The Friendship of God

"....""Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace,
that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need"

"If God is not," wrote George Buttrick in his book on prayer, "'and the life of man poor, solitary, nasty, brutish and short,' prayer is the veriest self-deceit. If God is, yet is known only as vague rumor and dark coercion, prayer is whimpering folly: it were nobler to die. But if God is in some deep and eternal sense, like Jesus, friendship with Him is our first concern, worthiest art, best resource, and sublimest joy." What is this thing in which we engage as Christian people called prayer?

The veriest self-deceit? There are those, of course, who argue that all religion is the mere absolutizing of human desires and fears. As for prayer, Ludwig Fuerbach concludes it is nothing more than the act of human beings 'adoring their own hearts and regarding their own feelings as absolute.' How comical, then, how pathetic it is for us to bow our heads, to bend our knees and cry out our griefs, our needs, our sorrows, our joys to the empty air around us or the ego's ear within us: the veriest self-deceit.

Fuerbach goes to the extreme in his argument against God's existence. Yet, now and again, in even the most fervent believer's mind, the question arises as to whether or not there could be One who hears our sighs too deep for words and responds. To be sure, the question can issue from despair, from an experience of life as poor, solitary, nasty, brutish, short...(and then you die)...making prayer an absurd act of desperate men and women. For many on this earth, that is so.

For others of us there is the luxury of a question which issues from awe: prayer is, at times, too fantastic an act to dare! That we are not finally alone, that we matter in some eternal sense, that our pains are felt in heaven above, that our lives are not just chance and happenstance but held within some graceful purpose: could that be the case? Sometimes faith in such a God seems too good to be true; and prayer, then, not so much self-deceit as an unnecessary excess of our hopeful hearts. If God is not.

But if God is...if God is, says Buttrick, "yet is known only in vague rumor and dark coercion, prayer is whimpering folly." This, I suspect, is how most prayers are made. Being a minister has a way of drawing out people's theology, no matter what the setting or circumstance. Over the years, you begin to hear commonalities amid homemade theology, and one such commonality is a simple sort of deism: a God known in vague rumor and dark coercion. The God in whom so many vaguely believe seems to be a God who probably created everything, who expects us to behave in a certain way (the founder of an ethical system of sorts), who is more known in a sunset than a sentence of scripture, but who is not very easy to call upon. It is a God about whom ones thinks, rather than a person to whom one prays...a God known in vague rumor, a God called upon in extremis and so in whimpers, if at all.

But Buttrick begs a deeper question: what if this God to whom we pray indeed is but has chosen to remain unknown to us except in vague suggestions...like a stern parent whose presence is unmistakably real, but whose intentions are hidden, whose actions appear arbitrary, a parent with whom no relationship can be imagined save that of slave to master or mistress. Then we are left to beg for mercy, with no assurance that the One to whom we beg has the least bit of sympathy for our plight. Prayer as whimpering folly.

"But if God is," concludes Buttrick, "in some deep and eternal sense like Jesus, friendship with Him is our first concern, worthiest art, best resource, and sublimest joy." In a word, if God is and has chosen to be known by us in Jesus, then friendship with God is worth our very lives and prayer becomes a conversation with this One who first calls us "friend." If you are one who this day, despite your presence in the pew, suspects that prayer is no more than talking to yourself: the veriest self-deceit; if you are one who may harbor an abstract idea of God in your head but have found little in that idea to move your heart, and nothing in the Incarnation to connect with your life; if you wish you could pray but cannot because there seems only silence to hear your cries, then I would bid you hear these simple little words of Jesus first as a Word of God to you: "I have called you friends," Jesus says...friends...and, if a word to you, then also an invitation to engage in a conversation which just might become your first concern, worthiest art, best resource, sublimest joy.

"I have called you friends," he says to the disciples in John's 15th chapter, yet it is a friendship unlike any we will ever know with one another. Were we to guess from our own experience, we might speculate that after three long years of traipsing across the Judean hills, these thirteen men knew each other very well: their personal habits, their secret faults, their pet peeves, their dark nights. You could surmise that though Jesus was surely a cut above this motley crew, he had come to have a true affection for these chosen companions, so much so that at the end of his life, he called them friends. But that is not the reason he gives for such endearment. He calls them friends not because of what they have come to mean to him or because of what they have shared together or because of some mutual kind of esteem.

Jesus calls them friends because he has revealed to them--and so put them in relationship to--the God who first loved them. No longer are you slaves, he says, those who do not know what God is up to in the world, those whose prayer is whimpering folly. "I have called you friends, philoi, beloved, because I have made known to you everything I have heard from my Father." You are friends because in knowing me, you have come to know God. How? In what sense exactly? I cannot say. All I know, all I can promise is that as you follow with your mind and your heart and your life one Jesus of Nazareth, the friendship of God will become your first concern, worthiest art, best resource, sublimest joy.

For he will make you to know that you have to do not with some blind tyrant or some unrelenting silence or finally with your own ego writ large, but with a loving Father, a good shepherd, a brooding mother, a persistent widow. In him you will be led to trust that you have to do with one who knows your weaknesses, who has suffered the temptations with which you even now struggle, who in mercy forgives you. How else but with him could we imagine that God is a God who will come after us when we are lost, who will dine with us when we are cast out by all others, who will welcome us home after we've wasted our lives, who will always, always, always take the initiative with us? Yet beyond stories and teachings and actions and words, there is this life itself, which is life indeed...this life in which we encounter the Living God as an eternal friend.

Though there is more, for our friendship with God through Jesus, according to Jesus' words in John's gospel, has to do not only with who we know God to be in him, but also with how we are loved by God in him. "No one has greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends. You are my friends...." God loved the world in this way, the gospel writer keeps saying over and over and over again, until we begin to get the point: God gave us in Jesus Christ, a life we could hear and feel and taste and see and nail upon a cross, (in this is love) that everyone who trusts their lives to him may not perish but may have eternal life.

What is it to perish, but to live without this One who calls us friend? What is eternal life but life forever in relation to the Living God? Friends, philoi, beloved. If God is in some deep and eternal sense like Jesus, God gives up everything to be with us and for us forever. Jesus calls us friends because in him God has sacrificed all, such that there can be nothing--neither death nor life nor angels nor principalities nor powers nor things present nor things to come nor height nor depth nor any other creature able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus. Friends he calls us, friends he makes of us from the height of a cross and for the depths of God's love.

Then, he bids us do the same: love one another. This friendship, you see, has a cost...one he has already borne for us, but still, one he invites us to bear. "This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you." As I have loved you. When Jesus said those words to the ones he called friends, they did not begin to comprehend the consequences. When the writer of this Gospel wrote down those words for the likes of you and me to read, he knew full well the end of the story. The friendship of God leads us not to contemplation in some dark corner, but out into the world where life is poor, solitary, nasty, brutish and short; where people whimper their prayers and know not the God to whom they pray; where faith seems the veriest self-deceit. To give over our lives that another might know the friendship of God is to follow this One who called us friend, even to the cross.

I do not care what your rational problems might be with the Incarnation and with all the creeds attempting to say who Jesus is as fully human and fully divine. I do not care that you cannot comprehend the mystery of Word becoming flesh or of virgin birth or empty tomb: who can? I care that in Jesus' life and death and resurrection, as you spend you life learning of him, you are given to trust that God is, in some deep and eternal sense, like him, and thus in him calls you friend.

Prayer, then, is what follows. Finally, in the context of the friendship of God, Jesus says to his disciples, "ask." He commands them, in a word, to pray. "Prayer," says Buttrick, "is a friendship. We do not make friends by nodding our head to a man across the street once a month. A Friend begins by appearing aloof. Then through speech and silence, through laughter shared and danger braved, through the give and take of unsuspected self-revealings, heart opens to heart and mutual loyalty is gladly pledged. So," he says, "with Friendship from above: it grows of oft-repeated meetings, contacts, self-givings, ...trust."

There is a story told of Horace Bushnell, congregational preacher and theologian of the last century, who had lost the sense of God as friend. But, as the story goes, "he carried on, praying to the next best thing, the abstract principle of right. It was a dreary devotion but sincerely meant. He put into his prayer no more faith than he had in his heart; he would tell no lies on his knees. If he could not address God as a known person, he approached God as an unknown Something. If he could not feel God, he could feel after God. If he could not see God, he looked in the direction where he conjectured God might be. If he saw anything that seemed to be sunshine, he stood in it. At last in Christ, the sky cleared and the revelation of the Living God became to him real once again.

Years later, a friend who accompanied Bushnell on a camping trip to the Adirondacks tells of an evening: "When it came time to get into our blankets, we had a few words from the New Testament, and I asked him to pray. He turned partly over on his face... and began in his natural voice, but with a tone as soft and melodious as the low murmur of the stream beneath, what seemed for all the world like speaking to someone who was next to him but whom I could not see. And so he continued--till, when he ceased, I found every other feeling swallowed up in the thought that God was there. There was in his whole manner the vivid suggestion, the reflection of a long and dear acquaintance, fraught with precious memories between him and his Heavenly Friend." "But if God is in some deep and eternal sense like Jesus, friendship with God is our first concern, worthiest art, best resource and sublimest joy." Thanks be to God!

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