Sermon: Brotherhood

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Brotherhood

By Charles Rush

May 27, 2001

st week, I spoke about sex. No one moves an inch when I talk about sex. You can relax this week. What I actually talked about was intimacy and how important that is spiritually speaking. There are two more sermons related to that: brotherhood and sisterhood. Today, we can only speak of Brotherhood, and it is somewhat appropriate to do so this weekend.

Brotherhood does not come as easily as Sisterhood. There is a certain caginess to most male friendships. I am reminded of the story of two famous friends, the playwright, George Bernard Shaw and Winston Churchill. One room could hardly contain the ego's of these two, who saw eye to eye on almost nothing political or aesthetic. But both were notorious curmdugeon's. Shaw had a play open in London, so he sent a note to Churchill that said, “I enclose two tickets to the opening of my latest play. Please bring a friend, if you can find one.”

Churchill wrote a note back to Shaw, “I regret that I cannot attend the opening night as I have a previous engagement. Please send two tickets for the second night, if there is one.”

The same jocularity applies even to the clergy. One time the evangelist Billy Graham and the great Catholic Bishop Fulton Sheen were leaving a meeting they had both presented speeches at. Billy Graham offered the Bishop a ride in his car, saying, “After all, we're both engaged in God's work.”

“Yes”, replied the Bishop, “You in your own way and I in His.”

We were sitting around the fraternity house in college, a group of us who still get together every year… One of my fraternity brothers barges in the room and says, “Anyone got a quarter, I need to call a friend.” One of my other fraternity brothers says, “here's a dollar, why don't you call all of them.”

Men may be close, but you won't ever hear them talking like the author of scripture in our passage, “the soul of David was knit to the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul.” Even if it is true, most men need a lot more distance.

The profundity of the relationship between David and Jonathan was forged out of battle. It is interesting to read their story in I Samuel 15 and following. They were both young, daring, fool hardy guerilla soldiers fighting the Philistines to drive them out of the land of Israel. Reading it this week, there was an eerie contemporaneity to the story. Our text remains important because for thousands of generations, it is probably true that male friendship was formed around warfare or hunting.

I don't want to glorify violence in any way but it seems to me that at it's profoundest, what happens tomorrow on Memorial Day are men and women taking time to remember individual acts of courage and honor that are unforgettable.

Pete Moran was twenty two when he was drafted into the service in WWII. He flew B-24's out of France over Germany as part of the liberation of France. He'll never forget the first mission he flew as a co-pilot. The pilot of the plane was 20, Pete was the old man on the crew at 23. On a return run from their mission, they encountered very heavy anti-aircraft fire from the German army. The pilot of the airplane was killed, the navigator was killed, the rear gunner was killed. They were down to a skeleton crew. One of the engines had been shot out and the plane was going down. It took all the energy a young man had to keep the helm straight. Pete was trying to fly the plane as long as it could possibly go because they were behind enemy lines and the closer they got to the Allies, the better their chance of living. The engine was on fire. Fuel was leaking. They thought the airplane would probably explode upon landing. That is a lot of pressure to put on a young man.

Pete set the plane down in a cornfield somewhere in Northern France. It didn't immediately explode but everyone expected it to blow at any minute. Pete was so exhausted physically and emotionally from flying through that chaos, that he lay his head down on the control panel and just sobbed when the plane came to a stop. The crew could have just run for cover but they didn't. They had to unbuckle him and pushed him out through the hatch behind the cockpit and carry him out of the burning plane to safety. You don't forget those who pick you up and carry you when you can't find the energy to carry yourself, who don't count the risk… when uncommon valor is a common occurrence.

One of my friends growing up had a great uncle Vince. He wasn't actually related but his grandfather treated this Vince like a brother. When Vince needed some help to get his construction company through a difficult time, my friend's grandfather helped him out. Vince didn't have many relatives, so he was always invited to family events around the holiday season. Often he would come for part of the time. He was something of a fixture. One time, one of us kids asked the grandfather how Uncle Vince became Uncle Vince. The Grandfather said quietly, “he carried me for two days when I was wounded on Okinawa. I would have died.” Typical of that generation, that was all he ever said. You don't forget that. That is a life long bond.

Truth be told, if you look down the long march of human history, stories like that are probably the primary way that men have formed deep friendship. Down the long march of human history the two constants that have brought men together have been war and hunting. Heroic acts of courage and saving others from danger and death, these have been the constants.

In Stephen Ambrose's book Comrades, he relates friendships between famous and not-so-famous men. One of them was Crazy House warrior Crazy Horse that defeated Custer at Little Big Horn. Crazy Horse was an unbelievably brave warrior and bravery was the chief value that the Sioux Indians placed on leadership. He was promoted to the highest levels of honor. His good friend was another warrior named He Dog. They were friends for life. In the later part of his life, Crazy Horse did a lot of dumb things, some of them dishonorable things. His good friend He Dog did not approve and could not even fully respect him for some of his actions. But he never stopped being there for Crazy Horse because of this bond they developed on the battlefield during their youth.

Nowadays, in times of peace, the closest thing we come to something like that is sports. I was watching the Boy's Lacrosse team for Summit a couple weeks ago when they won a game in overtime over Mountain Lakes, one of the 4 best teams in the state. They all went running out on the field at the end of the game and jumped into one large pile. The locker room had a boom box blasting at about 8000 decibels. Great victories and championship seasons… Those are the glory days.

You would think that in a time of peace and prosperity, we would find a way to really take friendship to the next level in order to honor the sacrifice that others made for us to be here. You would think that we would find creative ways, more spiritually alive ways, to deepen the bonds of friendship.

But for the most part we haven't. When you get to this subject too many men become mute. Part of it is surely competition that isolates us in the marketplace. I have a friend who is a Wall Street lawyer that called me to ask about graduate school and life at the University. He said to me that he realized just recently that he was lonely, despite being surrounded by people. I asked him to elaborate. He said that he has dozens of superficial relationships with other people, but with other men in particular. I asked him why that was and he said that the people closest to him, those he would most like to share some substantive things with, are the very people that he is competing with for a cut of the annual bonus and job promotion in the future. As a result, he says he has been talking about surface stuff for years. He is witty, affable, and… lonely.

He was under the impression that things might be different at the University. It is true that things are not as cut throat at most Universities as they are at Wall Street law firms. But, it is also true that you are competing against the colleagues you could potentially be closest too. The vast majority of men that succeed in the University also have a cultivated distance. You don't want to share your weaknesses, your doubts, your vulnerabilities with this crowd. I was sorry to disappoint him.

Others of us find ourselves slowly taken over by our jobs. We take on more and more responsibilities, we stay gone on the road more days out of the week. Increasingly, we just left our wives control the social calendar. We may coach. We may volunteer for different things… But the next thing you know 8 or 10 years go by. Usually one day, we get some kind of crisis report. The doctor tells you something you don't want to hear. A close relative is getting divorced. You are in a lot of pain and you find yourself sitting there staring at the phone realizing that you don't really have anyone you can immediately call to talk about this with. The only person you can think of is someone from grad school. Or maybe, it is just that when you try to actually talk about it, you find that you can't really get the words to articulate what you want to say because it has been so long since you have talked on this level that you just aren't any good at it.

There is a scene in the movie Mumford where a very successful entrepeneur who lives in a huge mansion with beautifully manicured grounds hires his psychologist to come over to his house. He doesn't want to have a deep therapy session. He wants to toss around a football out on the lawn. The entrepenuer says to the psychologist, “isn't this great?” And the psychologist says, “yeah, most guys would kill for this.”

Perhaps you read the article in the Atlantic Monthly this month on “The Organization Kid”. They interview a whole bunch of undergraduates at Princeton University about college life today and they note a number of trends that are substantially different from the baby boomer experience of college, some good, some not so good. One of the nearly universal characteristics of this generation of students at elite universities is their over organized lives. Students report that they have very little time to just hang out. They have goals. They know where they are going and what they are about. They carry day-planner's and they use them. All of their day is structured. Class, lunch, volunteer project, study, frat meeting, work out, bed. They interviewed a couple of students who said, “I have to intentionally sit down and schedule in some time to see my friends or else I find that I just go for days without talking to other people.” I read that and I thought, ‘gone are the days of the bull session in the dorm room or hanging out.' But then I remembered, “these are our kids. This is the way we raised them, to be like us as we are now.”

At root, the issue is nearly the same one I spoke about last week, the issue of intimacy. Intimacy is the spiritual key to spiritually ground, meaningful sexual relationships. In a different way, but not so different really, it is the key to profound spiritual friendships. Our scripture this day says, “the soul of Jonathan was knit to the soul of David and he loved him as his own soul.” That is a great thing, a special thing, when you have a friend that really knows you to the depths of your soul, someone that you know you can count on, someone you can share with on a profound level, someone you can trust with your secrets.

Great friendship does not necessarily have to be with people of the same age that have shared the same experiences. In our scripture passage read earlier, St. Paul describes his affection for a young Timothy, who has all the gifts for leadership in the Church. They traveled widely together and started many Churches around the Mediterranean. Paul was Jewish, Timothy was not. Paul was probably 25 years older than Timothy. They just shared a common passion in faith.

I've been lucky to have two very good friends that are older than me and those friendships developed out of a common desire to grow in some area. One of them knew a lot more about archeology than I did, the other about Opera. I'm not what you would call an expert in either today but I have been richly blessed by them. In the going, on the way to archeological sites, I would hear a few other things about your life perspective at a different age. And there is nothing quite as wonderfully grounding as seeing someone come alive, sharing what they have learned about their interest, their avocation with someone else who cares about the same thing.

A few years ago, there were a spate of books that talked about dearth of male rituals. Several authors suggested that what we needed was for men to retreat to the wilderness, beat their drums, and reinvent rituals of passage from boyhood to manhood. I don't know about that. There are many models in history. Socrates and the Greeks held banquets for the soul purpose to pursue truth on a subject such as “Goodness”. The Romans gave speeches to each other and the winner was the person with the quickest wit. Monks in the middle ages spoke of matters eternal. Each was defined by their culture and the spirit of their age. I do not know what form our brotherhood should take. But I do know that we have been given a great opportunity of peace and prosperity in which to cultivate more profound friendship and intimacy, to nurture the higher spiritual values for which we were created. May a richer way bloom before us in this generation.

Amen.