DEEPLY CONNECTED
Noel K. Anderson First Presbyterian Church of Upland 10/3/21
Text: JOHN 15: 12-17 NRSV
12 “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. 13 No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. 14 You are my friends if you do what I command you. 15 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. 16 You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name. 17 I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.
Bonding Good & Bad
What Connects us in the Depths?
The third of our four vision statements says that we seek to be “deeply connected.” What exactly do we mean by deeply connected? First, we have to notice that people connect in many different ways, then we can talk about deeper connections and consider how we become deeply connected with head, heart, and hands.
We connect with others through having something in common. It can be the simplest of things. We both like the Dodgers, share the same politics or come from the same hometown. When Americans meet other Americans abroad, say while visiting Australia, they may have nothing else in common. They can make a meaningful connection just because they’re both Americans and tourists.
Sometimes the connections form accidentally. How many of your closest friends over the years have been people who just happened to live nearby? Neighbors, classmates, polka enthusiasts—for the many ways we can make initial connections, these all begin as shallow connections. We may connect in shallow water, but we also develop deeper relationships from some of these.
Our deeper relationships are our intimate relationships. Family, close friends, and other special confidantes--all make up our inner circle. Intimacy is a kind of exclusivity.
Deep connections tend to form over secrets. If you have secrets with one or two others, that is an intimate circle. It can be a deep connection, but one that is dark and negative or light and positive.
Sin can connect people deeply, and those connections can be all about wicked secrets. We’ve all seen movies of bank heists, murder plots, and adulterous affairs—all involve two or more sinners keeping a tight, secret circle. Secrets can create a deep bond, although it can be a negative bond.
Tragedy can bond people profoundly. Survivors of a terrible storm, accident, injury, wars, and catastrophes—tend to connect people at a level deeper than usual.
Our text from John speaks of a profound, positive connection. Verse 12:
“This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.”
The deepest possible connection between people or a group of people is to have Christ in common. To have Jesus in common is to share something of the same soul. All who are in Christ are kindred souls. We all share the same Holy Spirit. And we not only share the same spiritual depths, but we share a common eternity.
For us and our vision here at First Pres, to be deeply connected means acknowledging and practicing the spirituality we hold in common. We practice and share the Holy Spirit, which binds us now and eternally. We seek to love one another with a deep love indeed. Agapé love is something we can continue to grow into every day of our lives.
We seek to be deeply connected, head, heart, and hands.
HEAD: Sorting it Out
Connecting over What Matters
The depth of our connection mentally depends upon the depth of thinking we hold in common. Sharing shallow ideas provides a shallow connection; sharing deep ideas provides for a deeper connection.
Our thoughts can be shallow or deep depending upon the depth of our awareness or how thoroughly we think something through. Age and wisdom go together because of thoroughness. The more years you walk this earth, the more times you have had to visit and revisit certain thoughts. In time, you’ve searched them out from every angle and had chances to try them out in real life. A person who has lived with an idea for 20 years will have a wiser appropriation than one who has just read about it this week.
To think thoroughly can also be like using a microscope. Think of a newspaper. You can hold it in your hand and read it, but you can also put it under a microscope. At 10x power, each letter is huge, and you see the ink breaking up at the edges. Photos look like messy splotches of color. At 50x power, the letters look like inky mountains with white valleys. At 100x power, you see the fibers of the paper twisting and connecting like grass roots and rhizomes.
When we read Scripture, we want to do so with both thoroughness and increasing awareness. We want our mental microscope working at as many levels as possible—this is why we never come to the end of studying Scripture.
The world presently rides the wave of the Information Age. More basic information is available through your phone than any group of PhDs would have been able to access in a month just a few decades ago. In a matter of seconds, a 15-year-old with a smartphone can answer questions that would have sent college students off to the library for hours.
But information is not wisdom. The hard work is sorting it all out—determining what we pay attention to and what we ignore. I get a kick out of those person-on-the-street videos done by Jay Leno, Jimmy Kimmel, or Conan O’Brien. They seem to prefer Venice Beach, and they cobble together “common knowledge” videos, asking random passersby simple questions. People may know everything about the Star Wars universe or be able to quote verbatim from directors’ commentaries of Marvel movies, but ask them who was the 4th president of the United States, or where WWII was fought, or where is Viet Nam on a map—and you get blank stares or comical answers.
We must invest ourselves in information that matters. Can we spend our time and energy pursuing more important things than what the Kardashians are up to? Of course we can. It’s fine, right, and good to have hobbies—so I won’t knock Star Wars, soap operas, and Lakers’ trivia—but we develop deeper connections when we share things that matter—matters of faith—the greatness of God, the breadth of our mission, and our movement toward eternity.
HEART: Deeper Bonds
To Share Faith is to Have Depth
It’s one thing to have a mental connection but another thing—a deeper thing—to share matters of the heart. To share deep feelings with another is a deep connection indeed.
•Romeo and Juliet—like all romances, give us a picture of deep feelings connecting people at the heart.
•Patriots singing the National Anthem—particularly at special events like the 9/11 memorial or Pearl Harbor. It can bring most of us to tears.
•Dodgers fans winning the pennant—enormous sharing of joy and victory.
As strong as these connections are, they can still go wrong. Remember, one of the critical lessons of romances is that those feelings can destroy people. Romeo and Juliet both end up dead. Even Nazis and KKK-ers share deep convictions and a kind of heartfelt patriotism. This is why we say the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.
Feelings can be deceiving. To be deeply connected in the heart is to share in the true and the eternal. No one is closer than two or more who share in the love and adoration of God. It makes marriages deeper and more stable. It makes families closer and better, and it makes friendships deeper. To have God in common is to have all things—including eternity—as one.
The deep connection of the heart is the Holy Spirit that resides within us, and it makes two Christian strangers closer than blood brothers.
In high school, I had a best friend with whom I had everything in common. We lived in the same neighborhood, went to the same school, same church, liked the same music—we had everything in common. It was the deepest friendship I had known. Still, years ago, on a mission trip to Indonesia, I experienced a moment of epiphany when I stood beside missionary Jack Makonda in front of the Borobudur temple in Java. On the surface, Jack and I had nothing in common (except that we both lived in Pasadena). He, a black Indonesian, decades my senior, loved foods I had never tried and music I had never heard. On the surface, we had zero in common. But we were in Indonesia together, serving the Lord on a mission.
Standing there, I felt as though I were on Mars—everything seemed utterly alien to me. Jack had a big smile on his face; he went to high school nearby, and this was one of his playgrounds. In a moment, I realized that I was much closer “friends” with Jack than with any of my high school friends. Many of them have left the faith; we no longer share a love of Christ in common. But my friendship with Jack, though there were few-to-none connections at the surface level, was profoundly deep. We share the deepest waters in common—the Mariana Trench of personality—because we live by and for the Holy Spirit. Our friendship runs so deep that my former friendships were like little paper boats floating on the surface of the deepest, glacial lake.
The deep reveals the shallow; the shallow cannot reveal the deep.
HANDS: Walk Along
We can invite others into deeper connections.
What can we do to become more deeply connected? I would offer two words: reach and risk. To reach means ever inviting others into the deeper water in whatever ways we can, and it must begin with love and service. When we reach out, others may be immediately aware that we are trying to take them deeper. We become, in their minds, salespeople intent upon closing a deal, which diminishes them—turns them into a target to be evangelized.
Here’s the thing: we cannot control whom God does or does not call, and we do not know to whom God will or will not give his Holy Spirit—at least for today. As Jesus says to his disciples in verse 16a:
You did not choose me,
but I chose you.
We reach out, but we do so with love, service, and humility.
As for risk, we persist in moving toward deeper water and more important matters. We celebrate the shallow connections as starting points. It’s great that we’re both avid stamp collectors—through this connection, we build trust and friendship. Aside from enjoying that for what it is, we also risk going to deeper waters. The stamps are fun, but what is truly valuable? What really matters? We risk going there, seeing whether others can wade a bit deeper, swim further out, and perhaps take a dive into the depths.
It’s not about “saving” our family and friends—you and I cannot do that; only God can do that—but we can walk with them for a way and pray for them as we go. Walk with others along the way— invite them into what matters.
To the Table
Let’s be mindful of the depths we share with all in Christ.
What it means to be deeply connected is pictured perfectly at this table. Today we share communion with people of every nationality and most every denomination. This table is our oneness—our deep connection in Christ—and we are all kindred souls because the Holy Spirit resides in all who trust in Christ.
We are closer than blood, more eternal than the things of this world. We will be celebrating this meal and its fellowship long after our universe has gone cold. What a thing to share! We certainly ought to be sharing it. Let’s share it together this morning, mindful of all our brothers and sister with whom we share all that deep water. †
Questions
- What are some of the shallow connections you enjoy with others?
- How does secrecy factor into your more intimate friendships and relationships?
- Have you, through tragedy, grown close to someone for whom you would otherwise have had nothing to do?
- With whom do you have your deepest conversations? How deep is your connection?
- What are the dangers inherent in deep emotional connections?
- What, for Christians, stands at the heart of our deepest connections?
- How do we help connections grow from shallow to deep?
- Why are shallow connections yet to be sought, enjoyed, and celebrated ?