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The theologian Robert McAfee Brown wisely said, “Where you stand determines what you see.” Well today I want to live into that theological wisdom by considering a different kind of spiritual practice for exhausted people. We have spent time in all of the classics – Bible reading, prayer, fasting, solitude and silence but today we are going to consider perhaps a more fringe practice or one that we might not have considered a practice at all – friendship. What happens when think about friendship as a Christian practice? So what follows is a 6-stanza poem titled Dying for Friendship. I will stop after each stanza and offer a brief explanation so that hopefully beauty and meaning will meet.
What if we were made for love “at all times.”
What if the One who made us, delicately crafted us as puzzling puzzle pieces
that only make sense together and never alone
What if friendship is the end and the reason and the hope –
the divine image we share
What if friendship is the Lord between me and you?
The theme running throughout this poem is Jonathan’s declaration to David that God is the one who bears witness and glues their friendship “the Lord between me and you”, their covenant to each other. Read alongside Proverbs and Jesus’ own words, It’s interesting to take that declaration and place it at the center of our spiritual existence. How might we look at God, each other, salvation, discipleship, if friendship is the point?
These three faces meet me with holy script
It was good and lovely even funny
But it wasn’t holy until the pieces clicked
And the picture emerged that I needed them
Really needed them – to listen and speak
To call me in, and call me out, to call me up – and laugh
What if good news always demands a group of friends to parade it about?
What if friendship is the Lord between me and you?
This stanza is about a Bible study that I currently find myself in. What’s been so transformative, however, hasn’t simply been the study itself but the friendships that have formed while we meet. And as those friendships deepen, so do our insights, our questions, and our honest reflections. We moved from trying to be smart to being for each other. What if the key to our Bible studies is not better teachers, better tools, better a-has, but better relationships. What if we don’t use friendship as some functional tool to introduce people to holy things. What if friendship, formed my mutual respect, love, honesty and truth, is the holy thing? How might we read differently if friendship is the point? What is the gospel story but the belief that a band of friends carrying good news of friendship, God’s and our own, is enough to change the world?
And if I would not come to ruin, I should avoid those counterfeit friends
Of politics, money, and the hue of my skin
For these want me as servants – begging for meaning that always comes
With a price too cheap to pay
Broken, plastic relationships
Where sin’s loneliness winks in “likes” and “waves” with no real face
Friendship is supposed to be the Lord between me and you.
If Jesus is right that friendship is the source and result of salvation, then it makes sense to see sin as estrangement and loneliness. I’m not talking about being alone. Being alone is healthy; being lonely is a killer. How do we know? Living with air pollution increases your odds of dying early by 5 percent. Living with obesity, 20 percent. Excessive drinking, 30 percent. Living with loneliness increases our odds of dying early by 45 percent. Friends, that loneliness might be one of the sicker elements of our culture where we spend more time with people like us than ever before and are lonelier than we’ve ever been before. The algorithms of friendship from Facebook are killing us where we are with more like-minded folk to our own ruin. Friendship is NOT Joe Biden “between me and you” or “America first” between me and you. It’s not even “Duck or Beaver Football” between me and you. The social science researcher Brene Brown writes that the core value that cuts us off from real friendships and connection is actually one that we most often pick to unite us with others - FEAR. She notes that our national conversation is constantly centered on fear: What should we fear? Whom should we blame? And this fear is leading us to ruin, to algorithm echo chambers of horror.
I’m so sorry to say what must be said
That something must die between me and you
One of us must lose, one of us must cry,
One of us will have to choose, one of us must refuse to lie
For friendship is revealed when life is at death’s door – “a time of adversity”
A time of pain for which all of us were born
A brother, a sister for someone else
The Lord between me and you.
There is no such thing as riskless friendship. In fact, the cross becomes essential even in this human relationship. Real pain and hardship are what reveal the foundations of friendship. And for that to happen the actual risk – the real dying - is the confessing of pain and loss to someone else. One of the reasons that churches have become so sick is that we have forgotten that admitting pain is what makes true friendship possible. We’ve unheard Jesus’ words and imagined, “Greater love has no one than this: to sip a latte with one’s friend.” We’ve made friendship about us at our best, rather than our worst. If you want to experience actual friendship, reveal real love, you are going to have be the time of adversity for which someone else is born. If you wish to actually have a friend that is closer than a sister – you are going to have to be willing and honest that you’re dying.
Friends are family chosen
When I come to the startling realization that
I am also a friend worth having
So that I can love others as I love myself
To become one in spirit
Is a spiritual act that is foolish to avoid
Friendship is the Lord that loves Me and you.
“There is a friend who sicks closer than a brother,” the wise teacher tells us. I was also struck with the words from 1 Samuel, “Johnathan became one in spirit with David, and he loved him as himself.” In fact, twice it tells us that Johnathan loved David as he loved “himself.” And that means that he understands that he is also worth loving, worthy of being treated well. Friendships become sick when we see beauty everywhere else but within, in everyone else but ourselves. It’s not a “me” culture if you love yourself. “The Lord between me and you” is simply the honest recognition that the master sculptor, painter, artist, conceived, designed, and created you. Can you imagine me hanging an actual Michelangelo painting in the bathroom? Why? Because it’s Michelangelo! Well, remember who made you as well.
The invisible visible One commands greater love
And preaches to himself
He calls us friends
And sends us out as missionaries
To do the same and die
No longer servants
But now always willing to serve
Born as brothers and sisters
For the Lord is between me and you
Friends, we were made in love, for love, to love by a God who practices what he preaches. Go and do likewise. Be missionaries of friendship to exhausted and lonely people. Be missionaries who value yourselves as worthy of greater love. Be missionaries who become obedient to the One who defined that relationship as friendship. Be missionaries who declare along with our Brother Paulinus of Aquileia in 796, “Wherever love is true. God is there.”
