)
Of course this is not necessarily a new insight. For some of the best minds that speak to us through the canyons of time have known friendship to be the main ingredient to the good-life! To the ancients, friendship seemed the happiest and most fully human of all loves; to have and be a friend has been celebrated as the crown of life and the school of virtue. Some of the best minds that have preceded us regarded Friendship as something that raised us almost above humanity. C.S. Lewis once wrote “This (Friendship) alone, of all the loves, seems to raise you to the level of gods or angels.”[2]
Maybe we desire Friendship, in our core, because we know, sense, intuit that we were not meant to walk alone? We have a kind of tacit sixth-sense that it is in friendship that we experience the essence of a well-lived life. And I can’t help but wonder if friendship is possibly the key we need to unlock Hope College to be the learning community – the beloved community - we all want to experience? Pursuing friendship changes how we see each other – if you are a friend, you’re not a dot on a graph, a problem to solve, or a constituency to win over. If you are a friend, then you are a person to love! Maybe what we need are fewer studies, surveys, and data about each other, and simply more time getting to know each other?
Think on it…what if Hope was a school whose excellence is defined not only by the quality of a core curriculum, but by the excellence of our core friendships? How might friendship reframe our shared expectations and how we practice our virtues of discourse? How might friendship help our mission to raise up leaders for a global society in the context of the historic Christina faith? Taking time for friendship puts learning in a relational gymnasium where the muscles of virtue can be exercised daily. Friendship nurtures conversation. Friendship practices conflict without polarization. Friendship seeks to honor another’s experience, without nullifying one’s own. A friend sees another’s perspective – their pain – their loves – as a gift to honor. In friendship we become our best selves, as competition, gives way to communion. Maybe this is why Aristotle argued that the end of all virtue is friendship.[3] If all this is true, friendship is a super-power!
If I was to be honest with you, it is through friendship – some of you who are in this room - where I have experienced the best of God’s love. More often than I care to admit, God’s grace has gripped me, less through private devotions, work, or even worship, then it has through my friends who have shown up. Friendship has held my life together at some of the hardest moments.
IV. Jesus Calls us Friends
Maybe this is why Jesus, right before he went to the cross, gathers his disciples and calls them friends! It is a dramatic statement. Jesus – the son of God – the embodiment of God on earth – says, “I no longer call you servants…but friends!” (John 15:15). Jesus redefines their relationship with himself – and with us. This changes everything.
Maybe the reason that Josh, you and I, and all the research, and all the wisdom of the ancients uphold friendship as one of humanities highest gifts, is because friendship is what we were created for? We long for friendship, because we were designed for friendship. A friendship with God! This is why Thomas Aquinas says, “God is our chief friend!”[4] The story of the Triune God, it could be said, is one where God created humanity, in his image, for the joy and pleasure of a friendship with him, with ourselves, each other, and with the world he so loves? Despite our rejection of God, our constant wandering away, God keeps pursuing us - relentlessly – coming into history in the person of Jesus Christ – so that we might be able to have a new life – a friendship - with him – one that will last forever! Maybe this is what Augustine was speaking to when he opens his Confessions, saying “Our heart is restless, until it rests in thee.”[5]
Friendship with Jesus reframes the Christian life. To be called Jesus “friend” means shifting one’s primary focus from working for Jesus, to being with Jesus. To be Jesus friend means sharing his mind, and his heart, and to follow his simple, yet complex command to love each other! “You are my friends if you do what I command.” This is where friendship with Christ is experienced. Friendship with Jesus is a gift of love - a grace - which frees us from thinking our worth, our value, our identity is defined not by what we do for Jesus, but rather, by what Jesus has done for us. Remember that this year when you feel overwhelmed; or you lose a game; or the lecture you give is an iron dove that clanks on the floor!
This is the good-news. Jesus has made it possible to have the friendship we have always longed for, because he has laid down his life for his friends! (John 15:13) A friend has no greater gift to give! Jesus has given it to us! Jesus gives his life, so that we might find life. Jesus pioneers and perfects the way, so that we can find the way. His is the cruciform way that leads all who follow into the expansive geography of the Kingdom of God – where we are given not only a river of fresh hope, but also a new name – a friend of God. Isn’t that what we have, below the surface, always longed for?
On the cross Jesus takes away the sin of the world – destroying once and for all the division – the hostility - between us. In the Father’s resurrection of his Son, Jesus, he inaugurated a new epoch in history - where the power of eternal hope overwhelms the darkest despair – and points us to a day when he will come – again - and like a tender mother – and wipe away every tear from your eye! We will see him face to face – and he will say to you – you are my beloved – you are my friend – now and forever! This is the end – the telos – of hope.
It's August, my friends. The end of summer is upon us. A new year begins. Let us experience what we were made for together! Let us experience what it means to be a community of Hope in friendship with God and with each other! We have no better hope to live into than this!
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Notes:
[1] See Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships (London: Little, Brown, 2021) p. 4-5.
[2] See C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Harvest/JBJ Book: New York, 1960), p.89.
[3] See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Trans. Terence Irwin, (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1985) p.
[4] See Thomas Aquinas, The Summa Theological of St. Thomas Aquinas, 2nd ed., Trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, (New York: Benzinger, 1920) part II-II, on 27.8. Here Thomas revises Aristotle in a more theological context and he argues friendship with God is the basis for his entire system of understanding Christian love of God and neighbor. He argues that friendship is fundamental for social life, justice, and Christian community.
[5] See Augustine, Confessions, Trans. Henry Chadwick, (Oxford, Oxford University Press: 1991) p, 3.
Trygve Johnson is the The Hinga Boersma Dean of the Chapel at Hope College in Holland, MI. He is an ordain minister in the RCA, and is the author of The Preacher as Liturgical Artist (Cascade Press, 2014). He holds a PhD from the University of St. Andrews and is a member of the St. Anselm Fellowship of the Center for Pastor Theologians.
