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All Will Be Well - by Bob Scott

It’s a pleasure to be back. I worshipped at Vision just about every Sunday since Don and Pam founded it, until last fall when my job started requiring me to be in New York on Sundays. I direct Christian education ministries for Trinity Church on Wall Street. I try to bring to my work there the spirit of Vision, because part of what’s special about Trinity is that it has more than three hundred years of tradition, and part of what’s special about Vision is that we’re about to turn 10.

A few years ago I attended a retreat for Trinity. At one point we were paired off and asked to share our answers to the question: What is your earliest memory of God? I don’t know about you, but I usually start out a little uncomfortable in these sharing sessions. I’m sure everybody will say something amazing and I’ll say, “ummm….” And sure enough, my partner was a British priest who talked about being three years old and playing with items on an altar and knowing that she’d be ordained someday. I felt fine, though, because as soon as I heard the question, I knew what my answer was.

In fact it may be my earliest memory of any kind. I was two or three, and I was really mad about something. I threw a tantrum, crying and stomping. I ran and hid under my bed and muttered to myself how awful my mother was and how much she hated me. Finally, when I ran out of steam, I looked out from under the bed to see that she had been sitting quietly the whole time in the rocking chair, holding a glass of milk and smiling. She wasn’t angry at all, just patiently waiting until I was ready to climb into her lap to be comforted.

I call this a memory of God because it’s what I think of when I hear, “God is love.” That’s probably one of the most quoted lines in the Bible, and it’s a wonderful message. But do you ever wonder, if it’s true, why awful things happen in our lives? Does God’s love come and go? And what about the awful things I do … on rare occasions? Does God love those?

Friends Without Benefits

We stink at friendships.  I know this because I hear all the time how unsatisfied people are with their friendships.  Although they might not put it so bluntly, I hear it expressed beneath the words they say. 

Take the life any teenage girl.  She may have a group of friends whom she texts all day and night.  On the surface, it may seem that these girls are a close-knit community of friends.  After all, whenever they see one another, their voices go up in pitch an octave.  They squeal and hug each other.  There are hundreds heart-shaped emoticons getting posted and texted.  Yet this giddy group of young women are masters of gossip, back-stabbing, ganging up on and excluding one girl.  They conveniently forget to invite this girl to a party or have inside jokes and glances that they exchange abut her amongst themselves.  But if you ask them, they will claim this girl is their “best friend”. 

When these girls grow up and become adults, they will basically do the same crap all over again.  The only difference is they will do it while having bigger houses and more money. All this dysfunction will be hidden under the label of friendship.  It makes one wonder if the word has any meaning anymore.

Men don’t fare much better.  Growing up, we play the same games of bullying and exclusion.  We mock the boy who is in any way different, or sit silently while others do. For a teenage boy, getting the laughs of a group of guys often trumps any commitment to a friendship.  We the price for ignoring friendship when we reach adulthood.

When we watch TV, we see beer commercials, sitcoms and dramas where guys all hang out with their “buddies” on a regular basis.  These buddies somehow find the time to everything together.  They go camping, kayaking, and skydiving on weekends.  They have a favorite pub where they all hang out on a weekly basis and alternate between arguing about sports and sharing their most intimate problems with one another.  Although we are constantly bombarded with these scenarios, few men I know would say it is an accurate depiction of their life.  We may secretly long for a “nights out with the guys” but for many men, there no guys to go with and even fewer nights available.  Although many men may long for them, we have no “buddies”, but would settle for friends.

We stink at friendship.  Along comes Jesus and says, “I no longer call you servants, but friends.”  Great.  We can barely form healthy friendships with the people who live across the street and now we’re supposed to be friends with Second Person of the Trinity?  How are we supposed to do that?  If we approached friendship with Jesus the same way we approach some of our human friendships, the relationship would consist of men rock climbing with Jesus and not speaking to one another, and women getting together with him to dish about how all the other Messiahs are getting fat and coloring their hair.

We stink at friendship and, if left to our old patterns, we will probably stink at friendship with Jesus too.  Not only that, our shortcomings in human friendship will also color how we perceive Jesus’ friendship with us.  If we allow that happen, it would be a huge loss to the richness of our lives.  So how can we be friends with Jesus?  With all our distorted images of friendship, what does the phrase even mean?