FRIENDSHIP

Stephen Dietz, playwright: "What do we affect during our lifetime? What, ultimately, is our legacy? I believe, in most cases, our legacy is our friends. We write our history onto them, and they walk with us through our days like time capsules, filled with our mutual past, the fragments of our hearts and minds. Our friends get our uncensored questions and our yet-to-be reasoned opinions. Our friends grant us the chance to make our grand, embarrassing, contradictory pronouncements about the world. They get the very best, and are stuck with the absolute worst, we have to offer. Our friends get our rough drafts. Over time, they both open our eyes and break our hearts."

Years ago Emerson wrote: "Make yourself necessary to someone. In a chaotic world, friendship is the most elegant, most lasting way to be useful. We are, each of us, a living testament to our friends' compassion and tolerance, humor and wisdom, patience and grit. Friendship, not technology, is the only thing capable of showing us the enormousness of the world."

Friends; friendship; church: maybe the Quakers understand it best, understand what a church community, at its best, is all about, when they call themselves a Society of Friends. In a group of friends we find all sorts and conditions of people: people who don't look alike, think alike, share the same politics; people who come from different backgrounds, different places, different ways of thinking. It is our differences that make us one more than what we have in common. It is in and through those differences that we are able to grow as a person. They open our hearts and minds when we allow them in and do not if we do not.

It is our differences, the recognizing of our differences, the accepting of our differences, that allows friends to be friends. It is this that enables us to listen to the other, and while we may disagree, still be friends even as we point out our disagreement. To do so is definitely not easy. Perhaps that is why we seem to be so divided these days: we only allow those into our lives who agree with us, who we deem to be like us. And for that we are paying a very steep price, it seems to me. So sad.

Perhaps this is even more true when it comes to a community of faith, a church. For that is what we hold in common and what brings us together. All else is mere baggage. We are first, last and always a Christian. As Christians, we are friends: people who are compassionate and tolerant, wise and patient. We get through the bad times with one another and rejoice with one another in the good. Whatever else we are only describes us better. It does not define us any more.

What brings us together for worship and fellowship, for ministry and learning, for all that we do and all that we are -- what brings us together again and again and again, and what makes us want to gather again and again is that we are friends in Jesus Christ. That covers a multitude of foolishness, unreasonableness and even bad behavior on our part. It doesn’t justify our actions or make them acceptable. It is simply the truth. Thank God for our friends.