Thoughts on Losing a Friend
John
15:12-15
On the event of Bob London’s death
Bob
London believed in a careful lesson plan, even though he knew the Holy Spirit
might come to disrupt it. In light of his detailed plans for his memorial
service, I told him that the Spirit had suggested a disruption to me. That was
the addition of a scripture text that Bob should have included but didn’t. As
Jesus prepares to depart his disciples, he speaks these words from the 15th chapter of John’s gospel:
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.
It
is an extraordinary passage, for Jesus suggests a shift from power to equality.
No longer is he the “Master” (capital “M”) with servants (small “s”). Now the Lord
of life declares we are his friends, and that he is our friend. There is
mutuality. Everybody stands on the same level ground. Nobody is better than
anybody else. All are loved equally.
This
relationship is possible because Jesus steps down from heaven. That is the
mission of God according to John’s Gospel. The One through whom all things were
made takes his place among those he has made. He lays down his divine life out
of self-giving love, to the end that all people might be full of his life. This
move from “on high” to “side by side” is the essence of friendship. You stand
side by side with your friends.
The
first day that we met was the first day that I began work as a pastor. He was pulling
boxes out of his car for a workshop at my first church, handed one to me, and
said, “Here, kid, carry this.” Then he began to traipse down the sidewalk
assuming I would follow. I never stopped following that man. He invited me to grow as a pastor, insisting
that teaching was essential to the church’s work. He led me to youth events,
pastors’ groups, and enlarged my understanding of confirmation, youth ministry,
and officer training. Yet he never did this from a stance of superiority. We
always stood on level ground as friends.
Once
I was the preacher at the Synod youth conference and Bob was my roommate. By
the second day, I had a major ear infection and could not stand longer than
thirty minutes. “That’s how long the worship services should be,” he affirmed.
In between each service, he brought me soup. He brought every meal to me, and
then prayed that the food would be blessed, and I would stand and get off my
bed, just like all the paralytics that Jesus healed. Both prayers were
answered.
Bob
could work a crowd using only a tennis ball. He could re-ignite any group that
lost its way. He could take a group of self-absorbed college students and
transform them into a church camp staff. He could pull fearful adults off the
sidelines and help them befriend seasonal farm workers.
The
key to it was Bob’s spiritual gift of encouragement. People young and old were
touched by his ability to take them seriously, just as they were. Together we
took teenagers to wilderness camps and Ground Zero, to soup kitchens and
cathedrals. He invited me to join him as a caregiver for an annual retreat for
people with disabilities and then requested me to teach the Gospel of Mark to these
people who could neither hear nor see. Once we paused to pray together for a
lady who was sleeping on a Philadelphia subway grate. Immediately we stepped
inside a swanky hotel to watch an expensive ice sculpture melt at a black tie
reception, and we paused to pray again. My soul has been enlarged because of
the size of that man’s heart.
Bob
London could persevere like a hound dog. He hunted down ministers who didn’t
keep current to make sure they knew about changes in church curriculum,
sometime dragging me along as his advocate. One time he chased down a paper
trail and discovered someone had embezzled money from Lehigh Presbytery. When
he worked as a synod education consultant, he was capable of working two
forty-hour jobs each week, one in each presbytery. I know this, because I took
part in two of his personnel reviews. He could exhilarate you and exhaust you
in the same moment.
When
I first expressed an interest in pursuing a call as the pastor of the Clarks
Summit church, Bob sneaked me into town for a full tour, long before any
paperwork was prepared or interviews arranged. After the call went through some
time later, we became partners in Gospel Subversion. He prayed for me, I nudged
him back, and neither of us would let the other one rest in complacency. That
was the shape of our friendship.
We had our moments, occasionally knocking
heads but always concluding with a hug and a prayer. Sometimes for the sake of
emphasis he would use that special word of Jesus, and the Tulsa accent would
leak out: “friend” (pronounced in two syllables: fray-end). But neither of us needed to name it. We were friends. Thanks
to our friend Jesus, we shall be friends forever.
I
suppose someone who ran so hard would run out of breath one day; all of us
will. But it is a line from St. Hildegard of Bingen that makes me remember my
friend best: “I am a feather on the breath of God.” That is what Bob has been
to me: a beautiful rainbow plume from the wing of the Holy Spirit. He floated
on the gracious Breath of Christ, our Saving Friend. Now we commend him to
God’s arms.
