The Rector's August Visions

​I’m no longer calling you servants because servants don’t understand what their master is thinking and planning. No, I’ve named you friends because I’ve let you in on everything I’ve heard from the Father. 

- Jesus is John 15:15

How are you God’s friend? And how is God your friend? For most of my life, friendship has not been the way I have understood my relationship with God. I usually waffle between “God is my Lord, and I just say ‘yes sir!’” and “God created me and inspires me and it’s my job to make sense of the puzzle of life with God’s help.” The truth is, I often don’t understand what the master is thinking and planning.

Still I do think God has a relationship with us that is strangely best characterized as friendship. One of the earliest images of God is the one Adam and Eve go walking with “in the cool of the evening.” That sounds pretty friendly.

What does it look like to be in a close “friendly” relationship with the divine master of all that is? Strangely, this God of ours wants us to be at his side, not groveling beneath him. While no single image in our own experience is going to make complete sense of God who is always beyond our understanding and wildest dreams, there is also this real sense that God wants to take walks with us, wants to know us intimately like a good friend, wants us to be there for him as he is there for us – not just as an heroic power, but as a person who loves and cares for us.

As we prepare for the Sabbatical that is coming in September, one of the things we all will be asked to explore is what does it mean to have a faithful friendship with the Almighty? Something in us may cringe at the thought of having a buddy in the divine. And there is something right about that cringe. But there is also something strangely wrong about it. When Jesus is preparing for the cross, what he wants is some of his closest friends to pray with him, to stay awake and be there with him.
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How odd of God to make us friends. Yet God is odd indeed to our ways of thinking. And we can do few things as wonderful as take some time in the cool of the evening or the middle of the night or any other time to walk and be with the one who gives us life.
God’s Peace,
Gary+