Friendships operate on so many levels, from casual to “BFF”. There are “Facebook friends”. If you ever take a long, hard look at your friend list on FB, you will be scratching your head. “What was I thinking?” The irony is that we click on that button so as not to offend, then we often find ourselves in attack mode with that same person over politics and current events. For the youngest generations, this is their world, their medium. Bullying can have tragic consequences. It is only in basing, grounding our friendships on the greatest model we have for friendship – Jesus – that we learn to revere and cherish our relationships. Friendships die when they become all about me. When we fail to uplift and affirm a friend’s gifts and successes unselfishly, we lose a bit of our inherent goodness. We learn the hard way, especially in our current divisive culture, that harping on the negatives, the differences, is so damaging. Some never recover from wounds inflicted from bitter fights. Divorce. Estrangement. We learn the hard way, often from our failures. There are so many instances where we give up trying, becoming self-determining and self-gratifying.

We “paint portraits” of others. Starting with the blank canvas, we make them into an image that pleases us. We discard the unpleasant traits and attributes. The film Juno is about a pregnant teenager who gets to know the prospective adopting couple. Juno is drawn to the husband. They have deep conversations about music and popular culture, while the wife seems boring and aloof. The husband never really gets to know Juno, and mistakenly thinks that she will applaud him when he decides to leave his wife and pursue a career in music. Meanwhile, the seemingly dull wife is surprisingly courageous, generous and friendly.

Friends accept us for who we are, warts and all. The perfect model of friendship, Jesus, gives that kind of friendship that is unconditional. We are rightly able to say that more than liking our friends, we love them. Last Sunday when we sang the Hymn of the Day (“You Have Come Down to the Lakeshore”), the words in the refrain: “Sweet Lord, you have looked into my eyes, kindly smiling, you’ve called out my name” gave me chills and a lump in my throat. Jesus – what a friend he is! There is such relational intimacy in what God through Christ offers freely to us.

Pastor Art