Dear Friends
I don't feel quite a fraud writing to you in these terms, because my brief time spent with you during the calling process has assured me that I can confidently look forward to beginning many new friendships when I move to Sheffield and begin working with you at St Andrew's. The beauty of friendship, in a world where so many are lonely and isolated, and differences are liable to generate fear or hatred, is that any people can become friends with one another. I'm sure you can think of instances in your own experience where people of different races, backgrounds, ages, political opinions or faiths have become firm friends against all the odds!
Of course, friendship is not something which can be taken for granted. It requires time and effort on both parts in a new and untried acquaintance for both parties to feel safe with one another, safe to reveal the vulnerable parts of themselves, to be ‘real' with one another, rather than keeping up the exhausting fiction that everything in the garden's always lovely, thank you for asking. Real friends share enough of one another's lives to weep and rejoice with one another in the times of sorrow and joy which come to all of us. I hope we at St Andrew's will grow into that sort of friendship as we get to know one another, a friendship that is strong enough to achieve that difficult Christian balancing act of on the one hand ‘speaking the truth' to one another and, on the other, doing it ‘in love'.
Yet friendship is a universal gift - what, if anything, do Christians specifically have to offer to its understanding? Looking at the New Testament, Jesus' stories show that he appreciates the ordinary sort of friendship based on neighbourliness or common interests - people for whom we throw a party when our lost sheep or our missing coin turns up. Yet he advises his followers: When you are planning your next dinner party, don't just invite those in your usual friendship circle, who can easily return the favour, but remember those who are overlooked because of poverty or disability, and make friends with them. Moreover, Jesus' opponents frequently describe him as ‘a friend of tax collectors and sinners' - collaborators and prostitutes - not the sort of people whom others usually queue up to be friends with. It looks as though ‘birds of a feather flock together' does not, or should not, apply to a group of Christians: look at the variety of people Jesus chooses as his close followers, from rich women to uneducated fishermen! The church community can have a great role in bringing together people of different backgrounds who would otherwise have little opportunity to become friends.
I'm not pretending that friendship, whether within or outwith our comfort zone, is always easy. As we have been reminded through Holy Week and Easter, real love, real friendship demands much from those of us who try to practise it: even our whole lives. Yet our friendship for those around us, and for others beyond our church community, is powered by the unkillable love of Jesus. He calls us to continually deepen our friendship with him, committing ourselves, each new day, to loving God, one another and ourselves. And I am looking forward to seeing how that love - already there at St Andrew's before I was even born! - goes on working itself out in the life of the church, as we become friends.