Café - Hot Topic Lent: Making a space for grace by Inez Torres Davis

BFFs for life
by Christa von Zychlin

"We have friends, or we are friends, in order that we do not get killed." That's how a book on friendship by the Lutheran theologian Dr. Marty E. Marty begins. I couldn't agree more. I have friends, and I am a friend, so that I won't get killed.

I mean it. If my friend Abby hadn’t answered her cell phone and picked me up when my car got hit on that unfamiliar highway, while I was shaking and couldn’t figure out what to do next, I might have died right then and there.

And I still think that if I hadn’t been there, and I mean really been there, that afternoon those years ago when my roommate discovered that her pregnancy test was positive, she would have been undone without a friend, and not just any friend. Later, others added their good listening ears and practical help for decisions that had to be made, but that afternoon, it had to be me.

But before I go out and spend $9.95 on a “friendship book” with sappy kittens on the cover, I’m going to remember that friendships can also be complicated and messy, and like all things human-related, sometimes our friendships need a good sorting-out.

As part of the Wisdom literature of the Bible, the books of Psalms and Proverbs have all kinds of pithy sayings that can be useful in measuring the health and wealth of our friendships. Take a look.

Jana & Elise
Just as water reflects the face, so one human heart reflects another. (Proverbs 27:19)

Sometimes friends aren’t “good,” and other people in your life don’t like them. But you like these friendships because you provide reflection of and sparkle for each other’s lives:

Elise was Jana’s best friend throughout high school, a relationship that Jana’s mother didn’t like one bit.

Even though Jana defended Elise totally and utterly, her Mom actually had a point. Elise did smoke pot occasionally. Her home reeked of beer, and often when Jana went to her house for a sleepover, Elise’s dad would be passed out on the couch while Elise’s mom was out with friends for the night.

But Elise also taught Jana about the music of Janis Joplin, Nat King Cole, and Louis Armstrong. She taught Jana how to play poker, highlight her hair, and how to deal matter-of-factly with a dad who is drunk. Jana, meanwhile, gave Elise glimpses into a family life where parents asked you about your day and worried if you weren’t home by a certain hour at night.

They added sparkle into each other’s lives, and for a time, each one grew a little bit more like the other—Jana grew bolder, learning to laugh at her shyness in new situations. Elise started getting homework done, as she saw her friend make studying a regular habit.

“My best friend is the one who brings out the best in me,” Henry Ford is credited with saying. For several years, Elise and Jana seemed to fit that definition of being good friends for each other.

The righteous gives good advice to friends, but the way of the wicked leads astray. (Proverbs 12:26)

In their senior year of high school, though, Elise’s drinking and smoking and a complicated string of bad boyfriends led to her quit school. She didn’t find Jana very interesting anymore, especially when Jana drew the line at her so-called new adventures and declined her invitation to go along on an all-night spree the weekend before finals. As Jana moved on toward graduation and then college, the young women drifted apart. For Jana, no doubt, it was a healthy change. As the proverb puts it firmly, there really is such a thing as being led astray by friends. The relationship was no longer life-giving, and it was time to say goodbye. To go back to the imagery of Proverbs 27:19, the water of that relationship had just dried up.

Jana & Kiersten
Even my bosom friend in whom I trusted, who ate of my bread, has lifted the heel against me. (Psalm 41:9)

Sometimes friends leave you behind, and sometimes they even turn against you.

Jana met Kiersten as they were going through childbirth classes, each with their first baby, each having just moved into a new community. While their husbands discovered a shared interest in college rugby, the two women struck up a conversation that seemed like it could go on forever.

Kiersten told Jana about her crazy sister-in-law, and it turned out Jana had a cousin-in-law just like that! The couples had each over for dinner and they joined the same church. When their babies were born exactly one week apart, both healthy boys, they looked forward to play dates over the years to come. One day Jana even told Kiersten about her first marriage—something few people knew about— and what a nightmare it had been.

And then when the babies were about 6 months old, Kiersten just stopped dropping by. When Jana finally got hold of her, Kiersten said, “Oh, we’ve just been so busy, I don’t think we have time for the socializing we used to.” Jana saw Kiersten in the grocery store, and Kiersten smiled and waved as if they were distant acquaintances, then turned down a different aisle.

“. . . a whisperer separates close friends.” (Proverbs 16:28b)

The cruelest thing happened when Jana arrived at the church nursery to pick up her son. She overheard Kiersten tell another church nursery volunteer, “Oh, you didn’t know that Jana’s been divorced? Yeah, she had a very short marriage before she married this guy.”

Months later, Jana still asked herself, what did I do? What did I say? What could I have done differently? Was I too competitive about our babies? Too chatty? Too cheerful? Too boring? For a while Jana considered changing churches (and grocery stores!) but in conversation with her husband and new friends, she was reassured to hear that others had had similar experiences. She came to realize that sometimes friendships just go bad for no clear reason.

Through a new small group within her old church, she came to see that it was important for her spiritual growth to work on not gossiping about Kiersten just because Kiersten had gossiped about her. This was a huge temptation, with all the ammunition Jana had! But the friendship was over, and there was no sense in jabbing the wound.

Jana & Grandma are friends on Facebook
Some friends play at friendship but a true friend sticks closer than one’s nearest kin. (Proverbs 18:24)

Jana’s grandmother Doris recently moved into a senior living apartment not far from her daughter, Jana’s aunt. When she moved into the apartment, they had to rewire the place because Doris was going to bring along the new computer her kids had given her for her 85th birthday.

Doris wishes she had more friends. She’s disappointed that so few of her new neighbors ever open their doors or sit out on the community decks. “What’s the matter with these people,” she wonders. “Do they have so many friends they don’t want to meet anybody new?”

She’s read some of the research that has come out in the last decade or so: People with friends with whom they can eat and laugh have better blood pressure, better control over diabetes, less depression, lower cholesterol, and they appear to live longer.

We have friends so that we will not be killed . . . . and so that we can live!

If Doris is a bit disappointed in those around her, she doesn’t let that deter her from sticking to old friends, and still working on making those new ones, too. When her 25-year-old great nephew doesn’t call her up, she gets in touch with him via e-mail.

When her 31-year-old granddaughter Jana takes a vacation with her family and doesn’t send a postcard, Doris looks up the photo album on Jana’s Facebook page.

When her middle-aged son took a job overseas, a friend from church helped Doris set up a Skype account, and what used to be a $40 phone call now turns out to be free.

When her old friend Hannah passed away in Chicago, Doris contacted Hannah’s grieving son and shared her best memories of when Hannah was young.

Sometimes her children and grandchildren are a bit surprised at the way Doris keeps calling and neighbors aren’t always comfortable when she comes knocking on their doors, but Doris knows the value of being a friend—to kids, to in-laws, to old and new neighbors alike. She’s got sticking power.

I’m thinking that the old prayer of St. Francis could also be called the Friendship Prayer: “Grant that we may not so much seek to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.” (Evangelical Lutheran Worship, p. 87)

We have friends in order that we do not get killed. But really, it’s so that we can live.

The Rev. Christa von Zychlin has just moved from the United States to Hong Kong where she is studying Chinese, teaching toddlers to read, and occasionally preaching in local congregations of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Hong Kong. You can read more about her adventures in her blog at http://marathonangel.blogspot.com

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Does even God need friends? For the most part, Christians interpret the doctrine of the Holy Trinity to mean that God is in perpetual, dynamic relationship with Godself, and actually doesn’t “need” friends. This is why God speaks in the plural at the Creation: “Then God said, 'Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness” (Genesis 1:26, italics added).

God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are three Persons who interact in some mysterious way, which is creatively hinted at in the book The Shack by William P. Young. In my opinion, the book barely skims the surface in describing God’s true character, but it does a great job of encouraging readers to consider what the trinitarian relationship might be like. So God did not create human beings out of some divine loneliness, but God does invite people to share in and reflect God’s divine being through our own human interactions.

Jesus’ childhood friends
“Then the Lord God said, ‘It is not good for the earthling to be alone, I will create a friend for this one.’” (Genesis 2:18, author’s translation)

While he lived and breathed among us, however, God the Son was fully human, which means Jesus of Nazareth did need friends—and also knew what it was like to be lonely.

We don’t know who Jesus’ friends were as he was growing up. The Bible gives no details, simply stating, “And Jesus increased in wisdom and in [stature], and in divine and human favor” (Luke 2:52). From these words we can guess that Jesus was well liked, playing the normal childhood games, doing the normal chores, and having the normal buddies of a small-town Jewish boy. We can also imagine, though, that Jesus had times of feeling friendless. There must have been things about him that were different, and "different" often spells "lonely" in human society.

Can your parents be your friends?
In the Gospel of John, Jesus’ first miracle comes at a wedding, where he turns gallons of water into wine. This was possibly the wedding of a friend, and what a friend Jesus turned out to be! This story also provides an interesting sidelight on the evolving relationship between Jesus and his mother.

Psychologists and family therapists generally agree that it’s important to have healthy boundaries with your parents as you are growing up. A parent’s job is to be a parent and not a friend. As a young adult becomes physically, financially, and emotionally mature, the relationship between parent and child changes. It becomes more of a give-and-take relationship, and a healthy (and unique) friendship between adult son or daughter and parent becomes possible.

One interpretation of the wedding at Cana is that it gives us a glimpse of the transition in the relationship between Jesus and his mother. When she turns to him for help, his first response sounds like an adolescent rebelling against his Mom, “Woman, why do you involve me?” (John 2:4a, author's translation) Yet Mary doesn’t get mad at him; she trusts him to do the right thing. And sure enough, a moment later, he’s taking care of the situation. Is this the beginning of a genuine friendship between a mother and her young adult child?

Sexual tension between friends
In the hilarious old movie “When Harry met Sally,” Harry claims that a real friendship is impossible between men and women, because “the sex part always gets in the way.”

We know there were several women friends in Jesus’ life: Mary Magdalene and Bethany sisters Mary and Martha get more press in the Gospels than some of Jesus’ male disciples. Since we know Jesus was fully human (as well as fully divine), we can expect that there was some sexual tension in these friendships; but no matter what Dan Brown says about it in The DaVinci Code, there’s no biblical or historical indication that there was ever a sexual relationship between them. To my mind, that’s a relief because I’d hate to think that Harry was right—that no one can be real friends with someone who is physically attractive without eventually getting into a sexual involvement.

Friendship betrayal
I’ve always been struck by the fact that Jesus was betrayed by a friend. Jesus shares the Passover holiday meal with all the disciples, including Judas, even though Jesus knows that Judas is going to turn him over to the authorities. It seems that Jesus was determined to treat Judas as the friend he expected and wanted him to be, even when things were going sour. At the same time, Jesus neither keeps secrets nor gossips, but openly lets his other friends (the disciples) know what’s happening: “Jesus was troubled in spirit, and declared, ‘Very truly, I tell you, one of you will betray me’” (John 13:21).

The long haul
Then nearing the end of his time on earth, Jesus looked around that same holiday table and said, “I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends” (John 15:15a).

I imagine this must have come as a great relief to Jesus. It’s hard managing servants. It’s a relief to be in the company of friends, who know all about you, who trust you, and who can be trusted (Judas had left the group at the table by this point). Even though these friends were far from perfect (Peter soon pretends he doesn’t know Jesus, the others run away as soon as they figure out that the Romans really aren’t kidding about this crucifixion thing), Jesus knows they will come around again. They’re in it for the long haul. And even though they don’t fully understand it yet, so is Jesus. Best Friends Forever, in fact. Jesus is going to see to that.

Discussion Questions:

1. Do you agree that "different" often spells "lonely" in human society? Can you give some examples of people who are different but who are well-liked and have healthy friendships?

2. Jesus turned water into wine and so helped rescue his friend’s wedding from disaster. What is the biggest practical miracle a friend has ever done for you?

3. Would you consider either or both of your parents to be your friends? Was there a certain age when that transition took place?

4. Can friendships survive sexual tension? Do you have what you consider to be a healthy nonsexual friendship with someone you find physically attractive?

5. You may be familiar with such hymns as “What a friend we have in Jesus” or “Borning Cry,” or even one that most pastors I know love to hate: “In the Garden.” (If you have a church-going grandmother or older friend, ask her if she knows it and if she likes it.) Do you think of God as your friend? How is that helpful or not helpful in your spiritual walk? Is it easy to think of Jesus as being a BFF? How about the Holy Spirit?