Well, during the phase where my boss and I were playing a lot of foosball (before I flipped the table), we were playing so much that our wrists started to become kind of sore from twisting the rods that hold the men. This led to both of us joking that we needed some kind of wrist guard to keep us from hurting our wrists. Eventually, this snowballed into me writing a script for an infomercial. I would like to show you that infomercial. [show video]

Ah, the good old days when all I had to worry about was making videos for youth group. Now why have I shown you this video? Well, first of all it’s pretty funny, but secondly, the Chinese guy in the video, his name is Rick Li. Great guy. Super involved in the youth group. Our friendship was one of the best relationships that I formed during my time in LA. But, of course, I left and moved on with my life.

We kept in touch throughout the years. Every time Courtney and I would fly back to San Diego to see her parents, I would try and make a trip up to LA to see him. But then, all of sudden, not long after I took the job out here, he stopped answering my messages. I’d try to call him, but he wouldn’t call back. I would come into town and try to meet up with him, but he basically ghosted me. He just wouldn’t talk to me anymore. There was no explanation why. Just nothing.

And I’ll admit that it really hurt my feelings. I didn’t understand what was happening or why he was treating me this way. I didn’t know if it had something to do with me or something to do with him. I asked different people about it and nobody could give me a straight answer. All I could really glean from these conversations was that he was going through a hard time, but that was really all I knew. It didn’t make sense to me that, even though he was going through a hard time, he would just abandon our relationship entirely.

I’m sure you’ve had this happen to you at some point in your life. A person who you feel you have a really good relationship with all of a sudden disappears. You’ve probably heard of the term “ghosting” where a person simply stops talking to someone who they’ve known for some time. They don’t pick up the phone. They don’t reply to texts. It’s like they don’t exist.

There’s a lot of reasons why this happens, but perhaps one of the most important is that our culture has taught people to treat relationships like a consumer good. As long as the relationships serve their needs, they’ll invest. But the moment the relationship stops serving their needs or becomes challenging, they turn their back and leave.

At the core of this issue is the fact that a lot of people don’t know how to have hard conversations. Talking to somebody about a disagreement or a point of friction can be hard. You’re making yourself vulnerable and, if it’s something where you feel the other person has hurt you, it can be hard to express those feelings in a productive way. So most people, rather than embrace the discomfort, run away from those feelings. Rather than have the hard conversation, they simply disappear.

And this isn’t just happening with friends. It’s happening everywhere. Take dating as an example. Dating nowadays for a lot of people happens online via apps on their phone. The way it’s supposed to work is that you contact the person, exchange some messages to get to know them, then, if both parties feel good about the interactions, you will meet in person.

Now, clearly, no one expects that every first date is going to result in fireworks, but let’s say one person liked the date, the other person didn’t. What is very common is that the person who didn’t like the date won’t tell the other person their feelings and simply stops communicating with them. Rather than say, “Hey, I really appreciate your time, but it just wasn’t working for me the way I hoped it would,” they just go silent.

This is disturbing for a number of reasons. First of all, it’s rude behavior. It’s hurtful to the person who invested their time and did like you. Secondly, the habit of not having hard conversations will, down the line, result in real problems when they actually do find a relationship that they like.

Every relationship, no matter how good it is, has points of conflict and disagreements. If your tact with those disagreements is to be conflict avoidant, where you simply do not address the problems or pretend like they don’t exist, then the tension is going to build over time until eventually something breaks. Frequently now, in marriages, you’re seeing one of the partners just get up and leave. It doesn’t matter if there are children in the equation or shared assets like a house. Rather than have that hard conversation, they simply vanish.

I’ve seen the same thing happen within the Christian faith. I see people ghosting the church all the time with no explanation about why they’re leaving or where they’ve gone. And that’s because, similar to the way people treat relationships like a consumer good, people also treat the church like a consumer good. I refer to this way of being as Country Club Christianity.

Why do you pay money to join a country club? Well, some people like services they offer like the golf course or the pool or the food. But more often than not, the country club offers you clout and a network of people through which you can do business. The idea being that the country club is a social hub that provides services and networking to enhance your life. This is how many people see the church. Therefore, if the church is not providing you with some kind of benefit, then why invest in the club?

What this means is that most people don’t really care about the fundamental message of Christianity. When you view the church as a consumer good, then the message of the gospel is secondary or, in many cases, means nothing. And what is the gospel message? Well, we read about some of the gospel message today in our reading from John where Jesus gives his disciples a new commandment.

Jesus says, “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.” Within this commandment is something quite radical that I think we very easily can gloss over. Jesus doesn’t just say love one another. That commandment already exists in the Old Testament. Jesus says love one another as I have loved you. Then he clarifies exactly what he means by that when he says, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” The love that Jesus is talking about is a sacrificial love. A love where you’re willing to give up everything.

Now that’s a hard message. It’s a message that most people don’t want to hear. Like we talked about last week, at the core of the gospel message is this need for sacrifice. And most people, in their natural state, don’t want to sacrifice because sacrifice is challenging. Just look at Jesus’ disciples. They walked with Jesus on the earth, they heard the message directly from his lips and they didn’t want sacrifice.

We read this morning about when Jesus is on trial. Peter is lurking in the background and people recognize him. They’re like, “Hey, weren’t you with Jesus? Aren’t you one of his disciples?” Now, this is a great opportunity for Peter to stand up for his friend and follow Jesus’ message concerning sacrificial love. But what does Peter do? Does he sacrifice? No. He denies ever having known Jesus, not once, but three times and ghosts his friend.

Think about it. Jesus preached about sacrificial love throughout his whole ministry, and yet, at the end everyone abandoned him. So Jesus’ message is not a message that most people want to hear because it requires you to go through a transformation. You have to become a very different kind of person, which most people don’t want to do at all.

I think for most people, the message they want to hear is: you’re a good person; there’s nothing you need to change about yourself; just keep doing what you’re doing. And, in fact, that’s the message you hear in most churches. Therefore, when you get a preacher like me, who really cares deeply about Jesus’ message of sacrifice and wants you to be transformed by the message so that you live your life according to that message, that’s hard to do. It requires stepping outside of your comfort zone.

I’ve noticed that when I preach those same messages that Jesus preached, people quickly fall away. They ghost the church and I’ll hear different reasons through grapevine, “Oh, Alex’s messages just weren’t for me. He’s not talking about things that are relevant to my faith. He’s not really spiritual enough.” Really? Not spiritual? I’m just saying the same things Jesus is saying. So if I’m not spiritual, then Jesus isn’t either.

The truth is my messages made them feel uncomfortable. My messages made them feel conflicted and, if you’re conflict avoidant, that’s uncomfortable. And I openly admit that when I preach to you, I aim to create a certain level of discomfort because that’s what Jesus did when he preached. But through that discomfort, Jesus helped the people who were listening to him to become best versions of themselves by teaching the need for sacrificial love.

So here’s our come to Jesus moment for today: Real relationships are hard. Real relationships are uncomfortable. For relationships to really work, you have to be willing sacrifice, sometimes in huge ways. And if you’re not willing to sacrifice, if you’re inclination is to walk away when the going gets tough, then you’re never going to experience the fullness and beauty of what relationships can be.

You’ve got to stick it out. You’ve got to have those hard conversations. You’ve got to be willing to sacrifice for your friends, for your partner, for your children, for your church. You’ve got to be willing stand strong when everything in your being is telling you to run away, because once you’re on the other side of those difficult moments, life becomes so much more vibrant and enjoyable.

I want to end by going back to my relationship with Rick Li. I still haven’t seen Rick in about 10 years. But when I turned 40, Courtney reached out to all the friends from my past and asked them if they would write a letter letting me know how much our relationship meant to them. Not everyone responded to Courtney’s request, but Rick was one of the people who answered that call. I want to read a line to you from that letter:

“Before Big Al became the man he is today, he too had his come to Jesus moments. I like to believe as much as I learned from him, he learned from us (meaning his west coast family of WPC). We had all sorts of deep conversations, whether discussing religion or politics, to drinking and socializing, or just how we can make a difference in the community amongst the church we worship at. Big Al is My Bro. I’m so proud of him and his accomplishments…He will continue making a positive difference in this world that we live in, as will his wife and kids.”

Even though Rick ghosted me, this letter let me know how he really felt. It meant a lot to me that he took the time to write it, but more importantly, it let me know that he cared and he hadn’t forgotten about me and what our relationship meant to him. May we all have the courage to do the same with our relationships. Amen.