I want to start out by reading an anonymous poem called “Friendship”:
Friendship is a priceless gift that cannot be bought or sold
But its value is far greater than a mountain of gold
For gold is cold and lifeless
It can neither see nor hear
And in times of trouble it is powerless to cheer
It has no ears to listen
No heart to understand
It cannot bring you comfort or reach out a helping hand
So when you feel down and need a lift
One of the best things to do to make amends isn’t diamonds,
pearls, or riches …
But the of love of real true friends.
Amen … that’s nice isn’t it? Here’s a rendition on friendship that might be a bit more familiar to you:
Thank you for being a friend
Traveled down the road and back again
Your heart is true
You’re a friend and a confidant
And if you threw a party
Invited everyone you knew
You would see, the biggest gift would be from me
And the care attached would say …
[Encourage people to sing …]
Thank you for being a friend.
Amen! Of course, most, if not all of you recognize that as the theme song from “The Golden Girls.”
The ancient Greeks had four different words for love. Wouldn’t it be great if we had four different words to describe friendship? Geoffrey Greif did exactly that in his book “Buddy System” (2008; Oxford University Press.).
First … there are “contact” friends … or what he calls “just” friends. These are people that you see around … the people that you see or come into contact with on a somewhat regular basis … a neighbor or someone you bump into at your child’s school activities … maybe someone you see or sit near at church on Sunday. You enjoy their company, but you have no desire to socialize with them outside of certain contexts.
The next level of friend is the “casual” friend … or what Greif calls a “rust” friend. This is a person, or persons, whom you’ve known for a long time. You share common interests but you are probably not going to get any closer to that person unless something changes.
Greif calls third level friends “close” friends or a “trust” friends. A “trust” friend is someone who shows integrity … someone you feel comfortable to be with … someone that you’re always glad to see. They are someone you’d like to get closer to if you had the time or opportunity.
Got it so far?
We have “just” friends … “rust” friends … “trust” friends and the, the fourth level of friend is “must” friends. These are the friends who make up your inner circle … your committed friends. This is someone you can count on when something big happens in your life … someone who supports you and sticks with you through thick and thin. This is a person who knows you … someone you trust enough to confront you when you’re doing something wrong … someone who points you in the right direction when you get off track. They are a rare commodity in life and you are blessed if you have one or two committed “must” friends in your life … amen?
How do you know which of your friends are “just” friends, “rust” friends, “trust” friends, or “must” friends? How do you know if your friend is a contact friend, a casual friend, a close friend, or a committed friend? Ask them to help you move, amen? I heard a comedian once say that he had 300 friends on Facebook … how many do you think showed up when he asked them to help him move?
Well … as the Apostle Paul found out … let a disaster tear your life apart and you’ll figure out who your real friends are pretty quick, amen? When you read Paul’s letters in the New Testament it quickly becomes apparent that Paul was a man with many friends. At the end of Paul’s epistle … or letter … to the Church in Rome, for example, Paul mentions 34 people by name.
We get a rare and insightful look into the heart and soul of Paul in one of his most personal letters. His two letters … 1st and 2nd Timothy … were written to a dear friend of his who was a young man … by the name of Timothy … who was just starting out on his career as a pastor of a church or the church in the city Ephesus. In 2nd Timothy … known as Paul’s “last will and testament” … the Apostle Paul pours out what’s in his heart … his pain, his anguish, his fear … to his friend and pupil Timothy … whom he calls his “beloved child” (2nd Timothy 1:2).
In verse 9 of chapter 4, Paul cries out to Timothy: “Do your best to come to me … soon!” This is Paul … the eternal encourager … crying out for help. Paul … who had been exiled, beaten, stoned, shipwrecked, nearly drowned, cold, hungry, thirsty, attacked by robbers, lead before rulers and governors in chains, imprisoned countless times. Not once do I recall Paul calling for help in any of his other letters. When he was in prison in Philippi, he never asked for a bondsmen … instead, he prayed and sang praises to God … and the jailer and the jailer’s family got saved. Usually Paul was the one to minimize his suffering, asking his followers and friends not to worry about him as he was in God’s hand and under God’s protection. In fact, he would tell his friends and followers that he was praying for them rather than asking them to pray for him.
Paul’s cry to Timothy is not about his physical condition. As I said, he had been beaten and abused many, many times without complaining. Paul’s cry is a combination of suffering … partly from the discomfort of his physical condition, partly from the ghastly treatment he was receiving in prison … and partly from the fact that he had been deserted by so many of his friends in his time of greatest need.
Paul was writing to Timothy from the Mamertine Prison in Rome … grimly referred to by the locals as “The House of Darkness.” In Casearia Philippi, I saw a cell similar to the one that Paul was put in in Mamertine. When I talk about a prison cell, you probably picture one of our modern prison cells … you know, like the ones you see in the movies … a window with bars, maybe bars across the front of the cell or a big, heavy metal door with a slot and a window. That’s not what the cells looked like in Paul’s day. They were basically pits covered with a lid … no window … no doors … hence the description of Mamertine as “The House of Darkness.” Because they had no doors or windows, these pits were dark, damp, and reeked of filth and pestilence.
Prisoners in the ancient world were rarely sent to places like this for punishment. Rather, “prisons” typically served as holding cells or detention centers where prisoners awaited trial or execution (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mamertine_Prison).
Prison was nothing new to Paul … but this time it was different. In 63 AD, the Emperor Nero set fire to Rome and almost burned it to the ground. He successfully blamed the fire on the Christians … which set off one of the worst persecutions in our Christian history. Feelings toward Christians at the time of Paul’s arrest in 68 AD were hostile, to say the least. Most Romans viewed allegiance to the Lord Jesus Christ as high treason.
Sitting in that cold cell in Rome, Paul died inwardly every day as word of the fate of his Christian brothers and sisters reached his ears … may of whom were personal friends of his. Some of them had been covered with the skins of animals and throw to wild beasts in the coliseum for the amusement of the crowds during gladiator contests. Sometimes the gladiators would slaughter Christians as a kind of pre-contest warm-up. Some Christians were coated with flammable materials like tar and set on fire to serve as human torches in Nero’s garden as he rode his chariot through the palace gardens at night … indulging his warped mind in a carnival of fire and blood to entertain his guests at his lavish garden parties.
Terror and persecution were in the air … and here was Paul … in the bottom of a pit … unable to do anything but grieve for his friends while anticipating an equally horrible end to his own life.
Difficulty can separate you from your friends in several ways. First is the inability of your friends to respond to your suffering. Think of the awful experience a person has to go through when dealing with a parent with Alzheimer’s or a spouse or a child with a terminal disease. Many people can see your pain and suffering … but even good friends and well-meaning Christians don’t know how to respond … so they don’t respond at all. They don’t know what to do … so they do nothing at all. They pull away … and when people pull away, especially their friends, it looks like they don’t care to the person who is suffering … and the person who is suffering feels like Paul did sitting in the bottom of his cell … they feel abandoned.
Our friends can pull away but we can also pull away from our friends when we experience intense suffering. There are times when the trauma in our life is so intense that it is impossible for the sufferer to invite anyone into that experience. You hear that a lot when people go to prison. If you ever go into the prison to serve on a Kairos weekend, you’ll hear many stories from the inmates about how they haven’t seen or heard from their family or friends for a long time … sometimes years … followed by comments like, “I don’t blame them.” Some inmates will come right out and ask their family and friends not to come and visit them in prison because it’s too painful for them and they want to protect their family and friends because it’s too painful for their loved ones to see them locked up like that. I know because I had to visit my brother in prison a couple of times. It was painful to pull up to the prison … to enter the prison … to see him in prison … and then have to leave him there in prison.
Difficulty can separate your “just” friends and “rust” friends and “trust” friends from your “must” friends like wind can separate the wheat from the chaff. When you go through a difficult situation in your life, you don’t have to ask “who really cares about me?” when it’s over, do you? You just have to look around, amen?
Difficulty can reveal who is committed to your friendship or relationship and so can despair. Paul was painfully aware that he was not going to get through this experience alive and his words just drip with despair: “For I am already being poured out like a drink offering,” he writes to Timothy, “and the time for departure is near. I have fought the good fight … I have finished the race … I have kept the faith. Now there is in store for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will award to me on that day” (2nd Timothy 4:6-8). Brave words … encouraging words … but words tinged with grief and despair. “At my first defense no one came to my support, but all deserted me…. But the Lord stood by me and gave me strength so that through me the message might be fully proclaimed and all the Gentiles might hear it. So I was rescued from the lion’s mouth” (2nd Timothy 4:16-17). Even though the Lord was at his side and rescued him from the lion’s mouth, Paul laments that no one came to his support, but everyone deserted him. You can just feel the loneliness and despair, the pain of his broken heart, can’t you? Despair hangs over Paul like a dark cloud … enveloping him like a wet blanket. Sitting in that prison, he knows that his time has come. Shivering, Paul writes to Timothy, painfully aware that he will never get to write to Timothy or anyone else ever again.
The difficulties facing Paul were insurmountable … his despair completely understandable. But Paul’s greatest pain wasn’t the cold, the prison cell, or his impending execution … it was the “defection” of his friends. Reading through the last verses of Chapter 4 is like reading a litany of defection and desertion.
“Do your best to come to me soon, for Demas, in love with this present world, has deserted me and gone to Thessalonica; Crescens has gone to Galatia, Titus to Dalmatia (2nd Timothy 4:9-10) … I have sent Tychicus to Ephesus (v. 12) … Alexander the coppersmith did me much harm, may the Lord repay him according to his works (v. 14). Erastus stayed in Corinth, and Trophimus I left ill in Miletus” (v. 20).
All of Paul’s “contact” or “just” friends … gone! All of Paul’s “casual” or “rust” friends … gone! All of Paul’s “close” or “trust” friends … gone! … and he is down to a few “committed” or “must” friends. As I said earlier, “committed” or “must” friends are a rare commodity and Paul was blessed to have them. He had Timothy, to whom he was writing … and he tells Timothy that Luke is there with him and asks Timothy to get Mark and bring him when he comes to Rome … knowing that Timothy and Mark will come.
It’s hard to read this long list of friends who are not there and not wonder what was going on in Paul’s heart as he wrote this letter. I think that the late Anglican theologian, writer, and poet Bishop Handley Moule captures Paul’s heart in his commentary on 2nd Timothy. “I have often found it difficult to deliberately read these short words,” Bishop Moule wrote, “without finding something like mist gathering in my eyes. The writer’s heart” … speaking of Paul’s heart … “beats in the writing. You see his tears falling all over the past and the harrowing present. Here is a man on his way to death … one moment strong and courageous … and the next he is as tender as a child when he begs his friend Timothy to come to him before winter because he lonely. For you see,” says Moule, “the great Apostle Paul was also a creature of flesh and blood. A man of nature as you and me. Although he has finished his course and is awaiting his crown … he is still a frail human being with ordinary human needs” (Moule, H.C.G. 1906. The Second Epistle to Timothy. Short Devotional Studies on the Dying Letter of St. Paul. London: Religious Tract Society; p. 178). Before we judge, however, we must remember that Paul’s friends were also creatures of flesh and blood … frail human beings with ordinary needs, amen?
One of the names that jumps out at me is the name of Mark in verse 11. Mark was a young disciple of Paul’s who, years earlier, had disappointed Paul. The story can be found in Chapters 13 and 15 in the Book of Acts. In Acts 13:13, Luke reported the following incident: “Then Paul and his companions set sail from Paphos and came to Perga in Pamphylia. John, however, left them and returned to Jerusalem.” The “John” in this verse later became known as “Mark.” Paul saw John’s split from the group as desertion and it left a bad taste in his mouth and a long-standing resentment in his heart. Later, in Chapter 15, Paul asks Barnabas to join him on a trip to visit the new churches they had planted to see how they were doing and offer them some encouragement and support. Barnabas wanted to take Mark. Paul vehemently opposed the idea. According to Luke, Barnabas was persistent and determined in his request and Paul was equally determined that Mark couldn’t go with them and a “sharp disagreement” erupted between Paul and Barnabas. Barnabas wanted to give Mark a second chance but Paul had written him off as nothing more than a casual or “just” disciple and friend at best. In the end, they couldn’t agree so Paul and his companion, Silas, went one way and Barnabas and Mark went another.
Barnabas saw something in Mark and was willing to give him a second chance … and thank God that Barnabas did because Mark would eventually … in Paul’s own words … become useful to Paul in his ministry and a comfort to Paul in his last days.
Remember … Paul … Mark … you … me … we are all creatures of flesh and blood. We are all frail human beings with ordinary human needs and, as such, we need to cut each other some major slack, amen? We have to allow room for our friends and our loved ones to grow and change. Who I am today is not the same person or Christian that I was 15, 10, even one year ago … and neither are any of you … so we must allow Jesus time and room to work in others just as we hope our friends will allow Jesus time and room to work in us, understand?
Like Paul, we are going to experience heartbreak and disappointment in life and in our Christian walk. You come beside a friend … you bring them to Christ … you pour your heart into them … you pour Jesus into them … you pour the Word of God into them .. and then one day you look around and … poof! … they’re gone! … and your heart breaks because you thought that they were on the right track … headed in the right direction.
Follow Barnabas’ example and don’t give up. I’ve seen it and heard it far too often … “I’m not gonna put myself out there any more … its too painful ... too disappointing.” Before you do that, think back over your own walk and thank God that your Christian friends and mentors didn’t give up on you when you let them down or disappointed them or broke their hearts, amen?
Like Paul, you never know. You may be the one to plant a seed but it may fall on others to water it, to tend it, to harvest it. Paul planted a seed in Mark … but it was Barnabas who watered it and tended it … and it was Paul who got the benefit of Mark’s fruit when he needed it most. Mark grew into a fully committed Christian … a fully committed servant … a fully committed friend that Paul could call upon in prison to come help him with his ministry.
One of the many things that I love about the Bible is that it is filled with the stories of flesh and blood people … frail human beings with ordinary human needs who face all of the same kinds of struggles and challenges that we face … which is why we can not only relate to Paul’s discouragement but can learn from his courage as well.
Listen carefully to the things that Paul asks Timothy to bring with him when he comes to Rome. These things represented his need or needs at the time … and if we examine our own hearts as well, they represent our needs as well. As we go through these things, take note of the fact that they will help us minister to our friends who are hurting and help us when we reach out to our friends who are feeling hurt or alone or abandoned.
First of all, Paul needed some physical support. Notice verse 13 and 21: “When you come, bring the cloak that I left with Carpus at Troas … also the books, and above all the parchments. … do your best to get here before winter.” The cloak he mentioned was probably a rugged, rudimentary garment that looked like a horse blanket with a hole cut in the top … like a poncho. It would provide Paul with some relief from the dampness of his prison cell and the cold winter weather that was on its way.
When we see somebody who is alone and hurting we need to pray for them … that’s a given … but we need to do more than just pray. There is a story of a farm family who lost everything they had in a fire … their home … their barn … all their seed, livestock, and farm equipment. After the fire was put out, their neighbor stood with them in the smoldering, charred ruins of their farm and empathized with them. “Truly tragic,” the neighbor said. “I am truly story for your loss. Let me know if I can do anything” … and then he left and went home. Later that evening a caravan from the church showed up with food, lumber, tools, a milking cow and her calf, sacks of seed. In Paul’s experience of loneliness, he said: “Hey … I’m freezing in here! What I really need right now is prayer … and the cloak that I left with Carpus.”
A coat … some food … some time. That’s what you do when have a friend in need. You don’t just give them your words … you give them your deeds as well. When you see someone who’s hurting … when you see them pulling back … isolating … when it seems like everyone has turned away … you resist the urge to turn away too. You turn towards them. You bring something in your hands … something that says “I love you” … something that they can hold in their hands … as you pray for them, amen? I always try to bring something with me when I visit someone in the hospital or rehab … usually a small pocket cross or angel … sometimes it’s a medallion with a Bible verse on it … so that the person has something physical to hold on to. At my last appointment we had a teddy bear ministry. You want to see a grown man cry? Bring him a teddy bear when he’s in the hospital. I want to start a teddy bear ministry here once we start meeting in the church again … so if you happen to be in Walmart or someplace like that and you see a teddy bear, please buy it and put in the plastic tub in the Narthex. And … hint, hint … you can buy more than one.
During times of struggle and disappointment, people also need personal and emotional support … they need their friends … they need their family, their loved ones … to be there for them. Most of us are like the little boy who was told that he shouldn’t be afraid of the dark because the LORD was with him. “I know that,” said the little boy, “but I want somebody with skin on” … and I understand that … and I’m sure that you do too, amen? We know that the LORD is with us but sometimes we just need someone with skin on to be God’s hands and feet for us.
Paul, like us, was a creature of flesh and blood … a frail human being with ordinary human needs. He wanted his friend Mark to come to him. He wanted his friend Timothy to come see him … and he wanted them to come quickly … not just because winter was coming and they might not get through but because he knew that he would not survive for very much longer. Sometimes you can’t do anything to solve their problems or take away their pain and suffering except be with them in their pain and suffering. When a friend is going through a hard time you don’t always have to say something or do something … you just need to be there … you just have to sit there … hold their hand … let them cry on your shoulder … whatever they need … but you can’t do any of these things if you’re not there, amen?
If God tells you to do something for them … do it!
If God tells you to bring something … you do it!
If God tells you to say something … say it!
But you can’t do something … you can’t bring something … you can say something … if you’re not there, amen?! Sometimes our friends could use our advice … sometimes they’re better off without it. Sometimes they need our help in solving their problems … other times our attempts to help them may just frustrate them or make things worse. Sometimes the best thing that we can do for our friends is just be there … be there with them in their time of suffering or pain or struggle.
Paul asked for physical support … a coat and his books and parchments. He asked for personal and emotional support in the form of companionship from his friends Mark and Timothy. Now what does he need? [Pause] … He needs spiritual support!
“The LORD will rescue me from every evil attack,” Paul tells Timothy, “and will bring me safely to His heavenly kingdom.… To Him be glory for ever and ever. Amen” (2nd Timothy 4:18). Did you hear that? Paul just said a … prayer! “The LORD will rescue me from every evil attack and will bring me safely to His heavenly kingdom.… To Him be glory for ever and ever. Amen.”
In every situation where we need courage … we need Christ … and here’s the good news … in every situation that we read about in the Bible where problems present themselves, Almighty God presents Himself in the midst of our problem or problems, doesn’t He? In the midst of our situations and our problems, God puts skin on and comes to be with us in the midst of our situation… whatever that situation may be … and He does that by using us to be there for our friends who are His children. Jesus is God with us … and when God is with us then Jesus is there with us when we are there with our friends, amen?
In order for God to be with us, He has to be in us … in our hearts. And when He lives in you … in your heart … you’ve never seen anything like what can happen when Jesus is with you and in your heart … let me tell you! I don’t care where you are or what you’re going through … when Jesus is with you, when Jesus is in your heart … then He is all over you, amen? And wherever two or more of us are gathered and we have Christ in our hearts then Jesus is there also … through thick and thin, good times and bad. Sometimes God will tell us to do something for our friends … sometimes He’ll give us words to share … sometimes He just wants us to sit there and hold each other close and know that whatever we are going through … He is there … amen?
Let us pray:
