"Faith as Friendship"
Entering into a face-to-face relationship with God
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, June 8, 2008
Text: Exodus 33:4-11
In my last sermon, I mentioned that the greatest fear of any preacher is for people to fall asleep while they are preaching. Now, I want to say that there are three things that preachers shouldn't do themselves.
The first thing that a preacher should never do is preach in the presence of puppies. This is something I did during the Blessing of the Pets service in May. You are never as good looking as a puppy, and as a preacher, you will never get the attention that a puppy can get.
Lesson number two I learned a few years ago. There was prayer breakfast in Markham and I was supposed to speak after the great Ben Heppner sang. After he performed, everyone was in such awe and amazement that there were looks of dejection when I got up to speak. My words were superfluous. Lesson number two is never to preach after Ben Heppner has sung!
The third one is never preach after babies, for they will always be cuter than you are. They will always steal the show, as they do during baptisms. And many of them have more hair than I do! So never preach after babies. But there is a time to preach for the families and the church when we have baptized babies. This is what I want to do, because I understand that in this day and age, religion is very popular in many circles. It might not be present much in newspapers, but it certainly is when you go to the shelves in the bookstores. Maybe it doesn't always stress the traditional forms of the Christian faith, and maybe it talks about esoteric things, but there is still an interest in religion and faith.
Religion might not be on the front burner of the minds of politicians, and prayers might even be removed from the respective houses in which governments make their decisions, yet you can turn on George Stroumboulopoulos or Oprah Winfrey, for example, and there is much discussion about religion and faith and people who are concerned about God. It might not be faith that is stressed per se, but there is definitely an interest in the sociological make-up of religion, why people believe, how they believe, where they believe and, sometimes, what they believe. In other words, religion is very much in vogue these days.
I want to stress that at the heart of faith, and certainly at the heart of the Christian faith, the best way to understand true religion is to understand that it is a dynamic, living relationship. In many ways, one could say that faith, in its truest sense, is friendship. Let me be clear, in the text from the Book of Exodus, we read of Moses going and speaking to the Lord face-to-face as a man does with a friend. Moses went into the presence of God, but he did so in the context of difficulty. He did so because, and I love this phrase, the people of Israel were “a stiff-necked bunch.” In other words, they had become stubborn during their time in the wilderness, and they got carried away with what was known as “the golden calf” - with gold, materialism and success. Moses is told to be a mediator between God and the people. The problem is that he has to deliver bad news to the people; they are to sell their gold and jewellery; they are not to get caught up in materialism, but rather, they are to remain faithful to God if they are going to get to the Promised Land eventually.
Moses has to deliver this difficult message. He goes into his tent, not the tabernacle, and there is a pillar of cloud which, in the Book of Exodus, always symbolizes the presence of God. God appears to Moses as if he is face-to-face, as if he is a friend. In other words, for Moses to be mediator between God and his people, he has to have an intimate relationship with God. So what does this tell us? First of all, it tells us that Moses, who is one of the great characters of the Old Testament, has a friendship with God, so therefore, friendship with God is important.
George Elliott, the nom de plume for Marion Evans Cross, wrote these words about friendship and I think they are tremendous:
Oh, the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person, having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all out, just as they are, chaff and grain together, certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and with a breath of kindness blow the rest away.
That is George Elliott's definition of friendship. It is a friendship that can be honest, a friendship that can sift out the good and the bad, a friendship that is based on trust.
Do you have friend like that? Do you have somebody who is particularly close to you and no matter how difficult things are, how momentous the occasion or how bad you have been, you know that you can go to this person in honesty and truth and unburden yourself? That is a true friend. And so, in many ways, the relationship between Moses and God was a relationship between true friends. Moses could trust God and God, in a sense, could sift out the things in Moses' life that needed to be cleansed and changed. It was a relationship of trust.
In the New Testament Book of Hebrews, Chapter 3, there is a reference to this. The writer of Hebrews says that Moses had this friendship, this relationship with God, but in the form of a servant. One came along later, and his name is Jesus, who is the Son of God, and the Son of God has an even greater relationship with us. According to the Book of Hebrews, we now are believers and followers of the Son. Jesus is now the mediator between God and us. We have friendship with God through the gift of Jesus. In fact, Jesus even said to his disciples in John 15, “You are my friends if you do what I command you. And I will be with you always.”
The Church, the faith, invites us into that friendship with God through Jesus Christ. That is what faith is about. It is not just a series of doctrines or ideas or good teachings or things that we have to do. It is a living and a vibrant relationship of faith in God through a mediator, Jesus. We are offered this friendship with God. When I talk to people about faith, and when people talk to me about their various ideas, it seems to me that this is the great hunger in their lives: To have this sense of faith, to have a faith that is based on a friendship. But not all friendships are wonderful friendships.
Sometimes, there are people who are false friends, and we have to make sure that we are clear in understanding what the friendship of God is like. False friends are, as one writer put it, our “shadow friends.” When we are out in the sunshine and everything is going well they are with us like a shadow. But the moment we walk into the shade, the shadow disappears. False friends are with you in good times but when you have bad times, your false friends walk away and desert you.
The friendship of God, in Jesus, is not like that. The Book of Hebrews makes it clear that this mediator between God and us, this Jesus, understands our infirmities, understands our mistakes, understands the problems and weaknesses in our lives and is always with us.
John Calvin, the great Christian writer and theologian, made the point over and over again in his Institutes to the Christian Religion that once we have entered into a faithful, covenanted relationship with God, that covenanted relationship is never broken. God will always be faithful to us in dark times and in good times, in times of joy and in times of sorrow. That is the kind of friendship that Jesus offers. That is the kind of friendship that lasts forever.
There is one other ingredient in this, and this is where I really want to speak to the families of people who have had babies baptized, but indeed it goes to everyone, wherever you may be. That is that our friendship with God must result in an attractive friendship with the world. My great-uncle, Neville Davidson, who for one period in his life was Moderator of the Church of Scotland, once wrote in a note to my father:
“If we want, Jim (that was my father's name), to make the world and humanity Christian, we must first make sure that Christianity is human.”
By that, he meant that there is a need for us to embrace the world in a human way in order that we might reveal the friendship that God has for it.
I know that there is a lot of talk these days among those of us in the church about growth, evangelism and reaching out. There are many different programs that give us ideas - in fact, you can franchise anything these days and churches will grab hold of it as a method to grow. We have become, in many ways, the “Tim Hortons” of religion. We really have! You can buy a franchise on any corner if someone thinks this is a way for the church to grow.
But the way that churches really grow in the faith is not only to have a deeper relationship with Christ, but also for its members to have a friendship with the world. What it all boils down to is that the thing that really makes the church strong is the power of the Holy Spirit working in people who befriend the world, who befriend each other, and who draw others through that friendship to Christ.
One of my great heroes is Frederick Buechner, who has a wonderful definition of friendship. It is one that has influenced me for years. He said “friendship is when you share your deep gladness with the world's deepest hunger.” That is what Christian friendship should do. It should take the joy that you have in being in Christ and share it with the world at the point of its deep hunger. When you do that, you are not sharing a friendship in the sun; you are sharing a friendship in the shade. You are not just sharing a friendship based on, “I am glad.” It is based on, “I am glad and I want to share it with the world in its hunger.”
You, as family members and parents of the children we have baptized are still the greatest influence on the development of the faith of these babies. We can have great programs, we can have wonderful ideals, we can provide a great church school and choir school and youth program, but ultimately, it is your influence that will make the final difference.
I love what Dorothy Law-Nolte once wrote. I saved it, because I think it speaks volumes. It is entitled, Children Learn What They Live. Notice the last stanza:
If children live with criticism, they learn to condemn.
If children live with hostility, they learn to fight.
If children live with fear, they learn to be apprehensive.
If children live with pity, they learn to feel sorry for themselves.
If children live with ridicule, they learn to feel shy.
If children live with jealousy, they learn to feel envy.
If children live with shame, they learn to feel guilty.
If children live with encouragement, they learn confidence.
If children live with tolerance, they learn patience.
If children live with praise, they learn appreciation.
If children live with acceptance, they learn to love.
If children live with approval, they learn to like themselves.
If children live with recognition, they learn it is good to have a goal.
If children live with sharing, they learn generosity.
If children live with honesty, they learn truthfulness.
If children live with fairness, they learn justice.
If children live with kindness and consideration, they learn respect.
If children live with security, they learn to have faith in themselves and in those about them.
If children live with friendliness, they learn [to find the love of God in the world].
My friends, our job is to befriend those children, that they may find the love of God in the world. But first, we must respond to the friendship of God in Christ who comes to us, as he came to Moses, and says, “I want to see you face-to-face, as a man with his friend.” Amen.